Fate makes mock of me once more

One of the more attractive features of my apartment is the small park right outside my living-room window.

One of the more curious features of the said park is the large oblong concrete structure pictured above. As you can see, although it has a plain flat roof (its featurelessness broken only by that one cluster of skylights), its four walls are all thickly clad with great slabs of natural stone, giving it the appearance of a man-made mountain. It is some years since I actually went into the park, but I really think there's not even any obvious entrance into this building; the stone facing seems to cover it all. I suppose it is just about the right size for a swimming pool or a gymnasium, but it is not advertised to be such, and I'm pretty sure I've never seen anyone entering or leaving it, or even standing around forlornly outside after being frustrated in the attempt to find a means of admission.

No, the purpose of this structure is a complete mystery. I have often speculated that it is the discreet surface emanation of a government nuclear shelter, the iceberg-tip of an unimaginably vast underground fortress. This quaint fantasy of mine was rather disturbingly reinforced one night two or three years ago when a deafeningly loud klaxon went off in or near the "bunker" in the middle of the night; it shook my windows, and made it quite impossible to sleep; and it went on for some hours.

Anyhow - whether this strange building is Blofeld's headquarters, a disused swimming pool, or an extravagantly large groundsman's hut - it is currently undergoing an extensive makeover. For the past week or so, scores of builders have been teeming all over it. It is not clear to me what the results of these labours have been: it appears that a few small sections of the roof have been torn up - and perhaps replaced? - but I can't see that this would keep 40 men occupied day and night for a whole week, even here in China where working practices are notoriously inefficient. Other, more mysterious renovations are afoot, I fancy; perhaps even inside the building.

There are supposed to be laws prohibiting the carrying on of noisy work in residential areas between the hours of 11pm and 7am, but it is dashed difficult to obtain any enforcement of these. I have mostly been going to bed too late and too exhausted over the past week to notice how late or how noisy the work is at night; but there have certainly been at least a couple of nights when substantial noise has been produced all night, with delivery lorries and plant moving about, the shouting of orders, the occasional chime of pick-axes and the lusty singing of songs like 'Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it's off to work we go' (or maybe I just dreamed that bit?). At least the rattling of the two or three pneumatic drills that are in use around the back of the building seems to have been stilled at night. It has, however, been going from early in the morning and with very little respite during the day. How I have come to delight in the little oases of silence that come at noon and 6pm when the workers take their meal breaks!

The reason why I am finding this so especially difficult to bear just at the moment is that, having no work currently, I am usually home all day; and moreover, since I have suffered a string of extremely late nights (a self-inflicted harm, I know), I am often desperately trying to sleep during the day. I am having very little success in that endeavour.

I am rather afraid that I shall not be able to sleep during the night either, if the noisiness persists at its recent levels. My choices would appear to be as follows: 1) to check into a cheap hotel in a quieter part of town for a week or two until this hell is over; 2) to use this as an excuse to go and pay a long overdue visit to some friends down in Shanghai (given the notorious pretentiousness of "the Other Place", though, this would likely be a far more expensive option than No. 1, even if I were lucky enough to have my friends put me up for free); or 3) to enlist the help of a Chinese-speaking friend to try to persuade my local police to uphold the law and insist that the building site closes down overnight (I did once succeed in such an attempt, but it was many years ago; and that was a much smaller piece of construction; and it was in the middle of a university campus, which perhaps gave us afflicted residents a little more leverage over our landlord - the university itself - and over the police).

I am very, very, very, very, very tired and annoyed. An explosion of psychopathic rage may well be imminent. Ah, China.

(By the way, the reason why I've seldom been into this park is that access is ostensibly restricted to people who've purchased monthly season tickets for it. You have to present proof of ID [in my case, a UK passport] and proof of residence nearby in order to be eligible for one of these. And you can only renew your ticket over a period of a few days at the beginning of each month. This last requirement is an absolute classic example of how creatively obstructive the Chinese can be. Until fairly recently, the same used to be true of the monthly passes on the subway network - with the result that there would always be horrendous queues at the ticket windows on the 1st of every month. At least we are now spared that rigmarole: the monthly passes were phased out some time ago in anticipation of the new system of smartcards and automated barriers that was introduced just before the Olympics. Such useful reforms have not yet reached my 'private park', I think.)