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Our Water Sports Correspondent reports: During the past couple of weeks, we Bangkokians have reeled before tides of disaster, mayhem and sheer incompetence. We’ve watched open-mouthed as discredited politicians and hapless officials have struggled vainly to stem a deluge that threatens to engulf millions and wreck edifices once thought impregnable. Yes, with the rest of the world, we’ve been riveted by the melodrama of the Eurozone and its apparently impending collapse. It’s been a welcome distraction from the embarrassment of a local overflow that is a new feature of Thai political life.

While the UK has Prime Minister’s Questions, we have Prime Minster’s Waterworks. PM Yingluck Shinawatra has managed a spontaneous display of fighting-back-the-tears with almost every fresh spurt of alarmism and squabbling about the floods in certain parts of outer Bangkok. Only four months into the job, she is already being told she’s not up to it. Her moist-eyed response on Thursday was less than resolute, or resonant: “I am the Prime Minister but I don’t know everything about water,” she vouchsafed.

She may soon be out of her misery. Suddenly, the headlines are cheerful. Late last week, the Bangkok Post quoted the Irrigation Department’s claim that the capital could be completely clear within eleven days; nearly half of the 14 billion cubic metres of flood water from the north of the kingdom has already reached the sea. On Saturday, The Nation reported that water has receded in eleven districts of the city. Few national or metropolitan figures have emerged with credit, but it has to be said that the authorities’ goal of keeping central Bangkok dry seems to have been achieved.

Central Bangkok includes all the major tourist and gay areas, so your correspondent shudders to think how many holidays have been needlessly aborted. Lukas Habersaat, director of Bangkok’s much-loved Tarntawan Place [“Recommended by Spartacus Gay Guide since 1995”], says he would normally expect his hotel to be 90% occupied during November, but the current figure is closer to 50%.

“Yet none of the guests who have been here has experienced any disruption. Nobody has seen any water unless they’ve travelled to the end of the line on the Sky Train and positively sought out the floods.” Boggy sightseeing, it might be called.

“So it was a strange experience,” continues Habersaat, “to take a call the other day from a travel booking agency, who asked to cancel somebody’s reservation because we were under water. I looked out of the window and couldn’t see a drop!”

Sadly, where Thailand is concerned, westerners are too ready to believe the travel advisories of embassies and the hyperboles of western news services, even when contradicted by the evidence of their own eyes. That’s in part a consequence of the aura of shiftiness and the lack of credibility that surrounds public life here. And it can’t be denied that the waters have brought with them predictable opportunism and a few nasty scams. As during the political upheavals of 2010, though, those who are suffering most are mainly honest, low-paid folk who deserve better: workers in the hospitality and entertainment industries.

Meanwhile, tourists are not the only westerners who have allowed themselves to be excessively alarmed. Your correspondent has of late seen a good few resident expats take costly trips out of town in the firm belief that their corners of the capital were about to be deluged, only to slope back a week or so later to find their apartments bone dry.

By contrast, those of us who stayed put have had a high old time. Gay Bangkok has partied on. Limits on supplies of drinking water, beer and local spirits such as SangSom [improbable as that may seem] have been generally brief and confined to convenience stores. Few of the better-run gay bars or restaurants have struck items off their menus or drinks lists. Shortages have been real, but not enough to impinge on determined hedonists.

The Thailand Mardi Gras, however, sponsored by the Thai Red Cross and scheduled to coincide with World AIDS Day on 1 December, has been cancelled. The big men of Bangkok’s legendary Tawan Bar have postponed their 25th Anniversary celebrations until early 2012. For the most part, though, it’s been business as usual for Tawan and other gay venues around the city.

Thai personnel whose homes have been affected are resolutely showing up for work, so you’re still likely to find your favourite guy in his regular haunt. In fact, the determination of working Thais to keep the show on the road has been an inspiring feature of this saga of floods that were and floods that weren’t. Witness the incorporation on Thursday of the murky brown waters into that most beautiful of annual festivals, Loy Krathong.

Floods have afflicted northern, rural areas of Thailand all too often in recent years, proving deadly for hundreds of people. The world took little notice until this year, because it was only this year that the waters reached the outskirts of the capital. Bangkok is where the news services have their offices and equipment, and you know how it is: news happens where the BBC and CNN have their cameras. But the kingdom’s infrastructural shortcomings won’t be solved by those who say they love Thailand, and who need be in no danger from the floods, staying away.

As if to illustrate the point, an elderly American crossed the lobby of the Tarntawan Place while I was hobnobbing with its boss. “I’m very proud of that gentleman,” whispered Lukas Habersaat, “and grateful to him. He’s 94 years old, our oldest guest, and he has visited us twice during the floods.”

The chap had a smile on his face and a handsome Thai companion by his side. The message of the smile was unmistakable: when push comes to shove, there’s no companion in the world quite like a Thai companion. So let’s hope more people are soon following the senior citizen’s example and coming on in. The water’s draining away and the skies are clearing. Your Loy Krathong wishes may just come true and, my Dears… life here is so very much more fun than in the Eurozone!