Consolations: 12 reasons I'm better off without that job

1) The pay was lousy.

I mean, really insulting. Most of the old college buddies I discussed it with during the summer were guestimating I'd be on up to 6 or 8 times as much. OK, some of them are completely out of touch with reality (that's why I love you, Dr P), but...... I learned at that time that the average starting salary for a graduate in the UK these days is well in excess even of what my salary would have been on a full-time basis, nearly twice what I was actually making for my 3 (or so) days a week. I know 'local hires' always get screwed, but really - for someone of my experience, and with the huge responsibilities of the role (with a crucial 'business development' dimension in a key new market: the whole of East Asia!), it was a pretty bloody contemptuously paltry remuneration. And significantly less than I had been earning from my bits-and-pieces of freelancing earlier in the year. From the financial point of view, it should be quite easy to say good riddance!

2) My immediate 'line manager' bugged the crap out of me.

Not that they were a bad person, or bad at their job particularly (non-ideal in some ways, but not at all terrible) - it was just a personality-grate:
their accent/tone of voice/manner/opinions/decisions invariably acted upon my psyche as the scraping of fingernails down a blackboard.

3) It was office-based.

Offices and I do not get along. I hated my desk, my computer, my chair, the neon strip-lights, the tinted windows, the fact that I could fail to notice what the weather was like outside for the entire fucking day.....

4) It was a 'teamwork' culture.

And I am, I confess, ultimately more of a 'loner'. Oh, I'm also 'a people person'. I like to get along with co-workers. And I enjoy co-operating with them one-to-one..... when it's actually necessary, and when we actually get something done. But having to put in half a day of "please" and "thank you" and fucking ego-massage every time you need to send an e-mail? Christ! No thank you.

5) It involved a lot of business travel.

And business travel is never much fun. In China in particular, it can easily degenerate into a slice of hell-on-earth. Better off without all of that.


6) Our Chinese partners are all dipshits.

Really. ALL of them. There's a spectrum, of course: it runs from "shouldn't trust these people as far as I can spit" to "nice, bright, sincere, enthusiastic people - who haven't got a fucking clue what they're doing". In a good-natured parting meeting with the boss this morning, I shared with him this little riddle, a bitterly jesting observation of many teachers I know who've spent more than a couple of years here: "What's wrong with the education business in China?" "Everything!"


7) It required a rush-hour commute into the CBD by Subway.

That's not fun in any city in the world. In Beijing...... it saps the will to live.

8) It was a long working day.

We were supposed to be in before 9am every day - just to set a good example to our Chinese staff (most of whom don't show up until at least 9.30 or 10!), just to show willing in case our Chinese partners wanted to contact us by telephone early in the day (they never did!). We were supposed to stay until at least 6pm every evening - just to give the UK office an opportunity to communicate with us (again, they hardly ever did). Last-minute shit had a habit of cropping up, which would tie you down until 7pm. And there was nowhere decent to have lunch in the vicinity, so I'd often stay in the office the whole time. That was a long fucking day!!! And 90% of the work I could have handled better from home.....

9) I had no autonomy.

No authority. No clearly-defined status, in fact. My line manager's job had grown unmanageably large, so I had been drafted in to pick up the overspill. But what that 'overspill' consisted of was largely down to their whim - and I couldn't do anything without referring to them. It was, really, a wretched skivvying role.


10) I had no real prospects there.

Even my 'superiors' aren't being that well paid, and they have years of seniority on me. It's a miserly little company. It's unlikely that I could ever have risen to a senior management position with them; and even more unlikely that they would have paid me what I think I deserve, even if I had. Better off without them.....


11) I'm never going to 'get rich' working for someone else.

Certainly not those jokers. Not that I really want to be rich..... but I'd like to stop being POOR.


12) It was consuming too much of my time.

The long days, the frequent travelling, the fact that I was (voluntarily!) doing additional paperwork and e-mailing on my "days off" - it was biting a huge chunk out of my week. Most of my previous lucrative freelance work has fallen by the wayside since I started with them. My jogging routine has faltered too. And it really wouldn't have been good for my prospects of forging any new romantic partnership to be 'on the road' two weeks out of every four.

Are you convinced yet?? I very nearly am.....

Chinese people LOVE me! (10)

"Chinese people love me because..... I mutter to myself almost constantly, like a schizophrenic, as I try to cross the street ("Fuckwad!" "Dipshit!" "Cretin!" "Learn how to drive, moron!" "Where's the brake pedal? Ah, yes - there it is.... well done!"). It's so amusing!"

Yes, I'm going through a particularly grumpy phase at the moment. But it doesn't seem to be doing anything to diminish the delighted fascination I inspire in my fellow Beijing residents....

8,000 Lurkers

Well, look at that - we've passed the 8,000 visitors mark on my Sitemeter at some point last night.

Something's definitely up with the traffic lately - I think we've had 30-odd hits in the last 12 hours or so. But no comments in that time. Hey, who are you guys? You come to my house, you sign my 'visitors book'! OK?!

(And yes, yes, I am already planning a post entitled '10,000 Maniacs'.....)

