Hating it already.....

I am feeling quite glad that the abrupt drying up of all my work means that I may not have any need to take public transport around Beijing again for the next week.

The seething masses on the subway, encumbered with much luggage and making their way towards train and bus stations with a view to returning to their home towns before the start of the Spring Festival holiday (still 10 days away!), already becoming an unpleasant phenomenon on Monday and Tuesday of this week, have grown quite intolerable today.

If you root around my archives, you will find quite a few pieces on the irritations of travelling on the subway in Beijing - chiefly to do with the bizarrely inconsiderate behaviour of your fellow passengers. Luckily for me, I haven't been having to use the subway that much in recent months, and very seldom in the rush hours; so, I had been rather forgetting just how horrendous the experience can become.

Now, I know every country in the world is plagued by the solipsistic arseholes who stop dead as soon as they step through the doors of a subway carriage, even though they have plenty of space to move further inside, and even though they should be well aware that there is a large crowd of people impatient to board behind them. However, in most other countries I've been in, I think, such people are in the minority; often indeed, I'd like to think, a fairly small minority. Amongst the Chinese, it's very nearly 100%.

At this time of year, this vexation is given an added refinement: people who stop dead on the threshold of the carriage and drop all their luggage at their feet. You only need two or three of these gits to do this, and you have an impenetrable barrier preventing anyone else from getting on or off the train through this door. Ggrrrrr.......

I must be patient. I must try to think calm thoughts. The seasonal rush appears to be peaking early this year; by next Friday, the madness should be subsiding. And then we may have a week or two of relative peace and quiet.

War on.... 'Demonstration classes'

I am in some discussions at the moment about maybe starting some legal English teaching after the Spring Festival holiday.

Unfortunately, my contact suggested he'd like me to do a 'demonstration class' for him, and I did not react well.

In the first place, I find it frankly a little insulting that people wouldn't just hire me on the basis of my CV: I am one of the best qualified and most experienced teacher/trainers knocking around Beijing, and probably about the only one who also happens to have qualified as a lawyer. (And if they don't trust my CV - which wouldn't be that unreasonable, since most people lie their arses off on their CVs over here - they could always check out some references. There are plenty of people I've worked with in the past who would recommend me very highly; but, for some reason, Chinese employers always seem to think it too much trouble to conduct this kind of elementary research into the background of their prospective hires.)

However, my objections to the curse of the 'demonstration class' go much further than this matter of personal pride. I think it can fairly be objected that in most cases this exercise is simply a waste of time, both for the job candidate and for the hiring school. Furthermore, I have, over the years, found an insistence on trial by 'demonstration' to be more or less definitive of a particularly bad Chinese school (or other employer) that I'd rather not be involved with. I have lost myself a few potentially quite lucrative gigs by pointblank refusing a 'demo' request.

There are quite a few Chinese schools out there - really - who shamelessly exploit this ruse, routinely forcing job applicants to give a full 'demonstration' lesson to an actual class of students, thereby getting some FREE teaching to ease their budgets and boost their profits (you perhaps only need to pull this stunt a few times every week to double your administrator's salary over the year).

But if you're not teaching an actual class (which I would always refuse to do, without at least a token payment), what is the bloody point? You usually find yourself sat in a room with 3 or 4 of the office staff - who probably have pretty good English already, but absolutely no interest in the English for Special Purposes or whatever you're being asked to 'teach' them, and who resent being taken away from their work, and are probably bored out of their mind because they get put through this 3 or 4 times a week. It's a completely unreal situation: no learning goals, no class structure, no integration into a wider course: no proper 'students', no motivation, no genuine interaction with the teacher. Very often you don't even have a board to write on.

The things that make a good teacher - clarity of communication (having a good voice and good pronunciation, with no strong accent; being self-aware about the volume and pace of one's speaking, and using vocabulary of an appropriate level for particular students), warmth of personality (being able to make a good connection with students so that they will like you and enjoy your classes), knowledge and experience, etc. - can all be judged much better in an interview, in my opinion. (Not that I'd trust most Chinese education professionals I've met to be very astute even about judging a foreigner's basic level of English proficiency, much less their strengths or weaknesses as a teacher.)

No, the 'demonstration class' is - in most cases* - a complete waste of time for all parties. And I am sworn to trying to stamp it out.

And I've probably just talked myself out of another job.....

