Season of sand

They're digging up Beijing again.

It's making it very difficult to go running in my neighbourhood, since every pavement and alley seems to be scarred with holes and trenches (and thickly cluttered with vans, trucks, piles of tools or building materials, clutches of idling workmen).

October seems to be traditionally (well, in this country, it's presumably a matter of state decree) the month of renovation. Overnight, great piles of builder's sand appear on every street corner, down every side-alley. Really, everywhere. And this always seems to happen in dead of night, remarkably surreptitiously. I've never actually seen it happen (I remember one time I was drinking in my favourite Adventure Bar and was mightily surprised and perplexed by one such stealth delivery of sand right outside the door - at around 1am or 2am, in between my hourly visits to the public loo down the lane at the side of the building).

The intended purpose of this sand is as mysterious to many people as its origin. I've seen locals regarding these sand-heaps with an apparent bafflement just as great as mine. Kids, of course, love them; sometimes crafting roads and rivers and little townships around their flatter edges, or scooping handfuls of the stuff into empty water bottles so that they can continue their play at home. And sometimes - though rather less often, as far as I can see - adults will cart off a bucket or two, to mix up some mortar to fill that bothersome hole in the dining-room wall or whatever. Some of it gets used for larger, communal projects - building a new wall, filling in a pothole. But most of it seems to lie around for weeks, unused, unwanted, until gradually time and the wind wear the pile away to nothing.

I had thought that we might be spared the phenomenon this year, or that it would at least be rather attenuated, since so much of this kind of work had gone on during the spring and early summer in a frantic spate of gussying up the city prior to the Olympics. But no. If anything, the great annual distribution of sand and the initiation of myriads of small building projects seems to be even more intense than usual this month. Perhaps it is that so many of those last-minute cosmetic building projects of 4 or 5 months ago are already falling apart? Yes, it could be so.

I am baffled as to how all this work is directed or co-ordinated. Indeed, perhaps it isn't. China often seems to operate with the collective will of an ant colony.

It is unfortunate that this frenzy of building work and proliferation of (uncovered, of course) sand piles should be scheduled for this windiest of months in Beijing (well, April is running it close; I suppose it's related to the sudden shift in temperature at the change in the seasons: spring and autumn only really last 3 or 4 weeks here - brief, intense, beautiful, windy). Most of Beijing's notorious sandstorms originate in its own backyard. The wind has often been abrasive over the past couple of weeks; and the sky has often had an ochre tint, even though the general level of air pollution has been remarkably low.

The frequency of sand distribution (and wind wastage of same) has, of course, been greatly intensified over the last few years by the preparations for the Olympics, a huge increase in the number of small-scale infrastructure improvements as well as the scores of major construction projects. This is why I thought The Pile O'Sand would be an evocative name for a bar - evocative, that is, for anyone who experienced Beijing in the noughties, for anyone who survived a decade of having their cheeks scoured, their eyes scratched, their lungs ravaged by this twice-yearly onslaught of windblown sand.