Bon mot for the week

"Between the great things we cannot do and the small things we will not do, the danger is that we shall do nothing."

Adolphe Monod (1802-1856)

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.]

Bon mot for the week

"I enjoy learning, but I dislike being taught."

Winston Churchill  (1874-1965)

Bon mot for the week

"The modern emphasis on active achievements is dangerously misguided. Each time we omit to get out of bed, most of us have probably made a small reduction in the sum of the world's unhappiness."

Froog

Bon mot for the week

"The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time."

John Stuart Mill  (1806-1873)

Haiku for the week

Stress of the unknown;

Excitement of novelty;

Three weeks on the road.

I am somewhat uncomfortable, ashamed at the relief I feel at the prospect of returning home after a period of travelling. 'Home' is too confining, a disengagement from the world; I would prefer it to be a journey's beginning rather than its end. But I am getting old; I exhaust easily.

Bon mot for the week

"A gardener does not 'grow' flowers; he tries to give them what he thinks they need and they grow by themselves."

John Holt (1923-1985)

We've heard from Mr Holt in this series before (here and here), and we might again. He was a pioneering educator whose writing became a major influence on me in my childhood and in my early teaching career. Here, of course, he was thinking of gardening as a metaphor for teaching.

Bon mot for the week

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."

Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Bon mot for the week

"Enthusiasm is useful if it can be stored in a reservoir. If its dam breaks, it can be very troublesome."

Froog

Such is my vice, anyway.

Bon mot for the week

"Nature is a haunted house, but art is a house that tries to be haunted."

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Gosh - Froog succumbing to a Halloween theme? Surely not!

Bon mot for the week

"A great many people think they are thinking when they are actually rearranging their prejudices."

William James (1842-1910)

A birthday headbang

Yes, today I am becoming even older - into the back end of my forties now.

I feel the chill of approaching senility and death all the more keenly because I am just about the oldest person I know. Few of my friends here in Beijing are yet past forty, and many of them are barely into their thirties.

One of the saddest problems of this generation gap is that things I cherish as key pop culture landmarks of my childhood and early adulthood happened too long ago for them to remember, in some cases even before they were born.

I was reminded of this chasm again just the other week, when my online sparring partner Music Mike told me that he is too young to remember Not The Nine O'Clock News, an influential BBC2 comedy skit show (first television exposure for Rowan Atkinson, for one thing) that was one of the hugest hits of my last years in high school.

I had recommended to him Mel Smith's frenetic parody of a punk song, Gob On You - my favourite of all their musical numbers.

I've always loved the lines:

Sex is boring; pain is fun.

I want to cut my fingers off one by one.

Ain't no point in stayin' alive;

Wanna be dead when I'm twenty-five.

Now that I have reached nearly twice that total, I do sometimes wistfully think that bowing out in my twenties - quitting while I was ahead - might have been the wise course.

Unfortunately, Youtube only appears to have the first half of the performance on video. If you want to hear the full two-minute song - including those memorable, maudlin lines - you'll have to try this listen-only posting (with atrocious sound quality, unfortunately)... or this one (again, no video), a cover by a genuine punk band, Chaos UK.

Wise words on teaching the young

"We destroy the love of learning in children, which is so strong when they are small, by encouraging and compelling them to work for petty rewards – in short, for the ignoble satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else."

John Holt (1923-1985)

I've quoted John Holt on here a number of times before. He was a highly influential writer on the practice of education and one of the only truly inspiring figures that I can acknowledge as having shaped the development of my own thinking. I stumbled across this online the other day (almost certainly a rediscovery, since I read just about everything he ever wrote when I was a teenager) and couldn't resist sharing it.

Bon mot for the week

"A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams."

John Barrymore, Snr. (1882-1942)

I don't think that's me yet...

Yes, oh dear, it's my birthday later this week. And the total is getting worryingly large.

Bon mot for the week

"It is the duty of a citizen in a free country not to fit into society, but to make society."

John Holt (1923-1985)

And in a non-free country, come to that...

Bon mot for the week

"The best advice is almost always unsolicited."

Froog

Bon mot for the week

"If you are brave too often, people will come to expect it of you."

Mignon McLaughlin (1913-1983)

Goals and objectives

I should, round about now, be returning from my first training run of full half-marathon distance.

Since Sunday is the traditional day for the Beijing Marathon (if it goes ahead this year; the country's political insecurities seem to be threatening to cause a cancellation), and for most other international marathons, I am intending to make Sunday my 'Big Run' day - forcing myself each week substantially beyond the distance I've so far achieved, and trying to replicate the race-day situation (i.e., getting up early, ready to start the run by 8am). I have, in fact, already run close to the half-marathon two or three times, and had hoped to push for the full distance for the first time last weekend; but I'm still having some stamina issues, so decided to wait another week. Hopefully, 21km won't be too much of a stretch for me now. Despite suffering a bad cold this week, I've still forced myself to run a couple of times, and I feel my confidence and pacing are slowly coming back to me. I'm managing to sustain a pace of nearly 10kph now, and I'm hopeful I can achieve a 10%-15% improvement on that over the next few months.