* I do allow that if proper parameters are set for the exercise (like being given a clear topic/purpose for the lesson and some materials to use, a reasonable timeframe [neither too long nor too short: 10 to 15 minutes would be ideal, I'd suggest], an actual classroom to work in, and a handful of 'real' students), and it's going to be assessed by an experienced teacher, preferably a native speaker.... well, then OK. But that never happens. And if it did, I'd still expect at least a modest reimbursement for it: to be reassured that the outfit weren't complete cheapskates, and that they weren't trying to pad out their timetables with FREE LESSONS.

A New Year Daily Llama

Since we haven't had any for a while, here is a triple dose of llama cuteness for you. Moonrat, at least, should be happy for a while.

As M de La Bruyère was saying the other day (more or less), "there's no new thing under the sun". I find that www.dailyllama.com is in fact a Monty Python fan website, albeit one that hasn't been updated for a few years now. And http://thedailyllama.wordpress.com appears to be (though, mercifully, the Chinese Net censors are saving me from inadvertently viewing it!) devoted to pictures of Latin American glamour models. And if you click on this 'Daily Llama' you actually find a picture of you-know-who..... or very nearly. (It's not so long ago that the Kafka Boys here in China were blocking Google Image searches for "daily llama". Perhaps they ought to start again. There's nothing so subversive as a punningly mis-labelled waxwork.)

It begins......

Public transport around Beijing today was thronged with people (yes, even more - much, much more than usual) with wheelie-bags in tow, making their way towards the railway stations.

It would appear that the great annual migration 'home' for the Spring Festival Holiday has begun already. Chinese New Year's Day doesn't fall until a week on Monday, but the travel bedlam is starting already.

And I just heard my first firework outside!

I swear this holiday gets longer every year......

Naughty, naughty

A friend is contemplating a visit here in a few months, after attending to some business in Taipei. Over the weekend he asked me about the logistics of this. Despite a recent liberalisation of cross-strait communications, the answer at present still seems to be, "You can't get here from there." I couldn't find any direct Taipei to Beijing flights online.

I tried searching on E-Long - probably the most successful, and certainly the most foreigner-friendly travel website in China - and initially had difficulty in finding Taipei at all. It's not featured in the drop-down menu list of 'domestic' destinations, you see; it's categorised as an international flight.

I have long believed that one of the reasons for maintaining the 'Special Autonomous Region' status for Hong Kong and Macau is that this creates a conveniently fuzzy half-and-half category into which Taiwan can also be fitted. It is fundamentally "a part of China", of course; just not in quite the same way as the rest of China.

I recall that the last time I was at Beijing airport (quite a long time ago!), the signage there observed this same odd neither/nor pretence: flights for Hong Kong and Macau were neither 'domestic' nor 'international', and were slotted between the two in the Departures area (I think E-Long treats them as 'domestic'). I imagined that Taipei would be treated in the same way, if and when direct flights between there and Beijing ever get going.

Whether Taipei can be described as a 'domestic' destination, or whether some new and strange nomenclature needs to be invented for it, it certainly can't be an 'international' destination..... because, er, Taiwan isn't a nation. It's a part of China. You all know that, right? Course you do. Somebody ought to tell the chaps at E-Long, before they get sent off to Heilongjiang for a few months of "re-education through labour".


Footnote: E-Long is such a China-centric service that its flight-finder only seems to allow you to select a Chinese city (other than Taipei) as your point of origin. Surely this is encouraging the 'Brain Drain'??

Now I've seen everything!

Well, not really, of course.

I just happen to have seen something that I had not previously seen in China - although perhaps the surprise should be rather that I have not witnessed such a thing in my 6 years here than that I did witness it today.

This lunchtime I saw a man riding a motorcycle over a pedestrian footbridge.

He was a pizza delivery guy, and he appeared to have turned the wrong way down Tsinghua Donglu. Since the widening and redevelopment of this street a year or two ago, there is a high fence partitioning the two carriageways. However - as anyone even vaguely familiar with the area should surely know - there are one or two breaks in this fence where you can turn into side streets or entrances on the other side, or pull a U-ey. There was one such turning opportunity only 200 yds or so beyond the footbridge that the motorcyclist decided to use instead. He should have been able to see this (if he weren't severely vision-impaired and had been paying the slightest attention), but seemingly he didn't - or chose to ignore the option.

