The Fifth Day

Over this fortnight and more of firework craziness that is the Chinese Spring Festival there are certain days that are crazier than others.

It's hard to discern any significance in this, since the pattern of firework usage isn't very consistent from one year to the next, or one day to the next.

However, over my many years here now, I had noticed that the fifth day of the festivities is almost invariably one of the heaviest gunpowder days.

Apparently it's because it's the traditional birthday of Guan Yu (or Tsai Shin Yeh), the God of Wealth. And he likes fireworks (so they say)!

I maintain that overall this has been a pretty wussy year so far for the exploding of ordnance on our streets. I'm not sure whether there were any government-sponsored meltdown-counteracting incentives to firework purchasing in place last year, but I gather the market in Bejing was much more competitive than it had been for some time, with three or four major wholesalers going toe-to-toe for the first time and getting into a vicious price-cutting war. This year, it would appear, fireworks are quite a bit more expensive, and people have been showing some restraint.

Concerns about last year's torching of one of the new CCTV buildings (almost certainly arson, but that's another story) may have been mildly inhibiting too: firework bans are back in place in a number of major public spaces and near important buildings (hence, unfortunately, the Bell Tower Square - minutes away from where I live, and a great place to watch the madness last year - has been dead this time around).

Even on New Year's Eve..... well, things were INTENSE for fifteen or twenty minutes either side of midnight; but usually that period of non-stop mayhem lasts two, three, four hours, dragging on well into the following morning. This year, things were fairly sedate again by 12.30am.

This has been the quietest Chinese New Year I've known in Beijing (since the 'firework ban' was lifted.... four years ago?).

Well, until tonight..... Day Five. I was woken by firecrackers at 10 this morning, and it's been going on sporadically all day. Once darkness fell, things got batshit crazy. Seems like people were maybe reining themselves in a little on New Year's Eve so they could do Guan Yu's birthday in style.

There is so much shit blowing up outside my study at the moment that I genuinely fear for my windows. There is a powerful whiff of gunsmoke in my apartment, even with all the windows firmly closed. I'm doubting whether it's going to be feasible to get much sleep tonight...

Favourite posts from the 4th quarter of 2008

Continuing my catch-up on recommendations from a year and more ago...

Pick of the Archive:
Favourite Posts, Oct.-Dec. 2008



1) Another sign of De-Olympification - 4th October 2008

An anecdote about my first introduction to Beijing's backstreet 'hairdressers'.

2) My Fantasy Girlfriend - Barbara Good - 4th October 2008

Barbara Good, in classic '70s BBC sitcom The Good Life, was just about the perfect woman.

3) Sunday silliness - 5th October 2008

One of my favourite short 'poems', one of my silliest, one of my most outrageous puns.

4) Bon mot for the week - 6th October 2008

One of my own, one of my best.

5) Possibly.... The Best Blog in the World? - 7th October 2008

A recommendation for a wonderful recent discovery, the blog Other Men's Flowers.

6) Sunday Poetry Corner - 12th October 2008

A favourite war poem, Clifford Dyment's The Son.

7) Therapies - 14th October 2008

A list of things that make me feel better....

8) SOAP! - 16th October 2008

A great collective bar-room joke: my drinking buddies and I invent the worthy charity, Stamp Out Animal Pornography.

9) Not exactly a poem.... - 24th October 2008

But rather amusing, I think.

10) Sunday Linguistics Corner - 26th October 2008

My academic editing job throws up a particularly disturbing neologism.

11) An idealistic teacher - 27th October 2008

My approach to the teaching of poetry.

12) A motto for China - 27th October 2008

Found humour: an anecdote on Other Men's Flowers seems strangely appropriate to my adopted home.

13) White Trash Halloween - 31st October 2008

I'm not a fan of this holiday, but I did find this photograph of unusual pumpkin decorations rather fun.

14) Urbane? Moi?! - 3rd November 2008

I think I would prefer the epithet suburbane. This post became a repository for reviews of my two blogs.