Whether or not I attain that increase in speed is almost entirely dependent on whether I manage to lose weight. I am alarmed, disgusted by how portly I have become in the last few years. Since I'm tall and have quite a broad frame, I don't think I'm yet in the zone of being considered 'clinically obese', but I'm uncomfortably close to the threshold of that category now: officially, in medical terms, 'overweight'; and, for someone who's been moderately lean and athletic for most of his life, I feel like a fat bastard.

I reached 80kg during my final growth spurt when I was in the 6th Form, but my weight then remained remarkably stable for a long time. Despite prodigious consumption of beer and kebabs during my student days, my youthful metabolism was more than capable of burning it all off (and I suppose I was doing quite a lot of exercise in those days; I began distance running back then, to get in shape for the Army reserve unit I had impetuously joined). My weight in kilograms might have crept up into the low 80s by the end of my undergraduate career, but that was mostly a gain in muscle rather than fat. And my weight continued uncannily stable for several more years - with only a few derangements. 

At the beginning of my second year as a schoolteacher, I tore up the cartilage in my right knee rather badly (playing football in the gym with the kids), and wasn't able to do any exercise at all for several months (even walking was a bit of a trial for a time). During that period, my weight quickly ballooned above 95kg. However, I gave up drinking for the summer term (I had been rather over-indulging in the cheap - and very fattening - lager we had on tap in the Masters' Common Room), which helped to reverse that trend; and when I was able to begin running again in the autumn, the weight fell off, and I was soon back down to within a kilo or two of what I'd been before.

My teaching career was abruptly ended a couple of years later by a violent - and mysterious - dose of food poisoning, which nearly killed me and had me laid up in hospital for three weeks. During the onset of that illness, in the space of just a week or so, my weight plummeted to 75kg - the lightest I'd been since I was about 10 years old! However, a big chunk of that weight loss was probably just dehydration; I'd recovered a lot of it by the time I left hospital, and within a month or two I was back to my 'normal' weight of 82-83kg.

During my backpacking year a couple of years later, my weight also fell dramatically - particularly during my last few months in America, when I had basically run out of money and was subsisting on a starvation diet. When I got back to the UK, I was again not much above 75kg - but this time I was lean and wiry, rather than ravaged by dehydration and muscle wastage. That's the fittest I've ever been in my life. However, despite continuing to live fairly frugally and to run 10 or 12km almost every day, my weight soon bounced back to 80-something kg; that seems to be my 'natural weight' - or, it was then.

I've always been mildly bothered by a propensity to gain weight quite easily in the short-term; noticing myself put on a kilo or so whenever I've gone through a few days of particularly heavy beer consumption, and to add 2 or 3 kilos each winter as protection against cold weather. However, when I was a young man, I found it fairly easy to lose that weight again. Since I moved to Beijing ten years ago, it's become much harder. Now, a few days of heavy drinking can bloat me by 2kg, or more; the 'winter coat' gets thicker year by year - 4kg or 5kg, or even 6kg; and it takes a few months of determined effort to get that weight off again. In fact, I haven't been able to get it all off: my weight has begun to creep up insidiously year by year, as, despite my best efforts, I only manage to shed two-thirds or half of the weight I've piled on over the winter. I don't think this is anything particularly to do with the environment of Beijing (although many expats point a finger of blame at the fattiness of stir-fried food - or the cheapness and ubiquity of the local beer!), just a matter of metabolic slowdown as I hit middle age. In fact, I think I'd started to notice it in my last couple of years in England; the turning point probably occurred some time in my early-to-mid-thirties. 

Things have got particularly bad in the last few years, though. I don't know if I should blame further metabolic changes or a more sedentary lifestyle or a shift to drinking a lot of premium lager or a drastic reduction in my running due to a succession of persistent injuries, but... in the last three winters my seasonal blob-out has amounted to 6kg or 7kg, and I've struggled to get any of that weight off again. A couple of times early this year my weight briefly peaked at around 105kg, a full 10kg more than it had been barely two years earlier.

I'd managed to shed a few kilograms of that before I quit Beijing in May. And I thought that, having mostly lived fairly healthily and done quite a lot of running, I would have shed quite a bit more during my extended summer holiday. But it seems that a few big beer sessions here and there had done their damage, and I was still a bit above 100kg when I came back here a month ago. I had briefly got down below 97kg, maybe closer to 96kg, a couple of weeks back - but that was perhaps partly dehydration after a long run in hot weather. Whatever - a few big nights out quickly set me back a few kilos again. Now I've given up beer for the coming month, and am committed to a more intensive programme of exercise, I feel I can achieve a substantial weight reduction. I seem to have been managing to lose 1kg or so per week quite easily, even when I was still drinking beer; so, I figure if I ramp up the amount of exercise I'm doing, and maybe throw in a bit of fasting, I should be able to drop 1.5-2kg, perhaps even 2.5kg per week.

