Last night, walking down nearby Jiugulou Dajie, towards the Drum Tower, I was suddenly overwhelmed by a potent olfactory sensation - a fondly remembered one, but one that is not at all familiar in Beijing. For a moment or two, I think I really couldn't place it at all; and then, for a moment or two longer, I couldn't quite believe it - the smell of fresh-cut grass!
And then there was the associated sound, equally evocative, similarly almost forgotten: a motor mower. Waves of nostalgia for English summers of years gone by crashed over me!
Ordinarily, you see, they replant the city's grass verges in April, and within a month or two, it's nearly all turned brown and scrubby. Even if they do water it enough to keep it alive, it doesn't grow very much. There's almost never any need to cut it.
But in this Olympic summer, so much new turf has been laid in the last few months, the grass is so much richer and denser than we've ever had here before, and it has been so extravagantly watered that...... well, some of it needs a bit of a trim.
I wonder where they found the men and machines capable of the task? They probably had to bring them in from Shanghai.
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