15) Website of the Month - Editorial Ass - 5th November 2008

A long overdue recommendation for the wonderful Moonrat (also my Fantasy Girlfriend of the month).

16) The next huge bestseller - 8th November 2008

I win a competition with this outline for a social history of Gin.

17) Chinglish mispronunciation - 13th November 2008

A favourite example of this genre of humour: a film whose title you will struggle to recognise.

18) List of the Month - 'Desert Island' albums - 16th November 2008

My 10 favourite rock albums.... well, amongst my favourites....

19) I am easily amused (yet again) - 17th November 2008

An unlikely Scandinavian name I notice in some film credits reduces me to helpless mirth, and provokes some silly flights of linguistic fancy from me.

20) Chinese lanterns - 24th November 2008

One of my favourite photographs, an unusual view of Beijing's famous Gui Jie restaurant strip.

21) Chinese people LOVE me! (20) - 25th November 2008

Chinese underpants don't have flies; this gives me an enviable advantage over the locals when I need to take a quick pee in a public toilet.

22) Late-night shopping run - 27th November 2008

I suffer a particularly galling incident at my local 7/11 store.

23) Translation - 28th November 2008

I attempt an English version of a famous bon mot from the Chinese sage Xun Zi.

24) Film List - the greatest Westerns - 29th November 2008

The first - and best - of my monthly 'Film List' series.

25) A restful image - 1st December 2008

A photograph of the courtyard where I stayed the last time I was in New Orleans - an image I regularly turn to for solace or relaxation.

26) Last words - 2nd December 2008

A humorous contemplation of suicide (and a little bit of bitching about Microsoft).

27) Today, in the recording studio - 4th December 2008

Recording listening practice exams was never so amusing! Well, in fact, it's usually fairly rib-tickling; but this session was something extra-special.

28) Because you can make 'Art' out of anything.... - 5th December 2008

I discover a website devoted to 'tampon art'....

29) The weekly bon mot - 8th December 2008

My blog-friend Tony produces a particularly good line on cats.

30) Pulgasari - 12th December 2008

My friends at Koryo Tours arrange a screening of this 'classic' North Korean Godzilla film, whose story is rich with political metaphor.

31) List of the Month - Things I wish my mother had told me.... - 13th December 2008

A collection of bons mots - the sum of my life's wisdom.

32) Oh, grow up! - 14th December 2008

Continuing my 'Free Advice' series.... I get irritated by the Chinese government's latest fatuous tantrum over the Dalai Lama.

Website of the Month (Vrrooom! Vrrooom!)

Old drinking buddy (and occasional commenter over on The Barstool) Little Anthony is a motor racing journalist who has for several years now been mainly covering the World Rally Championship. Last year he set up his own PR agency Mediatica, and he tells me that they've just helped to launch MaxRally, a new website devoted to news and photographs from the world of rallying. One of the partners in this new venture is McKlein, a photo agency which specialises in rallying - and they produce some really striking action shots of the cars.

This is well worth a look - if you feel like indulging your inner Mr Toad for a while.

Getting SHAGGY again

Just like last year (and the year before...) I have failed to fit in a haircut in the last week before the Chinese New Year holiday. My new local hairdresser hadn't been that busy this week, but I kept on forgetting to look in on him.... and then he caught me out by shutting up shop a day early, on Thursday. I think it's now been 8 weeks since my last cut; and I usually like to get a trim every 5 or 6 weeks. Not good.

I am on the brink of shaving my head. However, not being quite convinced that I am yet ready to embrace baldness this way (particularly when the weather is still so cold), I have decided to put myself in the hands of fate: if my hairdresser returns to work next week, I shall be straight in there, gleefully disregarding the local superstition that it is bad juju for a man to get a haircut in the first month of the Chinese lunar year. If he doesn't, then shaved pate here I come!

Bon mot for the week

"A man who lies is merely hiding the truth; but a man who tells half-lies has forgotten where he put it."

