Coming out

Oh, all right, then, I admit it - I'm in China. The capital, Beijing, to be exact.

I've been describing it as 'an exotic city' in my 'blogger profile' for the past 6 months, but that is perhaps over-glamourising it. I'm not sure that it is all that exotic, really; not in the way that you associate with many other East Asian cities, anyway. No - weird, engaging, exasperating, constantly changing, but perhaps not really 'exotic'.

There are reasons why I have chosen to keep my location a secret until now. Fear of attracting the attention of the censors was a small part of it (not that I have any expectation that my tiny, unread blog could ever deserve their wrath.... but I'm sure that if I become too openly a 'China blog', they will start monitoring me now and then, and that will be plenty irritating enough).

I am deeply wary of becoming a 'China blog', anyway. It can, I think, be rather too easy a ploy to boost site traffic, such is the intensity of interest in all things China around much of the rest of the world. And nearly all 'China blogs' from time to time (even the best of them; and there are some - not many - that I like) get a little drunk on this largely unmerited attention and veer towards self-importance. I don't want that to happen to me (though it probably will do, at some point).

Above all, I just don't want this to become a blog about where I am; it's almost always been so far a blog about what's going on in my head. And that rarely has very much to do with where I am; far more to do with what time of the year it is, what I've been reading or watching or listening to, who I've been hanging out with, what substances I'm under the influence of.

And such it will, I hope, continue to be.

However, though laying to rest the popular 'Where in the world am I?' strand, I will from time to time offer some observations on life in China. I'm not sure what category label I'll give them yet; we'll wait and see until I've written one or two of them.

And for those of you who were skim-reading...... I'M IN BEIJING.