Thursday 17th

I just survived a mosquito attack!

I was awoken at 2 am by that ominous buzzing sound we all know to be something that is going to bite you. Now I’ve learnt my lesson. This is not a noise you can just ignore. Nor should you think that DEET can save you. No, your only defence is offence. You have to get the little bugger before it gets you. So it was at 2 am that I unrolled my 3 point plan to DESTROY ALL MOSQUITOES. Well, not all mosquitoes, just the one in my room last night. And not so much destroy them as to neutralise their threat.

Step 1: Open the door and turn on the lights in the lounge and hall to lure it out.
Step 2: DEET up, just in case it decides to work this time.
Step 3: Run round the round room furiously swatting the air in the hope that you'll get lucky and kill it.

And when all of these steps fail, which they ultimately will when implemented by me in the middle of the night, you simply retreat back into your mosquito net, pull your blankets over your head and hope that you don't run out of oxygen.


And you'll be relieved to know that I survived this horrific ordeal, and continue, as best I can, with my everyday life.

We have in our house a conflict of the strangest sort. We have a fridge in the kitchen in which we store water, cabbages, etc. Now most people accept that fridges are supposed to be cold; that is after all, the premise on which we argue their usefulness. But it appears that no one has told this to our house girl, Angelique. She prefers to use the fridge as a cupboard. This would be fine. Warm water never hurt anyone. Except that our new intern keeps yoghurt and fanta in there, and she likes them cold. But whenever she opens the fridge, a blast of warm air wafts out. So she turns the fridge up to full volume. And whenever Angelique opens the fridge, the cabbages are frozen solid, so she turns the power off completely. Well, it looks like the intern is winning because when I went to have breakfast this morning, my milk was frozen into a block. So I’m sitting in the lounge waiting for it to defrost so I can have my breakfast. I’m watching Aljazeera while I wait, not the BBC because it's 'too biased' and not CNN because 'they just make things up'.