The weekly haiku

Everyone's sneezing.
The littlest cough spreads unease.
Spectre of the 'flu.

I hadn't realised how rampant the epidemic is becoming in the UK. My great fear now is not catching the bug, but finding myself excluded from China when the time comes for me to return there next month.

Surely they jest?

The pilot on my Virgin Atlantic flight back from the States at the start of this week introduced himself over the intercom as Captain Spunkmeier.

I shouldn't laugh. I know it's a perfectly legitimate name.

I didn't quite catch what he said his first name was. He only said it once, in a brisk mumble. But it sounded like something Greek - an odd combination with the Teutonic surname. Something like Papsmear....

And when he announced his co-pilot as Dirk Diggler, I began to think there was some tomfoolery going on on the flight deck. Was it a bet, I wonder?

Too polite!

That's the standard Chinese response when you display any routine social courtesy. It's meant to suggest, "You don't need to be so polite", but the clipped, choppy nature of the language always make it seem more a rather abrupt and disimissive instruction - as if to imply, "Why on earth are you bothering to be polite?" It's one of the features of the 'culture' that I don't much like: the exaggerated deference which seems to require that people hold themselves unworthy of any kind of compliment, courtesy or consideration from others, and which leads to the expected social response to any such pleasantries being to reject them.

However, there have been times recently when I have felt that American drivers are overdoing the politeness.

It is, I admit, a very pleasant change from Beijing, where drivers treat pedestrians as something to be recklessly ignored or murderously aimed at but never ever as something to slow down for. After a long spell in China, I always find my first few days in the more civilized road-user environment of the USA (or Europe) highly disconcerting. Drivers slow down for you if you're anywhere near the kerb. They usually STOP for you, if you look like you're attempting to cross the road - even if you're not at a designated crossing place. Such behaviour is quite unheard of in Beijing!

But this can be overdone. In Alexandria, VA, over the past couple of weeks, while out walking or (especially) running, I have frequently had cars stop and wait for me to cross in front of them..... when I was not yet anywhere near the junction. OK, these are mostly four-way stops, so drivers are required to come to a halt before proceeding across the junction. And it's a very sleepy, small town kind of environment - so drivers are in less of a hurry, more graciously disposed towards their neighbours, or inclined to be more wary of the possibility of kids or tourists crossing the road without paying attention. That's all very nice.

But really, guys (and gals), if I haven't yet reached the kerb, please feel free to drive on without waiting for me. I might not have decided yet if I want to cross the road - I might change direction, or loiter on this corner for a while. I might stop to re-tie my shoe laces, catch my breath, get my bearings, have a drink of water. There is no other traffic on any of these four roads for at least a quarter of a mile, so you're quite safe to go ahead. There's really no need to wait for me. You see, if you move on, after pausing for a few seconds to check for the possible approach of other road users, you won't be in my way when I finally jog across this road. And if you pause just a little longer, are a little slow to pull away.... well, I'm quite happy to jog around the back of you. But if you stand at the junction motionless for several seconds as I'm approaching, I wonder what the hell is wrong with you..... and I STOP at the kerb, because I think you've probably just zoned out for a moment, and will lurch forward as soon as you come to yourself again, without noticing my presence.

If I'm at or near the kerb and obviously looking to cross, then your waiting is a much appreciated kindness. But if I'm still five or ten yards away, it's really not necessary - you're just wasting everybody's time.

But, oh boy, how I wish I had these problems in Beijing.....

Bon mot for the week

"People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions. And conclusions are not always pleasant."

Helen Keller (1880-1968)

Don't write off the old men

This afternoon I went to see Stacy Keach's Lear at the Washington Shakespeare Theatre.

However, while having a quick bite of lunch in a sports bar over the road from the theatre, I was able to watch the last two holes of Tom Watson's final round at Turnberry, and the beginning of his play-off with Cink. I was sorely tempted to ditch the Shakespeare and stick with the golf. I mean, you can see Lear any time, right? Watson's achievement this week was truly unique, unrepeatable.

I stuck with the Lear because, when Tom missed his putt for the Championship on the 18th, I sensed it wasn't going to be his day after all. But still, for a man just shy of 60 to get himself into that position - magnificent, incredible. People will remember this for centuries, even if he didn't win.

A nasty moment

I've been running almost every day while I've been here in Alexandria.

