Last ever dog meal with Uncle Yellow

Woke up with a nasty cough and used what energy I had to put out the clothes to dry that I'd washed last night. Awl called at 1.30pm which was 5.30am his time and we had a chat and I made a mini pack of pao mian, which is what the locals call convenient noodles.

Uncle Yellow pinged me to eat dog this evening but I told him I really didn't think I'd be able to make it as I was feeling shit. So he told me to get some kip and let him know but not too late. I did try to get back to sleep but even the Spanish counting didn't quite do the trick, coughing kept interrupting. Some time before 3pm I gave up trying to sleep. I'd already finished the bit of local cough medicine that was left on the shelf, then Tan told me she'd left some Ibuprofen in Nezha's room from the summer so I did a couple of them. I was still feeling rough so tried a little nip of whisky and actually after the second one it seemed that the cough was diminishing.

It dawned on me that I had precious little time left so got back to Uncle Yellow to say I would do my best to make it. But he had a go at me getting back so late and he'd have to check if others could make it. Ah, they were only going to eat dog if I was going. Well I thought I wouldn't eat dog again, and told myself this would be the last time, if he could find others to eat with. But of course he did and within half an hour he told me to come down to Jiang Bing Lu for the said dog.

Well I turned up slightly late, and Uncle Yellow was waiting outside for me and shouted at me as you do. His name is Huang Lei but since 2003 I've known him as Uncle Yellow and I guess that won't change now. Having said that, I call many of my friends by different names from when I first knew them, e.g. A Wu used to be Xiao Li. I mean he still is but I guess as you get to know someone better your relationship changes and therefore the way you address them does. But it doesn't apply to everyone; Li Kun has always been Li Kun for example. I'll probably never understand.

Uncle Yellow remembered from 2019 that I rather liked Wolf Blass red wine and bought a box of 6 bottles of their 2017 "Gold Label", which looking online seemed to be £21 a bottle! Having said that, many people here have said that imported brands are often fake. Anyway, with my cough and cold I could barely appreciate it but had more taste than beer would have had. But, like beer, we still chinked glasses and drank fairly regularly, albeit smaller lugs, and I made my beer glass-sized glass last four sips each time.

Great dog meal with Uncle Yellow on the right and Boss Zhou high-fiving his wife

A Ning turned up a couple of minutes after me, with his wife and second daughter. Then a couple of more blokes did, plus one who only drank tea as he maybe needed to work later. Uncle Yellow asked me if I liked the monarchy. Hmm...this was not directly political but very close. I told him I had mixed feelings - on the one hand I do rather like having a non-political figurehead, but on the other hand it seems a bit unfair that you can just get born into such an easy life that we the taxpayers pay for. He very much agreed about the second point, and said they were very expensive. Yes, but I said they also bring in a lot of tourism so it's not black and white. He also agreed with the point about it being an easy life if you have blue blood. But again I countered my own argument saying it's effectively true for anyone born into a rich family. But here he disagreed, at least in the context of China. He said before anyone who had a lot of money could buy anything, but recently that wasn't the case. He made it very clear that these days just because you were rich didn't mean you had the means to do anything. I'm not quite sure how true that is, but I'm very willing to believe it's more like that here than some more capitalist places (and I'm aware that China is also capitalist). It's a conversation I would very much like to have engaged in for longer but we had to drink again and I realised I was running the risk of moving to something too political so we moved on to other subjects.

The meal was great of course, and didn't really need the dog. At 8.55pm the tea drinker got a message that he wouldn't need to work and immediately poured himself a glass of bai jiu and ganbei'd us. This went on for another hour but I needed to meet A Wu so before 10pm we all finished and one of the blokes insisted on driving me to where A Wu was near the football stadium. The driver got a didi che back I think, and when I walked in I was told we'd go back to A Wu's office so I ended up driving him there. So much for having a driver. At his office it was just a few bosses, and after having a small bite to eat I was flaking so made my excuses and went home.

I was home at midnight and although I'd planned to chat with the lads I fell asleep a few minutes later. I then woke up at 3.45am and saw a missed call from Sisi at 3.22am. I told her I'd been asleep so she sent me a picture of a bottle of wine and said she fancied some cigarettes, which was confirmed when she called me again. Well it was 4am but this is Pingguo and I thought "why not?". I put on my clothes and took the dian dong che to the football stadium but I couldn't find anywhere selling fags. So I asked at a local bbq place and they said they could get me a pack for 10 kuai. Err, ok, I scanned the Weixin code and paid, and a couple of minutes later the bloke handed me a box of them. I shouldn't really ask questions. Then to the other side of the stadium to the same bar as the other day to resume drinking red wine, although this time much more slowly. Sisi was a bit drunk and talking wistfully about her late father and I knew she really missed him. I ended up taking her back at 6.45am and was home myself very shortly after...another 7+am finish.

Long meal by the river

Bloody coughing got me up at 9am after five hours' sleep. I somehow found a 3 hour in-depth video of Christopher Hitchens that kept me awake-dreaming till the afternoon when Li Kun told me to be at his at 12:30. A Wu also called me to say we'd start at after 1pm so I didn't rush too much, and only grabbed a shower at 12:20pm. I was feeling pretty shitty with Nong's cold, so allowed myself a couple of sips of the duty free whisky that had not found someone to be given to. Due to the lack of sleep I also had some cola with a bit more of the W. Intending to be fashionably late, I told Li Kun I would leave around 12:45 but he responded to say to wait 15 minutes as he wasn't there yet...so much for being told to be there at 12:30. So at gone 1pm I left the dian dong che to charge and walked the 10 minutes to Li Kun's, remembering to bring a long-sleeved top and phone charger just in case. Oh, and the bottle of cola.

