10th June – Mosquitos!
I’m a little obsessed by the fact that I look like one of the cast from The Inbetweeners. Either one hungry little bugger or a whole gang of vampire mosquitos decided to have a party on my forehead while I slept the night before last then, not quite ready to call it a night, they partied on bouncing around my left arm and attacking at will.
AND who knew the bloodsucking little cretin could fly up to the 18th floor, I thought they’d turn to dust after the 13th…
15th June – Walking Walls
Status: It’s 5:00am and I would pay a million yuen for an ice cold, orange flavour Lucozade. And if this bloody spell check changes ‘flavour’ to ‘flavor’ one more time!
Such is the current state of affairs.
I have poisoned myself for the third time this weekend and my body has decided that enough is enough. So far this morning, I have skidded – without falling – on the rug, I misjudged the length of the bathroom wall and in doing so rendered myself slightly stunned after walking into the doorframe. I have confirmed the day three times on my phone and realised that my bike is still tied up to the railings outside the train station. Hmm.
There’s only one thing for it: I’m going to have to listen to the BeeGees on the bus this morning – I’m not sure that there’s much else that can salvage this day from my selfinduced toxic stupor.
16th June 2015 – Broken
Shanghai nearly broke me yesterday.
There are a veritable banquet of reasons why: a bad day at work; a mile and a half unnecessary walk in the wrong direction, in the dark, in the rain; the fact that people are not especially considerate with umbrellas and walk too slowly in the rain; silent mopeds without headlights on the pavement in the rain; the onset of trench foot; the fact that IKEA can move elusively behind trees and flyovers which renders the dominating huge superstore virtually impossible to find; the moment when you are in IKEA reeking both soggy doglike & sweaty exhausted and the till guy actually takes a wiff of his own t-shirt to establish whether it was him; the fact that I couldn’t even muster the energy to buy an ice-cream costing less than 10p; the bastard trolley not stopping when I loaded some shelves, rebelliously rolling away leaving me balancing a not insubstantial shelving unit on one knee flailing around trying to ineffectually calling it back before it decided it wasn’t to be spoken to like that and, spinning, crashed straight into my shins: aaaagh; relentless, unforgiving rain and not having wellies or a mac…
Did I want a handsome stranger to appear ride up on a trolley, whisk me away to the fitted kitchen section and pour me a glass of bubbly to enjoy while he went and spoke Chinese to the delivery, invoicing and payment counters? Yep. This time I did – I was nearly broken, I tell you! I was perfectly happy to give up and crash into the faux wooden mahogany garden patio furniture display along with my new reading chair topped trolley. But I didn’t. Still smelling, not smiling, I completed the necessaries (although I couldn’t walk back to get the ice-cream), propelled a warning vibe of mammoth proportions at the girl who tried to push in front of me at the taxi rank and drove back up the road that I had been stomping down an hour prior after exiting the station at the wrong exit.
She went to Shanghai 