At present, I am just over 97kg. By the end of the National Holiday Week (8th October), I aim to be 92kg - the weight I was when I last ran a marathon, six years or so ago. By my birthday (20th October), I aim to be 88kg - an even more psychologically significant milestone for me, since this is the weight I was just before I came to China. 

If I can achieve these goals, I may push on a bit further with my dieting (and avoidance of beer!) to see if I can get down below 85kg. And if I can manage that, I'll try to see how much lower I can push it. I don't think I can reasonably, or safely, expect to get back down to 80kg. There are certain fat deposits that obstinately refuse to shift at this time of life; and my bones have got bigger since I was a teenager; heck, my liver has got bigger! But if I could get back to around 83 or 84kg, the weight I was in my mid-twenties, I would be very, very happy. This is MY MISSION for the next few months.

"A man needs goals and objectives to give his life meaning."

Bon mot for the week

"To sentence a man of true genius to the drudgery of a school is to put a racehorse on a treadmill." 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1172-1834)

It is unclear whether it was teachers or students that Coleridge was sympathising with here.

And he might equally well have said "to the drudgery of office work".

What are days for?

Music Mike, a fellow Beijing blogger with whom I have entered into frequent online correspondence over this past year, was kind enough to nominate me for a blog award last week (not for the vaguely artsy Froogville here, but for my more down-and-dirty 'drinking blog', Round-The-World Barstool Blues - which, coincidentally, turns six today). I felt I had to decline the honour, because, as I've noted before, I'm a bit down on the whole 'blog meme' thing; and, moreover, I really don't think there's anyone I could pass the award on to (the 'rules' demand that you extend the chain to ten new recipients!). Mike himself included nearly all the essential China blogs in his own nominations (and the few he missed are admirably covered in this fuller rundown from Danwei). Nearly all the other bloggers I used to read have hung up their spurs now (unplugged their keyboards?). It's Götterdämmerung time for blogging, I fear.

I also struggled with the award's demand to answer a batch of "What's your favourite...?" questions: favourite animal, colour, number, food, drink, flower, and... day of the week! (Only two of these inquiries would I have been able to come up with a straightforward answer to. Do I prefer Facebook or Twitter? Neither! [Although I concede that Twitter may have some utility, whereas Facebook is a pure social evil.] And do I prefer giving or receiving presents? Giving, naturally. Doesn't everyone?) I don't have one favourite anything. If I did nominate just one thing, it would only be a partial, misleading answer, a momentary, inconstant impulse; ask me again tomorrow and I'd say something completely different.

Whenever I try to do a 'favourite things' post, I always end up with a list - sometimes quite a long list; and that's only an illustrative sample rather than a comprehensive account of my tastes in the area. Over on my other blog, I started a series of 'Top Fives' a few years ago; even that format I find very difficult, much too limiting - I quite often find myself having to 'cheat' a little bit, throwing in one or two supplementary nominations... or I return to the topic after a little while with another list of five... and perhaps another, and another. 

What's my favourite food?? Where would I begin?! With a narrower frame of reference, like 'Favourite childhood comfort food' (baked beans on toast) or 'Favourite Beijing street food' (rou jia mo), I might have a chance of coming up with a single answer - but favourite food??!! No, the idea of having a single favourite something utterly baffles me.

And particularly for 'Favourite day of the week'. I might from time to time have enjoyed a particular day because of a regular activity associated with that day. For a long time in Beijing, Thursday was the best night of the week for me, because musician friends of mine in a couple of bands had long residencies at nearby music bars - Jianghu and Jiangjinjiu - on that night, and I'd go to hear them play almost every week. But all good things come to an end; Thursdays are nothing special to me any more. And there was never anything intrinsic to Thursday that made me like that day, only events that happened to take place on a Thursday.

More often, I think, people acquire negative associations with particular days; and preferred days may only seem better by contrast with these worse ones. Most people, I suspect would nominate a weekend day as their favourite, because of the freedom from work. That doesn't apply for me, though, because I am entirely freelance these days, and so quite often work just as much - or as little! - on the weekends as I do on any other day of the week.

In general, I find the mere idea of days oppressive, emphasising as it does the repetitive cycles not just of work but of our lives overall. My favourite days are those on which I have managed to lose awareness of what day of the week it is. That doesn't happen often enough.

All of which preamble was merely an excuse to post some more Larkin....

Days 

What are days for? 

Days are where we live. 

They come, they wake us 

Time and time over. 

They are to be happy in: 

Where can we live but days? 

Ah, solving that question 

Brings the priest and the doctor 

In their long coats 

Running over the fields.

Philip Larkin (1922-1985)