Friday 8th April, 2016                 1630

Yes it has been a few days but to be honest the intervening period between entries has been mostly routine.

In the absence of Joan (who will be done and dusted with her exams imminently thank God) I have found another fan of my cooking, Dumpling. On Wednesday I made a salad. I expected it to be a lovely day so it seemed appropriate but the reality was it hissed down all day, flooding all the level grasslands on campus and many of the roads, which naturally were laid with no thought whatsoever given to drainage after rains. Few drains come to think of it. I was trapped in “The Office” for a while before I came home as I waited for it to die down a bit and what with the thunder and lightning I prayed the power wouldn’t be switched off. It wasn’t.

But I had promised because she wanted her favourite potatoes - boiled and with salad cream atop and so of course she got them. I even made a load of ham in only 5 days (normally I cure for at least a week and sometimes two) but it turned out perfectly. Bloody hell she can put it away! I made far in excess of what I expected to need (spuds are cheap after all) and yet she packed in three times as much as me! There were two pieces of potato left at the end and all she left on her plate was the pickled beetroot which is alien to Chinese and she clearly didn’t like. Tomorrow night I am making macaroni cheese (the cheddar is going mouldy so I need to trim it and use it - and don’t tell me I shouldn‘t because I have been doing it all my adult life without problem!- for her - Joan was invited but she must study - and I will use an entire pack of pasta just to make sure there’s enough. How these kids stay so slim is beyond me, really.

In an hour I shall go to yet another English Corner, I am pretty sure it is the penultimate one for me here (ultima being next Friday) and the little darlings only informed me about this evening in class yesterday! Well it was fine because I had no arrangements but of course they think I am a bottomless pit of games. The problem is I have to dream up/remember games so I have different ones each year and for each class in case some of them have seen them at a previous Corner. I have three for this evening involving a blindfold, Chinese Whispers and two oranges but that leaves me now scratching my head for new ones next week!

The recruitment agency has come up with no suggestions since I turned down the prison camp offer in China’s most polluted city so over the weekend they will be getting an email from me expressing my displeasure and I shall also start widening my search and registering with other agencies. Not the way I like to operate, I prefer to be a loyal customer but if they can’t fix me up then I am not sitting here finding myself at the eleventh hour putting my trust in them alone.

Last month I was very restrained when it came to online food shopping, due to Joan’s mis-ordering of cat litter and food quantities I got by without ordering a thing. Therefore this month I am going bananas.

Provided the tally comes in at under 700y (200y of which will be cat necessities I cannot avoid) I will be buying Branston, lime cordial (I have yet to see squash in any Chinese supermarket, don’t ask me why), a new snuff box for when I travel and can’t smoke (lost the last one), smoked salmon, cream cheese and bagels and manna from heaven - Wall’s pork bangers from England!

During my time here I have ordered “British type” sausages which have been ok (admittedly encased in rhino hide) but they weren’t REAL bangers. Neither are Wall’s it has to be said (I much prefer Tesco Finest pork and Granny Smith) but take me back fifty years and I am in my grandma’s kitchen waiting for my breakfast or a sausage sandwich. Bloody expensive though - £7 a pound! I can only hope they haven’t changed in the last half a century. I did find a form of fish finger but decided not to order although I may do later depending on the bill.

After this month though I shall have to confine myself to only ordering the vitals and concentrate on using up as much of what I already have as possible. And I have actually amassed quite a bit by way of ingredients, some of which I will probably leave to Andrei and Juliette but most of which I will probably try and take with me wherever I go - if indeed it is still in China.

It looks as if the warm weather is back to stay now. Today the bus said it was 27C and the forecast is set firm for the mid twenties. I hope so.

Oh and lately the bathroom has stunk to high heaven. The last time Dumpling cleaned so did my bedroom. The reason? Lottie pissing on the bathroom floor. It gets into the sponge on the mop and of course is then shared everywhere even when it has been rinsed and squeezed. She is the one thing I most definitely won’t miss. Dumpling will have a new mop head when she comes to clean tomorrow. And then people wonder why the cats are banned from my bedroom. Well, except occasionally for Tigger, the only bad thing he does is pester me for a fuss when I am nodding off. The other three would destroy my laptop and anything else whilst Lottie would soil my bed. The hell of it is, when I start trying to let them make The Great Escape I reckon she will be the only one not to.