My 'agent' reassures me!

I have for a while been chasing a fairly lucrative TV documentary voiceover gig, via a Chinese go-between who I was recommended to by a friend of a friend.

It's been a couple of months since the project was first mentioned, and it's all been ominously silent since then; but today, I thought I'd send one last follow-up text message, just to see if there was any chance it might still be a live prospect for me.

The agent-guy apparently shares my intuition that the production company must have found someone else for the gig. But at least he apologised to me for the disappointed expectations, and he promised:

"If I have new job, I will touch you first!"

Well, that's nice.....

An ominous phone call

Probably another entry in my would-be series, 'Signs you're about to get canned'.

The boss phoned me out of the blue this morning to ask if I could come in today for my 6-month performance review. I only work 3 days a week for this outfit, and Tuesday ain't usually one of those days.

I do suddenly get a sinking feeling about this.

It would be a bit of a shock to get canned now, though. There's been no further warning of dissatisfaction. In fact, there seems to be no likely pretext at all. There haven't been any more problem issues since I first started to get a bad vibe from them a few months back. I've been working hard; getting things done; my colleagues in the UK all seem to like me; my clients here in China (mostly) love me; I've even managed to develop a modus operandi with my tempestuous Chinese colleague where she doesn't throw Tasmanian-Devil tantrums all over the office any more - even if I tell her she's wrong about something! No, things have all seemed to be going pretty well.....

But the boss man's voice did sound heavy with 'bad news'.......

Well, we shall see. I have deferred the confrontation until tomorrow. If they're going to sack me, they can at least do it on a day I'm (supposed to be) getting paid for!

Winter at last?

Yesterday's damp fog was driven away overnight by an area of high pressure, resulting in much the hardest frost we've had so far this year. And today might well have been the first on which the daytime temperature didn't rise above freezing (although, if Weather Underground's Beijing page is to be believed, the mean air temperature did just teeter a few degrees above - but it certainly didn't feel like it with the windchill!).

Walking around the nearby Houhai lakes area this morning (on my way to make a desperate last-minute mailing of Christmas cards at my local post office), I discovered somewhat to my surprise, that this recent drop in temperature had apparently been enough to start the ice freezing on the lake. Most years, I think, the relevant authorities actually drain most of the water out of these lakes at the onset 0f winter (I'm not sure if that does anything to help the formation of ice, or if it just renders things less hazardous if people should happen to fall through the ice), but they don't seem to have done that so far this year. And yet the lakes are freezing anyway - a good and thick-ish covering over all but the very edges of the surface.

This is somewhat of a mystery to me, because I really wouldn't have thought that, until last night, it had been cold enough to make much of a start on this process (the last couple of weeks, it's been really strangely mild for the time of year, and I don't think it's dropped much below freezing even at night). And the old city moat near my apartment doesn't have the slightest suggestion of any ice-formation on it (though perhaps sewage works as a kind of anti-freeze?). I wonder if they're adding something to the lake water to make it freeze? Ice-9, maybe??

I confess I tend not to notice exactly when the icing of the lakes occurs, because my jogging habit fades (a figure-8 circuit of the two main lakes is my favoured route) as the weather gets colder at this time of year, and I rarely go out to any of the lakeshore bars..... so my steps may not take me past there for days or weeks at a time in December. However, I am pretty sure that most of the years I've been living here, the icing has already been pretty much complete by now, and it is some time around the middle of this month that the annual 'frost fair' gets under way - with skating, sledding, and various other amusements taking over the ice until the end of January or beginning of February.

The ice certainly isn't thick enough for that yet - I suspect we're going to be a week or two behind the normal schedule this year. Global warming, anyone?

His Left Foot

I was reminiscing over on the Barstool with The British Cowboy the other day about some of my happy memories of watching live football matches - most of them from back in the mid-70s, when, for two or three years, my dad bought me a season ticket to see the local side, Hereford Utd.

I have celebrated on here before the joy of being present for the greatest sporting moment in history.

Another of the most vivid pleasures of those years was seeing a young lad named Kevin Sheedy make his debut for us. We were lucky enough to have quite a few characterful and very good players in those years (the moustachioed goalkeeper, Tommy Hughes, who was the Welsh international No.1 for a while; and the dogged midfielder Terry Paine, who spent his swansong years with us after setting an unapproachable record for English League appearances with Southampton [between them and us, I think he notched up a final total of 824 - which I'm sure must still be the record]; or the mercurial striker, Eric Redrobe, a great crowd favourite at Hereford even in his declining years; or indeed young David Icke, who was understudy to Tommy in goal before arthritis brought his career to a premature end and he reinvented himself as a prophetic loon); but Sheedy was the best, quite plainly a class above anybody else we'd ever seen playing in that division. He was only 16 or 17 when he first played for us, and during his first couple of seasons we were very conservative in using him - because he was still just a skinny kid. But once he'd turned 18, he was becoming a regular first choice on the left of midfield. And that, of course, meant that he started attracting a lot of attention further afield. Several top clubs sent scouts to watch him, and he was being courted to play international football for the Republic of Ireland. It was sadly obvious that we wouldn't be able to hang on to him for very long.

