Guilty pleasures

After being near catatonic with depression for the past two weeks.......

I find that a quick blast of Cher's Greatest Hits is blowing away the cobwebs a bit.

Well, no, I'm still depressed - but at least I'm moving.

It may help also that we are in the middle of one of the biggest thunderstorms I have ever seen, in Beijing or anywhere else, one of those where the thunderclaps are so loud they rattle your windows in their frames and (you imagine) the fillings in your teeth and...... well, they do set off half the car alarms on the block. This is a BIGGIE.

Of course, it needs to be to have a chance of clearing away the disgusting fug we've been suffering all day. I think this was perhaps the worst day of the whole year (and god knows we've had more than our share of them; I'd guess that at least one third of 160 or so days we've had so far year have been so foully smoggy that it hasn't really been safe to set foot outside); the air was so thick with haze and grime that it seemed to have become a milky fluid, barely translucent at all, tinted the colour of chlorine. Disgusting.

And not what you need to help you break you out of the blues.

Cher, though...... Cher and 100 decibel thunderclaps, that's starting to make a dent in it.