Beijing - a city out of hope

I've had some curious little jobs in my time here. Just in the last month or two, I've found myself preparing comments on China's economic prospects for the coming year (because, of course, the CEOs of major international companies don't have the time to answer interview questions themselves - at least, not for the likes of China Daily and the Global Times), ghost-writing an editorial for one of south-east Asia's leading newspapers, and tweaking the English version of a major international trade agreement. It's amazing, the kind of responsibility that people will entrust you with just because you can write nicely!

But perhaps the most onerous task I was ever offered - something that I was embarrassed and annoyed at being entrusted with, and eventually turned down - was just over a year ago, when I was asked to write the bid for Beijing to be selected as the next World Design Capital.

Well, I wasn't approached to write the thing from scratch. I wish I had been. I wish somebody competent had been. No, they thought they could get away with a bit of hasty last-minute re-touching. But, since the document was getting on for 20,000 words long and was a complete f***ing shambles, they really couldn't. And since they'd only thought to seek the assistance of a native English-speaking editor 48 hours or so before the final submission deadline, there wasn't even enough time available to 'polish' it thoroughly.

I'd had an early intimation that the project would be an ignominious failure at least a year or two before this, when the Beijing Industrial Design Center (as far as I could gather, this was a quango set up by the Beijing government specifically to coordinate the bid) hired one of my former students. One of my less gifted former students, that is: a pleasant enough chap, but, to be frank, a bit of a plank. He was tasked with conducting preliminary research into the perceived strengths and weaknesses of the design industry in Beijing. So, he sent me an e-mail asking, "What do foreigners think of Beijing?" Naturally, I asked him to be a bit more specific; and so it was that I slowly managed to piece together what it was he was up to. I suggested that he compile a mailing list of people involved in design and in the most closely related industries like fashion, art, advertising, architecture and urban planning, etc., and then develop a structured questionnaire that could be sent out to them. I even offered to help draft one, for FREE - but he never got back to me about that.

I've no idea what they did with the next 18 months or so, but they clearly didn't conduct any worthwhile research, or didn't manage to solicit very many responses if they did. My student ruefully confessed to me that they hadn't really received ANY positive comments in response to their enquiries, and had been left over the last few weeks before submission frantically making stuff up. The bid document they finally produced was way too long, chaotically structured, desperately, desperately DULL - and mostly written in the most risible, often just about incomprehensible Chinglish. And they had titled it.... Beijing - A City Out Of Design. I assume they meant By Design, but it never really became apparent. I was tempted to leave this unchanged, because it did seem all too sadly appropriate to the dismal portrait the document painted of a city which had achieved almost nothing worthwhile in urban planning or in the creative industries for the past century: We had some sense of design once, but now it's all gone....

You know, chaps, if you have to mount a bid for something like this in English, you really should hire a native speaker to write it for you. In fact, you should hire an international PR agency to assemble the bid for you. If you want to be seriously considered for the accolade, that is; rather than make yourselves - and your capital city, and China as a whole - into an international laughing-stock.

I have no doubt that the BIDC had originally been quite generously funded for this project. But what had they spent the money on? By the time they had drafted their ludicrous, no-hope-of-winning, not-even-going-to-be-read bid, they were carping about spending even a few thousand renminbi on my final edit.

I was willing to consider doing this work for a low fee; I might even have been willing to do it for NO FEE, because I would like Beijing (and China) to have a chance of winning honours like this, to at least have a chance of having the application taken seriously. Although I bitch about the place a lot, this city is my adopted home and I have a lot of fondness for it - and for China and the Chinese people in general. I don't like to see them made to look ridiculous. And that's what this asinine bid document was doing.

So, regardless of the fee, I was going to take this on, and do my best to re-write the bid to make it at least readable. Since the job was too short-notice to secure payment in advance, I frankly didn't trust this outfit to pay me anyway, whatever agreement we reached on a fee - but I didn't really care. This seemed like an interesting and worthwhile job, it was something that I wanted to do.

But then their go-between, my former student, rang me up again, and told me that he could get the fee bumped up by another couple of thousand, but he'd expect to keep half of the extra for himself. Now, I'm always grateful for an introduction to some work, and I would, of my own volition, have done something to express my gratitude on this occasion - a dinner at the very least, probably 500 RMB or so stuffed in an envelope. But 1,000 RMB seemed a little steep. And... well, I'm afraid I fairly blew my top at him.

It wasn't just my student's gobsmacking effrontery that annoyed me so. It was more that this shameless piece of petty graft brought home to me just why this project had gone so spectacularly down the toilet: the entire budget must have been serially pilfered by the people working there; everyone, right down to the lowliest office boy, had taken his or her own little rake off it, until there was nothing left to spend on fulfilling the project's purpose.

And that, I'm afraid, is China in a nutshell.

This was one of the pivotal moments that persuaded me I had to get out of this country.

Signage

I wrote on here a few years ago about how losing things disturbs me very profoundly, derails my self-image of being someone who's in control of his personal possessions, always knows where things are. ("Hey, there's a frood who really knows where his towel is.")

I have a similar hang-up about navigation. I like knowing where I am, and knowing how to get to somewhere.

Whenever I arrive somewhere new, the first thing I do is try to obtain a map, and then study it carefully to orientate myself.

I've always liked maps. A giant atlas was one of my favourite books in very early childhood, and I'd spend hours poring over its pages - and, a little later, scouring its index to find places that I'd heard of; and, a little later again, copying features from it using tracing paper (islands were naturally appealing for this exercise; Iceland and Hawaii were particular favourites). For a while, when I was about 7 or 8, I suppose, I had a bit of an obsession with making up maps of my own - battlefield maps and pirate treasure maps and so on.

As a result of this early interest, I took quite readily to the art of map-reading, and I greatly enjoyed orienteering at school. Long cross-country walks - using Ordnance Survey maps - were also a big part of my family holidays. These experiences helped to cultivate the related skills of judging direction (from the position of the sun in the sky, or just from keeping track of how far you've deviated from a last known compass point reference) and distance (being able to judge how far you've travelled in a given time, and being able to estimate how far away from you landmark features are). I wouldn't say I've honed these abilities to a very high level, but I think I have a good basic 'map sense' and 'dead reckoning' capability.

So, I pride myself on having a good sense of spatial orientation, and on - usually - being able to find my way around quite well, even in an unfamiliar place.

But in China... this ability has often deserted me. In retrospect, I think this has probably been one of the things that I have found most stressful about living in this country.

There's a problem with maps here. They're often not very readily available (it is just about impossible to buy a city map other than for the city you are in, so you can't plan a trip in advance). They're often severely out-of-date or inaccurate. They're often in Chinese only - or an inconsistent mish-mash of Chinese and pinyin. And, whatever language they're in, the font is typically far too small to read.