Enjoying the route along the river and back through Old Town; not enjoying the physical enfeeblement that is making even this modest (for me, for my aspirations!) little circuit of 8 or 9 miles impossible for me to finish without frequent rest stops.

And I did suffer a severely unsettling experience on the very first of these runs.

I tripped.

Heaven knows how. I retraced my steps to the spot and examined the ground carefully. There did not appear to be any significant gap or unevenness of the paving slabs; no obstruction of any kind. It felt like I'd been brought down by a tripwire - but I guess somehow I must have just tripped over my own feet. Perhaps it was divine retribution for my ogling the backside of a young woman who'd just whizzed past me on a mountain bike....

Anyway, I was done for. I was going down fast and hard. On to concrete. I knew I was going to break something - collarbone, wrist, kneecaps, face. It was one of those moments where your lack of medical insurance flashes before your eyes.

Luckily, I was running alongside a railing of tubular metal. I instinctively flung out my right forearm against one of the uprights (I might well have broken the arm, but it seemed the lesser of two evils), and was able to slow my downward plunge just enough to pull my feet back under me with a couple of lightning-quick extra steps (two desperate, stumbling, off-balance steps that strained the ball of my right foot and the outside of my left knee rather badly) and avoid the catastrophic faceplant.

Not a pleasant experience.

I wonder if a little bit of post-traumatic stress about that incident is corrupting my metabolism still, diminishing my performance, "putting me off my stride".

It must be something - because at this rate, I'm never going to make the Beijing Marathon this October. Damn, damn, damn. What is wrong with me??

Snooping

My host in America, the British Cowboy, delights in surveying the 'Recycle Bin' trash his neighbours have left out, as we wander back from his neighbourhood bar at midnight on the eve of the weekly collection day.

You can tell a lot about your neighbours from the trash they leave out.

In the week following the 4th July weekend, there is of course a higher than usual proportion of six- and twelve-packs of beer and empty beer bottles. It becomes easier to distinguish the major partiers from the modest consumers, and the modest consumers from the teetotallers.

But the guy who gets through a dozen or more large bottles of Diet Dr Pepper each week - that's rather creepy!

(I struggle to understand why such a product would even exist. Why would anyone drink something that tastes that nasty, other than for the sugar hit??)

Haiku for the week

Slumber deep and long.
Nothing now to wake up for -
Holiday lie-ins.

Ah, rediscovering the lost art of sleep. Possibly the best thing about a vacation. Possibly the worst thing about the prospect of returning to work....

Yet more gobsmacking naivety in Chinese academe

I've just finished another of those brain-mulchingly tedious editing jobs on a foreign policy paper.

The English was a lot less awful than in the last few of these I've done over the past week, and the subject matter - the future of NATO - was intermittently modestly interesting.

No, today's humdinger of crapness was saved for a footnote near the end. The citation this author gave as the basis for his comments on American military spending was...... Wikipedia!

You might accept this kind of slovenliness from a high school student, or maybe even a first-year undergraduate.... but from a Doctor of International Relations??!!

Ambushed once more by mischievous Fate

My host here in the USA has high-definition TV.

I had been sceptical of the value of this "premium service" since 90% of American TV has not been made in HD (and 100% of the stuff I might want to watch, since I have ZERO interest in baseball), and thus, when you watch it on the HD channels, it actually looks worse than normal (and, most of the time, the soundtrack is out of sync as well!).

But just now, as I channel-hopped after catching a bit of breakfast-time news, I found..... the MGM high-def channel. This morning, it's The Train, followed by Charge of the Light Brigade.

Oh my god! I may never leave the house again.....

A numbers game

My vacation has been somewhat sullied by offers of work - editing jobs for the policy thinktank back in China, which I felt obliged to accept for the sake of maintaining good relations with them.

This morning's was a particularly painful experience - more explicitly 'political' than most of the articles I rewrite for them, and hence replete with ponderous set phrases from the Chinese Communist lexicon that are pretty much devoid of meaning. (You wouldn't think it possible, would you, to drone on for 10 pages about 'China's model of development' without once mentioning what that model actually is?)

