Day 105

After two days of false starts, returning home meekly each day after a 5 hour wait of being told that Lukla airport is closed due to bad weather but MAY reopen, Rufus eventually found a determined way out of Kathmandu airport - by chartering a private helicopter! The cheek of him. £250 of our miniscule budget just so he can pretend he is Bear Grylls for 20 minutes. The good news is that he made friends with equally stranded slightly mad and frustrated trekkers so managed to at least start out as a group - although am sure his intention is to lose them all along the way. So as I write, he has taken off in a helicopter to go to Everest while I teach his English students for him and spend 2 weeks looking after the children. And as everyone knows, I don't really do 'alone' so will be frantically trying to fill my time by hanging out with my favourite Nepali waiters every evening. In fact I started my new social calendar before Rufus had even gone by making them skive off work for the afternoon and take me to see a Bollywood film while Rufus shopped for a manly camping mat (more like a yoga mat), dried fruit, thermal pants and iodine tablets - the glamour of the trekker! So Hari and Sankar took me to the cinema with the girls - and it was brilliant and we all loved it and the fact I don't speak a word of Hindi didn't matter a bit. Alll glorious colour, ridiculous song and dance routines, bizarre love stories and a weird mix of modern social issues including adultery, depression, alcoholism, self-harm and suicide. The multi-colour fantasy romance - depicting a simple India where love is a free and real choice and not a pre-destined caste-focussed arrangement - is just like how life should really be. A simple sweet love story based on chemistry and happiness - it really was joyous. And even though it was 2 and a half hours long with an intermission (although nobody sold ice cream down the front) I didn't complain once and Clover barely wriggled. Sure, she shouted 'what did he say' every few minutes but nobody seemed to mind. And I particularly enjoyed the man next to me who talked loudly on his mobile phone, the baby behind who pulled my hair and Hari who giggled like a child at every slapstick moment and covered his face with his hands at all the kissing. Sheltered life! He would be glue sniffing and trying to meet 14 year old girls on the internet in Scotland.

Teaching the English students is fun (three Korean women), I get a whiteboard and wander up and down a lot - but I realised pretty quickly that although my English is pretty fluent, I know nothing about suffixes (a county outside London?) or prepositions (from the word preposterous?). So I decided to teach them general conversation skills instead, and spent the whole four hour class talking about myself. Nobody fell asleep or walked out, but one woman did leave with a headache after an hour or so - I didn't take it personally, it was her loss. I mean, where is Korean going to get her in this world? She came back on day two though, where I thought I would begin with 'people I have loved and lost' followed by a two hour slot on 'my career mistakes'.

I don't want to eat out on my own while he is away in case I am mistaken for some desperate Shirley Valentine-type so have resorted to pizza and noodles for our evening meal. And even peanut butter sandwiches! I now make my lovely friend Hari come round after work and sleep on my sofa at night in case I get scared and so I am not alone. And only two more sleeps until my gorgeous big sister arrives and brings Marmite and Percy Pigs and Grazia. I hope she doesn't mind sharing the sofa with a cute Nepali boy, in fact I think it will cheer her up no end.