Saturday 2^nd November, 2019 0100

My heating came on last night and when I awoke this morning I had no internet.

Being China, you automatically wonder if it's your connection only or everyone else too. Sadly, the upstairs neighbours either moved or changed their password for their router which I used to use to see if I needed to unplug and restart. However I did find a router that was not password-protected and tried that throughout the day to no effect.

In the end I called Brenda to ask if there was an exam, and precisely as I knew, she said no, they take place on Saturdays. She got the really short bald chap to come to see me, the one who couldn't connect me when I first came here but is now the only IT teacher nearby. Coincidentally he also has the wife I have a bizarre attraction to! The plain Jane but with the most wonderful smile that lights the day on the odd occasion she does smile.

Anyway, hats off to the diminutive chap, he reset my router completely (albeit three times) and got me back online – sadly after the Wales v NZ match had finished.

A slight problem is that he never knew the difference between passport, password and router name so my visible name for my router is now the same as my password, meaning should anyone twig, they can log on and use my internet. Aside from speed it matters little though, the internet is free.

Not sure what is wrong with me lately. I cannot sleep for long – going to bed in good time ready for an early alarm yet waking two or three hours before I need to and not being able to drop off again – and then feeling lethargic all day.

Hardly been cooking (I bought baozi for dinner last night!) and as for the walking to and from the buses to work, it kills me lately even more than usual. Sure, I still have the joint problem but that's just pain and pain is an old enemy I have fought all my life but this is damned ridiculous. I am not going to self-diagnose like a hypochondriac and say it's MS because A) No way will I allow that and B) I have no idea. I did get told by a quack many years ago when I complained my “thermostat” in bed saw me sweating one minute and then cold the next at night that it was a slight thyroid problem. And I thought that was confined to women! Could be that I suppose but I shall soldier (Sailor!) on.

I was doing my usual daydreaming earlier, assuming I would be in the UK with Joanna next summer. All too brief due to her allocated holidays but I want (for her, not me, I can stay in the same pub all week!) to pack as much in as possible. I thought I should at least make it two countries and we could go to Glasgow so not only could she say she'd been to Scotland but I could attend a Wednesday lunchtime old shipmates session in the pub. Then I started thinking about three countries. Bloody hell! Have you seen the prices of the trains??? And the time it takes plus up to FOUR changes to get from Wycombe to Bangor?? I had entertained the notion of showing her what used to be my old school HMS Conway but that's definitely out.

I then considered London-Belfast which is possible but the flight prices one way are stupid, given that a return LHR-GLA is seventy-five nicker apiece. If it comes off I reckon it's two countries and a visit to Oxford. I really DO want to go to Scotland, I have hankered after Lorne sausage in morning rolls for the last decade! No ketchup or brown sauce, just the square sausage in perfect morning rolls that you don't see in England. Put two or three of those in front of me and a full English and I will guarantee nine times out of ten the sassenach will buckle!

And that reminds me of my college days in Glesga, my breakfast and morning breaks saw me eating vast quantities of the bloody things, cholesterol be damned. But on phase 2 we lived in rented accommodation in Rutherglen and nearby the patriarch of Gartland's Rolls had his baronial keep.

He will be long dead now but I remember his Jaguar XJ12 occasionally sweeping majestically past where we lived. He was old then, I thought he was 150 but I was only nineteen so probably he was about seventy. One day I was outside trying to sort something out with my first car, an Austin 1800 Mk II land crab and his lovely Jag came whispering past.

Have you ever heard a V12 Jaguar of old, before ABS, doing an emergency stop? Huge tyres, locked and screeching on the tarmac?

Well of course I had to look.

A police car (no sirens or lights) had come up the hill leading to the road, failed to stop when it should and appeared in the path of old man Gartland, causing him to halt suddenly.

Well I have never seen anything like it and at that age I couldn't believe what I was indeed seeing! Gartland leapt (as much as a pensioner can) out of his car, the police car was stopped inches from his bonnet, and he proceeded to bawl the copper out like nobody's business!

I stood there dumbstruck, thinking he would be arrested but of course the old bill were in the wrong and all but kow-towed before, rant over (and it really was some rant) old man Gartland got into his car and purred away regally.

Sadly I just searched for Gartland's Rolls and it seems as an entity they are no longer. But they did make exceedingly good morning rolls........