Monday 4th January, 2016              0330

Yes, this going to bed really late needs to be curbed over the next few days - I will need to be up at a respectable hour probably on Friday to pay a visit to the kindergarten. It is not something I relish the thought of but Helen has been a friend most of the time I have been here and I don’t like to disappoint. Especially as she probably told her boss she could get a foreigner to visit.

What the hell, I will have to pretend to like toddlers for two hours tops, I get a lift both ways and a lunch afterwards. If anyone from the university internet police stumbles across this entry, no, I am not working for them, I am volunteering my time. That doesn’t seem to be something which is embraced outside of the student activities. It really makes me sad because over the past lustrum I have volunteered many times (ok there was always a free lunch/dinner/piss-up to follow) and never a problem until Prof Fang requested a career move. I really wish she had waited. There would have been none of this unpleasantness over the classroom, playing Santa or anything. Sure, she may have had a word but she was fair to the foreigners and we held (and still hold) her in high regard.

With the new leadership there is a dullness and a pervading malevolence underlying daily life now and not just for me personally. The national speaking competition, which you may remember saw one of Kevin and mine students go to the national finals in Beijing, well that was a half-hearted farce this year, almost an afterthought. We made history for this place and twelve months on it was a damp squib.

Not one foreign language concert over Christmas or the new year. The only events have been those organised by the Lingdian Society and one of my students is the leader of that. When a workplace loses a strict yet attentive Captain and is replaced by someone with outside business interests and with a demeanour akin to Henry VIII in the midst of an attack of gout, you don’t have a workplace any more.

What the hell, I am apparently fast approaching my “best before” date and all thought of battling against it has virtually evaporated. I need somewhere I can be as happy as I was here until recently and that I can possibly stay for six years - then I can put my feet up (or not as the case may be) and not worry about anything other than perhaps renewing a visa annually.

Today I simply went to the business street in the afternoon, had two beers in the office and came home. Even that has lost its lustre, I now seem to go there just to be out of my home for an hour or so. Tomorrow I will go to town shopping although it is difficult to keep thinking up new ideas to try for dinner.

I did have a nice bit of roast pork with roast spuds tonight though and as I dined alone the crackling was all mine! Then again, the crackling here is not the same. It’s almost as if they sell you the pork but stick on some rhinoceros hide! The stuff my Mum used to make was crunchy but “fluffy” if you can understand - the stuff here resembles the consistency of paving slabs, and it is me who is cooking it! Maybe I need to buy a scalpel to score it because my kitchen knives simply bounce off the hide when I try.

Joan came to stay tonight to study (and her light is still on at almost 0400 now!) and she is rather sickly. Having on many occasions refused my offers of Halls Mentholyptus cough sweets when she had a cold, tonight she actually asked me for two packets. Here I buy boxes at a time from the little supermarket - I ask them for the black ones, the owner orders three boxes specially (60 packets) and I have to buy the lot. I use them though and now her next door has come around as well.

Well I think it’s bedtime now, I may not achieve much but I have laundered my jumpers and my bedding and by dint of leaving my balcony door open so my air conditioning could pervade, everything is already dry.

And I reckon my new trainers were a terrible buy. They are never going to be comfortable so between now and next Wednesday I need to buy another pair that fit and this time take my time choosing. I have a feeling I will be expected to do a lot of walking in Nanjing.