Ordinarily, when I edit pieces like this, the finished version ends up being slightly longer than the original, since Chinglish is chiefly characterized by the frequent omission of small but important words - articles and auxiliary verbs in particular, but also quite often prepositions, especially in phrasal verbs. The Chinese also have a propensity to use pronouns without any clear antecedents, and to pile up strings of clauses or adjectival phrases which make a sentence hopelessly unwieldy, if not completely dislocating its grammar. So, I find I usually have to do a lot of breaking down of 40-word sentences into two or three constituent parts, and then adding in some linguistic grout of my own to smoothe over the cracks. And then they also quite often use jargon phrases or abbreviations which they assume are generally recognised, but in fact need an explanatory gloss. And so on, and so on. In short, they tend to leave out a lot of stuff that a native speaker would expect to be included in order to render the English grammatically complete and readily comprehensible.... so I have to add stuff to fill in all those omissions.

I did a lot of that in today's piece too. But much of it was such hopeless drivel - either so grammatically corrupt as to be irretrievable, or staggeringly turgid and repetitive - that the only sensible 'fix' was to delete whole chunks of it.

Starting word count: 4,680

Final word count: 3,400

That is a stunning reduction in wasteful verbiage.

(And if I'd been writing it in English myself from scratch, I could have brought it under 1,500 easily.)

Bon mot for the week

"In strong sunlight the blues evaporate."

Froog

My Fantasy Girlfriend - Angela Hagenbach

One of those happy accidents... I happen to be staying with an old college friend in Alexandria, VA, this week. His house is a few miles away from Old Town, where I have usually stayed on several previous visits here. Thus, almost every day, I am making that short walk into the historic district along Wythe Street..... which involves walking past the Alexandria Black History Museum..... which currently has a splendid exhibition of black & white portraits by photographer Dan White of leading figures in the Kansas City jazz scene.

His picture of Ms Hagenbach fairly takes your breath away (you can find it, and the rest of the series, on Dan's website). Yes, she used to be a model in her youth, we're told.... but then was inspired to become a singer after being blown away by a Sarah Vaughan blues tune. All this, and she can sing too! And she writes songs. And runs her own music publishing and promotion business. I think she's in her 50s now, but still looking mighty svelte. Oh yes, definitely 'Fantasy Girlfriend' material.

A holiday haiku

Bright sun overhead,
Cooling breeze from the river:
Perfect morning run.

I do like the Mount Vernon Trail. (Apart from all the bloody bikers!)

New Picks ofthe Month

A couple of recommendations from the old archives to keep you diverted while I'm 'away'....

From Froogville I select one of my darkest posts, Very bad things - a post that explains why I am often so depressed in the month of June, and why I do not always manage to maintain the sunniest of dispositions towards China and the Chinese.

And on a (much needed) lighter note, from The Barstool I would direct you towards Ideal job? - some musings about the most suitable employment for someone like me, prompted by my then imminent (though, as it turned out, shortlived) plunge into conventional office drudgery.... and touching - in my usual, wide-ranging, discursive (not to say rambling) way - on life in Greece, a favourite film and a favourite film director, the musicality of the French language, and the useful concept of esprit de l'escalier.

A double bon mot

Destiny - A tyrant's authority for crime and fool's excuse for failure.

Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)

'It is destiny' - phrase of the weak human heart! 'It is destiny' - dark apology for every error! The strong and virtuous admit no destiny.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873)

List of the Month - trivia quiz team names

As I have recounted a number of times before, I have - in my time - been quite an enthusiastic quizzer. I first encountered the pub quiz phenomenon during my teacher training year up in Durham, and played quite often with some of my fellow students at a number of pubs around the town and at my 'local' out in the wilds, The Loves (scene of one of my most salutary experiences in the sport). During my first teaching job, I became a questionmaster/question-writer for our inter-house version of University Challenge. Then, drifting back to Oxford for a few years, I found myself reunited with some university buddies who had never managed to leave the lotus-eating city - JimBob ("The Nags"), The British Cowboy, The Bookseller - and played with them (and, usually, also with Roger The Dodger, the most nerdily formidable quizzer I have ever encountered, a man who used to read things like Whitaker's Almanac and Burke's Peerage for fun in his spare time!) in a number of weekly competitions. In fact, at one point we were playing four times a week: Mondays in the Oxford Union Jazz Cellar, Tuesdays in the big Sam Smith's pub next door to the Union (which is now long defunct and whose name I forget), Wednesdays in the Lamb and Flag on St. Giles (where the convention was that the winning team would act as quizmasters for the following week; rather frustratingly, this meant that we hardly ever got to play against our closest rivals amongst the regular teams there, since we were always setting the questions for each other's victories in alternate weeks), and Thursdays in the Oxfordshire quiz league (in which the standard was, not surprisingly, extremely rarefied - although with The Dodger on our side, we did briefly manage to get promoted to the 1st Division, and had a couple of decent runs in the knockout cup competition), playing for my favourite pub of the time - one of the best pubs ever - The Black Swan.

