Yesterday was Hellishly overcrowded - one of the school governors died so they declared a holiday in all three schools. This meant that Yesu, Arun and all their friends came round to see us and we spent the day playing cards, chess, music and on rare occasions, trying to work. We went to the dreaded Surya for lunch and had garlic chicken, one of the few things we can eat! In the evening we had tomato soup (no Chilli!) and salty biscuits. Indian bread is sweet and disgusting, but we can't find any 'normal' bread anywhere! They don't know what cheese is! Some things never cease to amaze me.

We found some cornflakes! Your actual Kellogg's too, but we have to eat it with powdered milk. Still, the stuff is absolutely gorgeous and it should sort our bowels out! With cornflakes and boiled vegetables we might well be on our way towards normality of a sort. I'm not running away from Indian food, I still like a lot of what we have been given – biryani is lovely – but the stuff they have with dosai is foul. And they have it for breakfast! I think our contact with Indian food should be occasional, not constant.

Arun came with us to the hotel on Sunday night and had chicken! He is a Hindu so should really be strictly vegetarian, he begged us not to tell his father or girlfriend. Bad boy. We don't think his letter worked because his girlfriend is called Onita now!

Yesterday we saw the biggest mosquito in the world – it was about two centimetres long and had stripy legs. I envisaged my diary being found next to a bloodless corpse... So we killed it.

We have become majorly stressed out and overworked with petty things. Today I spent the morning doing my washing and two hours making lunch. After lunch we had a grand letter drive, went to Schwartz (no one turned up) and then I had to worry about dinner. C. tried to prepare a lesson for St. Andrew's which he eventually gave up on and we just talked instead. The girls don't like Florence and hate grammar (who likes it?), which cheered C. up a bit. They kept asking us about our Christmas dress – I think it's some kind of tradition – we must ask Rev. Fenn next time we're in Madurai. I showed off my Tamil:

• "I am going to England tomorrow," – "Nan naliku Englandu pohirain."
• "Appa" - "Father"
• "Amma" - "Mother"
• "Akka" - "Sister"
• "Thambi" - "(Little brother)" "
• "Nanban" - "Friend"

I got rather carried away and wrote my name on the blackboard for them, remembering afterwards that C. can't write his (in Tamil). Well he'll know how I felt when we first came and he was showing off his vowels. Everyone thought I wasn't interested in learning Tamil so they all talked to C.. After this, the girls started throwing days of the week at us. I can remember "Sunny," (Saturday), "Dingal" (Monday) and "Gossu" (mosquito).

So. We're going to hire a dhobi to do our washing and teach Kumar how to prepare and cook vegetables so that we can get on with more important things like worrying about what the hell we're supposed to be doing, and sitting about not doing it. Kumar found some butter today, it was dam' fine! He told us that he wasn't being paid by the Rev, and wanted to work for free as our friend. While being wary of offending him, we explained that we wanted to go on paying him and would sort it out with the Rev later. The thing is, if we stop paying Kumar, he will inevitably stop working and then we would be overworked again.