I started teaching again ten days ago and now our holiday feels well and truly behind me.  This term I have more classes and a routine more like a full-time language teacher.  I work Monday to Thursday and most days I teach for six hours, which with preparation time makes for an eight to ten hour day.  It's been good to see my students again and to say hello to some new faces.  Up to now all my students have been Chinese, but I now have a group of eighteen year olds which includes some Malays and a feisty bunch they are. Looking back, I wish I'd written more about Sri Lanka and the experiences we had there.  One morning in particular keeps coming back to me when I was lying in bed at dawn in our B&B up in the tea country and as I tossed and turned I could hear church bells competing with the chanting from a nearby Buddhist monastery.  Haputale, where we were staying, is up at about six thousand feet and quite chilly at night and at dawn you can get...

I used to think jet lag was a myth propagated by people who secretly wanted to boast about their travels, but for the last week I've been a zombie, psychotic with tiredness yet unable to sleep.  Sue and I occasionally meet up in the living room at two in the morning to catch an old episode of a Jamie Oliver cookery programme or a sniper competition.  If only they could combine the two. We had been away from Saratok for five weeks and now everything seems strange again.  The day after we arrived I sleepwalked into Everise, our local supermarket, to be greeted as a long lost friend by one of the assistants who urgently directed me to the storeroom.  "Tiger beer" he said proudly, indicating a pallet load of blue cardboard wrapped twenty-four packs.  His logic was clear - a pink man coming to the store on New Year's eve must be in need of beer.  I staggered to the check-out with a case while smiling dutifully.  Then I witnessed another mystery I've yet t...