Bon mot for the week

"A man with no enemies is a man with no opinions. Or a man with no courage."

Froog

Sunday silliness

This is one of my older fripperies, but I don't think I've used it on here before.... and last week's musings on the Shenzhou spaceshot brought it to mind.

Are astronauts really
Always on time?
Or is the waitlessness
Just an illusion?

My Fantasy Girlfriend - Barbara Good

Oh, the insidious influence of television! Here we have yet another example of my romantic life being blighted by premature exposure to a too-perfect paradigm of womanhood. Barbara Good (played, of course, by the lovely actress Felicity Kendal - I bumped into her in the street in London a few years ago, and she's still looking gorgeous) was one of the lead characters in a classic BBC sitcom of the mid-70s, The Good Life. The premise of the show - beguilingly simple, but rather revolutionary and far-sighted for the time - was that her husband Tom (the wonderful Richard Briers), tiring of 9-to-5 wage slavery as he hit his mid-life crisis on his 40th birthday, abruptly decides to resign his job and adopt a back-to-nature lifestyle, trying to become entirely self-sufficient by transforming his suburban home into a small farm. Predictably cutesy adventures ensued, as they coped with raising (and killing) pigs and chickens in the back garden, and learned to do without most of the familiar comforts of the consumer society. However, the show was distinguished by the quality of its writing and acting: it was essentially a four-hander between the Goods and their friends/next-door neighbours, the snootily disapproving but affectionately supportive Leadbetters (Paul Eddington and Penelope Keith) - and all four characters were subtly and convincingly fleshed out.

Barbara, I'm sure, represented the ideal woman to many British men of my generation. Not only was she devastatingly pretty, she also had wit, intelligence, and an irresistible vivacity. (She was far too short for me..... but I'm somehow prepared to ignore that!) She was, moreover, an impressively tough cookie, resilient and determined - often providing a necessary counterweight to her husband's impetuosity. And, oh, that voice - it had a slight edge of hoarseness or huskiness to it sometimes, a purr; and it was sexy as hell.

It's such a pity she was married! Even her relationship with Tom, though, was an inspiring - and perhaps unattainable? - ideal, one of the very few really positive depictions of a marriage I can ever remember seeing on screen. Though married for many years, they still patently adored each other (curiously, their childlessness was never discussed); they tolerated and even cherished each other's foibles; they were unflaggingly supportive of each other; and, best of all, they got each other's sense of humour - their communication was characterised mostly by a playful teasing: they bickered a lot, and had a few full-blown rows, but these confrontations were always defused or reconciled by their use of humour.

I recall particularly fondly that in the very first episode Barbara sent Tom a birthday card that said: "Mozart and Mendelssohn were dead by 40. Why aren't you?"

Why has that been playing on my mind so much lately???

Another sign of De-Olympification

It's not just the street-food stalls that have returned, it's also..... the backstreet "hairdressers".

These are tiny, squalid salons - usually just off a main street, down one of the little side alleys - where no-one ever seems to be having a haircut, but the exclusively female staff are...... well, rather garishly dressed, and, by Chinese standards, rather voluptuous. Yes, they are in fact mini-brothels.

There used to be a lot of them on Jiugulou Dajie - The Street, my home in my first couple of years here; at that time a main road in name only, it was really no more than a wide hutong (though subsequently redeveloped and broadened into a majestic boulevarde) - where the presence of the private English college I taught at provided a significant source of business (lots of relatively affluent young kids who didn't know how to get laid any other way). Since the Olympic redevelopment of the area, they've all been forced into 'hiding' down the little alleyways round about. And earlier this year, they were all closed down. (I'm not sure if there was any policy targeting them specificially, although I would imagine that there was. However, the general crackdown on migrant workers living here without the requisite residence permit - hukou - will have led to most of their employees being kicked out of the city for the summer.)

Now, at last, they are starting to reappear. There's something oddly comforting about it - even the sleazier aspects of the city form part of its familiar charm.

