Sunday same old same old

Spend the day fretting, in varying order, on the following:

1) Shark. Gone. Disappeared for le weekend. Not a word. She is staying en famille elsewhere.

This is all due to Shark's new island friend Louise who has arranged with her le sleepover.

Really, it is all thanks to Louisa's maman, whom I immediately adore on the fact that she can sort it so my daughter disappears to have fun for 24 hours.

Slightly alarming is I'm not sure how to get Shark back thanks to Louisa's maman also disappearing. When I finally find her (phone not working, email bounces) she shows not one jot of concern and I can't help but fall in love with her a little bit more. She merely raises a perfect eyebrow and says, in an English accent tinged with French, They slept and now I think they are at the beach uhu?

I am trying to emulate Louisa's maman. I am going all insouciance while practising my languid uhu? Soon I will enthusiastically adopt all the accoutrements of foreign louche to complete the picture. Of course I will get it horribly British wrong, and turn up at our next appointment wearing a smoking jacket and dangling a novelty rhinoceros horn cigarette holder between my Yardley stained lips.

2) My thighs. They are not looking too bad if I get them in the right light and squint at the knees.

This brings both sadness and delight. Delight because the up-down Hong Kong hills regime has given me a pair of elasticated long doings, stretching twixt knee and hip, the like I haven't seen since aged 23.

Yet, sadness. In a way, I am nostalgic (cue soulful music and out of focus gaze). It has been my privilege to wear a true pair of wobbly English thighs for over a decade. Now they are melted, lost in the mountain tracks of Hong Kong, I feel sentimental for the old strawberry pink wobblers. Somehow, fattened thighs define an English girl. I am sure they could have carried that look of smoking jacket and rhinoceros horn.

3) The tree. I am obsessing over this. Circling it, both mentally, and physically, round and round the torn up trunk. I fretted this the other day.

They chopped down a tree. Now I see a notice is pinned to the end of the path, some forty metres away, reminding all law abiding citizens that destruction of woodland carries a squillion dollar fine. I stare at it glumly while Dig comments matter of factly how very Hong Kong this is. He adds how no one does anything until after the event when someone puts up a notice, saying You can't do that, and this merely shows what a non-politicised population is here. He does not know my tortured soul. Silently, I regret the lack of chains last Friday.

Thus, apart from fretful circling, nothing achieved.