Robert Bolt [in screenplay for Lawrence of Arabia, spoken by 'Mr Dryden', the slippery British diplomat played by Claude Rains]

Live long and prosper!

Yes, it's also the beginning of the New Year in the Chinese lunar calendar today. This is one of the cooler animal years, the Year of the Tiger.

Next year will the Year of the Rabbit. That could lead to some unpleasantness at next year's transition. Or maybe not.....

But if these fellas get any cosier, we could end up with....

And that just goes against Nature - UGH!

Well, a Happy New Year to you all! Remember to wear Kevlar!

What will they think of next?

I have no truck with this day at all.

However, if you feel the need to exchange heart symbols as a token of something-or-other, you might at least - as I urged you last year - keep them anatomically correct.

You can, of course, get t-shirts - like this one from Zazzle.

Or, there are a number of "anatomically correct" pendants, like this one, out there. Since I have my curmudgeonly hat on today, I will object that most of these seem to be more or less "anatomically correct" in everything except size. Perhaps "anatomically approximate" would be a better term. (Unless they're not meant to be human hearts? But that's just creepy, isn't it?)

I think I prefer this elegant little mechanical heart (just what The Wizard of Oz's Tin Man would have wanted!), which I discovered through the Polymer Clay Daily blog (it's amazing what's out there on the Interwebs, isn't it?).

I believe this is from the same artist, Monster Kookies. You can find more of her work here. It gives a whole new meaning to holding someone's heart in your hand, doesn't it?

I wish all of my readers a happy day - just don't bother me with it!

Time to break out the earplugs

My translator buddy Brendan yesterday posted this great skit on how an Iraq war correspondent vacationing in China might interpret the situation in Beijing this month.

Originally it was supposed to be a guest column for expat magazine The Beijinger 's issue this month, but it seems the editors thought some of the content a little too 'sensitive' - especially the reference to last year's CCTV building fire (which was, of course, a trifling event unworthy of comment, and didn't necessarily happen at all).

Do go and check it out. It would be very funny if it weren't so uncomfortably TRUE.

My Fantasy Girlfriend - Kseniya Simonova

I was introduced to the lovely Kseniya last summer by the inestimable JES in this post. Not only is she stunningly pretty but also quite phenomenally talented. I hadn't previously encountered the art of "sand-painting", but having now reviewed many of the examples posted on YouTube from leading competitions and festivals around the world, I would have to say that this girl seems to have something that puts her way out ahead of the crowd (though many of these other artists are very impressive also) - and I don't think it's just her exotic good looks.

Many of the "paintings", like the one above, are very striking when captured in still photographs, but the essence of this artform is that it is a real-time performance (created on an overhead projector so that it can be displayed on big screens), that the picture is constantly evolving before your eyes, sometimes completely transforming, sometimes becoming a succession of thematically linked tableaux that form a kind of animated narrative; and that the vigour and flair and passion of the creator is a key part of the overall impact. Kseniya Simonova is just mesmerising to watch at work.

She stormed to victory in the Ukraine's Got Talent TV show last year with the stunning performance below (when she had allegedly been practicing this kind of art for barely a year!). There are a number of other examples of her work on YouTube, all well worth checking out. And she's got her own website now (although there's only this on it, at present).

Alas, she's only just about to turn 25 - much too young for me. I wonder if her mother is single...?

I note also that she is the second Ukrainian to be inducted into the 'Fantasy Girlfriends' hall of fame. I think that this is something more than a coincidence. They do cheekbones extremely well in the Ukraine.

