Saturday 1st October, 2016                        0200

China’s 67th birthday and also the anniversary of my father passing away.

No, I am not going to get maudlin but I am in high dudgeon. Mum has been in hospital for - I don’t know - four or five months now. She is a frequent flyer at Wexham Park postwar prefab hospital, as depressing a place as you are ever likely to cross the threshhold of and which really, honestly should have “abandon all hope, ye who enter here” emblazoned over the portals.

I have tried on previous admissions to call her (thank God for Skype), been given the “transferring you now” runaround only to be told that the phone my sister had spoken to my Mother on a couple of days before could not be taken to her bedside. Tonight it was even better, the bedside phone doesn’t work, perhaps if I called back when her daughter was visiting we could do it over a mobile phone? From China???

I have since learnt from my sister that even the pay TV at the bed is defunct (mind you at the prices they charge it would be cheaper to buy a laptop and dongle) and I also take umbrage at the hospital website which makes it appear like something out of an American TV soap showing a private hospital when in fact it consists of buildings much like those you see in old war films being used as temporary airfield outbuildings.

Me being me, as much as I revere the institution that is the NHS and appreciate that successive governments have mishandled and underfunded it, I will not let it rest. It isn’t the staff but it IS the profiteering companies they allow in so they can instal their devices and charge fortunes. I mean, £4.50 a DAY to watch TV? A pound a minute for a phone call? And my old mum gets given both of them broken and I have no way to say hello on a poignant day for her?

1600

Not only do I seem to be exhausting local supplies of jing jo (had to search a little further afield today as stock control as always here is non-existent) but also cigars. The new supplier I found and whom I cleaned out a few days back still has no new stock and indicated she will get more on the 15th! There goes my BHG free day tomorrow then, now I will have to go on the off chance the other place has got some in now. How can people run shops that only have deliveries once a month? Of course, there won’t be any at the other shop either so I am guessing I will have to do a fair amount of walking to find some, I only hope I can. I still have a 6 year old pouch of pipe tobacco I suppose I could stick a slice of apple in to moisturise!

The weather is thankfully still pleasant in the low 20s (I will need to splash out on gloves and long johns very soon I suspect) and I have just been compiling a Taobao shopping list for payday. Nothing special really, just essentials apart from sausage skins (which are dirt cheap) because I am going to have a stab at making my own bangers. I am wondering in precisely which month I will manage to save anything from my salary!

Earlier I shifted the washing machine so that I can put the drain hose straight into the bathroom and did my laundry. Still a pain in the backside but at least it negates the need for me to keep bending down to catch the water on the pump-out, I just have to pour bucketfuls in. If there was a plumbing supply shop nearby (or I knew where one was) I would go in and make sure I got the hose and connectors I need. I am hardly the world’s greatest DIY chap, far from it, but I guarantee the blokes who are supposed to be here would sort it if it was THEIR machine at home.

Roast pork last night, omelette tonight although without cheese I hope my version of a Spanish one will at least be edible.