When I first moved to Beijing, I played a number of times in the quiz at the John Bull Pub (which, alas, ceased to exist three or four years ago) with my two disreputable teaching colleagues/drinking buddies, Big Frank and The Chairman ('The Three Amigos'), in which we fairly regularly used to manage to place 1st or 2nd, despite having a team about a third the size of everyone else's - and despite The Chairman being almost completely useless. We got disenchanted with that because of the absence of a cap on the team size; a raucous assembly of Australians, often nearly twenty-strong, began to beat us rather too regularly. After that, I had a bit of a lull in my quizzing. It's only in the past year or so that I have - a mere handful of times - been tempted to revisit my old vice.

Anyway, one of the key components of a good night's quiz is a good team name - unique, memorable, amusing, but perhaps based on references so obscure and personal that only the team members will really get it. Over the years, I must have played under dozens, perhaps hundreds of different quiz names (in the early '90s, the Oxford Union used to run occasional 12-hour Quiz Marathons for charity, and in those we'd usually adopt a different quiz name each hour - but on a related theme, so as not to confuse the poor quizmaster too much; I remember one time The Bookseller and I named ourselves after a succession of Abba lyrics; their classic grammar-mangle in Fernando has to be my favourite: "Since many years I haven't seen a rifle in your hand"). These are a few of the ones I remember most fondly.

The Three Represents

[The name The Three Amigos usually used to play under: it's a Chinese political slogan, the key contribution to the evolution of Communist Party doctrine from Jiang Zemin.]

Free The Grampus 8!

[Grampus 8 was an oddly named Japanese football club which became briefly famous in the UK in the early '90s when national hero Gary Lineker - one of the England team's most prolific strikers ever - chose to join them for the twilight of his career. Many quizzers of the time could not help but be tickled by the reminiscence of famous campaigns on behalf of groups of people unjustly imprisoned - in the UK, the most notorious were two IRA terrorism cases, 'The Guildford Four' and 'The Birmingham Six'.]

Pistol Pete's Karisma Klub

[For reasons I can't now recall, the British press were somewhat hostile to Pete Sampras at the outset of his career - suggesting that he had no personality, was boring to watch, and that the 'Pistol Pete' nickname deriving from his metronomically consistent big serve was the most interesting thing about him. Of course, within a year or two he would be a national hero - probably the greatest Wimbledon champion ever. My quiz buddies and I were ahead of the curve: we decided to mock the negative coverage and take the young phenomenon to our hearts.]

Touch The Monolith

[The source of all 'wisdom' in 2001.]

The President's Brain Is Missing

[The title of a series of skits about poor old Ronald Reagan in the classic latex-rubber puppet satirical show Spitting Image.]

12 Square Monkeys

[Terry Gilliam's sci-fi puzzle Twelve Monkeys furnished an irresistibly appropriate name for a group of quizzers assembled from Beijing's smallest bar - 12 Square Metres.]

The Nattily Attired Gentlemen Of Colour
[Yes, there is a story behind this one too - but I don't think I dare tell it in a public forum. Well, maybe later - in the comments... ]

The Rain Dogs

[A favourite name during those Oxford Union quizzing days. It is, of course, taken from the title of a great Tom Waits album.]

Norfolk & Clew
[A provincial estate agents' firm? Or a self-disparaging pun?]

The Crafty Homosexual Gangsters

[Charles Moore, an affected and rather unworldly journalist who used to edit the amusingly reactionary UK magazine The Spectator, wrote a long and disparaging review in that magazine of Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, in which he labelled Steve Buscemi's 'Mr Pink' character "a crafty homosexual gangster". I thought that was hilarious, and still regularly advocate it as a quiz team name today - even though nobody ever gets the reference. I assume Moore was taking rather too literally mob boss Joe Cabot's throwaway jibe that he has allocated the uncool codename to Buscemi "because you're a fag". There is no suggestion that this is meant in earnest, and no hint anywhere else in the script that this character is gay. I like 'crafty', though: 'Mr Pink' is much the most astute of the hapless gang of robbers.]

Any personal favourites you'd like to share?

A holiday haiku

Change of place, and pace,
Refreshing a weary mind.
Needful vacation.