I am quite sure it must have taken him just as long to ascend and descend the long ramps on to the footbridge, batting past the hordes of pedestrians on their way back from lunch. But I suppose it must have been some kind of personal challenge for him - "Damn, I bet none of the other delivery guys has ever done this before! Woo-hoo!!"

New Picks of the Month

I'm a little bit late in changing over that feature in my sidebar this month, but, on Froogville at least, we've already had quite a splurge of nostalgia recently with my Review of the Year feature over the Christmas holidays.

My new recommendation from the distant archives on Froogville is A 'Bad China Day' from April 2007 : what starts off looking as though it might be a standard expat 'China rant' soon reveals itself as a tirade against that genre, and hence against most 'China bloggers' in general.

From Barstool Blues I choose Another Jamaican Moment from December 2006: one of a number of snapshots of a rather wonderful holiday I had out there at the end of the.... (ahem) rather a long time ago.... with my old university buddy the Mothman.

A bon mot to end them all

"Everything has been said, and we are more than seven thousand years of human thought too late."

Jean de La Bruyère (1645-1696)

Things that go bump in the night (and the day)

To add to my ongoing woes with the builders in the park beneath my bedroom window, I found on my way home last night that some major roadworks had also been begun right outside my building.

Fortunately, the noise didn't carry that strongly to my apartment. And the work seems to have been swiftly completed.

Or almost completed, anyway. There seems to be an unfilled trench stretching across the entire width of the road. Thick steel plates have been laid across this, and stapled to the tarmac to keep them in place. It looks worryingly like a semi-permanent arrangement.

Now, these sheets of metal are highly resonant. Their edges stick up proudly, well above the road surface, so vehicles (which, of course, this being China, slow down only slightly if at all to allow for this hazard) are hitting them pretty damned hard. Moreover, they are not bolted down all that securely: I'd say there's a good half inch of movement available, so there's a huge wobble when anything runs over them. Yes, someone has built a HUGE METAL WOBBLE-BOARD outside my home. And the empty space beneath them amplifies the sound most impressively. It is very audible from my living room, on the other side of the building (which, as the space most insulated from external sounds in the whole apartment, is now also having to serve as my bedroom as well).

It's a distinctive, two-part THU-DUMMMP: the opening quite abrupt, the second part more extended and echoey - rather like the roll of distant thunder, in fact.

And, even on a slow Sunday, there are probably several hundred cars going along my street every hour - in each direction. I'm getting that dratted THU-DUMMMP every few seconds. During the week it's going to sound like a battlefield.

I can only hope that there won't be too much traffic overnight. Oh, please, god.....

Is it a game?

Oh, America, America, the good ol' US of A, how many ways there are of writing your name!

The author of the (very long) international affairs paper I am currently editing started off by calling it

the US

In my distant youth I was told that 'the USA' was to be preferred as the country noun, while 'the US' should be reserved for adjectival uses. A good and simple distinction, I always thought; but I fear the battle has long since been lost on that one, and we now regularly see the country referred to as 'the US'. Fair enough. I was prepared to go with that.

But of course, being a non-native English speaker, my author is entirely haphazard in his use of articles, and occasionally reduces it to

US

Not the end of the world. I don't mind adding a 'the' thirty or forty times. That's what I get paid for, after all.

Ah, but then he unaccountably began randomly restoring the long discarded full stops in the abbreviation:

the U.S.

or

U.S.

And then from time to time he's giving me

USA

or

the USA


And, of course,

U.S.A.

and

the U.S.A.

Now, towards the end (thank heavens!), he's grown suddenly tired of all these abbreviations and switched to (when he's being good)

the United States

or (when he isn't)

United States

And finally, just to make sure that he has left no stone unturned (and hurled contemptuously at his long-suffering editor), he resorts to

America

I have bewailed before the apparent inability of the Chinese to exercise any consistency whatsoever in matters of spelling, punctuation, or formatting - but this guy is really pushing the national vice to new levels here.

I'm beginning to wonder if he's going to manage to squeeze in all 11 variants into a single page before the end. (He's already managed 5 or 6 within a single paragraph!)