I was terribly naive about these places when I first arrived here. The girls would become terribly excited whenever a foreigner walked past - tapping loudly on the window with a coin to get our attention and beckoning us agitatedly to come in. "My god!" I'd think to myself. "Do I really need a haircut that badly?"

Every man has his price

Both a price he will pay for something and a price he will sell himself for.

I was thinking here of the former. Over the past couple of months, most of us Beijingers wrestled with the conundrum of how much we would be willing to pay for last-minute Olympic tickets. Really good seats, that is. For one of the blue riband events.

At the beginning of August, I was offered a chance to buy into an unused corporate box at the Bird's Nest for one of the major finals sessions of the athletics. The opportunity proved to be illusory, alas; but it did get me thinking on just how much I would be willing to pay for something like this.

The figure that I initially latched on to was 1,500 RMB (a little over US$200). That's quite a big wedge of cash for me, since work has been very slow and frustrating for me over the last month or so, and I'm starting to feel severely impecunious.

But then......

Well, I went to a few events in other venues, so I had been able scratch that 'I was there' itch.

There were so many offers of free tickets floating around that everyone began to question whether it was not simply a waste of money to buy them.

My experiences of going to the venues (or, more particularly, of trying to get away from them after an event) tended to discourage me from wanting to attend anything further, anyway.

I guess, also, I became increasingly jaded with the whole business, particularly with the relentless parade of Chinese nationalism, their tedious domination of the medals table.

And, after a brief early flirtation with Olympic excitement, I began to recall........ that in fact I just don't give a shit. How many people do, really? I find the Olympics - well, most professional sport, really; but especially the Olympics - to be a tiresome irrelevance in the modern world. They are as much a cavalcade of corruption, commercialism, and (undetectable, or overlooked) cheating as they are a showcase of any nobler 'Olympic ideals'. And the lengths to which competitors must go in order to achieve success are, these days, just ridiculously excessive, life-limiting. I think enthusiasts of minority sports are about the only people who get really passionate about the Olympics, aren't they? I haven't taken any interest in them since I was a kid. (Until this year, I honestly had not watched a single second of Olympics coverage since 1984.)

And so...... the price I was willing to pay went into a nosedive. Half-way through the Olympics, I was thinking that that executive box I'd been told about might still be available, and that I might possibly still be willing to pay 800 or 1,000 RMB for a seat like that. But within a few more days, my interest in the whole thing had evaporated. A few weeks ago, I was offered a ticket for some athletics at the Paralympics for 50 kuai...... and I felt it was too much!!

I'm still quite curious to see inside the Bird's Nest one day. But I figure there'll soon be football matches or athletics meets held there fairly regularly - events where you can just buy tickets on the door. That will do for me.

Traffic Report - the blog stats for September

After the Olympic blitz in August, things returned to 'normal' last month (although I worry that 'normal' is still way too prolific for either my good or yours, dear readers).

On Froogville there were 56 posts and nearly 18,000 words.

On the Barstool there were 40 posts and around 11,000 words.

I think I should aim to trim that ridiculous rate of output back by at least 25-30%.

I'm not sure quite what different methods of counting are used, but according to the rather more detailed traffic analysis I get from Statcounter I'm now getting 600-700 unique visitors to each of my blogs each month; that's considerably more than is recorded in the visitor-counter in the sidebars (which comes from Sitemeter; I'm not sure why I chose that in the first place, but I'm kind of stuck with it now - though it is evidently pretty cruddy). Also, curiously enough, last month, for the first time, the Barstool actually edged ever so slightly ahead of its big brother in number of visits - I wonder what can have brought this about.

We welcomed new visitors from Italy and Cyprus on the Barstool, and from Mauritius on Froogville. And I now have fairly regular readers in Dubai and Kosovo. Going up in the world indeed!!

Attentive readers will have noted that both blogs passed their second anniversaries last month. Can I keep this going for another year? I'm not sure. We'll see.

The weekly haiku

Night plague, sleep stealer,
Returning annual torment:
The last mosquito.

Why does this happen every year at this time? This year, having been woken up at 3am, I was sufficiently pissed off to get up and root out one of those plug-in bug-zappers. And guess what - the little fucker was immune. I didn't get much sleep again for another three hours.

