Ping pang and badminton

Up at 8am to continue with work, which I did till nearly midday when I got a call from A Wu inviting me to have lunch. Fair enough, I'd skipped breakfast and was peckish. He picked me up and we went to a place on the other side of town (a three minute drive), where we entered a private room with three rather pretty girls already waiting. Actually they weren't that young, and one of them owned a bar that I haven't been to yet apparently. One by one, Boss Yang and another couple of bosses turned up, then another couple of girls. Well it was an innocent meal with some nice food. I decided to gan bei a few times with people as I planned for a siesta. A Wu took me home at 2.30pm and I grabbed an hour's kip till Tan rang me to ask me to put the bedclothes out to dry. Note to self: put phone to sleep next time take siesta.

At 5.30pm Tan called to say Lao Pan had invited us to an evening meal at 6pm. It's lovely to be invited to so many meals, and we need to reciprocate more, but why oh why do they leave it till a few minutes before to let you know? Anyway, I shouldn't complain, I'm often like that. Leilei came to the meal with a number of his friends, but we managed to get him to eat a bowl of "yu mi zhou" (sweetcorn porridge - very popular among everyone except me), and a sort of bread dumpling with something meaty inside, and most of a bowl of "da mi zhou" ("normal" rice porridge). I made my excuses and left at 7.30pm (with A Wu taking me home) as I had work to do and a meeting at 9pm.

Leilei with his friends at Lao Pan's meal

I got home to find that my 9pm meeting had been cancelled. As this week has been one of the most long and stressful in terms of work, at 8pm I decided to get my bat and go to the old people's place to hit some ping pang (yes it's "ping pang" here, so presumably our "pong" is wrong). I practised with one of the old timers I know quite well for over an hour. We did nothing spectacular - just practised forehand - starting off slow and getting quicker and harder, and then I realised playing table tennis is a bit like making love to a beautiful woman. First you unzip your bat, then your opponent holds your ball...no...no...back on track.... I got to the point where I was playing about six feet away from the edge of the table and returning semi-smashes with my own semi-smashes. Very tame compared to the surrounding tables but a necessary step in my learning to be a decent player. Then a woman who was at least in her sixties came to play me and nearly wiped the floor with me. However, I used my head, I noticed she only had one serve - a vicious backspin with a bit of side - so I learnt to counter it. Then I saw she hit 90% of her shots with backspin, so I learnt to return most of them with backspin. Then, the hardest thing, how to return her backspin shots with a topspin smash. It took many goes, but eventually sometimes I avoided hitting the bottom of the net and scooped the ball up with enough intensity to return it over the net with interest. Unfortunately she was wise to that and mainly returned these with a more vicious smash than I had mustered. But just to have returned some backspins with a forehand smash meant I'd learnt something new today - and this is a very important string in my bow. I have about four now - lordy knows how many more I'll need, or whether I'll live long enough to learn them.

I got a phone call from A Wu at 10pm asking where I was. I'd forgotten I'd told him I'd play badminton with him at that time. So I said goodbye to my friends, put on my Man City away kit from 2008, and drove to the leisure centre 90 seconds away. After two hours getting smashed by pensioners, the last thing I needed was the even more energetic game of "yi mao qiu". I'll have to learn what "qiu" really means. It means "ball", but they also call a shuttlecock a "qiu". A Wu had brought his friend from the shop where I got my trainers, and both of them were there waiting for me. When I first played A Wu four or five years' ago I was the better player by far - it wasn't that long before that I'd regularly played with And and Awl. But I haven't played for two years, and the last time I played - two years ago in Nanning - I did my back in and had to go for a painful massage the following day.

Maybe because I'd loosened up with the table tennis I didn't get the back pain from last time. And I didn't play too badly. A Wu is greatly improved and he beat me 11-5 and 12-10, and I drew one game all with his friend. During my third game with A Wu he gave up leading 6-3 as he was too tired to continue, so I suppose I was the victor. He'd only played for half an hour but after sitting out for 15 minutes we called it a night and went home, where I was just in time for my 11pm meeting. Although knackered after today, I decided to have a beer and watch The Open for a little while on tv. I never normally watch golf, but I thought "why not?" and was interested in how difficult it was in the heavy wind at St Andrew's.