There's a problem with street signs. Many lower-tier cities still have fairly little road signage in pinyin. Beijing only introduced pinyin signage for all streets just prior to the Olympics (until then, most of the narrow hutong lanes had been unlabelled even in Chinese). Many cities (even Shanghai!) seem to try to save money by only placing a street sign on one, or at most two, corners of a four-way junction (and, through some perverse trick of Fate, it never seems to be on the corner you're standing at!). A further common obtuseness is placing these signs not on the corner, but some yards further down the street, where they are not readily visible even to pedestrians traversing the junction, much less to drivers. And the lettering is often too small (and too thin) to read easily; even the Chinese characters are often ridiculously small, and there is a national chauvinist principle in play that any use of the Roman alphabet must appear less important than Chinese writing, and thus has to be much smaller. Shanghai, again, is a particular offender in this regard: there's really damn-all point in them putting pinyin on their street signs at all, because they're impossible to read from more than a couple of yards away - of little help to you even if you're lucky enough to be on the same side of the road as the sign, utterly worthless if you're on the far side.

There's a particular problem with the major road signs. In many cities, these signs will display the name of a major intersecting road ahead as if it's the name of the road you're on. Even worse, signs will often alternate between labelling the road you're on and a major road (or, sometimes, the name of a district) up ahead, without differentiating between the two. That little foible caused me a world of grief down in Guiyang last month!

Then, there's a general problem with visibility. Most Chinese cities try to prettify themselves by planting ridiculous numbers of trees everywhere (it's particularly over-the-top in Beijing, where there isn't enough rainfall to support them, and - despite heavy watering - they tend to exacerbate the city's chronic aridity); and when these are in full leaf, it's almost impossible to see any features along the side of the street. Indeed, foliage often obscures major road signs hanging in the middle of the street! When it's not the trees getting in the way, it's the huge amount of street furniture that clutters Chinese sidewalks (and city planners here, for some strange reason, seem to take particular delight in siting street signs behind telegraph poles or transformers and the like). At night, things get even worse, because levels of street lighting are so low (and the lights are so often broken, or hidden in amongst trees). Trying to navigate around a Chinese city at night - even the parts of Beijing that I ought, by now, to know like the back of my hand - can be very, very challenging.

There's also a problem of homogeneity. There's rarely anything very distinctive about a street in China. The same building materials and architectural tropes are repeated again and again and again throughout an entire city - and indeed, don't even vary all that much from one city to another across the entire country. Small - often unnamed - hole-in-the-wall shops and restaurants are pretty much indistinguishable from one another. And even larger branded stores look much the same as each other, and recur with giddying frequency: in Beijing, there are three or four Starbucks rip-off coffee shop chains that all look almost exactly the same; down in Guiyang, I found that there was a local clothing store chain called JoeOne - which had a branch on almost every single block. So, even when you can see something, it doesn't look any different than the last block you travelled... or the next one.

The grid system that predominates in most of China's (only recently built) cities causes further difficulties. If there's no sun visible (and there usually isn't in this smog-choked country), it can be impossible to distinguish north-south from west-east. And, even if you do know which way you're headed down a particular road, it is dangerously easy to become disoriented when crossing a major junction - particularly if, as in Guiyang, you have to descend into a deep, deep underpass to do so (and when those underpasses often have no signs, or very misleading signs inside them; and when their exits are often not placed directly on the corner of the intersection, but some way off to the side; and when those exits do not follow the orientation of the streets themselves, but are offset on a diagonal); and particularly if there are no street signs on hand to reassure you that you are still on the street you want to be on.

The camel-back-breaking final straw is the quirkiness of street naming and address allocation. Streets often change their names for no good reason every block or two (but local people - and, sometimes, the major road signs - will take a more common sense view of things, and use only one name for a road that according to street signs appears to have five different ones). Streets sometimes resume the name they had a few miles back, after an unfathomable interlude of being called something else. Streets will sometimes divide into two for a while, with both branches retaining the same name - even though they diverge by a hundred yards or more. In Beijing, many road signs display the names of old city districts rather than the road names - districts that are probably unfamiliar to people who aren't local residents. Moreover, there is a frequent mismatch between what something is officially supposed to be called and what people actually call it: my nearest exit off the 2nd Ringroad is labelled on the road signs as Zhonglou Beiqiao, but everybody knows it as Gulou Qiao.

There's an additional problem in Beijing that - ha! ha! - logic is not applied consistently to street naming. The suffix -wai, meaning 'outer', for example, is usually applied to extensions of major roads running outside the 2nd Ringroad (the limit of the city centre), but Dianmenwai is well inside the 2nd Ringroad. The words for north, south, east or west are commonly affixed to names of streets radiating from a central junction, such that a Beidajie (North Avenue) typically runs northwards. Very helpful - except that in a few places, such as around the Workers' Stadium, the compass point designations are applied not to roads that run in that direction but to roads that run along that side of a square or rectangular feature - such that Gongti Beilu (Workers' [Stadium] North Street) actually runs east-west. Moreover, they rarely manage to give all four streets radiating from a junction the same name; near where I live, we have Jiaodaokou North, South, and East Avenues meeting at Jiadaokou Cross, but... what one might naturally expect to be Jiaodaokou West is in fact Gulou East. (And there's a Gulou West, but the north and south streets have other names.)

Postal addresses can be particularly misleading, especially here in the capital. Some streets number odds on one side, evens on the other; but some don't. Street numbers are rarely displayed on buildings anyway; there are frequent extended lacunae of no numbers at all, or sudden inexplicable jumps where almost adjacent numbers are 10 (or 20 or 50) apart, making it impossible to work out how far down a given street the address you're looking for might be. What's more, many housing compounds appropriate numbers from an adjacent street, so that a single narrow entrance may account for dozens of addresses. And many of the larger housing complexes take their names from a nearby major road (better known? more prestigious??) rather than the road that actually gives access to them! Then, of course, you have the problem that many of the more aspirational housing complexes (and malls and office blocks) give themselves an English name - but are known to local people only by a Chinese name, which is often not displayed on the building, and, in many cases, is neither a close translation nor a recognisable phonetic equivalent of the English name. Believe me, it can get very, very confusing indeed. Finding an address in Beijing for the first time is something you need to allow at least half an hour for. (Thoughtful hosts always provide detailed maps and/or directions for their party guests.)

One of the most egregious examples I've experienced was a few years ago when I was trying locate one of the low numbers - No. 4, I think it might have been - on Nongzhanguan Nanlu. Now, this is the road that runs along the south side of Chaoyang Gongyuan, the city's largest park. Hence, it has always been commonly known as Chaoyang Gongyuan Nanlu (Chaoyang Park South Street). A few years ago, the city fathers succumbed to the pressure of common sense and renamed the road this (or at least the section of it that runs alongside the park). But they didn't change the postal addresses, which are all still Nongzhanguan. Still, I knew this; all I had to do was work out how the numbers went on this street. I figured a low number would most likely be at the west end of the street; and that, probably, the odd numbers would be on the north side and the even numbers on the south. Or vice versa, since Chinese maps still often follow an ancient convention which inverts their compass orientation! Of course, it is difficult to find any numbers on a Chinese street. And this is, unfortunately, a particularly long street - some two-and-a-half miles. I was with a Chinese friend who thought she knew the area fairly well. We tried two different taxi drivers, and stopped to ask several local residents - none of them had a clue where this address was. And we found ourselves repeatedly confused by the fact that the street appeared to be all odd numbers, and then all even numbers on the same side (presumably just an unfortunate coincidence arising from the fact that 90% of the numbers weren't displayed at all); and by the fact that the street seemed to have high numbers at both ends. Yes, the mistake we'd made was assuming that the numbering would start either at the west or the east end; on this street, the numbering starts somewhere in the middle (just to the east of the main entrance to the park) and proceeds clockwise - east along the north side of the street, then west along the south side, and then, with the highest numbers, east along the north side again.