When he signed for Liverpool that season, our disappointment at losing our brightest young prospect was balanced by a pride that he was going to such a big name club. We fondly imagined that he'd be making national and international headlines quite soon.

But it took rather a long time to happen. Somehow or other, Kevin got on the wrong side of the Liverpool training staff and spent the next three-and-a-half years playing in their Reserves team. It was a shocking waste of an egregious talent, and might well have destroyed his confidence for good.

Eventually he managed to escape, securing a transfer to their bitter cross-town adversaries, Everton. There he quickly made up for lost time, becoming a lynchpin of the great side that was one of the dominant forces in English football through the mid-80s. He had possibly the sweetest left foot of any player I've ever seen (the only serious competition would be the great Liam Brady, whom he understudied and eventually replaced in the Irish team; although Liam's distribution was sublime, I think Kevin might possibly have had a small edge in his delivery from dead-ball situations); and for a while there, during Everton's glory days, he was racking up a goal-scoring rate that many outright strikers would have been more than happy with.

In one of the first Liverpool-Everton derby matches he played in after his career-saving move, he scored with this belter of a free-kick - and then ran half a lap of the pitch cheerfully flicking the Vs at all the Liverpool supporters. It was obviously a very cathartic moment for him! And it is still a moment much beloved of Everton fans, who feel a vehement hostility to their usually much more successful and admired Merseyside rivals.

This is a superb goal!

Days of no light

.... are bad for the soul.

We had our first snow of the winter in the early hours of this morning. Ordinarily this provokes a childish glee in me. But today was not a day for glee. The whole day passed in a twilight gloom; a penetrating mizzle dampening clothes and spirits, reducing visibility to a few hundred yards, washing almost all the snow away by mid-morning; the sodden air suffused with coal smoke and petrol fumes, a choking miasma of an unearthly, sulphurous, sepia hue.

This was not a good day for getting anything done. Certainly not a good day to try a last-ditch lunch with Madame X (that had been my plan when I woke up - ha!). This was a day for duvets and blackout curtains and turning the bloody phone off.

In praise of cautious fear

"The coward dies a thousand times; the brave man, only once. But the brave man does tend to get the shit kicked out of him a lot more while he's alive."

Anon

I have been through a few emotional shit-kickings in my time, and I'm really not sure I want to expose myself to that again......

Call me Prufrock....

Another poetry Sunday.....

I think I remarked a while ago that I found it strange I had not posted any Robert Frost on here.

This is one that's been jangling round my head quite a bit recently.

It's not, in fact, one of my very favourites, though. Frost, I think, has a lot of great lines; but the development isn't always completely satisfying to me. With this one in particular - I love the opening line so much, but rather feel that the rest of the poem didn't show up for the party.

One day, one day, I shall hi-jack this for a piece of my own.....

Acquainted with the night

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain - and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say goodbye;
And further still, at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Another fantasy girlfriend

I have remarked before that most of the women who have most captured my imagination (obsession, lust...) have been "dead, mad, or married". Or at least 'of another era'.... So it is, so it is.

I hadn't been particularly aware of Jean Shrimpton before (knew the name, must have seen some pictures around before here and there); but I did a little Google after my post about Rhapsody the other day.....

And found this....

Damn - didn't realise she was a redhead!! And then there was this.....

Add her to the list!!

My fantasy girlfriend - Rhapsody Angel

The first cut is the deepest, as someone once said - and so is the first love. My first love was Rhapsody. Well, I think she was. I confess I was a bit of a slut, and harboured lustful thoughts for all 5 of these lovely ladies. (I wonder - only ever-so-slightly guiltily - if even at the age of 7 I was starting to develop a little bit of a lesbian fetish?) I mean to say, they wore those slinky catsuits and they flew fighter jets - what more does a boy want in a woman?

OK, yes, they were made of wood (or fibreglass or something); but the childish imagination is prepared to suspend disbelief completely. For the duration of the show - and in my fantasies thereafter - they seemed completely real to me.

It can be difficult, after the lapse of so many years, to remember who was who. (For those of you who are already wretchedly confused, lost, this is a reference to a classic British kids' TV show of the late '60s/early '70s called 'Captain Scarlet', a sci-fi action adventure series staged with marionettes [the style aped by the South Park boys in 'Team America'] - a gimmick developed by the cracked genius, Gerry Anderson. The Angels were an elite team of female jet-fighter pilots for the hi-tech world security agency, Spectrum.) Destiny had the most memorable codename (the only non-musical one), and - if I recall correctly - tended to be the most prominently featured in the stories. But her cutesy French accent was irritatingly overdone, I found (or maybe I just hadn't developed my French fetish quite yet). No, the leading candidate for one's first erection was Symphony - a classic all-American blonde bombshell (never really my type - although I have learnt to give them a little more consideration since I discovered how well they can kiss). She had a little bit of a thing going on with Captain Blue as well. I think I was jealous for a while.