It's a bit of a mystery where the darned thing can have come from in the first place. We haven't had any mosquitoes round my way all year. (I can only assume that the moat and the lakes nearby have been generously dosed with DDT or somesuch, to keep the blessed Olympics bug-free.)

New Picks of the Month

Time to ring the changes over there in the sidebar again, with some new picks from the archive. This month, I give you a couple of my funniest pieces.

On Froogville I commend to you my wacky dream about The School for Henchmen.

And on the Barstool, I give you And.... they're off!, my decision-making process for choosing what to do with myself of an evening rendered as a horse-racing commentary.

Enjoy.

Things I didn't dare say about the Olympics/Paralympics.....

What?! There was anything I held back from saying??

No, not really. Just a few of the more un-PC or off-colour observations that bubbled up out of various bar conversations over the past few weeks.

For instance...... the finale of the Paralympics Opening Ceremony provoked lively discussion. An athlete in a wheelchair raised himself up a rope hand over hand, from the ground to the roof of the Bird's Nest, in order to light the Olympic Flame. A lot of people were concerned about how tiring this must be for the poor chap. (Well, he was in a harness, so I don't suppose he was really bearing much if any of the weight; but he did look a bit out of puff by the end.)  A more jaded talking point was just how far the organizers were prepared to tax our patience with this stunt - it did take f***ing ages. But the best comment was prompted by the surreal element of the spectacle, the fact that the guy was being raised up while still sitting in his wheelchair - even though the chair was not visibly supported by a harness or cradle. It really looked as though the chair should fall at any moment. "How's he attached to that? Do you think they used superglue? Or nails through his thighs?"

In a similar spirit of creative tastelessness, there has been an ongoing contest to suggest events that one would like to see in the Paralympics (occasionally, one is shocked to find that the event does actually exist!). My favourite was Wheelchair Judo (you have to dump your opponent completely out of the chair to score ippon).

And then..... the discovery that, in addition to the main Paralympics, there is an entirely separate Deafalympics (and, I've just learned, starting next week - entirely unsung! - a Mental Olympics, for games like chess and go), prompted some more tasteless ruminations on other possible 'minority' Olympic Games. Is there a Dwarf Olympics, for example? Or a Gay Olympics? ("Oh yes, great idea. China would clean up on the gold medals again in that one.")

The birth of a nation

Today is a big deal for the Chinese: the anniversary of the foundation of the People's Republic in 1949. Footage of Mao's triumphal proclamation to the crowds on Tiananmen Square seems to be extremely scant (at least on YouTube), although I did find this from a Chinese TV programme about the event.

However, this is a fuller and rather more interesting account, reconstructed with actors for a 1960s propaganda film.

Awww.......

They hung out the red lanterns and the fairy lights along the far end of my compound this weekend. It is rather sweet. It resurrects deep-buried memories of childhood Christmases....

Thunderbirds are GO!

I really enjoyed watching the pictures of last week's Shenzhou 7 space mission. It brought a lot of childhood memories flooding back. I was obsessed with "the space programme" as a kid (my much older brother had some great books from the early days, all the Mercury and Gemini and early Apollo missions of the '60s, which I read and re-read umpteen times); I was an avid viewer of the last Moon missions, Skylab, and the development of the Space Shuttle; I committed to memory practically all the facts and figures in The Observer's Book of Space Flight; and, of course, I read a huge amount of science fiction.

This was China's third manned spaceflight - and the first on which they actually felt confident enough to show the launch live on television (at 9.10pm Beijing Time last Thursday).

Ahem. There was something not completely convincing about these pictures. The shots of the rocket in flight all looked like generic library footage from previous launches. And the shots of it on the launchpad (especially that brief shot of the base of the rocket, in the last few seconds before they fired up the engines) look suspiciously like a model.

