This is unjust.

In flood-ravaged Bangkok, I am able to live comfortably with minor disruptions. The electricity works, the piped water runs clear and the phone lines stay connected. I can get to the post office, the bank and the doctor’s, where services are more or less normal. The newspapers are delivered on time, if a bit thinner than normal, and I can still order a pizza to the door, though some items are temporarily off the menu.

I can go shopping and get what is needed to survive. Supplies of some things have disappeared or been erratic, but, not being a Mama addict, nothing I can’t live without. (Except once when the shelves were bare of dental floss with a dentist’s appointment looming. Stockpiling dental floss? I don’t get it.)

I can work as normal, providing I keep stepping over knee-high walls and piles of sandbags. The fact that I can’t always find stuff that used to be piled on the floor and is now somewhere higher up can perhaps be blamed more on my untidy habits than the floods.

At home I’ve had to heave electrical appliances to higher elevations. The car has been despatched to safer ground so I’m doing a lot more walking. We spent a bit on anti-flood footwear that now looks like being more of a fashion statement than anything practical. And the elderly members of the extended family are enjoying an enforced vacation (and I’m trying to think that I miss them, but not always successfully).

On the plus side, the traffic is easier, that Gamling map is a brilliant time-waster, and flooding can be added to the catalogue of excuses for work done late.

Flood disaster? What disaster?

Well, it is for the thousands who have lost their homes, their belongings, their crops, their livelihoods, and their health. And, in over 500 cases, their lives. The survivors either while away their time in evacuation centres or someone else’s spare room, or wait upstairs as the sewage soup down below gets blacker and smellier.

Now why am I so blessed when others suffer such huge holes punched in their lives?

I could credit grandfather-in-law, who, when he was turfed off his leased orchard by Chulalongkorn University 70 years ago, decided to move house (literally – it was taken to pieces and re-assembled) to what was then a rice paddy close by Sukhumwit canal and the tramline.

At that time, this was the edge of the municipal area (marked by a cluster of brothels just up the soi outside the reach of the city authorities – they’re long gone). Far-sighted Granddad’s example was followed by the great and the good. Or those who thought they were great or had made good. The nobility and the bankers and the politicians moved in and we’ve been lowering the whole tone of the neighbourhood ever since.

But it’s put us, at least geographically, among the unsinkables.

A more proximate cause of our dry salvation lies in decisions made by the authorities (many-headed and self-argumentative as they may be) to soak other parts of the land so that we can (so far) stay dry.

I didn’t ask them to do this.

And it just isn’t fair.

I can make donations of money and time, which one hopes are useful. But this is nowhere near fair compensation to those suffering so that I can escape suffering.

Now no one but an idiot would advocate an equality of misery and say that if one neighbourhood goes under, then we should all go under. As many as possible should be saved.

The questions are: who gets saved? how to compensate those who are sacrificed? and, crucially, who decides all this?

In fact, if we get the correct answer the last question, the rest will sort itself out.

And the correct answer?

Democratically.