In a spirit of tokenism, other ethnicities were also represented. Harmony, the Asian babe, was a bit of a bland character but had a very appealing accent. Somehow one always struggles to remember the name of the African-American crew member (my objectionable Scots drinking buddy, The Bookseller, usually facetiously suggests something like 'Rhythm') - but I suspect it must have been Melody. Yes, I had a bit of thing for her too.

But my favourite must surely have been (at least, that's how I reconstruct my memories in retrospect) the redhead, Rhapsody ('real name' Dianne Simms - although I'm not sure that that ever came up in the series). That hair colouring is a congenital weakness of mine - something to do with the Irish ancestry, I dare say. I have just learned from one of the numerous Gerry Anderson fan sites that her features were supposedly modelled on the '60s supermodel, Jean Shrimpton. Maybe that explains it. That and the red hair. The hero of the series, Captain Scarlet himself, had a crush on her....... and there is a fan theory that they were actually having an affair (based, as far as I can gather, purely on this 'morning after' publicity shot of her wearing his hat!!).

Oh, the lost innocence of youth.......

Ding-dong, the Witch is dead!

Which old witch? The Quiz-Crazy Witch!

No, gosh, that sounds harsh. I have a huge soft spot for Beijing's leading quiz competitor, The Trivia Queen, but..... she is apt to take it all a bit too seriously.

Only once did I go up against her head-to-head. And I won. Well, actually I lost on the bizarre supplementary round - but on the quiz proper, I won, virtually singlehandedly. (Our 'captain', The Choirboy, had double-booked himself for the evening, and turned up only minutes before the end; while my other two team mates, Dishy Debs and Sexy Sarah, were mainly focused on inhaling bucketfuls of the house white wine and distracting the opposition, rather than actually contributing any answers to our scoring effort.)

12 months on, we learned (late in the day and much to our surprise) that the occasional series of special quiz events at The Bookworm (Beijing's celebrated 'library bar') was to culminate in a grand finale, featuring the successful teams from all the previous rounds. (The events had been themed on various professions - we were masquerading as 'journalists'. Well, I was. The others do all contribute to magazines from time to time. I really should get my act together and become a paid writer myself. At that time, I was justifying my eligibility on the grounds of a few micro-travelogue pieces I'd written for an English-study magazine, for next-to-no-money-at-all....) That's the top two teams from each round. Wa-hey!!! We're in the final - now we have a chance to set the record straight, revenge last year's injustice, etc., etc.

It was unfortunate timing (and I have a minor gripe against Jenny - the thoroughly lovely Scots under-manager at The Worm - that I was somehow missed off the mailing list notification of this anyway) that this momentous event should be scheduled for last night - the night of the grand annual Early Christmas Shindig hosted by Sarah and Debs.

The Choirboy - perversely, unexpectedly competitive - insisted on taking part anyway. Despite the absence of the rest of his team. Despite the absence of the person who had scored all but one of the points on the team's previous outing (me). Despite being roundly scorned and abused for his misguided priorities and disgraceful party-pooping.

Of course, we forgave him when he showed up at the party at 11 o'clock - with the trophy!!!!!!

The Choirboy had rounded up a trio of rather formidable 'ringers', and the opposition was trounced. The Trivia Queen had attempted to get them barred, citing non-existent 'rules' and a nebulous concept of equity. She failed. Apparently she is very miffed. She may not speak to any of us ever again. And I wasn't even there!!!

The trophy is kind of cool, though. We were all drinking celebratory beers out of it last night. The Choirboy says he is going to have a glass display cabinet made for it.

A slightly delayed haiku

Disconnected

Windowless dungeon,
Tormenting isolation.
A missed payment date!

Yup, no Internet on Friday. Sorry. But thanks to the miracle of adjustable posting dates, I have transported the weekly haiku back in time.

Purgatory on Earth, Unease to Men

God, I hate Christmas shopping in this country!

Every year, I find myself subsconsciously postponing it and postponing it, until...... damn, you think to yourself, it'll take 10 or 12 days by airmail, and you need to leave a few days in hand to allow for the inevitable snafu with the British postal service around the holidays, and..... oh lord, it's got to be done in the next few days!!

Then there's the present-choosing element of the ordeal. The only people I have to buy a present for are my two nieces. They are both still quite young - young enough to like bright and shiny things, and silly pointless things, and vaguely exotic "none of the the other girls at school has got anything like this" things. That should be a help, but somehow it isn't.

They're also not very far apart in age (just over 2 years), so they tend to like each other's things. There is, unfortunately, a lot of sibling friction between them. An ironclad set of rules seems to have developed over the years in regard to giving them gifts: I must choose something they both will like; I must choose something identical, or very nearly so, for each of them; I must choose things that are just different enough to be distinguishable; I must not choose things which are different enough to give one or other of them a sense of inferiority/superiority.

