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

A day to stay at home

Yet another of Yang Liu's posters illustrating fundamental differences between the cultures of China and 'The West': here we have 'Sundays on the road' (or 'in the park').

I'm not sure why the city is so thronged with people on Sundays (even more so than Saturdays, it seems). Perhaps it's that there's less flexi-time working, less ability to take time off during the week; or perhaps it's a result of the low level of average incomes - people can only afford to go out once a week, and for most of them Sunday is the day. Then again, maybe the folks here just haven't cultivated the concept of the lazy Sunday at home (or the wild Saturday night out that so often necessitates it!)..... or they haven't yet adopted our stay-at-home hobbies like D-I-Y and gardening (nobody in Beijing has a garden!). And driving out into the country is, I think, only just starting to take off as an interest (perhaps people lack confidence - rightly - in their driving ability, and are wary of trying to go too far, frightened of taking on the crappy roads and even-crazier driving that you find in the countryside); most people seem to prefer to stay in the city at the weekend. The area near where I live regularly encounters late Sunday afternoon traffic jams as bad as any in the mid-week rush hours. And the subway is best avoided.

If I go out this afternoon, it'll probably be on foot.

Once more, with feeling

I received a text message out of the blue on Saturday lunchtime from an engineer at a recording studio I'd never heard of before. Apparently, one of the American voice artists I know had recommended me. There was a short gig in the offing, doing a voiceover for a corporate promotional video.

However, they had to get me approved by the client first, so they were hassling me to provide voice samples (yes, of course, this was all supposed to be happening at no notice at all, and over the weekend). So.... I frittered away a chunk of my afternoon figuring out how the Recording accessory on my new computer works. (Isn't it amazing how Microsoft manages to make such a basic utility..... a) almost impossible to find; b) extremely non-intuitive to use [WHY can you not simply delete or discard unwanted recordings?? Oh no, you must save everything - as, e.g., 'Untitled 17' - before you can delete it!]; and c) completely different in appearance and operation every year or two??)

Once I'd e-mailed off some samples I got another text message back from the engineer. He thought my voice was "too soft". I'm not quite sure what he meant by that - my voice has been called many things, but rarely "soft". I suspect he meant that I was too understated, unemotional.

The remainder of his 'direction' was even more perplexing: "more high, strengthful, cheery, adventure, tough".

I asked him to send me a sample of what he meant - and the script he wanted me to read. It turns out that what he wanted was fulsome, gushing, near-hysterical. It's hard to get that passionate about annual production targets for a bus factory, but I did my best.

They were much happier with my new set of samples. Oh yes, that's the stuff!

But, belatedly, they remembered I wasn't American..... and the client had specified an American English voice.

I hate it when that happens! And it happens all the time......

Film List - what else I've been watching lately

A very quick and simple one again this month (feeling lazy again...). Penury has been keeping me home quite a lot recently, so - in addition to my planned 'Christmas treats' (I didn't quite get around to watching all of them, because a few got mislaid in my move to the new apartment, but I did watch most of them) - I've watched a fair few other DVDs over the past couple of months since I moved in here.

Here is a rundown.

Other Films I've Watched Recently


The Thin Man
(Dir. W.S. van Dyke, 1934)

One of the great drinking films - pretty terrible as a detective yarn, but it zings with great lines.

To Live And Die In L.A.
(Dir. William Friedkin, 1985)

Very brash, very 80s - rather like a more grown-up, edgier, more morally confused Miami Vice; and it has probably the best car chase ever.

The Longest Day
(Dir. Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton, Bernhard Wicki, Darryl F. Zanuck, 1962)
Epic, multi-faceted account of the D-Day landings that I remember from my childhood. Probably hadn't seen it in nearly 30 years, but it holds up very well.

Lola Montes
(Dir. Max Ophuls, 1955)

A random recent discovery in my favourite 'golden oldie' DVD store, and a very pleasant surprise: an unusual and stylish treatment of an extraordinary life, and Martine Carol is radiantly beautiful - if perhaps a little too determinedly enigmatic - in the title role.