You couldn't make it up.

This is why I have so often felt hopelessly lost in this country - both geographically and metaphorically.

[I mentioned Guiyang, the capital city of the south-western province of Guizhou, a few times above. On my recent visit there I suffered one of my most embarassing ever experiences of getting lost in China. All of the elements I outlined above were in place: streets that had very little to distinguish one from another, very patchy - and misleadingly inconsistent - road signage, very poor visibility (the smog build-up during the rush hour was just horrendous, cut visibilty back to barely 100 yards), and these unnecessarily deep and bizarrely convoluted underpasses everywhere which tended to screw up my sense of direction. It's actually a fairly small city, relatively easy to get around on foot. But I was tired and ill, suffering stiff muscles and sore joints after running an ultra-marathon over the previous three days, and carrying a heavy bag of groceries; I was impatient to get back to my hotel, and exasperated at myself for having managed to become lost. As dusk fell and the smog descended, my anxiety escalated. There were no cabs to be had for well over an hour, and the few people I asked for directions weren't able to be very helpful. Eventually I managed to enlist some remote assistance from a friend in Beijing who tried to give me directions courtesy of Google Maps - but these were of limited use to me because of the frequent absence of any visible street signs in my vicinity, especially when crossing junctions.

After walking around in circles for an hour-and-a-half, I eventually managed to hail a cab. The driver thought this was hilarious, because I was barely 300 yards from my destination. In fact, I think I had more than once been within a hundred yards or so of the hotel, but just hadn't been able to see it (because of trees or other buildings in the way, and the awful fuggy weather), or to recognise anything else nearby. Oh, the shame, the embarrassment!

When I managed to get hold of a map the next day, I discovered that the root of my problem had been that mischievous Fate had taken me along Youyi Lu (Friendship Street - oh, the irony) - which is about the only major road in the centre of Guiyang that does not run in a straight line. I hadn't noticed its gentle curve, but in fact it swings around through a little more than 90 degrees. Hence, it had completely distorted my sense of direction: roads that - in the mental map I'd constructed for myself - seemed to run east-west, in fact ran north-south; roads that I had thought were parallel to each other actually intersected each other.

This is about the most stupendous orienteering cock-up you can conceive of, and I am appalled at my failure here. Never mind that I had no map, no sun, no compass; I really shouldn't be able to lose my bearings so easily and so completely.

I begin to worry that I have lost my 'dead reckoning' ability while I've been in China. I suspect that I have become so used to being permanently at least semi-lost while I've been here, and so overwhelmed by the difficulties of navigating my way around, so used to the perpetual sense of helplessness - that I have given up paying attention to my surroundings.

I wonder if it's a little bit akin to my attitude to the language. I don't get lost overseas (I don't think). And I wouldn't find it too daunting to try to scrape the rust off my French or to acquire some Spanish for the first time. But here in China, learning the language just seems too damned hard; and so does finding your way around. And so, I seem to have given up; I've accepted defeat.]

Never sorry

The Chinese aren't good at apologising. The obsession with 'loss of face' seems to make them extraordinarily resistant to the idea of even acknowledging error, and often engenders instead a culture of evasiveness, lying - and even self-deception. And even if you can get them to recognise that they've done something wrong, they'll hardly ever actually SAY Sorry.

A few weeks ago, one of my employers sent her office assistant to my bank to make a payment to me. The teller there told the office assistant that my account was about to be frozen.

They didn't tell me. Although you'd think that this would be quite important news to pass on to a customer. And they do have details of how to reach me by mobile phone or e-mail.

Oh no, of course not; no, they told a third party, a complete stranger, the first person to walk in off the street. Someone that I work for!

I was not happy. I went down to the branch, and explained to their English-speaking under-manager that it was VERY BAD to pass on information about the status of a customer's account to a third party because - well, the sort of people who pay me money are also the sort of people that I might sometimes have to pay money to, the sort of people I might do business with, borrow money from, purchase things from, etc.; and if you tell them that my bank account is about to stop working, they might, you know, start to doubt my creditworthiness. It harms my reputation.

The under-manager took all of this on board, and acknowledged that the teller probably shouldn't have done this. I asked for an assurance that it wouldn't happen again, and she said that it wouldn't happen again. I asked her for an apology, and she looked at me in bafflement. I asked her again, and she muttered that the bank had indeed behaved badly. "Well, I'd like you - on behalf of the bank - to say that you're SORRY." She did, eventually; but it was like getting blood out of a stone.

Then, of course, we got into the question of why they thought there was a problem with my account in the first place. They'd told me on the phone that it was something to do with my passport. I wondered if it could possibly be that I'd changed my visa, since I'd left the country for a few months over the summer. But it really shouldn't be any of the bank's business what kind of visa I have, or whether I have a visa at all.

No, it wasn't that. They thought my passport had expired. They thought this because they had mistranscribed my passport details into their computer database (they also have a photocopy of it, which they could have checked - but they didn't). It doesn't expire for another 5 years, but they'd written down 2012 instead of 2017.

I don't know if government regulations on this have been changed, or if it's just this bank - the Bank of East Asia - that's being so particular about its foreign customers having valid passports. I have changed passports while I've been living here, and it didn't seem to cause a problem with any of my other Chinese banks (well, it did, indirectly; but that is one of my biggest China nightmare stories, and will have to wait until another time). The "logic" is, I suppose, that a passport is a foreigner's only means of ID, and they want to keep their customer ID information up to date. However, the fact that we use a passport as ID when opening an account should not mean that it continues to be a necessary form of ID when accessing the account: we have other forms of ID - our bank card, account number, PIN number, personal security questions - to verify our identity and authorise our account access. I envisage a time - perhaps in the not too distant future - when my travelling days will be behind me, and I will settle down back in England; and I might not bother to renew my passport, if I don't anticipate going overseas again. Oh, but I'll have to renew my passport, just to retain access to my Chinese bank account! Although, actually, that still won't do me any good, because they don't have any channels in place for updating customer information online. If I want to maintain access to this bank account in China, I'll have to get a new passport in 2017, and come here in person to notify the bank of the new passport number. [I wonder what kind of visa I'd have to apply for to do that?]

Footnote 1: The title of this post is also the name of an excellent documentary about the mercurial artist/dissident Ai Weiwei that went on general release around the world (not in China, obviously) this summer - essential viewing. Ai Weiwei's unapologetic confrontation of the Chinese government is a noble act of defiance, not a perverse refusal to admit fault.

