Return to the Hutong of Death

My new apartment is only about 350 yards or so off the main road, but I have been finding that walk down the lane rather irksome: it drags somehow, seems much longer than it is.

Of course, it didn't help that the first half dozen or so times I walked here I was heavily encumbered with bags of stuff (the new pad is only about a half a mile away from the old one, so I tried to simplify my moving day - and reduce the risk of particularly valuable items getting broken by the movers - by ferrying a lot of things over here on foot).

And it didn't help that for the first week of the New Year, the lane was virtually impassable because of uncleared snow and ice, and the four-minute walk to the 7/11 on the corner was taking me more like ten minutes (ten minutes of terror and exhaustion!).

And it doesn't help that, if leaving during the early evening rush hour, I will invariably find the lane snarled up with cars and vans trying to pass in both directions where there's barely room for one-way traffic (especially if, as is often the case, there's somebody untidily parked on one side of the road) - this problem really gets so bad that it significantly slows down my passage to the main road on foot.

And it probably doesn't help that I had misjudged my timings, over-optimistically exaggerating my estimate of how much nearer I would be to the bar/restaurant strip I habitually frequent of an evening (I had hoped I was going to be nearly ten minutes nearer to my favourite bars, but in fact it's only four or five minutes).

I hope it's just these niggling psychological factors that are making this little walk seem so bothersomely long, and that I'll soon start getting used to them, get over them.

However, it does worry me that perhaps it's not unrelated to a nasty experience I had here five-and-a-half years ago. Yes, by one of those bizarre quirks of fate, my new apartment building is directly opposite the former pool hall (now converted into a community health centre and neighbourhood police station) where my best friend suffered a murderous assault with a hatchet. Well, actually he was attacked in a public toilet a few yards up the street, but managed to stagger back to the pool hall where I was waiting for him. He survived, and is fine today - but it was very touch-and-go getting him to a hospital before he bled out. We had no chance of getting an ambulance call-out (it probably would have doubled the length of time taken to get him to hospital, a delay that would almost certainly have been fatal; and we didn't know our address anyway); so, I had to help him walk to the main road to try to get a cab. On that occasion, the 350 yards seemed like several miles.

I suspect it is that memory that is making me so impatient, so irritated with my walk to the main road. (And I fret that my friend might not want to come to see me here.)