Thursday 6th April, 2017                        1130

Sure enough, the tents were gone by the time I left home yesterday afternoon to go shopping. I elected to have lunch prior to shopping, that way I wouldn’t need dinner. Anyway, I had to find somewhere to buy a new belt, my trusty five year-old 300y one was in danger of snapping. That would have been embarrassing, Chinese trousers won’t stay up on me without being strangled excessively tightly, which is also the reason my belts don’t normally last that long.

I bought a belt for 220y up a side street and from the place I bought my shoes not so long ago. The ones in stock were either too short or far too long so I ended up getting additional holes punched and now have a rather long “tail”!

Then I started to walk to Dico’s for a crispy chicken curry by taking a shortcut through the alleys but stopped to peer in at a food place en route. I changed my mind and decided to eat there instead. It was a hotpot place but one where you sit there and various items come around on a conveyor belt a la Generation Game. You have your own individual hob and pot of water and spices and basically take whatever you want as it passes you by. You pay at the end when they count the number of sticks you leave, much as they used to in Singapore with the satay sticks. Some of the stuff was actually quite nice and I ate a fair amount by my standards, which including a pijou set me back 60y. I may well go there again another shopping day.

When I went shopping I never bought any food whatsoever. I can buy pork and chicken near home anyway but then when I got back I remembered I wanted to have a spit roast chicken! Argghh! I found one around the corner and unless it suffered from jaundice it was corn-fed and a decent size, bigger than the ones in BHG. Frozen of course, I didn’t have the heart to have one of the live ones killed and plucked in front of me. Funny that, I have picked live lobsters out in the past.

If my Mother has been watching from above these past few days she will have been laughing her head off at the hassle I have been subjected to. Having been named as one of the executors of her will (I assume she did this before I moved here), her insurance company would only release the cheque if it was made payable to an executor - me. My sister deposited it into my UK account and I thought it should clear in three days. That should have been Monday and so I went online to check.

To my horror the funds were showing as having left my account!

Now I know that I have not divulged any of my security details to anyone and my password is a very long and complicated one but nothing is 100% foolproof. I immediately called the bank, only to be told it would take another two days to clear while they carried out additional money-laundering checks. When it’s an insurance company? And why could they not put a note on my account to tell me that instead of giving me palpitations?

So yes, the funds cleared late last night and I didn’t want to try to pay a rather sizeable amount at that time as the lighting in my study isn’t that good (plus of course there‘s the hong jo and jing jo effect to take into account), so this morning it was to be.

I say “was” because I entered everything correctly and, because the undertakers are a new beneficiary for me, I needed to use my card reader to verify the transaction. Finally, after nine years loyal service, the sodding battery has conked out and short of dismantling the contraption and fiddling with tiny screws to see if I can get a replacement battery I could progress no further.

I shall now have to do it over the telephone but I can’t do that until they open at 1300 my time. Some people seem to sail through life with the greatest of ease but oh no, not me! Thank God for Skype.