I'm not sure that I've ever felt so broken down by work, life, the whole damn thing. I need to get away from everything for a good long while.

See ya later, suckers!!

Not that I want to seem too paranoid or anything, but..... well, I wouldn't want to risk anything - anything, even a little old blogpost on little old unread Froogville - drawing attention to me as I pass through the airport. So, I thought I'd defer a definitive announcement of my departure from Beijing until I'm safely out of Chinese airspace. Which should be about now.

Posting likely to be light over the next month-and-a-half while I'm on my travels, but I'm sure I'll still find time for a little froogery here and there.

Flu Corner

One of the spammers who's somehow got hold of one of my e-mail accounts recently is an Australian travel agency.

Amongst the 'helpful travel tips' they've been bombarding me with, there's been a heavy emphasis on escaping A/H1N1 infection.

Apparently, I should try to "avoid places where flu sufferers congregate".

What, like they have their own social sub-culture now? Are nightclubs ditching their midweek Gay & Lesbian nights in favour of the much more popular Flu Nights? Do sleepy little cafés hold Saturday afternoon 'Flu Corners' to facilitate 'virus exchange'? Are there 'Flu Sufferers', 'Recovered Flu Sufferers', and 'Aspiring Flu Sufferers' groups flourishing on Facebook?

Did they just mean to suggest avoiding crowded public places, I wonder? Or did they mean "avoid places where there is a higher likelihood of encountering sick people" (i.e., hospitals, clinics, doctor's offices!)? But the idea that there are places where flu sufferers deliberately gather together.... well, it gave me a good laugh!

Time to go

Just lately, things around here have been bugging me rather too much....

For example:

My landlord is an idiot. I've known this for a while. I've been renting from him for 5 years now, after all. But when I ask him (via a translating third party) if he is free to come around and collect his next quarter's rent during the afternoon on such and such a day when I will be working from home, and he does not make any reply (either to me or the third party).... then I do not imagine that he will turn up on my door at 6.30pm expecting me to be there (and waiting there till 8.30pm!); fortunately, I had already gone out to dinner, and run out of credit on my phone, so was spared his repeated demands for me to return home. I tried later to commiserate with the inconvenience he had brought upon himself; but, you know what, arsehole - we didn't have an appointment!

The cab driver I got on Saturday afternoon was an idiot. He spoke some bizarre dialect that wasn't - to my unskilled ear, anyway - remotely recognisable as Chinese, and - for reasons I couldn't possibly have fathomed even if I'd been fluent in his lingo - was histrionically refusing to drive me to Gongti Beilu (about as straightforwardly central a destination as any driver could wish for). I can only assume he didn't know where it was; or he just didn't like carrying foreigners.

My letting agent is an idiot. She rang me up on Sunday afternoon to ask me to come round to meet a potential flatmate and endure another round of talks with my would-be new landlord. We had arranged a day or two earlier that she would do this. I had rashly assumed that she would have fixed an appointment with the flatmate and/or the landlord, and would let me know what time had been arranged, so that I could wander over unhurriedly (the property isn't that far away from my current apartment - but a 15 or 20 minute walk) and meet them at the property. No, no - she rang me at no notice at all, as an afterthought, when the other potential tenant was already meeting with the landlord. "Can you come right now?" "Oh, yeah, sure. What am I supposed to fucking do? Teleport myself over there??"

The would-be new landlord is an idiot. He's worried that his property has remained unlet for three months. But not so worried that he'd consider sweeping out the yard, cutting back the foliage, or removing all the building materials and old flower-pots heaped up around the place. Or buying basic equipment, like a refrigerator and a washing-machine. Or negotiating down from his original asking price rather than up.

Everyone I walk behind on the subway, in the street, anywhere is an idiot. In the subway especially. I've been using the subway way too much over the past couple of months, and that's never good for the mental health (I have itemised its irritations before, here and here and here). Slow and erratically moving pedestrians in this country seem to function with a perverse collective consciousness that enables them - without even being aware of your presence in any conventional sense - to somehow work together to maximise your inconvenience.

Now, this is all run-of-the-mill stuff in China. Usually, I can greet such eccentricities with a wry smile. Lately, though, I've found my tolerance and humour wearing very thin. Lately, this kind of thing has just been starting to piss me off BIG TIME.