La Cité des Enfants Perdus
(Dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet & Marc Caro, 1995)

The story here is a bit of a meandering mess (requiring an awful lot of clunky exposition to make any sense of it at all), and not nearly so engaging as the macabre masterpiece that is Delicatessen; but there is some fantastic, dream-like imagery in this (as well as actual dream imagery), and two of the scariest ever renditions of Santa Claus.

Shane
(Dir. George Stevens, 1953)

One of the best Westerns ever, and one of the best bar fights.

The New Legend Of Shaolin
(Dir. Corey Yuen & Ying Wong, 1994)

Also known by numerous other names, including Five Founders of Shaolin, Legend of Future Shaolin, and Red Dragon, this is a delightfully cheesy Jet Li comedy martial arts flick that I discovered amongst a batch of DVDs bequeathed to me by a departing friend last year.

Singin' In The Rain
(Dir. Stanley Donen, 1952)

I loathe Gene Kelly, but there's so much else to enjoy in this silly tale of '20s Hollywood making the transition to talkies - notably Donald O'Connor's Make 'Em Laugh routine.

The Red Badge Of Courage
(Dir. John Huston, 1951)

A great version of Stephen Crane's classic Civil War novella, although it might have been even better had the studio not slashed almost an hour of footage. This is another one that I hadn't seen since I was a kid.

American Graffiti
(Dir. George Lucas, 1973)

Lucas's last good film (though not as good as his debut, THX 1138), a classic slice of small town Americana.

Kafka
(Dir. Steven Soderbergh, 1991)

A strangely overlooked minor classic, probably my favourite Soderbergh film after Sex, Lies and Videotape. I usually can't stand drippy Jeremy Irons, but his constipated lugubriousness is just right for playing Kafka here. And Lem Dobbs' script is brilliant at conjuring paranoia out of the most trivial incidents: in true Kafka style, the mundane details of life suddenly become fraught with potential menace.

Destry Rides Again
(Dir. George Marshall, 1939)

Jimmy Stewart at his best, and Marlene as the ultimate saloon chanteuse - wonderful!

Sideways
(Dir. Alexander Payne, 2004)

Another of the great drinking films - although the undertones of this are so dark, it's at times very uncomfortable viewing, it scarcely feels like a comedy at all. Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church pull off a remarkable trick here in being likeably unlikeable.

A Walk In The Sun
(Dir. Lewis Milestone, 1945)

I'd never heard of this one before, but it turns out to be quite a diverting war film - made when the war was barely over. It's interesting in the narrowness of its focus (based on an autobiographical novel by Harry Brown), following a single US platoon through the 1943 Salerno landings and their first morning on Italian soil; interesting too in its lack of bravado or idealisation. These soldiers don't really know what's going on, and have lost their commanding officer; they're just improvising as best they can; some are dumb, some are cowardly; their senior sergeant suffers a nervous collapse and is unable to lead them - these are not things you commonly see in American WWII films, certainly not in those made during or shortly after the War. Director Lewis Milestone, of course, was also responsible for the classic All Quiet On The Western Front.

Nanook of the North
(Dir. Robert J. Flaherty, 1922)

A mesmerising documentary about the life of the Inuit. Nanook's family are constantly on the edge of losing their battle for survival in the harsh wilderness, and I'd forgotten that 'the great hunter' did in fact die a year or two after shooting finished, starving to death on a failed deer hunt.

Election
(Dir. Alexander Payne, 1999)

There are two marvellous performances from Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon in this scathing satire of small town ambitions adapted from a Tom Perrotta novel. This is one of my favourite American films of the last ten years or so. I hadn't previously clocked that it had the same director as Sideways - I should look out for more of this guy.

It really ought to be a word

My 'Social Secretary' - the young lady who's been helping me organise parties lately - felt that she'd been overdoing things a bit in December, and decided to renounce booze for a while. Over the New Year she told me she was going to spend a few days in a monastic retreat.

I was a little taken aback. It seemed so out of character for her. Moreover, since she is an extremely vivacious young woman, I was concerned for the monks, I feared that their asexual tranquility might be catastrophically disturbed by her presence.