List(s) of the Month - Actors who might play Froog

My blog-buddy Tony was jesting (or perhaps not??) the other day that he has a producer interested in transforming his blog into a film. Discussions in the comment-thread touted the possibility that the great French actor Gérard Depardieu might be cast as me. I was, naturally, flattered by the suggestion (though subsequently rather piqued at the news that I was to be 'cut', on budgetary grounds). However, much as I am impressed by his talent, I am less impressed by Depardieu's body - not physically right for me, I feel.

This got me to thinking about who I would like to play me, should the film rights to Froogville or Barstool Blues ever be taken up (unlikely, I know, but a man can dream).

These, then, are the.....

Actors I would be happiest to see playing me

5) Johnny Depp

(Zero physical resemblance, but he does the eccentric humour and the brooding intensity so well.)

4) Edward Norton

(Again, just about zero physical resemblance, but the man can play anyone. And one of my friends worked with him when he was over here making The Painted Veil, so....)

3) John Cusack

(My Indian friend, The Egregious Dr P, once suggested that there was a strong resemblance between us, in manner rather than looks. Love the man, love his work - why not? I don't think my hair colour is an essential part of my Froogness.)

2) Paul Bettany

(Hiram, I can put you in touch with his agent.)

1) Ewan McGregor

(Yes, yes, I know he's Scottish - but he's so me.)

Actors I have often been compared to....

(No, really - this happens to me a lot; especially here in China. I don't necessarily concur with these identifications, of course. In fact, I think the people who make these comparisons are absolutely bonkers.)

5) George Clooney

4) Colin Firth

3) Jude Law

2) Pierce Brosnan

1) Hugh Grant

Actors who I would love to see playing me..... but for the unfortunate barriers of age, ethnicity, or being no longer alive

5) Peter O'Toole

4) Denzel Washington

3) Shashi Kapoor

2) Alain Delon

1) Cary Grant

And finally.....

Actors who should never be allowed to play me

(Not that I have anything against them. Fine actors, every one of them. And the sort of chaps I can envisage some people recommending for the role of Froog. Just not right somehow. Sorry.)

5) Gérard Depardieu

4) Brad Pitt

3) Daniel Day-Lewis

2) Daniel Craig

1) Tom Cruise

Come on, commenters! Do your worst!!

The weekly haiku

Cold wind from the north,
Icicles stab to the bone.
A day to stay home.

Sidebar!

I know, I know - this blog is getting too darned BIG for its own good.

My old college drinking buddy The Bookseller complained to me over a year ago that he feared to visit too often because it was possible "to get lost for days in the labyrinthine corridors of your blogs".

Perhaps I should look into getting a new and more flexible template, or maybe even a custom-made blog platform - drop-down menus, pop-up balloons, Flash animations, a site map?? No, no, I really can't be bothered. Sorry.

However, there is quite a lot of good stuff hidden over there on the right-hand side of the page. It's worth your while to scroll down and take a look at some of my archived stuff (not least because I am hellishly busy this week, and probably won't be posting any more for a while).

I particularly commend my two joke depositories over on companion blog Barstool Blues - one for bar jokes, and the other originally for Irish jokes, but now for 'bad' jokes of any kind.

I also have a list of interactive 'competitions': fellow Beijingers can share with me the lowest taxi driver registration number they encounter each month; anyone can make suggestions for amusing potential rock band names, sum up their life in a six-word epigraph, offer a great name for a bar, or share the 'found humour' of a favourite amusing film credit or misheard song lyric.... and more.

Then there's my list of (would-be) 'Great Debates' - though, alas, the only two that have kicked off at all so far are Is Chinese food terrible? and Which is the best Coen brothers film? Is Beijing or Shanghai the better city to live in? continues to be sadly overlooked.....

Fellow YouTube enthusiasts can find a summary of my embedded video clips to date here and here.

And there are several other links to recommended favourite posts of mine from way back in my early days.

You can even - should you be interested - find my New Year's Resolutions for this year (and last).

And finally, of course, there is the opportunity for you to offer your own review of my blogs - good, bad, or ugly, I really don't care.

Traffic Report - blog stats for December

There were 61 posts and around 21,000 words on Froogville last month (though I suppose about a quarter of that was accounted for by the "reader's favourite posts" that I rehashed for the Review of the Year feature over Christmas).

There were 45 posts and over 16,000 words on Round-The-World Barstool Blues (and all original content!).

