Saturday 3^rd March, 2018 1815

There were a lot more fireworks last night for the end of spring festival than there were for Chinese new year's eve. Lanzhou is a city which definitely has odd priorities, far removed from Chizhou. I never bothered going out, I was honestly numb in the forefront of my brain and only remained awake as long as possible so that I wouldn't be up at 0300 today.

As it was I nodded off on my desk at a time I know not and woke up after who knows when, at which point I tottered off to bed. It really has to get easier because I certainly can't get any younger.........if only.......

Joan asked me for a favour today. She needs help finding material for her thesis. I was somewhat taken aback considering when she visited last month she received news she had failed. I admit to not being au fait with how degrees work here but logic dictated to me that if she can't get one due to failure then submitting and defending a thesis is surely akin to a heavyweight boxer losing on a knockout, coming round and then saying let's fight the remaining rounds because the audience paid for twelve?

I will in due course get to the bottom of it and have indeed sent plenty of links to her, the topic being ambiguity in English. As a native speaker of course it is relatively easy to discern the difference between need and knead, lead and lead or the versatility of a well-known expletive (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIiutYIP9Rw) but of course for a non-native speaker it understandably becomes a problem of labyrinthine proportions – particularly with Chinese as they have no past, present or future tenses in their language. They say “I go to the cinema” to indicate they went yesterday, they go every day, they are going now or they are going next week. Quite how they actually communicate successfully is frankly beyond me but then I am not in charge of their national tongue. It does however explain perhaps why they only have around a third as many words as English does. Even then, when I read comments on Facebook I realise my students are still better than many UK-born posters!

So today I have not set foot outside. It took until mid-afternoon to even start to feel normal again, and again, I had neither the desire to cook nor in this instance take a walk and find a restaurant. I made two soft-boiled eggs. No bread in the flat so it was just that for my daily sustenance. I may well do a Sunday roast tomorrow if the lady up the top still has decent potatoes.

Then of course it is Mealtime Monday. Provided BHG have another box of them, it will be fish fingers, mash, proper peas and homemade parsley sauce now that Steph brought some from the USA. Also, now I have baking powder from her, I may dabble in making a Madeira cake. Doubtless they will want custard but I am beggared if I will let them take the leftovers with them this time! I am quite partial to Madeira cake with plonk or port.

By the time I teach again on Wednesday I hope the toilet situation will have been resolved. In a shining example of how not to schedule works, east campus are half-way through refurbishing the only ladies and gents in the main teaching building. Admirable as replacing primitive sloping concrete holes with flat porcelain fittings may be (they are all squat loos), when I left on Friday all they had were said loos. Previously at least each aperture received a modicum of privacy courtesy of a 2'6” high partition (no door, just two sides so often I walked past someone sitting on their heels having a dump and text messaging at the same time) and plumbing which as yet simply dribbles instead of flushing as it did before.

The entrances were covered by builder's synthetic sheets draped from the ceiling to foil prying eyes which passed but I noticed the girls had already managed to part one of the fixings to theirs which meant anyone going to the gents could grab an eyeful through the open doorway. And no, as tempting as the thought may be, I did not suddenly develop a weak bladder every break time.