Then there's the problem of remembering what I've already bought them. There's a lot of really quite charming jewellery, curios, and traditional crafts to be had at knockdown prices in China..... but, well, it's all very generic stuff; and the number of items that actually have any vague whiff of class or quality about them are rather few. They've had 5 lots of China Christmas presents from me now. Inspiration is running low. And when you add in all the birthday presents, all the trip-home presents, all the end-of-school-year presents, all the things I thought about buying them but didn't get around to, all the things I tried to buy for them but couldn't agree a price for, all the things I posted them that got lost in the mail..... well, I just can't remember clearly what I've given them and what I haven't.

It doesn't help that they're growing so quickly, and that their mother is perennially hopeless at keeping me up-to-date with recent photographs and measurements - so clothes are out. I have a few times in the past bought them mini-qipaos or funky T-shirts, but that option's not open to me this time.

Well.... I endured an hour of brutal haggling in the stalls of the new 'Silk Street' mall yesterday, and came away with a bunch of pretty "agate" bracelets, a couple of colourful silk scarves, and a couple of booklets of traditional Chinese cutout paper decorations. All that, and a new watch for myself, came to only about 300 RMB (that's 20 quid, for you folks back home). Not a bad afternoon's work at all (although I'm sure I could have paid substantially less even than that if I'd really gone in hard on them).

Job done? Well, no. I can't understand how this can have happened, but..... it somehow slipped my mind for the moment that my younger niece has a birthday on December 26th. Her elder sister - somewhat given to bossiness and petulance, as elder sisters so often are - has created a family tradition whereby, to avert outbreaks of brattiness, we have to buy her a second set of presents for the 26th as well. As far as I know, the littler girl, a much more sweet-tempered creature on the whole, has never yet remarked on the intrinsic unfairness of this and made a reciprocal demand that she also be given presents on her sister's birthday. Anyhow, I played along with this when they were both toddlers, but I think it's time now to start regularizing the birthday/Christmas distinction in that household.

So, I just need one more present then. But that will entail, I suppose, another visit to the dreaded 'Silk Street'. I really dislike that place; but it does have the advantage of a much more conveniently central location than the other markets of its ilk I might use (indeed, it is only a 20-minute walk from my office). It's crowded, chaotically organised, painfully over-heated, and - worst of all - most of the stallholders in there are really quite surly and needling, if not downright aggressive. I appreciate they are under extreme pressure to make money - this is a big, new, expensive building, a tourist showpiece for Beijing; so the rents are sky-high. It wasn't like that in the original 'Silk Street', a charming, bustling, open-air street market filling the alleyways behind the US Embassy. It isn't like that (well, not nearly so bad) in the Hong Qiao or Panjiayuan markets. It isn't even quite that bad in the notorious Yashow clothing market (where the bargaining can get pretty ugly!). The traders in these other places mostly appreciate that there is a game to be played in the haggling process, and they go through the motions of it with at least a modicum of good grace and often even with a chirpy friendliness. The new 'Silk Street' seems to be staffed entirely by robotic harpies.

And I've got to put myself through that ordeal one more time.

And then I've got to spend an afternoon in the International Post Office trying to get the stuff mailed.... Now there is a horror show deserving a post all of its own. Groan.

Traffic Report - blog stats for November '07

Well, we have at least scaled back a bit from the 'monster month' that was October - though still, perhaps, just a little too prolific for our good or yours.

54 posts and 15,000 words here on Froogville.

34 posts and 9,000 words over on the Barstool.

I haven't examined the detailed site traffic breakdown for quite a while. The number of daily hits seems to be fairly stable (though most of those are probably from Tulsa and myself), but there have been several much-commented-upon posts on both blogs over the last month, which is rather satisfying. We also had a first-time commenter at the weekend (Rachel, from Arkansas, whose blog has the excellent name: "Is it reflection or just plain bitchin?"), which was nice.

However, my attempts to entice more of my overseas friends from my former e-bulletin mailing list to join us here on a more regular basis are still bearing woefully little fruit. I shall keep trying - for a little while longer, at least.

December - holiday season - could be another bumper month! Then again, I may just succumb to SAD, and become a recluse again....

Chinese people LOVE me! (9)

"Chinese people love me because..... I never question the 'One China' Policy."

Yeah, right! I try to keep off the subject, and the Chinese are usually very good at treating silence as acquiescence. However, if they bring the subject up with me, toes are usually going to get trodden on.

For those of you who are not China-watchers or China residents, the 'One China' Policy is the doctrine that Taiwan is not a separate country, it is just another province of the People's Republic of China. Except that it has its own government. Well, no, it doesn't have a 'government'; it has 'authorities', but no-one really pays much attention to them, do they?

This is - quite bafflingly to anyone who grew up in an educated and enlightened country - the central plank of almost all China's international diplomacy. It is regularly used as a symbol of submissiveness, almost indeed of 'subjugation' in the original Roman sense (being forced to acknowledge your subordinate status after a military defeat by walking under a low hurdle or gateway improvised from three spears, thus being obliged to bow your head as you do so), in China's neo-imperialist drive to acquire more 'friends' than anyone else in Africa and South-East Asia. "You want a trade deal, an aid package, military hardware, a new oil refinery built on the cheap?? OK, fine, no problem. But first, you've got to tell me how much you love my 'One China' Policy."

