Monday 17th April, 2017                 1945

And I was doing so well yesterday. I made a roast pork dinner, roasted a couple of chicken legs to have cold for dinner with bread and butter tonight and made a doorstep cheese and onion sandwich to take to work today. It’s impossible to get a joint here, you get a lump of pig with some skin on it so what I do is, once it’s cooked, slice off the skin and fat and leave that to cook and turn into crackling.

Last night was no different. I ate dinner and settled down to watch TV in the study. Some hours later I decided it was time for bed and duly shut down the laptop. When I opened the door and went out it was dark but there was an awful stench. The crackling!!!! It had been cooking for 4 hours!!! Argghh!! Every other room in the place was filled with smoke.

I simply turned the oven off and spent about an hour trying to get to sleep in between bouts of coughing.

This afternoon 31 students turned up to class but 7 had decided to interpret the fact that we have the extra class on Thursday as meaning they didn’t have to come today. I really don’t know how much more explicit I can be when explaining what I am doing and why and then reinforcing it the class before by saying “I will see you on Monday”?

They are however determined it seems to make me appear to have lost my marbles, yet last week we all agreed I would take them at 1010 this Thursday. Today they informed me that no, it was 0800 because they have another class at 1010! I wrote contemporaneously in each of the classes the dates and times so I wouldn’t mix them up and took the paper home. It states clearly 1010 and I remember remarking that at least nobody had to get up really early. I could strangle them. So now I have an extra early “day off”. Ah well, at least I got the errant class organised as well, I will do them the day after the Labour Day holiday at 1630. Shouldn’t be too much of a hardship seeing as the Monday is a holiday.

On the bus home this evening we were about a mile from my drop off, passing the BRT stop (the crazy guy uses the bus lane, but then he IS a registered bus) when we went through at our usual breakneck speed. To be fair, I am 99% certain we had the green light but for some reason two cars, one from each side, turned directly in front of us.

I was convinced there would be a pile-up and braced with my hands against the seat in front - there are only seat belts in the very front seats. With a screech of tyres and a last second skid and slide to the left, we avoided a collision by millimetres. One day………..

Harriett sent me a text earlier asking how I was and saying that “they” had heard about the great work I was doing with the students and how it had attracted praise from her colleagues. How? None of them work on my campus! Nice to be appreciated. So it appears it is only the Party Secretary holding up my invitation to remain in situ for another year.

The doorstep? Must have been big because I have no appetite at all tonight!