Footnote 2: A couple of months ago, Yang Rui - the odious TV presenter who embarrassed himself with a series of xenophobic and anti-Semitic outbursts on his microblog earlier this year - issued an 'apology' of sorts for calling Melissa Chan (a Chinese American correspondent for Al Jazeera) a 'bitch'. Well, he referred to having expressed "sincere apologies" on various unspecified occasions in the past, and he acknowledged that his use of a pejorative and sexist term may have been "incautious" - but he didn't actually say Sorry. He appears to be trying to strike a conciliatory pose because his Dialogue programme is dying on its feet, with fewer and fewer foreign experts willing to participate in it. What a scumbag!

Progress, or procrastination?

For a final entry in my War on Chinglish series, I feel compelled to cover one of my biggest pet hates in the local use of English. It's a pet hate not because of its linguistic inelegance or pointlessness, as with most of the entries in this series, but because of the unfortunate habit of thought it suggests.

The Chinese love to say step by step. In fact, it trips off their tongues so readily and speedily, it sounds as if they have compressed the noun phrase into a single hyphenated adjective/adverb: step-by-step.

I'd much prefer it if they said gradually.

Now, step by step, or even step-by-step, is not wrong as such. It's certainly possible English; though I would argue that gradually is easier to use appropriately, the more straightforward and natural thing to say in most circumstances.

However, what I really like about the adverb gradually is that it seems to me to emphasise the process. And thus, although the process may be slow and discontinuous, this word nevertheless makes us feel some confidence in an ongoing progress towards its eventual completion.

Step-by-step, as almost invariably used by the Chinese, seems to emphasise the stages in the process - reminding you of their essential separateness, and of the need for a cautious hesitancy in moving from one to the next. Most of the time, the English phrase that would more accurately convey their thought is baby steps - the suggestion that care and caution must take precedence, and that progress, if it happens at all, must necessarily be very SLOW. It is a way of deferring a goal so far that one loses sight of it altogether, a useful tool for emasculating any initiatives for reform. The Chinese commonly employ step-by-step in much the same way as the dread phrase "Thank you for your suggestion" - to dismiss your attempt to offer helpful advice, and let you know, obliquely but firmly, that in fact nothing is ever going to change.

[I wonder if the Chinese have a problem with adverbs for some reason? It does seem to be a common mark of Chinglish to prefer clunky noun phrases to simple adverbs. Another particular bugbear of mine is in an all-around way, which, while it is again possible English, has, through its grating ubiquity out here, become definitively Chinglish. The more natural English would be comprehensively, and I do my best to substitute this as often as I can in my editing work. Unfortunately, this damned phrase is a favourite political buzzword here. It is hugely annoying because it is so rampantly overused, and is such pointless filler - essentially meaningless, but supposedly carrying some reassuring suggestion of care and thoroughness (and harmoniousness, I daresay). It occurs at least half a dozen times in any official pronouncement; and in an all-around way has become accepted as the 'official translation'. I tried weeding it out of the English text of a trade treaty I was revising a while ago, but I'm sure the Foreign Ministry will have re-Chinglished it before sending it to press. Sigh.]

How (not) to organise a marathon

In last week's lengthy account of some of the tribulations I'd suffered in participating in an 'Ultra-Marathon' event in south-west China last month, I mentioned that I had a further rant brewing in me about this. And here it is.

I had been assured by the folks in Beijing co-ordinating registration for the event that it was a "very well organized event". Their bullishness was overstated, of course: what they meant was "very good, for China" - which is to say, a bit of a dog's breakfast.

Now, credit where it's due. The organization relating to the actual running of the races did go pretty smoothly: the courses were well marked out, huge numbers of beaming locals were rallied to provide support, and the race-bag pick-up at the finish lines worked well.

The less positive points, though, would be.... well, EVERYTHING else.

Amongst the points you might like to try to address next time, dear organisers....

1)  Provide as much advance information as possible.

This is a perennial vice in China. I'm sure most of the salient details of this event - the dates, the courses, the accommodation arrangements - must have been finalised weeks or even months ahead; but nobody saw fit to pass any of this on to the participants. I hold Beijing's Heyrobics group, who were working as agents to recruit foreign participants for the event, partly culpable here as well. They were pretty hopeless at passing on promptly even what pitifully little information the organisers had deigned to give them. I had, for example, been led to believe that the event was to be centred around Guizhou's provincial capital of Guiyang. I had therefore planned to travel to the prettier and more touristy city of Kaili in the east of the province under my own steam after the event. I only found out the day before I flew down there that in fact the event was centred around Kaili, and thus had to change my hotel bookings to arrange some time in Guiyang instead. Lack of information about the locations and hotels to be used had scuppered the hopes a few friends of mine had had about possibly coming down to support me during the weekend. And none of the participants from Beijing had been told that the final day's race was based in Zhenyuan, another 2 hours or more east of Kaili, and at least 5 hours away from Guiyang airport - a fact which made it severely impractical to try to join the event for the last day only, as many had been encouraged to do. (Several people, in fact, came within an ace of missing their flights home. My pal Ruby only made hers - with minutes to spare - because she had eventually managed to browbeat her minibus driver into taking her straight to the airport rather than making drops in Guiyang city centre first.) And so on.

2) Provide maps and diagrams of the courses

The only maps we were given were squiggly lines on a blank white background. The few features marked were in Chinese only (no English or even symbols for drinks stations and so on), and far too small for anyone to read anyway. No place names or geographical features were indicated. And no larger scale map was provided to let us know which part of the province we were in, where we were in relation to the major cities of Guiyang (where we'd flown in) or Kaili (where we'd stayed prior to the opening race). In such mountainous terrain, a diagrammatic representation of the hills to be covered is pretty useful, too. A few of the other runners claimed to have seen such a thing, but perhaps, as independent competitors, they'd been able to request additional information directly from the organisers. There was nothing of the sort in the official information pack for the race. And the Heyrobics gang had refused to provide any contact information for the event organisers. On the first day, a German runner told me (perhaps on the basis of what he remembered from running the event in a previous year; apparently, there had been numerous changes to the courses this time) that the first race ended in a very severe hill-climb. I reined myself in over the last several kilometres, trying to save my strength for this cruel finish; but it turned out that the last few kilometres weren't too hilly at all. On the second day, however, the rumour had been that the course was almost completely flat - but we discovered that it ended in a brutally steep 3km hill. This sort of thing matters to runners! Provide a goddamned diagram of the elevations, please.

3) Provide clear information about the race arrangements

The runner's information pack was clear as mud. In fact, much of what little information it did contain was WRONG, so I pretty soon disregarded it altogether. In particular, NOTHING was done to publicise where the race bag drop-off or the assembly point for each race was. There had been diagrams in the runner's guidebook, but these were - again - completely unlabelled, and bore no obvious relationship to features we could actually see on the ground. The assembly points were all fairly nearby the hotels where we were staying; but not so nearby as to be easy to see or easy to find. On Day 2, several people missed the race altogether because the assembly point was quite a long way away, and was not visible from the hotel; and because many of the volunteer helpers were mistakenly directing people that they had to get on a bus - which was in fact supposed to be taking injured runners directly to the finish, twenty miles away. On Day 3, many people ran without being officially 'logged in' to the race start, because they had gathered at what appeared to be the obvious assembly point on a plaza next to the starting line - unaware that on this day, the official assembly point was actually half a mile away inside the hotel.