Improvised solutions

I bought a new frying pan to try making Jamaican 'Johnny Cakes' last week. None of the ones I already had were anything like flat, which makes shallow-frying anything a bit of a challenge. The new one isn't perfectly flat either (or else my stove isn't on the level), but I can just about get by with it. I have just discovered that this pan is flat enough (and, for the time being, clean enough, and heat-conductive enough) to dry-grill slices of bread on to make toast. My old electric toaster self-combusted over a year ago, and I've been missing it sorely (a slice of toast is one of the few 'Western' home comforts I really get cravings for). Now, however, I'm starting to wonder if I really need to replace it. Electric toasters are hard to come by here. I wouldn't trust the efficacy or safety of local brands. Foreign brands are quite expensive. And money is very tight for me right now. Maybe I'll just keep right on using the frying pan.

Last week, in preparation for my dratted housewarming party, I also went out shopping for a new hi-fi system (my old one died last summer, the controlling microchip going completely haywire). I wasted a whole afternoon on the quest, but came back empty-handed. Most hi-fi systems today seem to cost at least three or four times as much as the one I'm looking to replace (purchased six years ago). Most of them seem to have a DVD player (which I don't need). None of them seem to have a cassette tape player (which I do want). I fear I may have to enlist the help of a Chinese friend to help me navigate the bewildering, unsatisfying array of options. Or maybe I'll just continue to do without. For the last year, I have been getting by with playing ripped music on my computer, or with playing CDs on my television via a DVD player. The sound quality is pretty poor, but I suppose I've got used to poor sound quality (in this age of listening to so much music on computers and i-Pods, we get used to lousy sound quality as an 'acceptable' norm); the hi-fi that died last year wasn't anything very wonderful, and I'm sure almost anything I buy out here is going to sound fairly dismal in comparison to the proper hi-fi system I had to leave behind in the UK (and that system wasn't as good as the one I had in my undergraduate days: CD just never sounds as good as vinyl!).

Ah, once upon a time I was such an audiophile. I hate these compromises that age and poverty bring to us.

Haiku for the week

Chinese New Year

Much too loud, too long;
Alien celebration;
Deeply tedious.

The firework mayhem seems a little more subdued this year (or maybe I just live in a "quiet" neighbourhood?), but it was starting to get rolling in earnest last night - two full days ahead of the actual New Year's Eve holiday. And it will go on and on and on and on for the next two or three weeks. I found this an intriguing novelty when I first came here; but now it's just a HUGE bore. I can't wait for it to be over. In fact, I may just quit the country for a while to get away from it....

Those naughty Australians!!

In the UK, Australians are generally known for what might be called an extreme (and seemingly unself-conscious) directness of manner, which can - depending on your mood and sensibility - either be interpreted as refreshingly unihibited or as crude and abrasive. I posted a couple of classic comedy clips illustrating this stereotypical view on my Barstool Blues blog a couple of weeks ago to mark Australia Day.

This unihibitedness or, er, shamelessness manifests itself especially in the country's advertising. We all know that "sex sells", but there aren't many countries where you can get away with using sex in your advertising quite as brazenly as this. This campaign from a few years ago was promoting a new line of wetsuits from the Radiator company - the idea being that these suits were so thin that you felt like you weren't wearing anything at all, and, ahem, this helped to improve your flexibility while surfing!! Yes, the dots connect so easily, don't they? It's almost impossible to conceive of how they might have promoted this sports clothing any other way.

You can find some of the other photos from this series here, if you're interested. And the slogan was (oh, dear me!): "Not as thick. Just as warm. All the rubber you need."

Perhaps one of the most egregious examples of this (for an uptight Englishman) rather disconcerting lack of restraint is the long-running series of TV ads for the Antz Pantz underwear brand - which uses a spiny anteater in a highly risqué manner. This, I think, is the original of the series, more than 20 years old now. I recall it caused some discomfort with the TV regulatory authorities when it was aired on a late-night comedy programme in the UK; it would never get approved for screening as an ad, I don't think, not even in cinemas. And that one was fairly understated, compared to more recent entries in the series such as this.

Me, I think I prefer something like this 1980s UK TV spot for Brisbane's Castlemaine XXXX beer. It was probably toned down a bit from what the same ad might have looked like in Oz, to accommodate our sticky-beak Pommie sensibilities - but still quite out there.

