Haiku for the week

Gunfire in the streets?

Denied news, we dream and joke;

Rumour runs amok.

I hadn't been paying too much attention to all the talk of a coup in China this week. But then, just after midnight last night, I heard some "gunfire" of my own - away off down to the south-west, in the area of Tiananmen and Zhongnanhai. Oh, it could have been any number of other things (somebody letting off firecrackers for a wedding or an ancestor rite of some sort, I expect). And it didn't last very long. It was just unfortunate that it coincided almost to the second with my losing my Internet connection (my VPN is being very thoroughly squelched by The Kafka Boys; I'm currently having to route via Cairo - oh, the irony!). That had a powerful impact on my easily over-stimulated imagination, and I've slept very poorly.

My rather selfish anxieties currently centre not so much on the possibility of vicious in-fighting in the leadership ranks of the CCP as on the fact that the prospects for being able to renew a visa in the next three months have just been downgraded from 'difficult' to 'impossible'. It seems that I must start thinking in terms of a permanent departure rather than just the long holiday I had been hoping for.