Of course, it didn't help that she's a sloppy speller on SMS, and one of the messages she sent me about this actually said: "I'm going into a molestary for a few days."


I wonder if there's one of those anywhere near me?

Recently, on The Barstool...

A couple of days ago on my parallel blog I added a rundown of recommended posts from the 3rd quarter of 2008 (a companion to the list I provided for Froogville here last week). That was a particularly productive spell of blogging for me, producing a wide variety of good posts. My particular favourites would be this alcoholic bon mot, this humorous thumbnail sketch of a night out, this silly flight of fancy (attempting in vain to get the attention of the British Embassy!), and this sombre (but not without a joke or two) reflection on the Olympic year in Beijing.

Earlier this week I turned up an hilarious story from Singapore about a nightclub running a drinks promotion called 'Fill My Cups'.

And I marked Australia Day on Tuesday by posting a couple of pieces of classic humour depicting the stereotypical Pommie perception of Aussies, courtesy of Barry McKenzie and Monty Python.

One for The Cowboy

Well, two, in fact....

I am attempting to shame my old university buddy - and erstwhile leading commenter - 'The British Cowboy' into returning to the fold by dedicating this post to him.

He has been living in the States for getting on for 16 years now, and is thoroughly converted to the 'lifestyle' there - in particular, to the massive portions of tasty but unhealthy food. When I used to visit him in Philadelphia (10 or 12 years since; he had a house just a couple of hundred yards from the best bar in North America - great days!), our favourite snack from his local corner store was 'Pennsylvania Lard Chips'. In my memory, that was what it said on the packet - but I suspect that memory, as so often, plays me false, that this is just what The Cowboy and I called them. I think they were probably the brand below, Good's (although I am pretty sure there at least used to be a prominent banner on the packet back then saying something like 'Cooked In Lard' - it seems they've become more discreet about advertising the lard factor in these increasingly "health-conscious" times).

So enthusiastically did The Cowboy embrace the pleasures of lard that he bought a t-shirt (from Viz magazine, I think) with the picture above on it (purporting to be a genuine 1950s advertisement, but I'm pretty sure it's a spoof). I always rather coveted one myself; I wonder if they're still available. [I'd downloaded this picture from the Net ages ago, but only just noticed it was tagged with the name of the StrangeCosmos website.... which I visited for the first time a couple of days ago, and got rather bogged down in for an hour or two!]

Darn, I wish we could get a really good potato chip (or 'crisp', as we like to call them in the UK) here in Beijing. Lay's and Pringle's don't quite cut it, and the local brands are mostly just horrible.

So..... come back, Cowboy. We miss you.

Haiku for the week

Chill nights, dazzling days;
Not a single cloud in sight,
Only endless blue.

Pretty amazing sky today....

More computer vexation

My adoption of a subscription VPN five weeks ago has not entirely ended my online troubles.

Oh no. Firefox's baffling refusal to download Blogger comment pages has forced to me to revert to using Explorer as my default browser.

And Explorer, as some of you may have discovered for yourselves, has this maddening habit of deciding - for no apparent reason - that you are "Working Offline" even when you are in fact still connected.

In all the vast armoury of user-unfriendly idiocies that Microsoft has visited upon a suffering world, this surely has to be one of the most pointless. Why does the browser get confused like this? Why can't it detect the actual connection state? What the hell is wrong with just going ahead and attempting to load or refresh a webpage as requested (and judging from the result of that whether the computer is in fact online or offline)?? Why must they insist on us repeatedly going back into the 'Tools' menu to manually uncheck the 'Work Offline' setting?? To me, it just makes no sense at all.


Now, this was plenty bad enough when it just happened once or twice a day - when I was resuming an earlier Web-browsing session after a spell offline, and Explorer hadn't recognised that I'd come back online again.

But over the past few days - for some reason I can't fathom - Explorer has started switching to 'Offline' status repeatedly, in the middle of a browsing session, without any break in the connection at all. It's happening dozens of times a day; sometimes every few minutes, or every few seconds. It is rendering Explorer well-nigh unusable.