De gustibus non est disputandum, eh? Well, not if you're an Aussie, anyway.

I am not a baker

I have a distaste for raw dough that borders on a phobia. There are so many things that can go wrong with it - things that seem so mysterious, unknowable, uncontrollable.

And it gets everywhere. I hate the messiness of it. I think I always did, even in childhood cooking lessons - when messiness was supposed to be part of the appeal.

Making dough is particularly problematical here in Beijing. Chinese kitchens are invariably tiny (most Chinese cooking doesn't require much prep work apart from a lot of chopping - something which can be done just as well in front of the TV in your living room, or sitting on the stoop outside talking to your neighbours); my kitchen has about 18 inches of workspace between the gas burners and the sink - and it's bigger than a lot I've seen. Just about nobody bakes anything here, and very few people even have an oven (I do, but it's not a very good one: one of those "portable" electric ones - not very big or very hot). Because of this, it's very hard to get baking equipment or ingredients, even at the foreigner-oriented supermarkets (I couldn't even find a sieve!).

I tried to confront and defeat my deep-seated anxieties about this department of cookery last week in preparing for my housewarming party - but I got my ass whooped. Well, I did eventually manage to crank out some savoury 'Johnny Cakes' (a very simple kind of flat scone - classic 'poor people food' from the Caribbean; I was pursuing a Jamaican theme in honour of Bob Marley's birthday); but TWO attempts to produce a shortcrust pastry (and yes, I did look everywhere to try and find some readymade, but no joy!) for some Jamaican-style meat patties were thwarted - in the most frustrating and messy manner possible. I'm not sure what I screwed up (I suspect the recipe may have been at fault), but both times the dough turned out far too sticky and completely unworkable. Gggrrrrr. (At least the spiced mince filling I made for them was good; but we had to eat it off slices of plain white bread, because of my sorry inability to make mini piecrusts.)

In my mental review of possible new careers, I think I very definitely have to cross 'baker' off the list. And probably 'chef' too. And anything involved with the F&B industry, really. Or, indeed, with any kind of creative endeavour. My temperament is too depressive: setbacks and failures bring my spirits down far more than successes can lift them. That's why I should steer clear of pastry from now on.

The weekly bon mot

"Young men make wars, and the virtues of war are the virtues of young men: courage, and hope for the future. Then old men make the peace, and the vices of peace are the vices of old men: mistrust and caution. "

Robert Bolt [in screenplay for Lawrence of Arabia, attributed to Faisal bin al-Hussein bin Ali al-Hashemi, played by Alec Guinness]

A dark poem

I wrote this on Christmas morning (some measure, perhaps, of how depressed I was at the time). I had been shocked, outraged to read a few days earlier of the theft of the 'Arbeit Macht Frei' sign from above the gate of the Auschwitz death camp. I was relieved to learn shortly afterwards that it had been recovered, the ludicrously inept thieves (and the vile neo-Nazi who instigated their crime) caught.

The news prompted these reflections on the significance of the site. I gather it's not a particularly well-run or well-preserved memorial, and it is inevitably doomed to crumble back into the earth - probably sooner rather than later. And I worry about the kind of people who visit it; I fear it probably attracts a large proportion of prurient ghouls or Nazi sympathisers. I don't think I could bear to go there myself; its emotional impact is too overwhelming (I broke down in tears at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC a few years ago). But I would like to see it preserved for as long as possible. I think it stands for something far beyond the specific evil of the Third Reich. It should continue to exist as long as humankind exists: a reminder of our most terrible achievement, a reminder of the worst of which we are capable.

Auschwitz

What they killed here
Was humanity –
Their victims’ and their own;
The doers and the done-to,
Manufacturers and product marred alike
In this monstrous factory.