4) Don't spring a 'health check' requirement on participants at the last minute (though doing nothing to publicize it, or enforce it... and making vague statements to the effect that it can be ignored at the individual runner's discretion)

I refer, of course, to the ludicrous blood pressure checks about which I moaned at length last week - and which I spectacularly failed, though I went ahead and took part in the races anyway.

5) Sort out a better system for transferring bags between hotels

We had to stay in a different hotel for each of the three stages of the event. This is, of course, severely non-ideal: you really don't want to be dealing with the hassle of packing your luggage and clearing your room and checking out of a hotel in the last few minutes before you're due to run a marathon (it's not good for the blood pressure!); nor do you want to be cooped up on a bus for two or three hours heading to a new location immediately after you've finished running. But, if this is unavoidable, at the very least, the organisers need to make the transfers run as smoothly as possible. Now, in fact, we kept the same coaches throughout the event; and the coaches all travelled together in convoy between locations, so everyone left at the same time (which was a bit rough on the faster runners, who had to wait around for hours while we slowcoaches huffed and puffed our way to the finish). There was therefore no reason why we could not each have been assigned a numbered place on a numbered bus, to be used throughout the event; and why we could not then have put our luggage ourselves in the luggage bays on our personal bus; and why we could not have put more valuable or fragile items (computers, cameras, wallets, etc.) in bags on our seats, trusting our driver to ensure that the bus would remain locked until our return at the end of the day's race. No reason, except that this is China, and nobody will ever go for a simple and sensible option if they can do something half-assed, unnecessary and inadequate instead - like throw everybody's bags on to the backs of flat-bed trucks, and then have an unseemly scramble to recover them each day on arrival at the new hotel. (My inability to find anyone who was willing to undertake the safe-keeping of my laptop for me almost prevented me from taking part in the races altogether.)

6)  Make yourselves known to the participants

Only one member of the organising committee made a public announcement during the whole five days I was down there. He didn't introduce himself by name. And he disappeared immediately afterwards, never to be seen again. Few of the senior organisers were visible at all; none of them made any attempt to communicate - formally or informally - with the race participants. No public notices were displayed or announcements made, in Chinese or English, during the event. Hence, nobody had any idea what was going on - ever. Business as usual, in China.

7) Brief your volunteers about what's going on

There were large numbers of volunteers, and they were very nice - oh so cheerful and eager to please. There were rather too many of them, really. I think they quite comfortably outnumbered the competitors - the old 'Infinite Number of Monkeys' approach so beloved in China: why bother to plan a solution to something, when you can just keep throwing more bodies at the problem? This meant, of course, that it was almost impossible to find someone you'd spoken to about a problem previously; your would-be saviour would just merge into the crowd again, and, as like as not, never been seen again. And not many of the volunteers had sufficient initiative even to offer an empty promise to try to solve your problem; most of them just frankly admitted that they didn't have a clue. I felt sorry for them. They wanted to do their best to be helpful, but no-one had told them anything. They each seemed to have a very limited scope of responsibility - such that, for example, at the end of a race, the girls handing out towels could not tell you where to get water, and the girls handing out water could not tell you where to get a towel, and neither group had any idea where there was a toilet. Most of the volunteers based in the hotels seemed to have been charged with trying to help with accommodation problems only, and had been told NOTHING about the race arrangements; so, they were generally unable to answer even the most elementary questions asked of them - like "Where is the race bag collection point?" or "What time do the buses leave?" or "Where does today's race start?"

8)  Make the most of your English speakers

This is an event that aspires to an international profile, and is so desperate to attract more foreign competitors that it actually pays weekend fun runners like me to take part! And yet it does bugger-all to look after its foreign competitors. Only one of the main organisers and very few of the volunteer helpers spoke any English at all. Since just about all of the foreigners taking part - a few Germans, Russians, and Kenyans, as well as the expected Yanks and Brits - spoke some English, but, in most cases, little or no Chinese (and even those who could speak some were struggling; the local accent/dialect down there is pretty weird), it is kind of a high priority to find at least a few people who speak decent English (just a few; until all the fun runners arrived for the last day, there were only a couple of dozen or so foreign participants; it wouldn't have been that hard to find one dedicated minder for every 5 or 6 of us). The situation was better - not great, but not hopeless - at the first location in Kaili, quite a big city with a lot of university students; the subsequent two locations out in the sticks could barely muster any English speakers at all. Given the importance of communication in English, would it be so hard to bus some of those university students from Kaili out to the other venues as well? And why can't you give your best English speakers a little more responsibility, and brief them clearly about what's going on? I found a guy at the final location who spoke excellent English. He was actually part of the media liaison team, but he offered to try and help me find a way to get a late-arriving friend all the way from Guiyang to Zhenyyuan. Alas, he had been told that the airport pick-up service from Guiyang had only been operated for those participating in all three days of the event, and had thus been discontinued on Wednesday. This would have been most unwelcome news to my friend arriving on Saturday evening - but, luckily, it turned out to be complete bollocks.

9)  Don't change the parameters of the race at the last-minute

The second day's race had been advertised in the runner's guidebook as being 35km. We were told at the 'technical briefing' on the evening of Day 0 (which comparatively few people attended, because nothing had been done to advertise it) that this had been reduced to 32km. In fact, it had been increased to 38km. 38-and-a-bit km. However, the time allowed was reduced - without any announcement having been made to this effect - from 4'30" to a niggardly 4 hrs. Many people who narrowly missed the new, less generous cutoff point were denied an official classification for the entire event (something which didn't bother me, but rankled with the more serious competitors in the field quite a bit). I think the time allowed for the first day's full marathon might have been reduced as well: the cutoff had been advertised as 5'30", but the race clock already seemed to have been dismantled when I finished just on the 5-hour mark.

10)  Do measure the goddamned courses - and mark the distances - accurately

I believe the organisers may have calculated the distances using a flat map, not taking into account the effects of hills. As I recounted a week or so ago, I was pretty damned sure - having walked that part of the route on the previous day - that the first "5km" of the first race was perhaps as much as 30% long. People with GPS height and distance tracking gizmos on their smartphones reckoned the course overall was certainly between 1.5 and 2km longer than the regular marathon distance it was supposed to be. The last day's race was supposed to be a half-marathon, 21km. At the last minute, it was extended to "22km"; the guys with the smartphones said it was closer to 24km. There were a few eccentricities with the distance marker boards as well: there were a few stretches where there were no markers for 2 or 3km (this tends to cause the poor runner a lot of unnecessary anxiety, when he's got used to seeing a reminder of his progress consistently every kilometre along the way); and there was one point in the later stages of the short last race where a "1km" interval between boards was in fact very nearly 2km.

