10th May 2012

I know that the heading is not the date of this post but it is an important date for my new wife and I, because it is the date that we got married.

Mr and Mrs Benjamin Lefroy

We were supposed to get married two days beforehand but we ran into some difficulties. Why? Because my new passport, issued to me since my arrival in China, does not have a date of entry stamp.

I have had two twelve-month visas on the passport since receiving it in July 2010 without any questions being asked by the local Public Security Bureau (PSB). The British Embassy issued me with a Certificate of Non Impediment (CNI), which enabled me to marry in China and made no comment about the date of entry stamp. But as soon as the day arrived for us to get married at the office in Zhengzhou, people started asking questions.

Happy, or the current Mrs Benjamin Lefroy, was in tears in the office trying to establish why, when we had all the necessary paperwork, issued by the British Embassy, there was a problem with the validity of my passport. We were shown a form which we could obtain from the PSB verifying the date of entry and told that if we could get hold of such a document, stamped with an official government stamp, that the lack of a date stamp in the passport did not matter.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, we are now married. The document we presented satisfied the requirements of the woman in the office and we have two little marriage books stamped, dated and officially proving that we are husband and wife, or Lao Gong (老公) and Lao Po (老婆), so the validity of the aforementioned document is no longer an issue.

More news on the China front that I promised to include in this update is the birth, on 20th May, of Tom and Ping's baby girl, Arianna. Not many of you know Tom and those of you who do are in China, so probably can't access this blog unless you have a VPN. But he is a fellow Somerset boy and my congratulations to the two of you and I trust that we will have the opportunity to wet the baby's head sometime soon.

Talking of VPNs, I have just regained access to Facebook, Blogger, etc. courtesy of a new, completely free, service called Spotflux and I am using it right now to update my blog. I will keep you posted on its performance, but it seems to be performing quite well, thus far.

And that's about all that I have to offer on the news front. It's probably the most news you will get for the foreseeable future as children definitely aren't on the radar just yet. But then neither was marriage a few months ago, so watch this space.

There's a slightly new look to the blog, which is all down to changes engineered by Blogger – the company responsible for the talent and brains behind my little soapbox. Well, come on, you didn't seriously expect me to have gone to that much effort to make it look prettier now, did you? Given that I struggle to even post updates once every four or five months!

And finally, best wishes to my loyal reader and only follower, Hannah (my sister for those of you who don't know). If anyone else can't bear to wait for the Facebook status updates about the blog or the e-mails, which usually get lost between China and the rest of the world, then you can now follow the blog, too. I am not expecting many new faces the next time I update the blog but you never know...