Sunday 21st February, 2016                                               1600

It was of course inevitable that my body clock resetting efforts wouldn’t be entirely successful and as a result, yes I did loathe the alarm when it went off.

In contrast, Anna went from the sublime to the ridiculous. From missing the bus completely the other day, this morning she sent me a text to say she was at west gate. I wasn’t even dressed.  The reason she was so early?

You are not going to believe this.

She had woken at six and was in the library before seven because her friends (who are not on campus) asked her to bag seats for them. The library is of course the university library (although members of the public with a card can use it too) and as such one would assume it is run as a communal enterprise.

This is China.

Apparently if you leave a book or books on a table in front of a chair you are entitled to expect it is yours for the whole of the next term! I can see that working in western countries!! So she had taken enough books to reserve twenty seats and then gone to the bus stop. For friends who  are not even here yet.

I went at the time I had decided and we went to town. Anna of course had to buy some breakfast when we got there and got herself two meat filled baozi (had I been hungry I may well have done the same as they looked delicious) and we went to the little school. Kerry, the teacher leaving, didn’t have much of a bulbous bow and I later found out she had resigned when she is still possibly only two months into her gestation. They have some incomprehensible customs to this day.

Anyway I played the picture game and play your cards right, the kids had a good time and I am quite certain the replacement teacher (Coco) had no idea what to make of it. Who knows, I may just have given her some insight into how to use games as a carrot for behaving in class and doing the work first?

Having been switched to the last lesson before lunch I felt certain that by dropping a subtle hint we would be offered a free lunch and of course I was correct. I wasn’t in the slightest bit hungry but of course Anna, being both young and a student, is in a state of perm hunger. I had a couple of bottles and a few chopticks of cabbage hotpot, forcing myself to have the latter as my fruit and veg consumption hasn’t been prodigious recently.

For the first time ever, the number seven bus wasn’t packed and we both got a seat. It was then that Anna asked if she could borrow my bike. Why? I need to go to my apartment and get more books so I can reserve more library seats. What??? Thirty minutes she said she would be. I have no idea what time zone she is in but it was closer to ninety minutes and I was desperate to go back to bed. I could have and she would have sneaked in and returned my keys but I am a pretty light sleeper normally so I knew she would disturb me.

We got home and she was desperate for the loo, having for some inexplicable reason been too shy to use the one in the restaurant before we left. Anyway, off she went snaffling up all the seats she could in the library. When she returned eventually, she complained someone had realised they were her books (they are acquaintances) and pinched two seats back. It was bizarre listening to her complain about this - if you or I went to a library, provided nobody is in the seat and there are no obvious signs you are working and have just popped to the toilet, then we would simply occupy the seat. Not here.

Then she asked me if I had been to the toilet since we got back. It might sound like an odd question but I knew instantly what had happened. She had forgotten to make sure the toilet roll holder was closed properly and the tigers had been playing, creating a snowstorm. Well I wasn’t clearing it up!

Monday 22nd                    1620

Well now, who’s going from the sublime to the ridiculous this time?

By the time Anna had returned with the keys and left and whatever I was watching on the laptop had finished, it was five thirty and I was at that state where your frontal lobe starts to go numb. I set the alarm for seven and collapsed. Well I thought I’d set it for seven so when I awoke at nine I wondered how the hell I had slept through! Somehow I had set it for five thirty, the time I crashed.

Great. I had eaten a few morsels at lunchtime yet my stomach said don’t eat and of course later I was completely awake, so much so that I eventually got back to sleep at seven this morning! Even then it was fitful rest but I had set the alarm (properly this time) for ten thirty in a serious attempt at getting back on track. I wanted to go shopping to see if RT Mart had any of my wine yet and also for Mum’s last meal - after tonight she can fend for herself with student cast-offs seeing as by tomorrow night they will all be back. And hopefully I can get a haircut, I m getting perilously close to comb territory.

Anyway, Anna wanted to come shopping so I sent her a message to say I would leave home about noon. I said “about” and I would text her. That gives her anything between fifteen and twenty five minutes to leave her apartment and cross the road. What did she do? Sent me a message to say she was at the bus stop at 1205, just when I, as I was about to leave, had to answer a call of nature. Sometimes I despair.

The supermarket never had my wine again but at least they had Guinness and as I type two pork knuckles are boiling for Mum. Alice from Wuhu and her classmate are in my kitchen about to boil dumplings for their dinner, presumably because as yet the campus cafes have yet to reopen.