A beige Christmas

The view out of my living room window this morning.

It has been unseasonally mild all week - quite the warmest Christmas I can remember here. Heck, I walked home in my shirtsleeves on Christmas night (OK, I am an Arctic Gnome, largely impervious to the cold, but..... it really wasn't that bad). According to Weather Underground, it has been getting down well below freezing in the wee small hours (something between 5 and 10 degrees F below), but for the most of the day - and the night - it has been just a degree or two under or over. On Christmas Day, it got up to a positively balmly 10 degrees above.

I noticed when I went out to dinner last night that water recently thrown on the sidewalk had not yet frozen, and indeed that some standing puddles appeared to have melted during the day. There was a fair covering of ice on the moat near my apartment at the start of the week, but that all seems to have melted again in the last few days. I haven't had a chance to check if there's still ice on the lakes, but I'm pretty sure it won't be strong enough to support skating yet (one of the more charming features of the Beijing winter).

Oh, I suppose we shouldn't complain of mild weather. It's turned quite a bit chillier again today, and we had a half-hearted fall of snow (more sleet than snow, really) last night. It wouldn't be so bad if we'd had some clear blue skies and sunshine. Christmas Day wasn't bad, but the whole of the rest of the week we've been blanketed in damp air. And there's so much pollution here - coal smoke (there are still a lot of coal-burning stoves in Beijing, especially in the old hutong districts near where I live), smoke from rubbish burning (which still happens on street corners much of the time), car exhaust fumes, dust from all the construction sites - that it turns the air beige. I kid you not. You can get some sense of it in the picture above, but it's much worse in real life. I don't know quite where it's getting this colour, but the particles of whatever-it-is are so thick in the moist air that they've been accumulating on the roofs of parked cars and building up into a fine layer of silt - as if they'd been doused by one of our periodic showers of muddy rain (but until last night, there'd been no actual precipitation for quite some time). We have in fact been blessed with cloudless skies most of the week; we just haven't been able to see them because of this choking brown mist. There was a full moon a couple of nights ago, but all we could discern from the smoggy streets of Beijing was a featureless pale disc of smudged ochre.

This smothering of the light is thoroughly depressing. And the smoke-filled air scours your throat, producing an almost continual cough. One of my excuses for frequent imbibing of White Russian cocktails this week has been that it is necessary medicine.

Damn, I hope things clear up again soon. This is the most prolonged, most intense spell of unbreathable air I can remember in my 5 years here.