Any techie types out there able to offer me any insights on this? (I do hope it's not more mischief from The Kafka Boys....)

God on their side

I was relieved to learn that the US military is to stop displaying Bibilical references on its hardware (apparently, coded citations of New Testament verses were being added alongside the serial numbers of image-intensifier rifle sights - a personal quirk of the Jesus-lovin' Michigan manufacturer which the Pentagon was supposedly unaware of until recently).

However, in noodling around just now on Strange Cosmos (a rather haphazardly laid-out and hard-to-search group of interrelated websites, but rather fun: full of weird news and pictures), I found this. It looks as though the manufacturers of this mortar may be another Bible Belt proselytizer. General Petraeus is going to be a busy man, sorting all this stuff out.

While flicking through some of the stories and commentary on the Bible-bashin' nightsights story, I came upon this piece on the Huffington Post by Chris Rodda, a member of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (even some Christians are concerned about the prevalence of Christian zealotry in the US military). Her HP article from last September, Top Ten Ways to Convince the Muslims We're On A Crusade, is also well worth a look.

Pacing

One of the unusual skills one has to learn when recording English listening materials for China's educational publishers is a self-awareness about the speed of your speech.

Speaking speed is strictly graded according to the English level of the intended audience.

Fortunately, most of the work we do is practice drills for the English listening element of the gaokao - the national universities admission exam, held each June. This is paced at a fairly normal 160-165wpm.

Materials for the final year of senior high are also paced at about that level, although - unless they are specifically for intensive gaokao practice - we usually take a little more care to enunciate each word precisely, to lengthen our pauses just slightly. Second year of senior high is about 150wpm, first year 140wpm. Middle school materials are generally in the 110-130 range.

Beginners' materials get as slow as 90-110wpm. Materials for very young learners can get as slow as 70 or 80wpm, occasionally even 60wpm - which is just painful to do, really exhausting for the vocal cords.

The only exception to this framework seems to be Guangdong province in the south, where - whether through their greater historical exposure to English speakers in Hong Kong and Guangzhou, or a natural quickfire garrulousness in the local culture and temperament, or just from a perverse desire to be a little bit different from the rest of China - they ramp up the speeds by 10-15wpm across the board. This means that for gaokao, you're getting up towards 180wpm - which is way faster than most native speakers normally speak; gabbling, in fact. (It's also really hard to do, because you don't have time to read ahead, and so make far more stumbles. We're never given any time to pre-read or rehearse these scripts; they're all sight-read, so you have to try to read a line or two ahead of what you're actually speaking in order to get a sense of the context, decide on appropriate phrasing and intonation, edit out any Chinglish mistakes, mentally prepare for any tongue-twister moments, and so on. This is the other great skill of this work, which some people never really master. Voice recording work is often derided by other expats, but to do it well actually requires a lot of concentration and experience.)

So, a couple of weeks ago, my partner and I are asked to record something for a middle school listening practice book. We know how fast this should be, from long experience. And I think the scripts are actually marked as 120wpm. They also play us a snippet of a recording of one of our American colleagues reading the same script, as an example (as they usually do at this particular studio): yes, that's about 120wpm.

So, we start off recording it at 120wpm. But almost immediately we are interrupted by the young girl representing the publishers - can we go a little faster? Well, OK; you're the boss; anything to oblige.

Five minutes later, the same thing - faster. And again, faster. What?? Is this for Guangdong? No, no, north China, regular speed. Is this wrongly marked as being for middle school, then? Is it actually for 1st year senior high? No, no, middle school.

We're baffled, irritated - but we do as we're told.

The publisher girl is just going crazy: 4, 5, 6 times she interrupts us to urge us to go even faster. By the end, we're rattling through it at a full-on, gaokao 160wpm.

And you know what? That bloody girl butts in yet again with a request to speed up - on the very last page of the goddamn script!!!

It was no great surprise when we received a call from the recording studio last week to tell us that the publisher wasn't happy with our recording; it was much too fast; could we come in to re-do it?

Well, yes...... IF we're going to get paid for re-doing it. Fortunately, they were prepared to do that. So, yesterday we went in to give it another crack.

