Sunday 11^th March, 2018 0300

So much for going to bed and then getting up in order to watch England thrash France!

On a personal note, it seems as though I shall be bouncing back from one of my endless setbacks/hurdles.

I have sent Janet the letter to send to Foreign Affairs asking to keep me and Delia the vice dean on Peili has assured me that they will also be sending similar. That makes it 99% certain I shall remain. Bloody stupid really, were I younger I would be looking for somewhere that paid more but inertia takes over the older I get.

However, that now means that barring catastrophe, I will be returning to the UK for a short time in summer, providing Alice is granted a visa. I think that will make the trip far more enjoyable than the last time five years ago when I went solo.

For one, it will be her first international foray, two I will have company on the flight and three, I won't be spending most of the time in an hotel room – I will be concentrating on showing her as much as possible.

Besides fretting about the constant problems set before me, I find myself these days spending inordinate amounts of time agonising over what new dishes I can come up with for Monday Mealtimes! Earlier I decided on chicken shish kebabs with mustard, chilli and plain mayonnaise dips. Running it past Annie, she expressed dismay that I wasn't doing yak steak.

Yak steak may very well be akin to Aberdeen Angus if it is genuine but the ones available to me are more or less the same as gammon steaks you get in plastic packets in Tesco – has anyone ever found a perfectly circular pig with a diameter of about six inches? Bloody awful. Pester power being what it is, the girls will have chicken and yak kebabs! I meanwhile will confine myself to chook. Hopefully it will be the last I hear of anything yakkish.

I am also giving serious thought to making Chelsea buns. I have everything I need so it should be simplicity itself but experience says there could be disaster looming. Trouble is, I won't know until it is too late, I daren't make them tomorrow in case they go stale and of course my oven is too small to do anything other than bake them after the kebabs are done.

I would love to be writing about upcoming trips within China but sorry, all efforts are now concentrated on ensuring I have enough money for the UK jolly. I'd love to fly business but no chance seeing as I am paying for two, even the direct flight economy with China Southern is showing as more than £2,000 a brace. I am tending towards Singapore Airways at the lower end (£700 or thereabouts per head) which takes five or six hours longer but I used to like their service many years ago. I also care about arrival times – who wants to get there when the pubs are shut??? The problem is, I always so far have managed to squeeze a few days in Shanghai to see my friends there. I am not sure I will be able to this year and if that is the case it will sadden me greatly.

Oh yes, and the shifting of students will not only affect my timetable. It also means I no longer have any cleaners to do my housework. Alice is not interested and neither are her classmates, maybe the remaining class will throw someone up, after all it's not as if I don't pay double what they would get for teaching at a weekend school for an hour.