The UK’s most popular Thai event, the biannual festival in Surrey, is fast approaching and this yea’s extravaganza promises to be better than ever with over 40,000 visitors expected. The event is organised by Mudita Trust, a UK registered Charity supporting the secondary education of boys and girls from some of the poorest villages in Thailand helping prevent them from entering into the sex trade and instead using education as a tool in helping them make a better future.

Never ones to turn down a free lunch we happily took delivery of a sample bag of GBK’s new smaller lunch burgers at the office. At this point we should perhaps tie ourselves up in moral knots about the propriety of being ‘bribed’ in this way, but we won’t. GBK took a chance – if the burgers and fries had turned out to be crap we would have said so quite happily. Instead we liked them a lot.

My brief experiment with vegetarianism foundered on the large rock that is a bacon roll. At 6 a.m your defences are down and the waft of ketchup is too much to resist. Maybe I would have stayed loyal to the cause had there been dishes like the ones Vanilla Black are creating.

‘You have to mash the bananas by hand, squeeze them through your fingers. you can’t use a blender.’ Mark Read Head Chef at Mango Tree and at Awana is telling me how to make Thai Banana cake accompanied by hand gestures reminiscent of someone milking a particularly recalcitrant cow, ‘you want the lumps,’ he says. ‘Like Guacamole?’ I suggest. ‘Exactly!’

Perfectly timed for the summer, during the month of August, the award winning Light Bar of St Martins Lane has collaborated with the London Salsa dance school- Salsatecca, to host salsa dance classes. The first scheduled Salsa nights on 11th and 18th August will take place in the spacious marble event studios of the hotel, offering an hour packed full of fun salsa moves and great exercise.