According to Statcounter, Froogville enjoyed new visitors from Spain, Turkey, the Philippines and Romania(!!); while the Barstool claims the new distinction of having drawn one visit from each of the four Scandinavian countries, as well as ticking off India and Japan for the first time (not that I'm obsessive about 'collecting' all the countries, but....).

What will the New Year have in store for all of us? Let's venture forth and find out.

Gay penguins?!

Apparently, it's fairly common for penguins frustrated in their hopes of parenthood to try to satisfy their nurturing urges by adopting a nice round stone and trying to look after it as if it were an egg.

The craftier - or less scrupulous - of these eggless penguins may even on occasion steal an egg from another penguin couple and leave a round stone in its stead, in the hope that the theft won't be noticed.

Now, it seems, a male homosexual penguin couple at the Polar World zoo in the China's north-eastern city of Harbin have developed this naughty habit - and it's been pissing off the other penguins so much that their keepers have decided they need to be segregated from the rest of the community.

Yes, so many layers of potential symbolism in this story. I picked this up from the Gay & Lesbian column in this month's Time Out Beijing (don't jump to any conclusions; I read the entire magazine, OK?), but I suspect they got it from this piece in Britain's Daily Telegraph at the end of November. I'm not sure how much coverage it might have received in the domestic Chinese media.

I gather same-sex couples amongst penguins are not so very uncommon: there used to be a celebrated pair at New York's Central Park Zoo, much reported in the early noughties. Their keepers allowed them to adopt abandoned eggs and found them to be excellent parents (though it seems the couple split up a few years ago, after more than 8 years together). This would seem to be a rather more positive approach than that being followed so far in Harbin; but then, these two had tried to satisfy their parental instincts by looking after stones, and hadn't enraged the rest of the colony with rampant egg-stealing. Their names, incidentally, were Roy and Silo. Silo?! Ugh, that has some unfortunate potential connotations!

On the one hand, I take it as quite a positive sign that the Chinese media will acknowledge there is any homosexuality in China - even among penguins. On the other, though, I fear that this story is less an indicator of dawning enlightenment with regard to gay issues here, and more about advertising. I suspect the Harbin Polar World hasn't been doing so well lately, and was looking for a new draw: "Where can we find something that's still polar, but more of a unique attraction? Could we get an anorexic seal or a right-handed polar bear? Wait - those gay penguins were gold dust for that zoo in America a few years ago! Why don't we get us some of those??"

Am I a hopeless cynic? Perhaps, perhaps.

Review of the Year - Gary recommends....

Well, since today is the last day of Christmas/Saturnalia, this brings to an end my Review of the Year. I hope you've enjoyed this reprise of my 'highlights'. (It hasn't in fact been such a 'holiday from blogging' as I'd hoped, because it can be mightily time-consuming to search out the older posts and cut & paste them into a new post and add a few words of introduction and....)

There were a few people I would have liked to take part who I wasn't able to contact, and a few more who promised to come up with a contribution but weren't able to (we had hopes of Tulsa - once upon a time, the Commenter-in-Chief - but she is "on her travels" once again).

So, for the final recommendation, I allow Gary a second pick. It is no more than his desert, since he has been winning my Possible Band Names game over on Barstool Blues almost every month for the past year.

As well as the haiku he picked for us 10 days ago, he also told me he particularly liked this, a fairly recent post on the Barstool, but - again! - one that I fear may have been rather 'overlooked' at the time. It's a romantic reminiscence of my first year here in Beijing.

Cynthia??

first posted on Barstool Blues on 14th October

Is that really you??

My god, it's been years. But you haven't changed a bit. Same old thin-lipped, slightly crooked smile; same mocking head-tilt. And, yes, the same smooth curves, the delicate waist.

I remember the night we met. You came into my favourite restaurant* with a gaggle of my younger teaching colleagues, a rather boisterous, lager-loutish bunch. They'd picked you up out on the street somewhere. Heaven knows how or why!

But soon they'd moved on, and you stayed.

I did get very drunk that night. I completely forgot that I'd taken you home with me. Rising, still tipsy and befuddled, to answer the call of nature the next morning, I was at first rather shocked and flummoxed to find the outline of a female form dimly visible through my shower curtain.

I suppose I should have been concerned that you were slumped, completely inert, on the floor of the shower..... but it was still only 4 or 5am, and I was very, very, drunk.