Oh, I know, it's probably just a trick of perspective, an unfortunate combination of the harsh, flat lighting and the sheer monumentality of the structures that makes them look lacking in fine detail and gleamingly plasticky. But it seems to me that those Saturn V blast-offs back in the '60s and '70s always looked much more impressive, much more real. Maybe they just knew how to light the launch tower better for good TV pictures. Maybe they were savvy enough to intercut with a lot of close-up footage, where the violence and enormity of the rocket engines could not be in doubt. Or maybe it's just my memory playing tricks on me.

I don't for a moment suggest that there was any problem with Thursday's launch (much less that the whole mission was a fake!). But it does seem rather too plausible in a country like this that they wouldn't actually take the risk of showing a live launch on nationwide (and worldwide) TV, and would prepare suitable footage in advance.

This is what happens when you fake your fireworks display for the Olympic Opening Ceremony - nobody completely trusts anything your TV stations broadcast ever again.

An early sign?

I have been reflecting on when I had my first intimations that this year's Olympics were going to be a huge damp squib, a 'security'-heavy non-event, a foreigner-free zone.

A lot of laowai of my acquaintance seem enamoured of the theory that it was essentially a response to overseas criticism of the Tibet crackdown and the subsequent protests during the Olympic Torch Relay. I daresay that hardened government attitudes even further, but most of the 'security' measures and related visa regulations had been formulated and put into place before this April. Many of them had been at least hinted at more than a year ago.

I might have had my own private suspicions that this was how the government here was going to play it for the last 18 months or more; but these misgivings were dramatically confirmed for me early last summer. The lease on my apartment was up at the end of July. Beijing was rife with rumours of avaricious landlords already starting to bump up rents (and/or trying to get rid of their troublesome laowai tenants altogether), in anticipation of a possible Olympic bonanza the following summer. I feared I would be in an impossibly vulnerable position if I only renewed my lease for a single year, and had it expiring right on the eve of the Games. I therefore called my landlord up last June, and proposed a two-year extension of my lease - at the same rent.

Now, I would never let my landlord know this (and I hope it doesn't get back to him!), but - despite its crummy amenities - my apartment is an absolute bargain, given its huge size and enviable location (I'd probably pay at least three times as much for something similar in a laowai-targeted development). I had therefore expected something of a battle. Not a bit of it. The landlord was almost indecently eager to sign the proposed new lease.

"Hmm," I thought. "This is a pretty savvy guy. And he clearly doesn't think there is going to be any market at all for private letting to Olympic tourists next year. And possibly he's fearful of a huge crash in the rental market immediately after the Olympics."

I was rather discomfited by the discovery that my landlord could be so Cheshire-Cat pleased with the arrangement, and began to suspect that it was perhaps a poor deal for me. However, we haven't seen any significant dip in rental prices yet (rather the reverse, in fact - they are still on the up..... in complete defiance of the laws of supply & demand); and I'm quite happy that this is still a very low rent for the amount of space I've got. And it was worth burning a bit of money for the sake of some peace of mind, a reduction of sudden-eviction anxiety this summer (though not quite the elimination of it; if Chinese landlords want you out, there are all sorts of ways that they can achieve this!).

But that, I think, was when I first really knew how sluggish Olympic tourism was going to be this year. More than a year before the Games, the city's sharper landlords had all given up on there being any hope of lucrative holiday lets this August.

Bon mot for the week

"I don't mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy."

Samuel Butler (1835-1902)

"Unffhh!" Jesus takes a hit!

"Go, Timmy, go! Take that sandal-wearing hippie out of the game!!"

Yep, it looks to me as if JC is receiving the ball here rather than handing it off..... and that means he's in a whole lot of trouble. Well, in American Football, he's probably in a whole lot of trouble either way. That kid's going to pick him up and slam him into the ground. Yay!

This, I think, is my very favourite piece from the unbelievable kitschfest that is www.catholicshopper.com. I mentioned this over on the Barstool the other day. Also worth checking out is this piece by Libby Purves in The Times about a 'Top 20' of tasteless religious souvenirs. The Saint Sebastian pin-cushion has to be my favourite. Although the "thongs of praise" (ladies' briefs with pictures of saints on the front of them) are a close second.

