Sunday 8^th August, 2019 1500

I forgot to mention that to my surprise they paid my inflated salary early on Friday afternoon rather than the anticipated late payment on Monday! I had budgeted to try to avoid pillaging my UK account yet again and in fact would have lasted but it did give me the opportunity to go early for my drugs run. It also means in a week's time I shall be debt free!

I got sorted for another month of “health” and, armed with my list of UTI treatments, I endeavoured to buy one of them. Not a soul in the pharmacy speaks English but I asked them to put the words into their phones. Finally, they got a result and brought me the drug.

Eye drops.

As the old optrectomy joke goes, it may have cured my shitty outlook on life but would have had no effect on the problem at hand. I have now used my own computer to find three of the cures and have the Chinese for them stored on a USB, which shortly I shall take back and see if they can help.

Yesterday I was informed my Monday morning class is deferred due to military training. My guess is the “passing out” parade takes place then. The cheek of it though is that I have been told the class must be made up! They said they would tell me where and when. That didn't sit well with me because for sure they would find the most inconvenient time possible, so I have managed to get them to agree to wait until I actually do get to meet the class, compare timetables and agree a mutually acceptable time. I am hoping I won't have to engineer a crack of dawn wake up for myself.

So tomorrow is the first day back since 28^th June. I shall meet Alice before class so she can give me two months' supply of Halls and show me again where building three is! Then I shall hand over a wad of bank notes to take to the bank so my overdraft with the Bank Of Pudong is finally repaid.

I have all but stopped cooking lately. I have five portions of chicken and mushroom pie frozen but without decent potatoes it just doesn't seem right to an Englishman! Last night I went to my “new” restaurant around the corner and blew 93¥ on a prawn dish and a beer. I would have preferred company but my friends now all live miles away. It was ok, a load of prawns with onion, a birds nest, mange tout, some unidentifiable (and unpickableupwith chopsticks) things that looked like yellow, oversized orange pips. Also the weird Chinese mushrooms that have the consistency of jellyfish and the colour of Quink. I never left any prawns and the mange tout were too crunchy for my gums but I enjoyed it. Next time I'm going to try what look like spring rolls in sauce for a third of the price.

Tonight I was just going to buy some cakes and chocolate but I just remembered I still have a couple of chilli puffs in the freezer. There's not much fun in cooking for yourself, is there?