Sweaty basketball and finally finished work for the trip

Not up too late considering, but by the time I’d taking in the washing, hung the next lot out to dry, and put the third lot in to wash, then grabbed a shower, it was gone lunchtime and the kids had already had their dumplings delivered. Plus two drinks delivered by a second deliveroo person who arrived at exactly the same time. How inefficient.

I'm so embarrassed - for the last week I've been using this as fabric conditioner - I was absolutely convinced that's what it was...but Tan corrected me that it was "clearly" washing liquid...oh well...at least our clothes have been clean

All I had was an egg again, propped up with three packs of those almost weightless salty biscuits. Haiwai rang to tell me to come over and eat at his at 6pm, and I mentioned he had told me I was supposed to be going to his son’s school this afternoon (which I’d forgotten about until he rang). But he said “bu yong le” and that was that. At least I could focus on work a bit more, which I did until hunger really set in at 4pm. I thought I could hold out but it wasn’t going away so I opened another can of that expensive meat our ex-neighbour gave us the other day and guiltily had half of it.

Tan texted in Chinese to take the kids to A Xia’s where they would be waiting to take the kids at 5.30. At that time when I got them ready they decided for some reason they would rather go with me to Haiwei’s house so I called Tan and got the angry response that they had been waiting for the kids. Not much you can do.

We arrived pretty early at 6.08pm, and for the first time Haiwei hadn’t called me to ask where I was, and indeed was still cooking. I’d had the shits all afternoon and wasn’t feeling great, so took the opportunity of having a near-nap on his comfortable sofa counting in German up to 60 but not getting much further until accidentally switching to Mandarin. It was almost a dreamlike state and did refresh me a little.

The meal was typically excellent and Leilei ate up everything, unlike Xixi who has the smallest stomach in Pingguo. And instead of drinking more than a couple of cans afterwards we took our kids to Haiwei’s son’s school to play basketball, which Leilei was keen to do. It was dark and very sweaty - I didn’t particularly want to play but the lads wanted a father and son vs father and son so of course I joined in. Leilei is better than me but the two of them combined were a bit too much for us but who was counting? Xixi was a little bored so I suggested we play free throws, which she could join in with and was a little less energetic. We could have stayed longer but I really had to go back and finish work for the week.

Chen then invited me to go and eat at 6pm tomorrow, but I couldn’t confirm as I knew I’d be meeting waterman soon and he may invite me for the same time. No problem...he just said to confirm tomorrow afternoon.

After work I decided to go and see racist Huang but he was pretty pissed and boring, so much so that I didn’t feel bad relieving myself of his company pretty swiftly to sidle over to Boss Zhou’s place. He wasn’t there, but there were others who bade me over for half an hour or so for a couple of drinks. Then Zhang Hongping called me to say he’s seen me at Boss Zhou’s just now and he was just 50 yards away so I went there for the next 90 minutes until I could barely stay awake at 3am.

Brown boiled egg at Boss Zhou's

I managed to avoid the DFC order by forcing myself to take the kids out to the yumi tang place. We don’t even have to give our order now. Work and weather dictated spending the afternoon at home until I took the kids to A Hua’s place for tea where she was with Tan nattering, then got back to my own tea of a single egg. It rained on the way back and was a welcome coolness on the dian dong che, which I was to experience again soon after as the kids called me to pick them up again.

They took themselves to the guangchang for skating and I picked them up at 9.30 to go home and left them there as I’d been asked to go to Boss Zhou’s for an evening meal, and there was no way they’d want to accompany me there. I was the only one with him for a while and we shared a beer. But after a couple of messages to a WeChat group I’d recently been added to more people started arriving in dribs and drabs as photos of the food being served were shared. I made a joke that I had brought a brown boiled egg and for some reason one woman didn’t get the joke and when she arrived promptly ate it. The last person arrived after 1am, but we were relatively sensible with the Snowflake beer and finished by 2.30am, although for some reason didn’t sleep till well gone 4am.

My brown boiled egg

Boss Zhou's cat keeping a watchful eye over me