I am overdue for a break. I haven't left the country in nearly two years now. I haven't really had a proper holiday in three. No wonder 'China' is just getting a wee bit much for me. Six weeks of detox, and I'll be missing the place again, I'm sure, and ready once again to endure all these petty hassles with a laugh and a smile.

But right now..... right now......

If I get a taxi driver who doesn't know the way to the airport, there could be an incident.

1729

The number of the post.

I slip this in sneakily, after the fact. Purely to fulfill a promise I made 18 months or so ago to mention Ramanujan's Number when I got to this milestone.

Bon mot for the week

"I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery."

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

Baiting session

The Chinese film director Lu Chuan is supposed to be making a personal appearance at the Yugong Yishan music bar tonight, after a screening of his latest film Nanjing! Nanjing! (the Chinese premiere, I think, of its English-subtitled version).

Lu's name is on the two standout Chinese movies of the last few years, The Missing Gun and Kekexili (Mountain Patrol); but it's widely reckoned that he was no more than a 'front' for the temporarily blacklisted Jiang Wen on the former, and some critics even carp that he may have been less than fully responsible for the latter.

I really want to admire the man for his work - but these doubts as to whether it even is his work paradoxically come as something of a consolation.... because I've heard from a variety of sources in recent months that the man is a colossal prick - even by the standards of the movie business, and that's saying something.

Now, one of my very good friends bears a particular grudge against Lu Chuan because he did the original English translation of the script which enabled the director to shop the project around and get overseas funding, and was thus instrumental in getting the film off the ground; what's more, he claims, he didn't just have to render the rather turgid Chinese into decent English, he actually had to convert it into a screenplay format, because it had been written as a novella! And nearly two years later, he still hasn't been paid for that very substantial piece of work.

As a result of this, when Lu was looking for someone to write English sub-titles for the finished film (with typical Chinese last-minutism, this was only a couple of weeks before the film was due to make its debut at Cannes), most of the foreign translators I know refused to accept the commission. Thus, I'm rather curious to see what the sub-titles look like. I very much fear they'll have been done by a non-native speaker; perhaps even by a machine translator!!

But it's not only stroppy translators who have a gripe against Lu Chuan. A number of people have told me that he is not only habitually tight-fisted and unreliable in matters of payment, but a raging egomaniac - he seems to have got the idea that he is China's greatest living auteur (only Zhang Yimou is worthy of comparison, he seems to think; and a fairly distant 2nd), and thus treats everyone he works with like dirt.

So..... I'm hoping to enjoy the film tonight. But there could be quite a large heckling contingent at the Q & A afterwards.

I've been thinking of opening with....

"So, it seems everyone has a favourite 'Lu Chuan is such an arsehole' story. What's yours, Lu Chuan?"

Beijing landlords

All my plans and dreams for finding a nicer place to live are inexorably turning to shit.

The spectacular implosion of Option No. 7 yesterday is a good illustration.

As I mentioned, the landlord was hopeful of getting the same rent he'd had from his last tenant, although that was probably a bit high even in the buoyant market of a year or two ago, and a good 25% above the current going rate. He had at least seemed to understand that this might be a little unrealistic, and had expressed a willingness to negotiate.

Yesterday, the agent relayed the landlord's list of demands:

He's only prepared to drop the rent by rather less than 10% - and that only if I pay 6 months upfront.

Plus 2 months' deposit, rather than the usual one month's.

Plus a 1,000 RMB fee for the agent (again, a non-standard and highly dubious practice - although this is probably the agent trying it on, rather than the landlord).

Plus.... he insists that I sign a lease from the 1st July.

[Although he knows that I am out of the country for the whole of July and most of August, and am paid up on my current apartment until the 1st September. I had - rather generously, I thought - offered to consider signing the lease from mid-August... or maybe even from the 1st of August; AND paying my first quarter's rent immediately. That wasn't enough for this greedy prick. These people just don't seem to have even the rudiments of business sense: the 1st of July is only a few days away; that apartment has been vacant nearly a month already; the landlord has known that his previous tenant was going to be quitting for over three months; and, according to the agent, no-one else has even viewed the place, let alone expressed an interest; and most foreigners are quitting Beijing over the summer (either a standard holiday to get away from the excessive heat of July and August, or forced out by the crabbiness of the visa-issuing authorities) - if the guy acts like this, he's going to have an empty apartment on his hands for at least another 2 or 3 months. Well, it will serve him right!]

I said to my letting agent:

"You needn't have told me all of that. Every single one of those conditions is a dealbreaker!"