As you read this, I am at the end of my first quarantine week and halfway through.

(Yes, I’ve always crossed my 7s. I’ve done it since primary school, charmed by this exotic way of differentiating 7 from 1. It’s proof of my early visceral Europeanness.)

Hm, well I’m always being TOLD to go to bed earlier, which is hard for me because I am a night owl and not a lark, but when I do, despite all the admin, I end up waking before 6. This might be fine in DB, where I could at least go for a walk, but not when I’m encased here. I ponder whether I’m like Margaret Thatcher in not needing a huge amount of sleep but somehow I can’t accept that that is the case.

I haven’t ordered breakfast, because I was hoping to order something from Eric Kayser for a change and their Deliveroo orders can’t be scheduled in advance. I find on waking that they are closed until later today, as are a lot of other restaurants. Welcome to the weekend, I suppose. So it’s back to a pain au raisin at Pret with a bottle of Vitamin Volcano juice. True, it’s full of sugar and it’s much better to eat the actual fruit than the juice but the word vitamin sold it to me. I have given up on the hotel food which appears to have zero nutritional content. It was going straight in the bin, which I hated too, but I couldn’t eat all those rice noodles and stock-cube-cornflour soup as well as my nutritionally more valuable delivery food.

The result was two “garbage bags” full of waste to be put outside the door between 20.00 and 21.00 hours every day. (To do this at any other time is an offence.)

So many plastic bottles, cardboard forms, paper bags were going into the bin. I’d normally put them in the recycling, for what it’s worth, although I’m not certain that my carefully separated waste stays that way here. Hong Kong is still in love with plastic, it seems, even more so during the pandemic. You’d think that a place that has to deal firsthand with the careless over-consumption of single use refuse would be more mindful of what it chucks away but this is Antibacteria City.

I think about our landlord exhorting us to bleach the tiles in our courtyard garden once a week, and also about his wife who sprays her own garden with mosquito repellent half an hour before she sits in it. Seriously. These are nice, supposedly educated people. I mean, I hate the fact that I only have to go outside with exposed skin to become a feeding frenzy for mosquitos but I still wouldn’t advocate a sterile environment, devoid of anything inconvenient.

This afternoon, then, I take the bold step of cancelling my meal plan, which means I have to organise myself for food orders from now on. The waste was outrageous considering the homeless and hungry people in this city and I’m glad no longer to be adding to it. Today’s lunch is inedibly salty, in any case, a dish of slices of unidentifiable animal in a starch-thickened sweetcorn sauce. I am still shaken by yesterday’s horrific reports of the sufferering of a poor old seal, washed up on a beach in Norfolk and tortured as it lay helpless and dying, by local people throwing stones. What sort of brutality allows people to do this? The same sort of brutality that allows us to rear food animals intensively in appalling conditions. What a waste of gentle souls. I consider becoming a vegetarian, not for the first time.

I am quite disturbed by how much hair I seem to be losing. It’s everywhere I look. It could be my age, but oh, my beautiful, dark, shiny waves that have taken me more than two years to grow having been experimentally shorn by my then-new hairdresser! Now, when I put it up out of the way (for it gets far too sweaty in Hong Kong,) I do think of all those cultures where one’s hair is covered lest it provoke undesireable behaviour in strange men. I’ve never thought in that way but my hairloss exposes the strength of this cultural tradition. My request to borrow a vacuum cleaner is declined, however, because then the hotel would have to remove the machine from my room and they are not allowed to do that by the Health Authority. They are, however, allowed to take used sheets from my room, so at least I can change my bed linen. The mattress in encased in plastic.

I order pizza for supper. I cannot order a Peroni to go with it, however, because the delivery person needs my ID and I am not allowed to interact with anyone except the people from the Health Authority. Never mind. I have wine.