It is one of the most dangerous and delusional facets of this country's extreme nationalism, one that the leadership seems to have been emphasising more and more in recent years (seemingly an attempt to divert attention from domestic problems by focusing on an 'external' boogeyman).

It is ridiculous, self-defeating, unrealistic, petty. It makes China look like a pathetically backward country, with no real grasp of modern international relations nor of its own history. It makes China look like a playground bully. And I am not, in fact, such a huge China-sceptic. I like the country, like the people, wish the best for them at this difficult stage of their development; I even have a muted admiration for much of what the government is achieving. So, it really saddens me to see China behaving in a way that diminishes its status and respect in the world.

So, yes, if the OCP comes up amongst Chinese friends, I won't bite my tongue completely, but I will restrain myself.

However, if a foreigner (as seems to be happening more and more frequently these days, especially amongst younger expats [students of Chinese, who are doubtless being bombarded with lots of propaganda on this in their study materials]) says something like, "Oh, you know, I think they've got a point over Taiwan"......... you should pour beer on their heads.

Another lotus-eating temptation

It occurred to me that I should have included this in my list of "jobs I nearly had" at the weekend, but..... well, I was getting a little OCD about the 'Top 10' concept, I suppose. And the ones I did include were all definite job offers or final-interview stage affairs or, at the least, firm career plans - whereas this was always a bit more nebulous and remote. Moreover, it is a job I've actually had, at another point in my life, in the UK; thus, it didn't really seem to be eligible for that list.

So, anyway, back in the late '90s or early '00s - just before I threw in my lot with China - I was on a holiday in the States, visiting a friend down in New Orleans in the run-up to carnival season. This friend, JH, is a Brit of fairly advanced years, but still with a roguish twinkle in his eyes and a youthful zest for the good life - something of an aging hippy. He had spent much of his adult life in America, a good deal of it under the radar, working as an illegal immigrant (for many years he was managing a hospitality concession on the PGA Tour, and made enough money from that to 'retire' early - although he continues to be pretty active around the fringes of the NO music scene, helping to promote the annual JazzFest, for example); after a decade or so of this outlaw existence, he had been able to take advantage of an amnesty to regularize his status, and he now has permanent residence. While hanging out with him, I met quite a few other expats with similarly irregular backgrounds. And a number of his American friends (mostly barkeeps!) were vociferously encouraging me to hang around and see what sort of job I could find. N'Awlins relies so heavily on tourism and conferences that there are tons of casual jobs to be had there, and I was repeatedly assured that it is never much of a problem to get work of some kind without a visa or a social security number. I was more or less offered a job as a barman, to get me started. Tour guide was also mentioned as a likely possibility. (When I boggled slightly at the suggestion that a foreigner who knew almost nothing about the city could be a tour guide, I was assured that I could soon learn the necessary facts - it was the charm of my British accent that would seal the deal for me!)

So, there you are. For a few days, I was very seriously pondering the idea of trying to disappear into the New Orleans underworld as a long-term illegal immigrant. I have briefly been a barman (and a tour guide) back in my Oxford student days, but...... New Orleans! That would have been something else!

My natural caution won out in the end. I wasn't quite convinced this would be as straightforward as my new American friends were telling me. And I didn't like the idea that (unless another amnesty came along), I might be trapped in the country forever, unable to return to the UK to visit my family. I liked even less the thought that if I were caught and deported, I'd never be able to return to America (I do rather like the place, and so many of my friends are there now). Above all, I think I felt that I was by then just a little too old for that kind of marginal life. If I had been offered such an opportunity straight after University, in my early 20s, I think I might have jumped at it; but a decade or so further on, after two miscarried careers, I felt I needed something a bit more stable and above-board (not sure how China fits into that template!!).

Now I come to think of it, I suffered a rather similar temptation 5 or 6 years earlier during my round-the-world backpacking trip. It was my first visit to San Francisco, and I was blissed out, absolutely falling in love with the place. I happened to be wandering through Haight-Ashbury when I saw - side by side in the same window display (oh, Fate, you naughty girl!) - adverts for a very affordable room in a shared house (I went to see the room, and it was gorgeous) and a no-questions-asked job (a 'barista' in a local coffee-house). At that time, I was even more tempted to stay and give it a try. But I was on my way to a friend's wedding on the East Coast, and my sense of social duty won out.

In both cases, though, I've quite often wondered what might have been....

The counter ticks on

Wooo! That last post on one of my brilliant website ideas was No. 700 here on Froogville.

That's not a particularly fascinating number, is it?

(Does quick search on Wikipedia.)

No.

Well, it is, I learn, the sum of four consecutive primes (167 + 173 + 179 + 181).

And this post - which is, with a certain mathematical inevitability, No. 701 - is distinguished by being the sum of three consecutive primes (229 + 233 + 239).

This is interesting to enthusiasts of Number Theory, but not to anyone else. Sorry. I quite liked that story about Ramanujan on his deathbed proclaiming that all the numbers were his "personal friends", but that's the zenith of my enthusiasm in this field.

But, hey, the posts continue to pile up. Always scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr Froog?