11)  Don't f*** with people in the finishing stretch

A regular marathon is only supposed to be 195m more than 42km. On the first day's race, the finishing line was at least 450 or 500m beyond the 42km marker (which was, in any event, something over 43km from the start!), and the course was so twisty that you couldn't see where it was until you were almost on top of it. There was a similar deal on the final day, only worse: the course just went on and on and on, after the final kilometre marker. And then one of those big red inflatable arches that they use to mark the finish of a race finally hove into view. But it was a dummy - not the finish at all. WHY??  People yelled at us to keep running for a few hundred more metres. Another red arch came in sight and I sprinted for it - but guess what, it was a SECOND dummy. The real finishing line was yet another 200 or 300m further on; but, of course, by this point, we no longer had complete confidence that this really was the finish. I had had enough by that point: I refused to 'finish' the race, walking in along the sidewalk behind the crowds. Misleading course markings and false finishes are a big no-no.

12)  If you're going to have souvenirs of the event, let them not be crappy and worthless

We were given free race shorts and shirts. Disgusting design, poor quality manufacture - and ridiculously small (the largest size they had was ostensibly XXXXL; usually a Chinese XXXL is fine for me, equating to an XL back home - but this "XXXXL" was surely no more than an M, I couldn't get it on over my head!). Large numbers of them were abandoned in waste baskets in the hotels. That's not good for spreading awareness of your event and boosting participation in future years.

A Baker's Dozen Postscript: Don't steal your star attraction's passport. One of the professional athletes from Kenya who'd been brought in to give the appearance of this being a serious international competition had had his passport confiscated by the organisers for the whole time he was in the country. No clear reason had been given for this; I heard his minder spinning him some bullshit story about how they'd needed it to buy an air ticket home for him. He had been promised that it would be returned to him when we left Zhenyuan the day after the final race. It wasn't. And it seemed that nobody knew quite where it was. The minder made some anguished phone calls, and eventually announced that someone in Guiyang had it, and would come to the airport to return it to the athlete - an hour or so before his flight was due to leave. He was a lovely guy, very sweet-natured and laidback; but he was starting to get a mite pissed off about this unfolding clusterfuck. I suspect even his super-athlete's blood pressure was getting a little elevated. I was staying in Guiyang for a few days rather than flying straight back out myself, so I don't know if he was able to make his flight that day. I do hope so.

Beijing is broken

Well, the subway system, anyway.

I don't use the subway here much any more, because it is so painfully overcrowded most of the time. But on the intermittent occasions when I have had to travel by subway in recent months, I have noticed that more and more of the ticket-vending machines seem to be dysfunctional.

The touch-screen interface on these things always has been maddeningly unreliable. And they frequently run out of change. Or crankily refuse to accept your money, even if they ostensibly do still have change available. Or take so long to dispense your ticket that you're giving up and about to walk away when it finally appears. In short, the ticket-vending machines on the Beijing subway are a bit crap.

But now, more and more of them are simply broken, permanently 'out of service', not even putting up the annoying pretence of being available for your use. And nothing seems to be being done to fix them. At the station that I use most often, four of five vending machines have been out of action for weeks now, and one of the station staff has taken to hovering near them to sell tickets by hand (as in the good old days!).

Yesterday, however, the ticket that the station attendant sold me did not work - at any of the station's entry gates. When I looked at it more closely, I wasn't convinced that it was even a real ticket - it seemed to be much thinner and flimsier, and didn't look as though it had the electronic tag (or whatever it is) inside it that communicates with the ticket barriers. When I returned to the station lady to complain, she tried to assure that everything would be OK because she would get one of her colleagues to open a barrier for me, without my having to use the useless ticket. I was not mollified by this, because I would still have faced a problem passing through the exit barrier at the other end of my journey - a consideration that this lady seemed to be overlooking. And call me fussy, if you will, but I don't like paying money - even 2 RMB - for something that DOESN'T FUCKING WORK. The obtuse station lady would not offer me a new ticket or a refund. Sensing the onset of a Total China Meltdown, I left the station and walked 5 miles to my dinner rendezvous instead.

At another station I used a few days ago, five of the six exit barriers were out of action.

How do things get this bad???

Is it just a case of the Chinese being hopeless at planning and budgeting for routine maintenance? Or are the subway authorities letting the equipment decay to justify an expensive refit? (Re-equipping the entire network with ticket machines and/or entry/exit barriers will require a huge capital outlay, a large percentage of which - such is the Chinese way - can be expected to find its way into the back pockets of the people placing the purchase orders.)

I strongly suspect it's the latter. On the above-ground Line 13, added to the network not quite ten years ago, though much of the track is elevated, some sections of it are at ground level. But all of the stations - even those where the station entrance and the track are on the same level - are built on two storeys... often with the ticket hall being on the upper floor, above the platforms. The only possible rationale for this absurd piece of design is that it provides for the installation of escalators even in stations where they are not really necessary. The guys who sold the escalators, and the guys who authorised the purchase of them, made a modest fortune for themselves out of this little piece of lunacy. This is China.

Out of sight, out of mind

Um, except that this is NOT 'out of sight'.

One of those Chinese hotels I stayed in recently had a pair of light wells in the middle of the building, on either side of the main corridor. They were open to the elements, but this did not discourage the management from making use of this space for storage.

This is another of those little details that might, I suggest, prevent any Chinese hotel from meriting a star under Western hotel rating systems.

Hotels with Chinese characteristics

On my recent travels in the southern half of China, I was struck by the degree of homogeneity Chinese hotels seem to have attained these days. When I had a job that involved a lot of business travel in China 5 or 6 years ago, I found there was a great deal of variation in quality between hotels at the same price point and star rating, but now.... it's remarkable how very nearly identical they all are.

I assume the star rating system imposes certain rigid requirements for the facilities required at each level: for instance, the provision of a hairdryer now seems to be de rigueur for '3 stars' (although some hotels will conceal them in obscure drawers or cupboards to try to restrict the amount they are used). The only unique extra I encountered on my latest trip was at a hotel in a small city in eastern Guizhou province, which had a set of electronic scales - though they were well hidden in the bottom of a wardrobe, and didn't have any batteries in them. At a wedding party in a similarly out-of-the-way lower-tier city last year, my friends and I discovered that the only difference between the 'standard' and 'superior' suites was the provision in the latter of an electronic mah jong table (they are rather fascinating contraptions: there's an elaborate mechanism for automatically shuffling the tiles between games). Such eccentricities are, it seems, becoming rarer and rarer. Most hotels are eerily identical in almost every detail - two complimentary bottles of water per day, the same number of towels in the bathroom, the same leather wallet for the TV remote control, the same collection of non-complimentary products on offer (playing cards, pot noodles, Evian water; condoms, 'senior pants', and the 'magic towel'). The only differentiating factors we still find seem to be in-room Internet access (often advertised on travel websites as a generally available facility, but in fact usually a premium extra) and international cable TV (never more than a handful of English channels, but it does make such a difference on the rare occasions when you find this - a brownie point here for Green Lake Hotel in Kunming, and the Crown Plaza in Kaili [It is spelled like that on its business cards; not sure if that's a typo, or if it is a knock-off Crowne Plaza!]).

Yet, while this greater consistency of standards should probably be seen as a positive step, there is another kind of consistency that is even more ubiquitous, and rather troubling: a consistent shoddiness in the standard of fittings, in the level of maintenance and cleanliness - a consistent lack of attention to detail.

