Saturday 6th May, 2017                                        1715

Do you know, I went to bed at a sensible hour on Thursday night yet felt absolutely drained on Friday morning. That was just what I needed with an extra long day stretching ahead of me.

I managed to get through the classes and the competition. I would have loved to have nodded off at lunch time but whilst I felt it would be simple to do, it eluded me. If I had a couch there would have been no such problem.

I think by the time I was all finished it was about 1900 and Janet asked me what I was having for dinner. With only frozen food in the flat it was going to be cheese and Ritz but she said she was meeting three friends and their offspring for dinner and would I like to join them.

I wish I had refused.

It was a pizza place but one which served no alcohol. I couldn’t fathom why and I don’t think anyone else could either because first off, the staff said it was because there was a bar nearby. Well so what? Then it was because there were children present. There always are in China! And no, I asked if it was a Muslim restaurant and it isn’t.

Needless to say I began to wish I had simply gone home but as the friends had already ordered they got me a menu to choose for myself. I went for the smallest seafood pizza, knowing I wouldn’t even finish the baby one.

I managed two small slices and then had to apologise. It tasted odd and not pleasantly so either. Nothing unusual here, some of the ingredients they use are positively vile and that was all I ate, leaving the rest. I then sat until just before 2100 when everyone left and we got into taxis.

By now I was overtired so never turned in until well after midnight. I was woken a short time later (certainly before 0500 as it was still pitch dark outside) with a very urgent call of nature to answer and in a hurry. I only just managed to plonk my backside on the throne before the apocalypse. I have only experienced the like before when suffering from gastroenteritis or food poisoning. All I had eaten in the past thirty hours had been that pizza.

I have spent the entire day alternating between my study and the loo and only now is it easing off. I went from being bunged up to cleaned right out. Had it happened on a working day I would have had no choice but to not go in. I cannot use the squat toilets and there would have been no time to descend four flights and make it to the hospital next door to use their disabled facilities. Certainly the worst attack I have had all the time I have been here (and many years before that) and I have just remembered all the leftover pizza was taken home by the ladies to feed their kids with today! I wonder if I will be asked if I felt ok because the kids are ill?

So I have done nothing at all, not even run the washing machine and I can only hope I am better after another night’s sleep - well enough at least to prepare and eat a roast dinner otherwise I will probably collapse.