What it showed us
Was the darkness in all our hearts:
The capacity, the urge to hate and hurt;
And the tricks of losing feeling, sight,
Conscience, dignity, respect,
The checks that stifle the dark impulse,
The checks that, once removed,
Allow the hate to become habit, process,
The aberration to become the norm,
Wrong to become right.

What they killed here too
Was the last fond hope of God:
Where this can happen
There is no salvation,
No higher benevolence;
Alone we made this hell,
Alone they suffered it.

They re-made the world here:
Industrializing evil revealed
The impersonalization of modernity;
More than the Bomb
Or the Moonshot or the Electric Light
This place defined
The New Era for Mankind.

Let it stand forever
As a reminder
Of the fragility of human morals,
Of how easily civilization crumbles,
How easily decency is lost,
How easily cruelty conquers,
As a reminder
Of the worst of which we are capable,
Of the darkness in all our hearts.

And let the sign stand too -
Yes, that vile joke above the heads of the condemned,
The taunting lie of redemption –
Let it stand to injoin us always
To work to make ourselves free
Of this darkness within,
To make the world free of it.
Although we know
We never can be free of it,
Let us work always toward that end.

Therefore, let it stand.
Let it be the last thing remaining of us.
When the Alhambra and the Pyramids are long gone,
Let it stand.

List of the Month - Things I lost in the cab

A lightning quick 'List of the Month' this time....

I have been preparing frenetically for my housewarming for the past few days. Returning by taxi from a big foreigner-friendly grocery store on the east side of town on Thursday, I discovered that a few items had mysteriously fallen out of my huge shopping bag (one of those reinforced plastic IKEA jobs that you can get a small truck in). Alas, they were all items that are likely to be of bugger-all use or interest to the poor cabbie.

Things I lost in the back of a Beijing taxi cab this week

1) A tin of diced tomatoes

2) A lemon

3) A slab of sharp cheddar cheese

That is pretty much the story of my week.

That distant roll of thunder (again)

It's still 8 days until the Chinese Spring Festival this year, but already that ominous rumble in the near-distance is ramping up from 'intermittent' to 'nearly continuous'.

The week (month!) ahead is going to be rather wearing. How I would love to escape overseas somewhere!

Haiku for the week

Anxiety grows
As 'to do' list gets longer
- Before the party.

I have committed myself to having a flat-warming party tomorrow. I still have heaps of stuff to try to do to get ready for it. It is now barely 32 hours away. And I'm blogging about it....

Paranoia

I was awoken today by somebody leaning on my entry buzzer at 8am. I was enjoying the first decent lie-in I've managed in a long time, and was disinclined to respond. They got in somehow, and started knocking on my apartment door. I ignored them some more and they went away.

They tried again an hour later. I happened to be on the loo, so had an ideal excuse to ignore them again.

Fearing that they might try every hour on the hour throughout the day, I went out on a long shopping expedition before 10am rolled around.

Usually, untimely hails from the front-door buzzer are just spammers who want to shove leaflets under everybody's door advertising pizza delivery or illegal satellite hookups. But they don't knock on doors. Or immediately follow up with phone calls (to my landline - who the hell has my landline number??). I suffered a bit of a panic attack that it was the police come round to check on my residence registration (or something) - and, as you may recall, the last time I registered my residence I had a bit of a nightmare experience because I'm on a 'dodgy' visa and don't have all the supporting details of my ostensible employment at my fingertips.

When I left at 10, there was a cop (of sorts - actually a chengguan, one of the quasi-police regulatory enforcers.... I don't think they usually deal with visa stuff, do they?) loitering outside the front gate of my apartment block. Another brief surge of panic for me. But he didn't attempt to speak to me - even when I smiled and made eye-contact and mugged a brief "Hey, what gives?" in his direction.

Maybe I managed to pull off one of those Jedi mind tricks on him: "This is not the foreigner you're looking for."

Or maybe the pesky bell-pusher was just the water-meter reader....