The same girl was there supervising the recording for the publisher. After 5 minutes, she came into the booth to ask us to go faster!! Ahem. NO. You know what, lady - WE know our jobs, and YOU don't. Just shut the f*** up, and let us get on with it.

You'd think, wouldn't you, that having cost her employer several hundred renminbi with her previous screw-up she might have learnt a lesson. It seems not. Some of the people I have to work with are just inconceivably dim. And it vexes me a good deal.

Deep breaths.

Ways and means

Three weeks after the heavy early-January snowfall, there's still a lot of snow uncleared in Beijing. Although the daytime temperatures have been climbing close to or a bit above freezing over the last few days, the remaining mounds of snow are so deep-frozen now that they refuse to budge.

The roads and sidewalks, at least, are (almost) all well-cleared now: the snow has all been shovelled into heaps at the side of the road, or dumped on the grassy central reservations.

Yesterday, however, the snow shovellers were out in force once again.

This time, they were shovelling the frozen snow back on to the roads.

Yes, somebody had had the bright idea of spreading the remaining snow and ice across the roads, in the expectation that passing traffic would help to melt it - or at least disperse it.

I'm not convinced about the efficacy of this tactic, but.... even so, I am sort of impressed by the ingenuity on display here.

Then again, maybe it has nothing to do with attempted snow dispersal, really. Perhaps the city authorities' only concern is with keeping their small army of workmen busy with something.

Strange dreams

I don't often have dreams that I can remember, but when I do, they're usually pretty kooky. I've had a string of late-ish nights, and a very long day yesterday, and on turning in last night was starting to feel a bit poorly from some iffy chuanr. So.... conditions ripe for something such as this....

I found myself dozing in an unfamiliar place. I seemed to be adjacent to, overlooking Beijing's Bell Tower Square.

I kept half-waking, looking out of a window, wondering why I was there, and then..... being too tired, or apathetic, or mired in sleep-paralysis, to get up and look around.

At one point, a driver - presumably drunk or very tired - drove his open-topped car directly into the corner of the big stone wall around the perimeter of the Bell Tower. It wasn't a particularly high-speed impact, but he didn't brake at all, and wasn't wearing a seatbelt: he hit his head very hard on the on the top edge of the windscreen, and I was pretty sure he was dead on the spot. This was just before dawn, and there was still not a soul around. I felt I should get up and go and check on the crash victim, but I succumbed to overpowering sleep again. I woke again, perhaps 20 or 30 minutes later, and the poor chap was still there motionless in his car. Still, it seemed, no-one was up and about; no-one had reported the accident, or come out to take a look at him.

I passed out again. When I woke again, I felt guilty as hell about not having gone to the aid of the crash victim, but it was now evidently sometime later: the square was bustling with people, and the crashed car appeared to have been removed.

Funny thing was, though, that now it was full daylight, there was something not quite right about my surroundings. The two large buildings looked very like the Bell and Drum Towers, but the other buildings around the square were different. I had no idea where I was!

What was perhaps even more disturbing was that I discovered I'd been sleeping in a car. In a taxi, in fact. (During the night, I was pretty sure I'd been on the upper floor of a two-storey house alongside the square, but.... later on, this had changed, as things are wont to do in dreams.)

I was convinced that some rogue taxi driver had decided to take advantage of my having fallen asleep on the way home to take me miles out of my way, and jack up my fare through the roof. However, the driver had completely disappeared.... and the dream ended rather perfunctorily with me making a swift exit before he could return to try to extort an enormous fare from me (I think I found another cab to take me home, but I was starting to wake in real life at that point, and the conclusion of the dream is just a series of vague impressions rather than fully-formed images).