As I was nearing his office his second daughter spied me and ran at me to give me a huge hug which was absolutely delightful. It's little unexpected things like this happening that can really make your day. We got in his car with his wife and two youngest and drove a good 15 minutes south before coming to a stop at the side of the road to call A Wu as apparently we didn't want to arrive before him as it wouldn't be right. So we basically sat in the car for another 15 minutes or so with his little son on my knee and Li Kun himself trying to learn the words of Hey Jude. It was actually quite tricky to explain what it meant to take a sad song and make it better, but I did my best anyway. Finally A Wu's car turned up and we then continued on our way past a fishing lake and finally to a few houses on the riverbank.

Li Kun's younger daughter and son in the car while waiting for A Wu

It looked like we were among the first to turn up and as it was getting on for 2pm I realised that we were coming for tea rather than lunch. I saw a couple of oldish people manually ripping the corn off the sweetcorn cob and of course joined in to help. It was a lot harder than it looks and I started to tire after just doing one, so I thanked them and went to look around instead. There were a couple of blokes cooking and A Wu's and Li Kun's kids running about with some of the local kids. I ended up taking them down to a small pier where they spent a good half an hour fetching stones to throw in the water under the glorious Guangxi sunshine. Both A Wu's and Li Kun's kids are really comfortable with me now and often take me by the hand to lead me to places. It was just simple fun, but maybe like Li Kun's daughter's hug earlier it just seems to feel more special here, like being here tunes up your sensory perception. I suppose it's generally like that when you are abroad, but when in Europe I don't normally stick out so much and the sensory uptick is more of an aural thing. Here it's pretty much every sense. But for the kids they don't seem to see me as being much different; they've got past the "your eyes are blue, your hair is blond, your nose is tall" stage and I'm just Uncle Peng to them now. And I guess now that my kids are mostly grown up I do miss some sort of interaction with the younger ones and their innocence.

Li Kun and A Wu chatting by the river

A veranda built around a tree

The pier from which the kids and I threw stones, Li Yan in the foreground

More people turned up during the afternoon, many of whom knew me and I pretended to remember them. The men smoked and talked and the women just talked, and I mainly stayed with the other kids outside, though aware about the risks of getting sunburnt (though getting sunburnt in November is such a luxury). Then, finally, at 3.44pm it was announced that we were to eat. I was bloody hungry by this point and accepted half a bowl of rice that I wouldn't normally do. We had the lovely spicy bamboo root stuff although they keep telling me it isn't bamboo but something else I've not yet managed to learn or write down. Presently the beer was poured for most of the blokes and white alcohol for a few others. It didn't take as long as usual for cai ma to start, and A Wu suggested I go round the whole table (well both). Well sod it, why not? The only real rule seemed to be that you one of you had to win twice but both had to lose at least once. I was trying to do the maths for the best possible situation - there were about 12 blokes, so at half a glass per loss the best case would be six glasses of Snowflake beer. The worst case would be significantly worse. The actual case was pretty bad; I did pretty well against the majority, but there were two or three blokes that just kept winning and it took a good 7 or 8 losses before I beat them. Then finally to A Wu, but for some reason I caned him, to everyone's delight. I totally lost count of how many glasses I'd imbibed but after ensuring I'd eaten enough I made me genuine excuses and said I needed to rest for a while. I found one of those lazy chairs and pretended to sleep for about 30 minutes. Maybe I did drop off. But Li Yan, A Wu's son, wanted me to go and play with him. So I said "15 minutes", and indeed exactly 15 minutes later he came back so I went out to play for a while.

Getting ready to eat

Excusing myself for a shoot with A Wu's and Li Kun's younger daughters respectively

Predictably, as the meal wore on some of the blokes got pretty drunk. I'm generally ok with this although never allow myself to become so imbibed as I like to feel a good degree of control. So after another session at the table I made more excuses to lie down, and once again Li Yan wanted me to play. So another 10 minutes later I spent some time with him before it was nearly time for the City Liverpool match. I noticed Li Kun and family had already gone home, which I was slightly annoyed about as I had been due to go back with him but he had probably seen me "sleeping" in the chair and let me lie. So I went for a walk past the pond and sat at the side of a house and managed to find a half-decent stream of the match on my phone. It had been worth taking the portable charger.

Then at half time, around 9.30pm A Wu and family were ready to go back so I got a lift with them. Very annoyingly, a pissed bloke was acting just like the pissed bloke in the broken lift the other night, and may well have been the same person. He grabbed my arm and kissed it and had I had a few more beers I might have done or said something that wasn't appropriate. He had a horrible high-pitched laugh too. Once we arrived at A Wu's I sensed he wanted to walk with me and I made it clear to A Wu that I would walk home alone and walked in the road rather than the pavement to avoid him tracking me. I didn't look back, and just marched on, hoping that A Wu was restraining the other bloke. I would have liked to watch the second half of the footy but by the time I got home it was already in injury time. An unsatisfactory 1-1 draw after a good performance but trying to keep positive at least it's good for the title race.

I was really starting to feel shit now though and was coughing badly. I don't know if the whisky was the cause or the cure but I tried a bit more to help get to sleep after a chat with Awl.