Despite my fatigue and mental confusion, though, I think there was some dark corner of my brain that realised that there was nothing to worry about, that there was a non-threatening explanation behind the situation I'd just surprised myself with in the bathroom.

The explanation was...... well, that you were not quite the woman of my dreams. In fact you were barely even half that woman. You were, let's be frank, a limbless shop-window mannequin.

I adopted you that night to ease the discomfort of the Boss Man in the restaurant - who probably feared that those wild young lads had looted you from a clothes shop, and that the police might descend at any moment and interpret your presence on his premises as evidence of his complicity in a scandalous incident of vandalism and theft.

In fact, it was pretty evident that they had picked you up from a roadside trash heap somewhere. When I got you home, I discovered that you were absolutely filthy - hence my dumping you in the shower. Alas, I then collapsed into a crapulent coma, and utterly forgot - at least temporarily - about who you were and how you came to be with me. I'm so, so sorry. It was not the most romantic start to our relationship.

Why did I name you Cynthia? I forget now. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. Perhaps it was a fragment of my Classical education reasserting itself: Cynthia was one of the many names of Artemis/Diana (also sometimes known as Delia - references to the supposed place of her birth: on Mount Cynthus in the isle of Delos). I'm not sure that I've ever particularly liked the name; but I don't dislike it, either.

I gave you an elevated perch, balanced precariously on top of the microwave oven on my windowsill - to improve your stature (I always worried that, as a mere torso, you felt a sense of inferiority about your height) and give you a commanding view of the college courtyard below.

The police never came to investigate your history or reclaim you for some putative owner. And so you stayed with me, my companion throughout that stressful and lonely first year in China.

I assure you that it was not without regret that I abandoned you in the apartment when I left the college that summer. I was moving in frantic haste, and I had so much other stuff to take with me. And I really hoped that you might be welcomed by my successor; that you might perhaps find him or her a better friend than I had been to you.

I did think about you several times during the following months, and even years. I did, in fact, return to the college the following semester to try to recover you...... but it appeared that you'd already 'moved on', and no-one could tell me where you'd gone to.

And then, this morning, while I was out running around the hutongs, I came upon you once again, reclining by the side of the road. You could have knocked me down with a feather! Where have you been all this time? What have you been doing with yourself? I suppose I shall never know the answers.

It was you, wasn't it? Or do you have a sister??

* It was, of course, The Adventure Bar. Incidents such as this are how it got its name.

Review of the Year - Froog recommends.... another bon mot

Regular readers (there are at least a few of you, though you mostly lurk) will probably have noticed that I've started contributing my own observations as the 'weekly bon mot' rather more often this past year. This is one of my favourite examples - me consoling myself for my abrupt sacking at the beginning of the year by riffing on Voltaire.

I notice - in searching this out - that I also mentioned Voltaire in passing in this post, one of my few poetic offerings this last year: a translation of a famous piece by Catullus.

A bon mot double whammy

first posted on 28th January

"Work spares us from three evils: boredom, vice, and need."

Voltaire (1694-1778)

"Unemployment spares us from three evils: drudgery, management, and fatigue."

Froog

Review of the Year - Snopes recommends....

My dear old friend Snopes (once a butler to the stars) chooses this post from way back at the beginning of last year. He is impressed by my passion for the subject of toilets, and notes that "good plumbing is one of England's greatest gifts to the world, a gift that has sadly been rejected by many nations".

It's a funny old world

first posted on 29th January

My thanks to Ello (one of 'Moonrat's Minions', who keeps an amusing blog of her domestic struggles, with the fantastic title Random Acts Of Unkindness) for alerting me to the above piece of craziness. Yes, this is not just a joke, this actually exists. It is suggested in the promotional copy that these 'love seat' loos could actually bring couples closer together and cure relationship difficulties. Really? I should have thought it would be more likely to accelerate terminal ruptures, amid shrieks of, "What have you put in my bathroom, you pervert?!"

The Two-Da-Loo™ is apparently manufactured in China (although I would not like to speculate as to whether it was also conceived and designed here). I think, therefore, we can be confident of one thing - it won't work.

