I’m starting to settle into the new quarantine regime. It helps that I have food deliveries to look forward to.

The normal East to West jet lag routine has set in, it seems: I’m so tired the first night after travelling that I fall asleep immediately, having nodded all evening then wake at 5. The second evening I wake in the small hours only to doze until about 6.30. It’s fine, and much better than the West -> East, which involves five days of hours of insomnia. And I can’t go out for a walk, which is probably what I’d normally do.

Today my plans are:

PCR test

Update blog

Walking workout

Actually wear clothes

Food delivery

Washing up liquid from M and S

Today’s first, and slightly scary task is the Day 5 PCR spit test. I do this at 6am but I’m unsure how to send it to the authorities. In my bewildered fog of Day 1, I haven’t taken on board any instructions. I don’t want to get anything wrong: my door is watched by CCTV – they check that I am wearing a mask every time I open the door – and any transgression could be punished with a fine and/or a prison sentence. I’m not joking.

I eventually receive a phone call from a number with a prefix that I’d normally ignore as a cold call informing me of all of the dates for my upcoming PCR tests. I am to leave my test on the chair outside my door to be collected by a nurse. I am to place a chair and a waste bin by my door ready to receive the testing people on the requisite days. No, the chair outside my door will not do.

I walk just over two kilometres the length of my small room listening to an Apple Fitness+ walking podcast by Stephen Fry. While acknowledging his National Treasure status, I’m not such a huge fan. I still hold a grudge for a dismissive tweet he wrote about bankers about 10 years ago. I decide I should review my attitude because his podcast is gentle and sweet and I now owe him.

My meals today consist of three lots of rice noodles with some undefinable shreds of topping and “soup” beneath, containing some sort of ball, beef and fish in my estimation. The lunchtime one might even have some veg in it, well, spring onions. It’s my own stupid fault for ordering these meals, I know, but I did it when my mind was otherwise fully occupied and under duress, and in my defence the print size on the menu choice email was tiny so I just put a pin in the menu and hoped for the best. This was the best.

A pot of lettuce is delivered with my breakfast which has some sort of white sauce on it. I save it until later. The next day breakfast, actually, when I decide that greens are greens and I should eat them but I gag when the topping tastes unexpectedly sweet.

The self-pity about the food only increases when I see FB posts on the quarantine support group with much lovelier-looking meals than mine, and The Husband tells me that his VIP option food plan, for which he is paying extra, includes baked halibut for dinner today. Waaah! He reassures me that the people posting the lovely-looking food are only boasting about how much they paid for their quarantine hotel packages. I baulked at having to shell out thousands of pounds extra as guaranteed income for hotels who will provide the minimum possible to those of us who have no choice but to do this. After spending so much on my Canada trip it didn’t seem justifiable. I now decide that I will have to order food in to supplement my depressing food plan.

My food orders arrive. Of the two bottles of wine, one has a screw cap. For some odd reason I’ve ordered a bottle of olive oil. I have no idea when I’m going to I use that. Washing up liquid arrives and, delighted, I use it to clean my disposable plastic cutlery in my bathroom basin. Odd what brings you joy, isn’t it?

It’s a remarkably sociable evening, for me. I have several WhatsApp conversations including one with my friend who returned from the UK on the same flight as The Husband but is in a different hotel, who tells me of the bedbug infestation in her room. I have an actual phone conversation for over half an hour with my mother in law. I’m useless on the phone, and it shows. I’m conscious of filling silences by babbling like an idiot.

I videocall my friend whose pelvis was fractured in two places a few weeks ago when she was run over by a truck here in HK. She’s thankfully on the mend now and it’s lovely to speak to her again. She and some other lovely friends extend kind offers, most gratefully received, to bring me anything that I want and need. This is the advantage of being in the middle of Causeway Bay so maybe this wasn’t such a mistake after all. I feel thankful for my friends, old and new.

A little drained by all this interaction with PEOPLE – I am quite introverted after all – I manage to watch the whole of the next episode of Family Business, which is still delightfully silly, before nodding off at just after ten. It’s been a better day.