Another money-spinning website idea

If you are a laowai (foreigner) at large in China, you tend to get treated as if you were a celebrity most places you go. Really. Chinese tourists will queue up to have their picture taken with you.... or just to take your picture. It's not quite as outlandishly over-the-top and ubiquitous as it was a few years ago, but it still happens a lot.

It happens to you even more if you are a woman, especially an attractive woman. And if you are as uncommonly tall and as uncompromisingly blonde as my artist pal, H, then you get asked for a picture all the time - mostly by goofy young men who are obviously looking for an opportunity to kid their pals back home that they managed to pull a foreign chick.

Many of us foreigners in China have joked from time to time about how we ought to try to charge a fee for consenting to these photo ops. But it's usually just idle chatter - or, at most, we're only thinking in terms of trying to discourage the constant intrusiveness of such requests.

But I really do think there could be some serious moolah to be made from this phenomenon. Most of these goofy young men are only thinking about a snapshot they can carry around in their wallet, or a low-res digital pic they can display on their mobile phone. But how many people can you impress that way??? How does that even begin to compare to the grand ego festival that is displaying your prestigious 'conquest' to the world at large via the Internet?!

And so, I give you - www.myforeigngirlfriend.com, a website where dopey Chinese boys can try to convince the great web-surfing public (and delude themselves) that they really do have a glamorous foreign lover.

I think women like H could make a tidy living off something like this.

Any far-sighted venture capitalists reading out there??

Please - don't forget The Barstool

I have been quite prolific over on brother-blog, Barstool Blues, just lately. I think it's 14 posts in the last 8 days (not including the Ogden Nash quotation or the list of recommended 'highlights' from the third quarter of the year that I posted this morning).

Some of it, I asssure you, is pretty good stuff.

And yet, and yet..... barely half of those posts have yet attracted any comments at all - only around 18 comments in total during last week, and none at all over the last weekend.

Last week here on Froogville, there were some 30 comments. Just over this weekend, there were another 21 (well, OK, nearly half of them were from me, but still....). There was even one from a complete stranger!!

Now, it doesn't surprise me that the dear old Barstool has lower visibility to passing Blogspotters and random Googlers. But it does disappoint me that my "regular readers" seem to be spending so little time over there of late - or, at any rate, not leaving any evidence of their passing.

Please, folks, do go and take a look. Videos, music reviews, the reawakening of my interest in the game of poker, fitful 'progress' in my love life, the alarming ballooning of my liver, and bon mots aplenty..... it's all there.

Bon mot of the week

"So much of what we call 'management' consists in making it difficult for people to work."

Peter Drucker (1909-2005)

A different kind of haunting

My use of that resonant word 'haunting' in the last, frivolous post, reminded me of the following poem. I'm afraid I haven't really been writing any new stuff lately - a few jottings only, nothing of substance. So, I have to delve back into my archive. I don't think I've shared this one with you yet - another of my deceptively simple 'list' poems, another one inspired by my breakup with The Poet. Yes, yes, you've seen it all before! Please be patient with me: I will have something new for you again in a while, I'm sure.

Haunted

Every hour, every day
I miss you
Everywhere I go, everyone I meet
I miss you
Everything I do, everything I say
I miss you
Every time I go to bed
I miss you
Every time I wake up
I miss you
In a taxi, on the subway, in the street
I miss you
Every meal, every drink, every cigarette
I miss you
Every song I hear
I miss you
Everyone I sleep with
I miss you
Anything I read, any time I write
I miss you
Every single thought, every single breath
I miss you
Every time the telephone rings
I miss you
And when the telephone is silent
I miss you
Every time I close my eyes
I see you

A haunting image

When I visit New York (a pretty rare event over the last few years, alas, and usually only ever for a day or two, en route down to DC), I usually stay in the Vanderbilt YMCA, over on the East Side, just a few blocks from the UN Building. It's a bit of a sleazy place (I have overheard a couple of spectacular hooker fights in there), but it's a good location, reliable, and cheap.

I was reminded just the other day (it came up during the course of Friday's epic bar crawl with 'new best friend', The Man In Black) of a favourite recollection from one of those visits.

Yes, once (I forget exactly when - sometime in the late '90s, I suppose) when I was checking in, I found this exciting notice on the bulletin board in the lobby:

Welcome, Swedish trampoline team!

Hmmm, yes, indeed. I confess I did spend a fair bit of time loitering downstairs in hopes of seeing them - but no luck. Perhaps they were not, after all, the lissom blonde 20-year-olds in leotards that I fondly pictured. The men's national trampoline squad would certainly not have been nearly such a fascinating prospect for me. I wouldn't even begin to try to visualize them!

Yes, that fantasy has lingered with me for years. I've often thought I'd like to have that greeting printed on the front of a T-shirt. Or maybe on my boxer shorts.....

A man can dream....

Jobs I nearly had

'List of the Month' time again!

This month, 10 jobs I might have had.....

(Yes, originally it was 8, but I've made a couple of additions.)

