TECH ISSUES. Taiwan's prices are pretty unbeatable and we picked up a decent spec notebook PC for about 2/3 of what it would have cost anywhere else. At last we have our own computer again, rather than the one we'd been renting from the school for the last 18 months. It's meant that we've reduced to almost nothing the gob-smackingly tangled array of wires and cables that used to skulk under our computer table (a traditional Chinese mah-jang game table, actually). We generally found that using a laptop is a bit of a hassle typing-wise (well, actually LAETITIA is the one who complains) so we added a separate full-size keyboard to the whole shebang which makes things a lot easier. That's what she says, anyway. Isn't one of the achievements of living in a 'wired' world being able to get rid of the wires?

ALTERNATIVE LIFESTYLES. While I spent the first fortnight of August in London visiting my brother Shelley (who was seriously ill in hospital there), Laetitia spent the week-long summer holiday still in Taiwan. She and 2 co-workers, Matthew and Jess, took a long drive down the East Coast of the country to see some new scenery. It worked - they ate the same food (but in a different part of the country), narrowly avoided the same road dangers (but in a different part of the country) and visited some fairly nice coastal spots when they could find them (they MUST have been in a different part of the country). One of the things worth doing was visiting one of what's apparently only two cold-water thermal springs in the world. This one's at Jiao Shi on the East Coast of the island. They spent some time in the Toroko Gorge, a wall- to- wall marbled chasm which should be one of the things that every visitor to Taiwan should see, and also checked out some waterfalls and stuff, all exotic-like.

AIR MALAYSIA CAN GO JUMP! We finally got our refund from our cancelled trip to Borneo. Here's what happened: we were due for a week off in August and had booked and paid for a few days in Borneo (through Air Malaysia) until I decided to go to London instead where my brother Shelley had been rushed to the intensive care unit with complications arising from treatment he was undergoing for his brain tumour. Since then, we'd been fighting with Air Malaysia for a refund and we have decided never to fly with them again if we can help it - the bastards simply ignored our correspondence. We got the good news about the refund while we were sitting at the local government hospital waiting for our new Health Check forms to clear - we've had to apply for new visas and work permits because we intended to stay a bit longer in Taiwan.

Home by 4am.

CLUBBING IN. We spent New Year's Eve 2000-2001 at a wedding banquet for a colleague, Laura, at a 5-star hotel in Taipei. This gave me the chance to dress decently for a change. Later, we spent until about 8 on New Year's morning at a subsequently shut-down dance club called 'Lightbug' which provided us with many hours of fun and entertainment - or did we provide that for everyone ELSE there. I forget. Just in case you're wondering, the hair is completely computer- generated. It makes up for the Mohawk...

As things are, we're having a few days break for the Christmas weekend and the hubbub of noise that normally fills our days has been reduced as the schools fall silent. Xmas here is VERY expensive, the price of setting up a traditional-type festivity in a part of the world that's probably furthest away from where traditional Christmases are generally held. That was our new year 2000-2001. There was another one to come, as the Chinese celebrate their Lunar New Year a few months after the Western one.