It's not too hard to piece together the origins of the various elements here. I do live very close to Bell Tower Square; it's one of my favourite parts of Beijing. I have often commented on the untrustworthiness of certain Beijing cabbies, and was reflecting to a friend just recently about how they will occasionally refuse to recognise even the most famous addresses and landmarks in the city; indeed, at times, they will wilfully misunderstand you, and try taking you far out of your way (I did once - in my early days here, before I could give directions very well - have one chap who'd been asked to take me to the Bell or the Drum Tower make a huge detour to the north, up towards the 4th Ringroad!!). And it's not inconceivable that there might be other less famous Drum and Bell Towers elsewhere in Beijing (it's quite a common combination in Chinese Imperial architecture: there are small drum and bell towers in some of the city's parks, and large ones in some other cities, such as Xi'an and Nanjing). It's not even inconceivable that, with the Chinese love of faking up historic landmarks (and creating tacky 'world parks' with copies of famous buildings), someone had thought of creating life-size facsimiles of the two famous towers in another part of the city.

Also, of course, when one is coming home a little late and a little drunk, falling asleep in a cab is a constant hazard - something that I have indeed suffered several times (although I've only ever dozed off for a moment: occasionally enough to allow the cabbie to get in a wrong turn, but not to hijack me to the far side of town), something that I am regularly a little anxious about. However, it was not an especially present fear last night, since I'd only been out in the neighbourhood and had walked home.

I think the main real-life input into the dream was that some friends I'd been talking with earlier in the day had mentioned alarming rumours that there is to be some new development in the area around the Bell and Drum Towers (there's already a huge - mysterious - construction project going on at the Air Force base a few hundred metres to the east: the fact that this is happening on a military installation does not at all preclude the possibility that it is a commercial real estate project!!); however, the immediate vicinity of the two Towers is supposed to be under some kind of preservation order. Alas, in China, such 'orders' are extremely flexible: if someone with powerful enough connections (and/or enough money to distribute in bribes) comes up with a plan for redeveloping the area, then I am quite sure 'exceptions' could be made.

So, the disturbing unfamiliarity of very familiar surroundings (and, perhaps, the incompetent driver's kamikaze charge at the Bell Tower?) were, I think, probably expressions of my disquiet at this news.

And the element of very broken sleep, sleep in an inappropriate place, may well have been connected with the fact that I had crashed out on my sofa when taking off my shoes. I woke up several times, but as in the later dream, I was too exhausted to summon the willpower to move into my bedroom until shortly before dawn. So, that part of my dream was constructed from very recent experience.

There is something particularly disturbing about dreaming about being asleep, and hence becoming uncertain as to whether you're really 'awake'. I'm glad it doesn't happen to me often.

Bon mot for the week

"Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going."

Paul Theroux (1961- )

My Fantasy Girlfriend - Vanna Bonta

I first stumbled across the remarkable Ms Bonta via a quotations website about a year ago (she furnished a 'bon mot of the week' last February), but somehow didn't get around to elevating her to Fantasy Girlfriend status back then.


She is quite the renaissance woman! Encouraged by her grandfather, the celebrated Italian writer Luigi Ugolini, she began writing as a child, and had a first collection of poetry published when she was barely 14; a short story of hers was taken up by Gene Roddenberry and turned into an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation; and she's written a successful sci-fi novel, Flight, an innovative, genre-defying piece she describes as 'quantum fiction'.

She started out (a surprisingly long time ago; she's past 50 now, but still looking very fine) in a career as a model and actress (best remembered for a cameo role as the hero's mother in cult fantasy romp The Beastmaster), but soon withdrew from public view to specialise as a voiceover artist instead. She was - allegedly - the model for the lissom female figures in Frederick Hart's 'Ex Nihilo' series of bas-relief sculptures at the Washington National Cathedral. From time to time, she comes up with some very good lines in her writing, and in her conversation. She plays the piano acceptably as well. And she has the most stunning blue eyes.

As if this were not enough, she's also made a name for herself in recent years as an advocate of sex in space, and to facilitate this has designed the 2suit - which uses the miracle of velcro to allow two people to get, and remain intimate in low-gravity environments.

And she's created this music video celebrating the human conquest of gravity.

And did I mention she has the most amazing eyes?

Haiku for the week

Time for something new?
Leaving begins in the heart,
And may end there too.

I have never been quite so dissatisfied with my life in Beijing, but I still have no likely escape route...