The wild Wall

The "country cottage" I stayed in last weekend (my friend DD favours the term "hovel", which is not entirely fair: it's a pretty big place, and the structure is sound enough, but.... the amenities are, well, basic) is but a short walk from this magnificent stretch of The Great Wall, rugged and unreconstructed.

Lots of great hiking in the hills round there. I hope to go back there often.

Another Sunday poem

It's been a while since we had any Graves on here. Well, at least a couple of months!

Counting the beats

You, love, and I
(He whispers) you and I,
And if no more than you and I,
What care you or I?
Counting the beats,
Counting the slow heart beats,
The bleeding to death of time in slow heart beats,
Wakeful they lie,
Cloudless day,
Night and a cloudless day;
Yet the huge storm will break on their heads one day
From a bitter sky.
Where shall we be
(She whispers) where shall we be,
When death strikes home,
O where then shall we be
Who were you and I?
Not there but here,
(He whispers) only here,
As we are, here, together, now and here,
Always you and I.
Counting the beats,
Counting the slow heart beats,
The bleeding to death of time in slow heart beats,
Wakeful they lie.

Robert Graves (1895-1985)

The charm of the countryside

A picture from my very welcome getaway in the mountains out in Huairou County last weekend.

Sacrilege

A confession: I don't actually like the two centrepiece arenas of Beijing's Olympics very much.

I like the concept of the Bird's Nest more than its execution. That intricate lattice design is pretty striking at a distance, but when you get up close, it starts looking kind of crappy.

Are those really solid steel girders? Perhaps my problem stems partly from an inability to comprehend or accept the massiveness of the construction: it doesn't seem plausible that that lattice can be made of solid steel, or that it can be in any significant way load-bearing rather than simply decorative. Perhaps it is - but it doesn't look like it! Couldn't they have chosen a finish that looked more robust, more metallic? These girders are a drab, pale grey colour, with a matt texture that looks oddly plasticky - just not impressive at all. It almost looks as if it is made out of Lego.

Well, except that it appears to be rusting already. I noticed quite a number of worrying reddish-brown streaks on the grey paint. Well, we did have a lot of rain over the past few months......

And as for the Water Cube..... well, it looks pretty at night when they have all those different coloured lights playing across it. But by day..... well, it's a very, very dull shape, not to say ugly. And, er, it looks as if it's made of plastic bags. Which it is. An ingenious construction technique, perhaps, but hardly beautiful. Up close you can enjoy some interesting details of the varied shapes and contours of the bubble-surface (as in this shot below; though, unfortunately, the light wasn't very good when I was there taking photographs); but from a distance, it looks like nothing very special at all. (And my arch-curmudgeon friend Big Frank objects noisily that it isn't even a cube. He made this point so often last week while he was staying with me that I began to wish the structure might suddenly rise hundreds of feet out of the ground on hydraulic jacks and reveal itself to be truly cubic after all, but..... alas, this never came to pass. Actually, I'm not even sure that the horizontal cross-section is a perfect square; isn't it a bit longer than it is wide??)

Not that I'm competitive or anything....

But..... my lovely friend and recording partner DD has decided to enter the 10km race in the upcoming Beijing marathon.

I gather she used to do a bit of running in her younger days (and she's still rather younger than me, darn it!). And she's in very good shape: she's a working mum, she cycles prodigious distances all over town, she does some kind of extreme yoga thing.

And now she tells me that, on only her 3rd or 4th effort around the circuit of Houhai and Qianhai lakes that I usually run, she managed a time of 28 minutes.

28 minutes??!! Damn, that's fast. At least, it is for me, these days.

Yesterday, of course, I felt compelled to try to better that time. And I didn't quite manage it - even though it felt like I was running myself into the ground!!

Well, I had had rather too big a lunch. And I am still plagued with this dratted throat infection. And I haven't been able to keep up much of a running habit all year. But even so, damn, that's frustrating.

If the dear girl tells me next week she's run it in 27'30", I'm going to be killing myself in the search for more speed! Oh dear.

