Again, apologies for my late blog, especially to my good friend Andrew, one of my (few) regular readers. In my defence, I am still waiting for his blog to be set up. Actually, it is a weak defence. I saved my first draft of this blog post on 22nd August, which is over a month ago. I’ll write about what I’ve been up to in a month’s time.

My stint as an English teacher had made me more self-conscious about my spelling and grammar. I’ve also noticed how the English language has changed during my 18 months in China. Obviously, there are new words such as:

• Credit crunch
• Sub-prime
• Collateralized debt obligation
• iPhone
• Macrogolisation – the realisation of some old truths about money:
• cannot keep borrowing it forever
• it does not grow on trees
• people do want it back

OK, the list is not comprehensive and says a lot more about my interests. Plus I made the last one up after looking up the ingredients for the moisturiser I use.

The phrase that I have thought about the most is “at the minute”. When I first heard it I thought it sounded completely incorrect, yet, it seems (and probably is) grammatically sound.

Which wordsmith first came up with this phrase?

OK, my time in Liverpool has ended, save the occasional weekend trip and Christmas. Even when I was at Nottingham university, 22 weeks of the year were spent in Liverpool. I have left behind:

1. Liverpool One – A new shopping development that opened during the time I was in China. It looks good but I have heard complaints that it takes too much walking to do your shopping. After three weeks of fruitlessly exploring every shop to find brown shoes that I liked, I would agree with that view.
2. The Polish food store – Also opened in the time I was gone. I’ve only seen it once and I didn’t go inside.
3. The Chinese Badminton Club – I came here every Friday night that I could make for 7 years. I really loved coming here. A place for Mainland Chinese, BBCs and Brits to come together and play badminton. If you want to join, go to Garston Sports Centre on a Friday from 8pm to 10pm. Bring money.

But after a four hour journey with a car’s worth of my possessions, I have moved to London. I am still far far away from Scouseland.

The ball finally dropped that some readers wanted to contact me and were having to leave comments on my post. So I finally created a contact email address. It is:

admin(at)jameshuang.co.uk

All spam, junk email, phising scams are welcome. They will be automatically deleted by gmail. (Am I asking for trouble here?)