Alas, I spent the rest of the morning in a raging funk, madly pondering all the possible reasons the police might want to talk to me (the blog? delinquent tax returns? a malicious complaint by my former landlord?). Probably I was just worrying over nothing. They didn't come back again this afternoon.

It's just an unfortunate reminder how precarious our position as foreigners is in this country - our right of residence, and even our personal liberty can be snatched away from us at any time, with no warning and no reason given. This is still a 'police state'; and the 'midnight knock' on the door does, unfortunately, still happen - though it's usually just the local people who suffer that; for us foreigners, most of our less pleasant encounters with the police - checking up on visa paperwork - are the result of their occasional over-zealousness and lack of consideration, rather than wilful harassment; but, even so, it becomes rather wearing to have that hanging over you all the time.

Just as I was starting to recover my spirits, and to chide myself for succumbing to foolish paranoia..... the taxi driver who brought me home from my shopping trip asked me if I wanted to go to my old street name. Now, it's in the same neighbourhood, sure; but I had told him fairly precisely where I wanted to go, and hadn't mentioned my old address at all. What are the odds of me getting a taxi driver who's driven me before and remembers me? Pretty damn long, I would think.... unless there's a central database of where all the foreigners live??

And just as I was starting to dismiss the taxi driver incident as a meaningless oddity..... Witopia went down again.

It soon came back online again, thank heavens.

But, boy, am I jumpy today!

New Picks of the Month

Time to dip into the archives once again to unearth a couple of forgotten 'classics'....

From Froogville I nominate Accidental Poetry - an anthology of readymade images I discovered in a box of 'Magnetic Poetry'.

And on The Barstool, you should take a look at Sometimes larking, usually darkening, an anecdote about the failure of my career as a lawyer (including, as a bonus, the funniest clerihew ever written).

Return to the Hutong of Death

My new apartment is only about 350 yards or so off the main road, but I have been finding that walk down the lane rather irksome: it drags somehow, seems much longer than it is.

Of course, it didn't help that the first half dozen or so times I walked here I was heavily encumbered with bags of stuff (the new pad is only about a half a mile away from the old one, so I tried to simplify my moving day - and reduce the risk of particularly valuable items getting broken by the movers - by ferrying a lot of things over here on foot).

And it didn't help that for the first week of the New Year, the lane was virtually impassable because of uncleared snow and ice, and the four-minute walk to the 7/11 on the corner was taking me more like ten minutes (ten minutes of terror and exhaustion!).

And it doesn't help that, if leaving during the early evening rush hour, I will invariably find the lane snarled up with cars and vans trying to pass in both directions where there's barely room for one-way traffic (especially if, as is often the case, there's somebody untidily parked on one side of the road) - this problem really gets so bad that it significantly slows down my passage to the main road on foot.

And it probably doesn't help that I had misjudged my timings, over-optimistically exaggerating my estimate of how much nearer I would be to the bar/restaurant strip I habitually frequent of an evening (I had hoped I was going to be nearly ten minutes nearer to my favourite bars, but in fact it's only four or five minutes).

I hope it's just these niggling psychological factors that are making this little walk seem so bothersomely long, and that I'll soon start getting used to them, get over them.

However, it does worry me that perhaps it's not unrelated to a nasty experience I had here five-and-a-half years ago. Yes, by one of those bizarre quirks of fate, my new apartment building is directly opposite the former pool hall (now converted into a community health centre and neighbourhood police station) where my best friend suffered a murderous assault with a hatchet. Well, actually he was attacked in a public toilet a few yards up the street, but managed to stagger back to the pool hall where I was waiting for him. He survived, and is fine today - but it was very touch-and-go getting him to a hospital before he bled out. We had no chance of getting an ambulance call-out (it probably would have doubled the length of time taken to get him to hospital, a delay that would almost certainly have been fatal; and we didn't know our address anyway); so, I had to help him walk to the main road to try to get a cab. On that occasion, the 350 yards seemed like several miles.

I suspect it is that memory that is making me so impatient, so irritated with my walk to the main road. (And I fret that my friend might not want to come to see me here.)

