Saturday 20th August, 2016                         2020

I apologise and I know this blog has become a place of doom and gloom of late but so has my life - and that’s what I blog about.

I am an eternal optimist even though that optimism has been slapped in my face more times than I care to remember during my life.

It’s easy to look on the bright side when you have money and a loved one to back you up. Youth helps too! I have none of these. I really miss Joan.

I am now approaching one of those crossroads we all come across in life. I have three directions in which I can go. Straight ahead is to put my trust in China. To be fair, I have enjoyed six years here with no major problems and yet now I am in a strange place and apart from a couple of hours when I arrived and the following morning I have been left to my own devices. That would be fine by me if I wasn’t sitting here fretting over money and whether I will ultimately get the documentation I need, I don’t need babysitting. With a resident permit and no expensive HK run to do it would be hunky.

As of Monday I have seven days to legally be here and I have had no indication of when I will get the papers required to go to Hong Kong. If they come on Monday then fine, I can go on Tuesday or Wednesday.

Another option is by far the least preferred. I have enough to take a one way flight to the UK where I have nowhere to stay and cannot claim a thing from the state. I can’t afford to buy a false Syrian passport - although I could probably make money by skippering a boat full of them and actually getting them safely to shore.

I still also have enough to pack my bags and hightail it to Cambodia. I could stay in a cheap hotel and readily find work teaching (God forbid) kids. I really don’t want to do anything other than plough straight on but I am going to need answers tomorrow or first thing on Monday because I either need to stump up more money for this hotel or skedaddle while I still have the wherewithall.

So the optimist will send an email to the FAO in the morning along with a text telling him to check same!

I think I have been bitten by a tsetse fly. I seem to be spending 40% of my time in bed since I arrived. Not necessarily sleeping because people are so noisy and once I am half awake the worries come crashing in. In fact the only time I seem to come awake is late at night when I should be going to bed!

This morning I awoke to two texts from Molly regarding a female teacher who was fired from a university in Lanzhou for contracting ovarian cancer. She was convinced it was where I may work and the young lady passed away at 32. With her employment having been terminated her medical insurance and treatment had been cancelled. She would probably have died anyway (and she looked a lovely thing) and treatment may only have given her a little more time but I found the story appalling.

The school in question (used to be called the railway university but now transport) used the defence that she was fired for absences. Do you believe the school, or the court who yesterday ruled the dismissal was unlawful? The family can now make a claim for money but what use is that? Cold comfort to be proved right when the girl never even lived to see victory.

As a foreign teacher it hardly affects me anyway - our contracts always state that if you are off sick for more than 30 days you are fired! That of course depends on the school because when I brought it up six years ago when I was in hospital, to be fair they did say don’t worry about it.

And just to finish up tonight, earlier I sort of went for a walk, found a bank and checked my balance. I was having nightmares last night that I had done my party trick and thought I had much more than I did. Thankfully (or sadly, for it could have been more!) I have exactly what I thought I did. As long as nothing goes wrong and in get to HK I can probably do this thing on my own.

A more pressing problem will manifest itself in six days time. Cigars. I can’t find anywhere that sells mine. Certainly cigars can be bought but they cost twice as much. In a city of two million people surely there must be somewhere I can buy cheap cheroots???