In almost every Chinese hotel room - at least, at the 3- and 4-star level* and below - you can expect to find the following.

1)  Appallingly dirty carpets. China is an unusually dusty, grimy country. And vacuum cleaners are still uncommon here. But jeez, you'd think some of these carpets had never been cleaned since the hotels first opened. You almost suspect there's a specially designated team of staff who go around trampling grime into the carpets to give the impression that the hotel has more custom than it does. Certainly, there doesn't seem to be any system in place for regular shampooing or periodic replacement of carpets. And they're always a pale beige colour, which does tend to highlight their grubbiness.

2)  Chipped, broken or completely missing bathroom tiles. 

3)  Faulty electrical outlets and equipment. There's almost always at least one powerpoint that doesn't work, and it's quite often hanging off the wall with the wires exposed. You can expect at least one of the light-bulbs to be blown, and to be unlikely ever to be replaced. I have quite a few times seen electric kettles with huge holes in the insulation on their power cords exposing the bare copper wires within.

4)  Smelly drains. This is a problem anywhere you go in China - but you would think 4-star hotels would have found a way to address the issue.

5)  Wonky heating/air-conditioning. Often far too noisy to be used at night, and of limited effectiveness anyway. Invariably switched off by staff, often in cunning and unexpected ways - like turning a thermostat concealed inside the control unit down to 15 degrees, or switching the setting over from 'Warm' to 'Cool' in the middle of winter (and perhaps vice versa in the summer). Now, energy saving is all very laudable, but... do you really need to do this every time a guest leaves the room??

6)  Airing rooms and corridors by leaving windows wide open - even in the middle of winter. All three of the hotel rooms I stayed at in eastern Guizhou were absolutely bloody freezing upon my arrival. One of them obstinately declined to warm up at all, obliging me to wear just about every piece of clothing I'd brought with me to stave off hypothermia in bed.

7)  Cleaning staff who call at ridiculously inconsiderate hours, and/or ignore 'Do not disturb' signs or your requests to go away. I mean, really, why the f*** would anyone think it's a good idea to try to make up a room at 6pm, when a guest has only just checked in? Or at 8am, when they're getting ready to check out?

8)  Cleaning staff who 'tidy' stuff away unnecessarily - including a guest's personal possessions! I complained last week about the maid who removed my shower mat from the bathroom while I was at breakfast, and stored it somewhere very hard-to-find. At another hotel, a maid actually stole one of my own towels from me (karmic payback, I suppose, for the countless millions of guests who have stolen hotel towels over the years). It was white, yes; but it didn't look that much like this hotel's towels (it had a fairly conspicuous blue thread around the border, rather than being pure white) - and it was in the bottom of my case.

9)  Failure to clean under the beds - EVER. You really don't want to look under the bed, because there is some nasty shit down there.

10)  Crappy, broken, or seriously worn furniture. Armchairs in which the stuffing of the seat has completely collapsed, upright chairs that sag and wobble because of loose joints, sofas stained or worn shiny by years of use. Not quite as bad as the carpet, but sometimes running it close.


And the food is usually pretty lousy too....

*  The star-rating system for Chinese hotels seems to go up to 7 rather than 5; and very few Chinese-owned hotels achieve the highest rating (but the foreign chains are not immune to these problems either: I've encountered many of the same faults in a Crowne Plaza and a Ramada and a Best Western). Hence, it is generally suggested that a Chinese rating is two stars above its equivalent in the West. I suspect this in fact understates the disparity: I think the shakiness of basic quality control indicated above would preclude most Chinese hotels from getting any stars at all under much more rigorous Western assessment schemes. Not that they're really all that bad. Most 3- and 4-star Chinese hotels, and even a few 2-star ones, are acceptably clean and reasonably comfortable, and are pleasantly inexpensive. But a true service culture has barely begun to evolve here yet.

China and the science of materials

I think I have just encountered a new low in the quality of Chinese design and manufacturing. 

I have complained before about the extraordinary brittleness of most plastic made in this country, rendering items like ice-cube trays and washing-up bowls effectively a one-use only deal because they break so easily. Well, here is an especially egregious example. A few days ago, I bought a pack of eight fruit yoghurts. The supposedly perforated or weakened joints connecting the pots are in fact much stronger than the plastic forming the rest of the pots. Indeed, even the adhesive holding the foil lids on to the tops of the pots is stronger than the body of the pots! Such that when you try to separate two of the pots or to remove one of the lids from a pot, you tend to inadvertently tear the pot in half instead - and thus dump gloops of yoghurt on your kitchen floor. I would not have thought it possible to create something this CRAPPY, but.... this is China.

Maybe it's something to do with the weather. The seemingly robust and well weather-proofed windowframes in the elevator lobby on my landing have suddenly revealed themselves to be hopelessly corroded inside. The one most often opened (by a couple of my elderly neighbours who like to smoke out there) has just had its door-handle latch completely break away from the frame, leaving the window uncloseable.

The building management, with the half-assedness that is unfortunately so characteristic of this country, have sought to remedy this problem by.... sealing the window with sticky tape. Needless to say, this is not a very effective fix. Particularly when there's a north wind blowing in at 20 miles an hour. If they don't fix it properly soon (you know, replace the window with a new one), the temperature in that lobby is going to be sub-zero, and we could get snow accumulating in there.

By strange coincidence (well, probably not such a coincidence: the same crappy windowframes have been used throughout the building), the handle has just broken off my kitchen window in exactly similar fashion. My only consolation is that the window is now jammed shut, rather than left permanently open. Ah, China.

You can never find one when you need one!

A further reason why Chinese banks are SHITE!

When I huffily closed down my account with China Merchants Bank a few years ago, the young girl attending to my ire insisted on knowing why, and amongst the dozen or so reasons I gave was that they didn't seem to have any branches anywhere near where I lived - indeed, none, so far as I was aware, anywhere inside Beijing's 2nd Ringroad. She loyally protested that they had at least 50 branches in Beijing. "Oh yeah? WHERE??" She was unable to help me on the specifics.

But I've been keeping more of an eye out since then, and perhaps it is possible that they do indeed have a branch on every other block in the city. It's just that most of them are inconspicuous to the point of INVISIBILITY.

Check out this picture.

Does anything about this really give the obvious impression of its being a bank? I don't think so. These days, most (but not all) bank signs do at least have the name in English as well. But the logos of all the Chinese banks seem to be strangely un-eyecatching. And the great majority of them favour a predominant colour scheme of 'lucky red' - which is, of course, also used by 80% of other businesses in China. Bank signs often don't have any high recognisability factor about them, nothing much that distinguishes them from a sign for an insurance company or a restaurant or a massage parlour. What's more, most bank branches these days are housed inside malls, and do not necessarily have any frontage on to the street. Thus, their signs - where they are visible at all - will be clustered in amongst dozens of other similar signs for insurance companies and restaurants and massage parlours, and really not at all conspicuous. And not all that close to the actual location of the bank. I have several times had the experience of seeing a sign for a bank (and a cashpoint) on the exterior of a new mall development, and thinking that the bank should be easy to find as it is probably the only tenant thus far, but after ten minutes of vainly trying to ask security guards and janitors about the the whereabouts of the yinhang, I have given up my search and returned to the streets still cashless.