1) Detective, in the Royal Hong Kong Police Force - Even as a kid, I'd always been fascinated by the idea of living and working overseas (I suppose I'd read a lot of Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene.... and seen a lot of films like '55 Days At Peking' and 'The Sand Pebbles'), and particularly in China. And back in the late '70s or early '80s, there was a terrific documentary series about the RHKP on the Beeb, called 'The Hong Kong Beat'. When I looked into it further as a serious career possibility, I found that the terms of service were extremely attractive: high pay, low tax, and a generous tax-free bonus on completing a three year tour of duty. Only the silly shorts they wore gave me pause. When I went up to University, this really was my plan for a first job after I left. But then..... well, things started getting a little ugly in the colony after it was agreed to hand it back to China, and I was concerned that the job might become more about public order than fighting organised crime.

2) Professional Beach Bum - During my round-the-world backpacking phase in the mid-90s I visited a tiny Fijian island called Leleuvia (it's probably submerged now), and was offered a job as a 'host' there. Basically, you had to be friendly, strum a guitar occasionally, clean the toilets, make a weekly trip across to the main island to pick up supplies.... sleep with a lot of nubile 20-year-old Swedish girls. It was a tough proposition, but I thought I could handle it, was quite tempted for a while. It was a Lotus-Eating set-up, though. I asked the two young Aussie guys (permanently smashed on marijuana) currently doing the job how long they'd been there, and they genuinely couldn't remember......

3) Accountant - I was once offered a training contract with the National Audit Office (the UK government's in-house accountants)...... but failed the security clearance!

4) Researcher/Case Manager for the Criminal Cases Review Commission - Another government job, but no security check this time. I aced the aptitude tests (and, amazingly, the psych profiling!) and the preliminary interviews, and was assured by the HR manager that I was one of the strongest applicants they'd ever seen and was a shoo-in for the job. At my 'second interview' with the board of governors, I somehow managed to offend everyone in the room..... (Don't mention Hanratty.....)

5) Conference Organiser - This was a small company in the Home Counties that produced conferences on the financial services and IT industries. This one foundered because I needed a few hundred pounds to relocate, and my bank had cut me off without a penny.

6) Risk Consultant - God, what a glamorous concept! Definitely the coolest-sounding job I was ever up for. However, it was going to involve working shifts on a 24-hour hotline, fielding calls from places like Bogota and Johannesburg - "Somebody's trying to kidnap me! What should I do?" "Stay calm...."

7) Strategy Consultancy Lecturer - Errrr, not sure what the actual job title was going to be here, but that pretty much sums up what it was. An American company that produces analyses of business trends needed charismatic and energetic people to give impressive presentations introducing its latest reports to clients. Lots of travel, and (by my humble standards, anyway) a huge salary. I got the initial introduction through someone I met at a dinner party in DC. They loved me. It looked like it was going to happen. But...... immediately post 9/11 it was just about impossible for anyone to get a visa. And so..... I came to China to work for peanuts instead.

8) TV Presenter - In my first year here, I applied for a job on CCTV9, the English-language channel on the national TV station here in China. I had to wait around for about 4 hours, because they didn't have a camera available to tape the auditions. Not a good sign. The main attribute tested was memorization ability - they have no autocue/teleprompter, so you have to be able to deliver 400-500 word spiels from memory. I was actually rather good at that. Then, they reluctantly admitted that I would probably have to be able to speak pretty good Chinese to communicate with my film crew (I had asked upfront, and they'd told me Chinese was not necessary at all). Ah well - the pay was lousy; and I really wouldn't want to become a recognisable face here. And I did make one very good friend amongst the other candidates (none of whom took the job).

9) Radio Presenter - An American acquaintance, who I think of as 'Disco Mike' (think of The Simpsons' 'Disco Stu'), is a hugely knowledgeable music aficionado, and has worked in radio back in the States.... but his voice just doesn't function any more, it's shrivelled to a croaky whisper (too much time in smoky bars, shouting above the music, I guess). I had got an introduction to one of the producers at CRI (China Radio International), and Mike persuaded me to pitch a programme idea for a jazz & talk show, for which he would provide most of the music and script..... and I'd just have to be the voice. It was a great idea, but..... as a state-run organization, CRI is not very flexible: everybody has to be under exclusive, full-time contracts; everybody has to earn their keep by working long shifts on script-editing chores and so on. Hiring people for a single two-hour programme is not possible. Oh well.

10) Bar Owner - Yep, I have already turned down one formal offer to take over a bar here in Beijing (it had been set up by an Aussie girl we knew, and her Chinese boyfriend; but they were leaving the country, and wanted someone to take it off their hands), for a surprisingly affordable sum of money. My pal The Chairman and I were thinking very hard about buying it together, but.... well, the place was tiny and well off-the-beaten-track. I crunched some numbers, and couldn't picture any way that - even if we could make it a 'big success' within its very modest scope - it would generate more money for us than the teaching/editing/recording/etc. we do at the moment. And in all probability it would never be any more than a minor 'cult favourite' (as it was starting to become under Anna's management), and would struggle to cover its operating costs. I was mighty tempted, though. Sigh. One day, I think I will get into that business. One day....