Sunlessness

That makes 8 days straight, going on for 9.

Let's see - yes, a week yesterday started fairly bright, though with some haze and overcast, so I don't think the sun was ever actually directly visible; and things had started to turn pretty murky - humid, smoggy, gathering rain clouds - by the time I went over to Tuanjiehu for a barbecue with friends mid-afternoon. The last day that was actually clear and sunny was Saturday 21st June.

Since then, we've had 8 days of sepulchral gloom - every single day wretchedly humid, massively polluted (no API figures seem to be being released at the moment, but I'd guess it's been continuously above 400 throughout this time), rainy, unrelentingly GREY. Light levels in the middle of the day have rarely been better than you'd normally associate with dusk.

I think it's inducing a kind of jet-lag in me: it's almost impossible to tell what time of day it is. (Of course, staying up late for the football so often hasn't helped with that!). It's certainly not helping with the depression I've been suffering this past month.

This last week or so has been especially grim, but the entire month of June has been pretty awful. And April and May weren't all that wonderful. An acquaintance I hadn't seen for a while commented on my hair colour when I bumped into him in my favourite Jianghu bar last week. He thought I might actually have been dyeing it! No. My hair is the same non-descript mid-brown that Nature bestowed on me. It's just that ordinarily it goes several degrees lighter when I get some sun on it. My companion, it seems, remembered my surf-bum blond highlights from last summer. He'd only just got in from Nanjing, and didn't realise that we haven't really had a summer in Beijing yet this year.