Sunday 17th July, 2016                    0200

Well today never turned out as envisaged. There was an emergency visit to the hospital.

Joan returned from her teaching job (for which the Dean pays her chimney-sweep boys’ wages) and asked me to look at her legs. I am always happy to do that as they are indeed rather nice and I had a bit of a problem in identifying what exactly I was supposed to be seeing. She wanted to go to hospital.

Little red spots.

Now in fairness she is a mosquito magnet. She clearly smells great to the buzzing beasts whilst my scent is an effective repellant as they daren’t even try to sample my blood (perhaps I should bottle it and give it to her to rub on) and she complains of mosquitos when I am unaware any are even present.

This of course was nothing to do with them. Of course, being young and finding something is not the same as it was yesterday with your body, she feared the worst. My immediate response was that it was nothing and then after further reflection I offered to get her some antihistamines in case it was an allergy. I thought perhaps she had used too much soap in the laundry, however unlikely.

Notwithstanding, and not feeling in the mood for cooking, I did say that if she wanted to go to hospital I would accompany her and we would eat in town a day earlier than I had planned - I don’t want to cook every night.

And so it came to pass that we saw the dermatologist on the 3rd floor of No. 1 Peoples Hospital. His verdict was the same as mine, nothing wrong. Of course the Chinese are very similar to Americans in this respect - they don’t feel the doctor has done right by them unless they are prescribed some medicine. In this case it was vitamin C! Well to be fair it can hardly do any harm even if it was just a sop.

I don’t want to embarrass Joan unduly because it seems to be the norm here to panic at the first sign of anything untoward, in contrast to western people who tend to put it to the back of the mind, sometimes until it is too late to be treated. I recalled the case of Kiki with her sty and her insistence on going to hospital, being prescribed expensive medicine and then told to return in a week for an operation. No matter what I said she wouldn’t listen. I explained to her what would happen, that it would burst on its own and lo and behold, before the “operation” (doubtless 100y for the doctor to pop it with a needle as I used to do as a child) it resolved matters itself naturally.

If I went to see a doctor every time something wasn’t quite right I probably might as well move in.

Anyway I didn’t need to cook because we went to a barbecue restaurant. Normally I eat sparsely there but tonight I ate (for me) a lot, in fact about a quarter of what Joan did. I ended up so full that I felt slightly nauseous although I did find a little room at the end for some ice cream.

Now get this: She has to give dictation on QQ (like Facebook) to her students at 2040hrs for 20 minutes each night. She started to fret that we wouldn’t be home in time for her to access the course book, although we made it with 13 minutes to spare. So a social life seems to be out of the question as far as the Dean is concerned, even during holiday time. And the best of it? It is unpaid!

So the fish and chips will have to be tonight but by going where we went I could buy some liver in the supermarket downstairs for a casserole on Monday - I promised I would make liver & bacon and I haven’t had that in probably eight years. Hope I don’t cock it up!