The Rigmarole

At lunchtime today it took me 25 minutes to pay my phone bill and buy some more credit for my electricity smartcard. There were only three people ahead of me in the line. However, by the standards of Chinese banking transactions, that was pretty damn swift. It's not uncommon for people to contrive to take 20 minutes or so over a single deposit or withdrawal.

One little bit of business Chinese customers can use to slow things up even more is a thing I call the triple-bag technique.

It's most common amongst the ladies. Almost all Chinese women carry their money in a small purse. And they keep this purse in a larger handbag or clutch-purse, or sometimes in some kind of holdall or shopping bag or backpack. But here's the thing - as an extra protection against possible snatch-purses, they always seem to use an intermediate-sized bag as well: the purse is inside a larger purse which is inside the handbag. And all of them are secured with zippers and/or clasps.

And a Chinese lady would never think of getting her purse out before she's been told how much she has to pay. Oh no. At the supermarket checkout or the cosmetics counter or the restaurant or your neighbourhood convenience store, she will wait until she's asked for the money.... and only then open the handbag, rummage for the intermediate purse, open the intermediate purse, remove the purse-purse, open the purse-purse, remove the money, count the money, count it again, and then grudgingly - and in ultra-slow-motion - hand it over. And then, of course, the whole thing in reverse once she gets her change. And she couldn't possibly move away from the counter until the process is completed.

The amount of dithering that goes on at cash registers in this country is just astounding. Really. Until the introduction of smartcards and ticket-vending machines on the Beijing subway a couple of years ago, it was not uncommon to see women taking a full minute or so to purchase a 2rmb single-journey subway ticket. Waiting in line at the ticket-window could take a very long time indeed.

I hadn't thought Chinese men were quite so bad as this. They do typically have a man-purse, in which they keep their wallet (why it's not cool to keep your wallet in your trouser-pocket, I really can't fathom), but...... I don't think I'd seen a man triple-bagging before. But TWO of the three guys ahead of me in the line today were. Oh god.

Traffic Report - the blog stats for January

Oh dear - Barstool Blues has been keeping up the momentum of peak party month, December. This is a damning indicator that I have had way too much time on hands recently, and have been going out far more than is good for me (or for my bank balance, anyway). While I have managed to observe my private resolution to scale my output back just a bit on Froogville, the Barstool is threatening to get out of control. Hold me back, someone, hold me back!

There were 44 posts and 12,500 words on Froogville last month (I'm sort of aiming to get it down to about 40 posts and 10,000 words).

On Barstool Blues there were also 44 posts, but a whopping 16,000 words (where does all this stuff come from??).

I wonder if I'll be able to rein myself in a little in February. I'll do my best. At least it's a short month.

When does the LYING stop?

I've commented before on the unfortunate prevalence of lying (to "save face") here in China.

I've just encountered a particularly egregious example. The private student I took on just before Christmas wasn't getting on well with me, and decided to end our sessions. But he didn't tell me that.

Oh no. He told me he was "out of town on business" all week.

However, I'd split the work with him with a friend of mine who's studying Mandarin up in Wudaokou. He had his session with her on Tuesday afternoon as usual - despite being "out of town on business"!

What's more, he told my friend that he would be seeing me the next day as usual - despite having cancelled that session at the end of the preceding week, and having told me that he had no time at all to reschedule it.

WHY?? What on earth does he gain by telling these elaborate - and transparent - lies? Does he think his two tutors don't communicate with each other about what they're doing with him?

Well, as I mentioned before, I fear this chap is a complete nutjob, dangerously mentally unstable. However, in this preference for telling ridiculous lies (rather than just telling me straight out that he wants to cancel the classes with me), he is not at all untypical. This is a national vice in China. I don't think I'll ever really understand it. And it is one of the things that I most hate about the place.

Bon mot for the week

"How can a man's disappointments be bigger than his dreams?"

Froog