And another thing.....

..... that bugs me about Chinese behaviour on the roads:

Cyclists will always cut corners.

Always.

And, of course, without any attempt to slow down, or to watch out for people or vehicles emerging from the side roads they are about to enter.

Even though this means nearly hitting the wall or the kerb on the inside of the corner (quite often, actually hitting the wall or kerb!).

Even though this means running over irregular road surface, potholes, recently refilled trenches, blocked drain puddles, etc. at the near side of the corner.

Even though this means cutting dangerously in front of people who are trying to cross the junction and have almost reached the sidewalk they are skirting so close to. (Actually, this is kind of a separate - but equally irritating - phenomenon: Chinese cyclists always try to pass in front of pedestrians crossing the road. Always. Never behind. No matter what the road conditions. No matter how much space there is to pass safely behind you. No matter how close you are to the far kerb. They always try to whizz in front of you, to force you to stop in your tracks, to run over your toes.)

Even though this means maximising their chances of colliding head-on with a person or a vehicle coming out of the blind-spot just around the corner.

This happened to me while I was out jogging yesterday. A woman approaching me on a bicycle suddenly veered into the side entrance that I was just finishing crossing. I was keeping right to the edge of the road, so as to try to keep out of her way. I had actually just passed the entrance she was heading for. I was running on a bumpy patch of earth where a small roadworking ditch had just been filled in. And the bloody woman decided to cut the corner so sharply that she ran into me anyway. Even though this meant that she was wobbling around over the bumps of the filled-in ditch. Even though this meant she would probably have clipped the near edge of the wall (if she hadn't had me to use as a cushion). Even though this meant that she couldn't possibly see anyone or anything that might be about to come out of this entrance. Just utterly, completely bloody CRAZY.

And I'm pretty sure she saw me - but didn't respond at all. A lot of Chinese road-users, and bicyclists in particular, seem to completely ignore everyone else on the roads and just assume that it is other people's duty to somehow avoid them (a duty that they are mysteriously trusted to perform, even though they are all behaving in exactly the same way).

I'm sorry to say that, for once, I completely lost it: I just screamed blue murder at the stupid woman for 20 or 30 seconds. She could have broken my bloody leg, for chrissakes. She could have got herself killed. She probably will do if she carries on riding like that.

Half an hour later, I almost got hit by someone else, in very similar circumstances.

It is one of the great disincentives to jogging outdoors in this country, and especially in this city. Oiveh.

Red sky at night

This was the view out of my kitchen window at about 6.30pm yesterday.

We don't get many great sunsets in Beijing - but that makes the ones we do get all the more cherishable. And we have had some really fantastic clear skies here the last few days. It's almost enough to cheer me up........

The weekly haiku

Always the damn cough;
Day and night, for weeks on end;
Always the damn cough.

Nope, my state of health is not good. I'm actually starting to get rather worried about it. And, in general, I pay no attention to health problems unless they seem potentially life-threatening. I've had a persistent cough, wretched sore throat, intermittent fever, and hugely swollen neck glands for, oh, getting on for two months now. I took a course of antiobiotics last week, which seemed to ameliorate the problem slightly, but hasn't put an end to it. Bottom line: I don't trust Chinese hospitals to be medically competent; I don't trust foreign hospitals not to be commercially ruthless. In fact, I think I probably have a pretty fair chance in either kind of hospital of being both misdiagnosed and egregiously ripped off. And I just don't have the spare cash to run that gauntlet. (Health insurance?? Hollow laughter, breaking down into sobs.) I think my only recourse may be to head back to the UK and try to get a free examination on the NHS. I'd been planning to visit home in December anyway..... so, I guess I'll try to hang on until then..... and hope for a spontaneous resolution in the meantime.

Hawk. Spit. Death-rattle.

Fingerlickin' good!

Here's an engaging little oddity (something that I rather suspect my buddy Tolstoy, that indefatigable beachcomber of Internet eccentrica, will lift from me for his delightful Webside Gleanings blog):

'Redneck Art' - a rather good finger-painting of a deer made on the table of a diner.....entirely with, er.... barbecue sauce.

