Monday 29^th July, 2019 1700

On Sunday I did my daily chore of going to the jing jo shop. Nothing unusual in that, I sometimes see a grandma or two out with their grandkid (this time one was feeding hers broth and I jokingly opened my mouth to get fed) and as always I said ni hao to the security guard sitting outside his “Fire Tiny Station”.

Purchases made and with nothing else to buy on the stalls (omelette was on the menu and I couldn't be bothered to walk all the way up to buy spuds), I made my way home. It's a walk of about a minute each way.

As I waited for a break in traffic to cross the road, to my amazement a woman, busily engrossed on her mobile phone, stepped into the road without so much as a glance to see if she might be imminently flattened by a Number 15 bus! What she did walk straight out in front of was a taxi which was about twenty feet away!

I shouted a warning to her.

The taxi stopped about two feet from her. She neither noticed nor cared and she never even registered that I had shouted at her! She just carried on walking, gabbling on her call, not bothering even to check the traffic in the opposite direction.

I have no idea what my facial expression was. Doubtless my mouth wasn't fully closed, I was quite simply dumbfounded by the blind idiocy of the woman, who surely does deserve some day to win a Darwin Ward by getting herself removed from the gene pool when repeating the feat. I looked at the taxi driver, a young man in his late twenties I would guess, he had heard my warning and saw my physog. Were it me driving I would have vented in a very unmistakeable way but he simply beamed at me as if to say, yep, I agree, she's nuts.

In the evening I received a text. It was a copy of one I sent out for Chinese new year but with the addition of a few Chinese characters at the front. It was from Molly, a middle school teacher from Chizhou who some may recall was one of my elves when I did the Santa thing one Christmas Day and took an entourage to the children's ward of No 1 Peoples Hospital.

Seconds later another text arrived, same thing with slightly different Chinese characters. Then a repeat of each of them, totalling four messages. Wondering if it could be a scam to extract money from my phone (PAYG so not a lot of spoils to be had in any event) or a child had picked up her phone, I texted back “What???”

Molly responded asking why I had sent that. She knew nothing of the messages, could I send her copies? A short time later she emailed. Her husband “Little Fatty” (I am guessing perhaps I am Big Fatty) had picked up her phone, seen the English text, didn't understand and thought he was getting it translated but instead sent me four messages. Maybe he is a jealous person but it must be said she IS a teacher of English.

I know they have had problems in the past, not with the marriage but a miscarriage however it was lovely to hear finally they have a five month old daughter. She was desperate to have a child. Not sure she doesn't in some small way regret that now it has become reality after she said how much she envied my “freedom”!

What is freedom? None of us are truly free, there are just some who are freer than others.

Talking of freedom, this afternoon I actually moved my lazy backside and cleared out one of the cardboard boxes I had sent here when I moved. That's created about six more square feet of floorspace. When I went out to the jing jo shop I left it as I always do with cardboard, beside the wheelie bins. By the time I returned three minutes later it was gone! Clearly Christmas came early for one of the scavengers.