Purgatory on Earth, Unease to Men

God, I hate Christmas shopping in this country!

Every year, I find myself subsconsciously postponing it and postponing it, until...... damn, you think to yourself, it'll take 10 or 12 days by airmail, and you need to leave a few days in hand to allow for the inevitable snafu with the British postal service around the holidays, and..... oh lord, it's got to be done in the next few days!!

Then there's the present-choosing element of the ordeal. The only people I have to buy a present for are my two nieces. They are both still quite young - young enough to like bright and shiny things, and silly pointless things, and vaguely exotic "none of the the other girls at school has got anything like this" things. That should be a help, but somehow it isn't.

They're also not very far apart in age (just over 2 years), so they tend to like each other's things. There is, unfortunately, a lot of sibling friction between them. An ironclad set of rules seems to have developed over the years in regard to giving them gifts: I must choose something they both will like; I must choose something identical, or very nearly so, for each of them; I must choose things that are just different enough to be distinguishable; I must not choose things which are different enough to give one or other of them a sense of inferiority/superiority.

Then there's the problem of remembering what I've already bought them. There's a lot of really quite charming jewellery, curios, and traditional crafts to be had at knockdown prices in China..... but, well, it's all very generic stuff; and the number of items that actually have any vague whiff of class or quality about them are rather few. They've had 5 lots of China Christmas presents from me now. Inspiration is running low. And when you add in all the birthday presents, all the trip-home presents, all the end-of-school-year presents, all the things I thought about buying them but didn't get around to, all the things I tried to buy for them but couldn't agree a price for, all the things I posted them that got lost in the mail..... well, I just can't remember clearly what I've given them and what I haven't.

It doesn't help that they're growing so quickly, and that their mother is perennially hopeless at keeping me up-to-date with recent photographs and measurements - so clothes are out. I have a few times in the past bought them mini-qipaos or funky T-shirts, but that option's not open to me this time.

Well.... I endured an hour of brutal haggling in the stalls of the new 'Silk Street' mall yesterday, and came away with a bunch of pretty "agate" bracelets, a couple of colourful silk scarves, and a couple of booklets of traditional Chinese cutout paper decorations. All that, and a new watch for myself, came to only about 300 RMB (that's 20 quid, for you folks back home). Not a bad afternoon's work at all (although I'm sure I could have paid substantially less even than that if I'd really gone in hard on them).

Job done? Well, no. I can't understand how this can have happened, but..... it somehow slipped my mind for the moment that my younger niece has a birthday on December 26th. Her elder sister - somewhat given to bossiness and petulance, as elder sisters so often are - has created a family tradition whereby, to avert outbreaks of brattiness, we have to buy her a second set of presents for the 26th as well. As far as I know, the littler girl, a much more sweet-tempered creature on the whole, has never yet remarked on the intrinsic unfairness of this and made a reciprocal demand that she also be given presents on her sister's birthday. Anyhow, I played along with this when they were both toddlers, but I think it's time now to start regularizing the birthday/Christmas distinction in that household.

So, I just need one more present then. But that will entail, I suppose, another visit to the dreaded 'Silk Street'. I really dislike that place; but it does have the advantage of a much more conveniently central location than the other markets of its ilk I might use (indeed, it is only a 20-minute walk from my office). It's crowded, chaotically organised, painfully over-heated, and - worst of all - most of the stallholders in there are really quite surly and needling, if not downright aggressive. I appreciate they are under extreme pressure to make money - this is a big, new, expensive building, a tourist showpiece for Beijing; so the rents are sky-high. It wasn't like that in the original 'Silk Street', a charming, bustling, open-air street market filling the alleyways behind the US Embassy. It isn't like that (well, not nearly so bad) in the Hong Qiao or Panjiayuan markets. It isn't even quite that bad in the notorious Yashow clothing market (where the bargaining can get pretty ugly!). The traders in these other places mostly appreciate that there is a game to be played in the haggling process, and they go through the motions of it with at least a modicum of good grace and often even with a chirpy friendliness. The new 'Silk Street' seems to be staffed entirely by robotic harpies.

And I've got to put myself through that ordeal one more time.

And then I've got to spend an afternoon in the International Post Office trying to get the stuff mailed.... Now there is a horror show deserving a post all of its own. Groan.