I stumbled upon this, by the way, thanks to a link about the oddball Texas delicacy of "chicken-fried bacon" that was left for me here by my pal Brendan the Translator.

Keeping my seethe to myself

Yet another reason why I don't learn Chinese.....

The other day I had to pay a visit to my local branch of the Industrial & Commercial Bank of China to pay my monthly phone bill.

Trying to accomplish anything in a Chinese bank can be an exhausting gumption test, particularly in a small neighbourhood branch where no-one speaks any English. But my little branch has been getting a lot better over the past year or so. They've taken on quite a few new staff - mostly girls - who do seem friendly and helpful, and even fairly brisk and efficient. And just lately, they have appointed a middle-aged lady as a supervisor (and she does speak a little bit of English), and she seems to have got all the service points working much more efficiently.

Well, all but one. Dumb-as-a-Post is still there. He's a surly young man of about thirty, and, I think, the only member of staff who's been there ever since I moved here about 4 years ago. He is just unbelievably sour, slow-moving, obtuse, and obstructive - a real old school China service professional!

I hadn't seen him in there for a while, and was hoping he might have left. But yesterday, he was back - and his was the only window that was free. I was so dreading the encounter that I considered joining one of the other lines (none of them had more than one or two people in them, but some transactions in Chinese banks can take a very long time indeed). Instead, I decided to face up to my nemesis.

I think he must have smelled my fear. I passed him a scrap of paper with my number on it and told him I wanted to pay my telephone fee. This is what I always do. For the past 18 months or so, nobody has given me any shit about this. One of the nice young girls has keyed the number into the computer, printed off my bill, taken my money and given me my change with a minimum of fuss - and even, of late, with a breezy smile. Dumb-as-a-Post is looking at me with a mixture of contempt and incomprehension. He decides - as he usually does - that I really ought to fill out a 'request slip' detailing the nature of my transaction, in full, in Chinese. Lately, the other staff seem to have been quite happy to dispense with this otiose piece of paper entirely. If they do feel that it is somehow a 'necessary procedure', they will be quite happy to fill out the chit for me, using the information from the bill printout - it only takes 15 seconds. It should be pretty obvious to anyone, I would have thought, that, since I can hardly speak two words of Chinese, it is highly unlikely that I can read or write even one word. But Dumb-as-a-Post doesn't get this concept; he keeps waving the shitty little form in my face. And, unfortunately, the angelic supervisor lady is not around just at the moment.

I don't think it's just me. I think there's a reason why there's never much of a line at Dumb-as-a-Post's window. The other clerks were all looking at him as if he were a complete dickhead. So were some of the other customers. Soon, one of them came to my aid and filled out the form for me.

I mentioned this incident to a laowai friend that evening, and he said, "Don't you think you'd be able to deal better with situations like this if you spoke a bit more Chinese?"

"No," I replied quite emphatically. "First of all, if I'd shown any sign of being able to cope with things myself, that nice chap in the next line wouldn't have come over to help me. And second, I probably would have just called the clerk a dickhead in a language he could understand, and that probably wouldn't have helped."

We all suffer these vexing incidents from time to time. We all go through spells when we are particularly vulnerable to them, particularly low on patience and forebearance. We all - no matter how saintly and pacific our temperaments (and mine's not very) - experience the occasional bout of 'China rage'. And when this happens, and you get tempted to vent a bit, it's really much better to do it in an incomprehensible foreign language (although best to avoid the F-word, since almost everyone understands that these days!). Succumbing to the urge to swear at people in Chinese would be a very, very bad thing. And some of my foreign friends who speak good Chinese get themselves into bother because of this occasionally. I'd rather not expose myself to that risk, thank you. Ignorance of Chinese can be a kind of protective insulation. (Also, of course, you don't really know when they're insulting you..... except that you can usually deduce it from body language and so on; and I do in fact know most of the choicer swear words. Nevertheless, on balance, I maintain that not being able to swear at people in their own language does help to avoid unpleasantness sometimes.)