Chinese banks - they really are damned hard to find sometimes.

Blood pressure

Amongst the many vexations I suffered as a result of the chaotic administration of the ultra-marathon event I took part in three weeks back (a longer post is brewing!) was the fact that the organisers sprung on us at the last minute (which is to say, it had not been mentioned at all in what little advance information about the event had been made available) that there was to be a compulsory blood pressure check before each of the races, and that failure to pass this would result in exclusion from participation.

Now, I only found out about this because I had some other urgent questions I wanted to raise at the 'technical briefing' (which had itself scarcely been publicized) on the eve of the race. There were no notices put up about these health checks, and only a couple of fleeting, unexplained references in the runner's information packs. Many competitors might have remained completely unaware of them. And it would have been quite easy to inadvertently bypass - or deliberately avoid - the doctors and nurses conducting the checks, since this was happening in the lobbies of the various hotels where we were being lodged - and it wasn't absolutely necessary to go through the lobbies (certainly not in the third and final hotel, where my room was in a separate annexe, a couple of hundred yards away from the main lobby; and even in single building hotels, I tend to use the stairs rather than the lifts, for exercise, and to leave via the fire exit to avoid possible crowds in the reception area). Moreover, the few references in the information pack actually gave incorrect times/locations for the checks - so, I think we might be entirely forgiven for having skipped them. And, as I discovered, there seemed to be no effective enforcement in place. There were no checks as to whether someone had taken the BP test or not, no system for excluding people who hadn't from starting, not even any subsequent follow-up if they realised later that people had run without having been given the all-clear to do so (I took part without completing the check on all three days, and not a word was said about it).

I might possibly have been denied an official finishing classification for having failed to complete the check (big deal!). And it would have been entirely reasonable to exclude me from the organisers' health insurance coverage if I'd become ill during a race. But I really don't think anybody was keeping any effective record of the test results at all.

One of the other runners at the technical briefing, a super-keen amateur from Hong Kong who'd evidently run lots of ultras before, and taken part in this event two or three times previously, objected that in past years the doctors had tried to exclude some runners for having a blood pressure that was supposedly too low, and he asked for reassurance that this wouldn't happen this time. The organisers' spokesman (the only member of the entire organising committee, it seemed, who spoke any English; but he didn't introduce himself by name, and was never seen again after this meeting) didn't give a very clear response, but he seemed to indicate that the health checks would be "more of a guideline", and that nobody would actually be excluded from taking part if they were confident they were healthy.

It was such a woolly answer that I didn't take much comfort from this. And I was anxious that I was likely to fail the test. Heck, the anxiety about possibly failing the test - the anxiety about having to take a test - was raising my blood pressure considerably. And I'm not super-healthy, not at all a natural athlete. I felt quite intimidated by the rest of the field: even the other amateurs taking part in this event - at least, on the first two days; a bunch of fun runners showed up for the final much shorter race on Sunday morning - seemed to be very serious runners who'd done heaps of marathons and ultra-marathons before. I was one of only four or five who were over forty; and the only one who wasn't whippet-thin.

What's more, I'd come down two days ahead of the first race, and... the concussed bee stupidity of the organisers had just got a bit too much for me. I'd arrived in quite a happy and relaxed mood, but after 48 hours of confrontation with this relentless incompetence, my blood was boiling. I knew there was no danger that my blood pressure was going to be too low. Oh no, it was going to be TOO HIGH. There was no doubt about it.

But still, my innate respect for following the rules bade me try to pass the test, on the first two days of the competition.

The first time I attempted it, I was recorded at 150/100 - which is, admittedly, quite bothersomely high; but not quite in instant heart attack territory. Given the amount of hassles I'd gone through in the previous few minutes, I was quite pleasantly surprised that it was that low. I'm quite sure it must have been at least 10 points higher just a few moments before, and that I'd managed to bring it down quite substantially by a sheer effort of will. So, the doctors told me I'd failed - but I could come back and try again in 10 minutes. Since I was now anxious and angry about the prospect of being excluded from the race on medical grounds (after having travelled 1,000 miles and shelled out a lot of money to get there), and since there was less than 40 minutes to go before the start of the race, and I still hadn't found anyone to take care of my computer (long story), nor had I been able to discover where the dropoff point for race-day bags or the assembly point for the race itself were (despite having asked everyone in sight at least 10 times: NOBODY knew!).... the chances of my blood pressure going down seemed pretty slim. I did try one more time, about 5 mins later; and this time I was apparently 140/100 (which leads me to suspect that the medical staff just weren't very good at using the equipment; I'm quite sure my pressure at this point must have been the same or higher). I didn't think this would be over any reasonable 'danger threshold', but they seemed to think it was, and were still trying to stop me taking part. Eventually they proffered a piece of paper, which I assumed was some kind of waiver of responsibilty if I died, but they weren't able to explain it to me, and..... well, just as I was about to sign it to get them off my back, another little crisis started unfolding, and I went away to deal with that and entirely forgot about signing their damn waiver (if that's what it was).

The following morning, I was in a similar zone - 140/95. Although it was damned hard to get them to tell you what your reading was; and even harder to find out what the 'pass' threshold was. I eventually divined that it was 140/90 - although I might have been misled about that. I suspect it might have been 130/90, which is typically given as the threshold definition of 'pre-hypertension' in medical books.

Now, to me, excluding someone for having a blood pressure which is not ideally healthy, but well within the normal parameters of the general population, seems unduly harsh. Oh sure, we'd all like to be down around 120/80, but how many of us ever are? I doubt if very many people would register that level after an even averagely stressful week at work. Certainly not many middle-aged men.

I doubt if my blood pressure is ever much better than 130/90, not when I'm up and active. I don't recall ever recording a reading lower than that, anyway (but the mere fact of being tested probably bumps it up a few notches; I do not like doctors). And a big race unleashes a huge jolt of adrenalin into your system: half an hour or an hour before the race, I'm pumped. My blood pressure is going to be elevated by at least 10%, if not 15-20%, I should think.

In summary, it is INSANE to seek to exclude runners from an event like this because their blood pressure is slightly higher than normal. It is INSANE to conduct such tests less than an hour before the start of the race. It is INSANE not to the tell people what the parameters of the test are. And it is deeply ANNOYING and STUPID not to let people know about something like this well in advance. It is also completely bloody POINTLESS if no record of the checks is being kept, and half the competitors are ignoring them anyway. This is the kind of thing, I'm afraid, that only seems to happen in China. And it is apt to RAISE YOUR BLOOD PRESSURE.

A few days later, I had the chance to get my blood pressure measured again by a young nurse who was offering free health checks on the street. Removed from the stress of the incompetent event management, I was back down to my 'normal' 130/90.

By the by, Blood Pressure is the title of one of Damon Runyon's classic humorous accounts of New York's gangster low life during the Roaring Twenties, one of the first of these that I read. I discover it's now available online - here.