When I first visited this country 14 years ago, it soon became a running joke with my fellow travellers and the various foreign teachers I was visiting here that we all had to become skilled amateur plumbers in order to be able to survive the country. Really. In every place I stayed or visited, every Chinese friend's apartment, every cheap hotel, every university guesthouse, the lavatory cistern was completely dysfunctional. The Chinese seemed to just accept that this was the way of the world, and always kept a tin bucket of water beside the loo for flushing purposes. Yet my resourceful foreign friends and I often found that we could achieve at least a temporary rectification of ill-fitting outlet valves, blocked inlet tubes, and errant stop-cocks; bent coat-hangers proved particularly useful for such improvised repairs.

I had fondly supposed that things might have improved in this area by the time I returned here in 2002. But no, not much. The loo in this apartment leaked continuously (with horrendous consequences for my water bill) for about 18 months before I was finally able to browbeat my landlord into replacing it. Unfortunately, I failed to get him to buy me a (not terribly expensive) Japanese brand that I know to be reliable; but I did at least get a 'top-of-the-range' Chinese model this time. It still ain't great (the flush button is apt to stick; and I'm quite sure the mechanism will break completely within a few years), but at least it does the job and doesn't waste water like a mini-Niagara Falls.

A few months back, I visited a South African friend in her breathtakingly upscale apartment. When I went to the bathroom and saw the almost-forgotten name of Armitage Shanks (Britain's premier manufacturer of lavatories), I swear I nearly wept with delight.

Of course, it's probably a knock-off Armitage Shanks - but a good knock-off (a "genuine fake" as the local terminology charmingly puts it) is usually pretty close to the real thing; and even a poor impersonation of an Armitage Shanks toilet is going to be 10 times better than any purely Chinese brand I've ever encountered.

Signs your country isn't really 'developed' yet: Inability to build properly working mechanisms of even the most elementary complexity (such as flush-toilets and can-openers)

Signs your country has ideas above its station: Taking on the manufacture of novelty dual-toilets when you can't even get the basic model right yet

I think perhaps I should have titled this post Running Before You Can Walk.

Review of the Year - Froog recommends....

I have been trying to save a slot for Tulsa, who is wandering somewhere on The Silk Road (and I mean by this the Central Asian wilderness, not some fancy-pants restaurant); but we're going to wrap up the Review of the Year tomorrow, and it seems the satellite-dish-equipped camel has bolted from the caravan, leaving her without Internet access. Alack and alas.

So, I'm going to substitute for her. And why shouldn't I get in on the act once or twice?

I don't think we've had enough selections from my parallel blog, Round-The-World Barstool Blues, so I'm going to choose something from there. If I had to name a "most important" post of the year, I suppose it would have to be this one - but I am really trying to leave that particular heartache behind me now.

This post, though a fairly recent one, is well worth a second outing. I fear it may have been rather overlooked in the flood of posting I've unleashed over the last month or so. Moreover, I think it is a post that says more about me than just about any other.

Another unsuitable role model -

Terry Collier

first posted on Barstool Blues on 29th November

The Likely Lads was a popular but short-lived BBC sitcom of the mid-60s, written by the great comic partnership of Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais. I wasn't around to see the original, but they revived it in the early '70s as Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads? and that show became one of my earliest favourites, one of the most resonant memories of my childhood.

It was a touching study of a friendship, of the bond between two young northern working class lads who'd known each other all through their schooldays. It was not always an easy relationship: it was something of an attraction of opposites, with Bob Ferris (played by Rodney Bewes) being meek, neurotic, earnest, ambitious, conforming, while his mate Terry Collier (James Bolam) was an indolent, curmudgeonly ne'er-do-well. But they were both fond of a beer or several, and this was probably my first introduction to the cosy camaraderie of pub culture.

At the outset of the revived series, it was revealed that Bob had signed up for the army on a wild impulse (perhaps after being dumped by a girl?), and Terry, not wanting to be separated from his lifelong friend, had followed suit; alas, Bob was rejected for having flat feet, while Terry found himself trapped in the army. Terry, we learned, had taken to life in the forces for a while, and while stationed in Germany had fallen for a German girl and got married. The marriage had foundered, and he returned to his hometown (it was supposed to be Newcastle, although I don't think there was any location filming until the later feature film version) and, after several years out of touch, resumed his often fractious but extremely warm friendship with Bob.

Bob had by this time got himself a steady, boring job and had married an attractive but very strait-laced, social-climbing, slightly shrewish girl called Thelma. Terry lapsed into the life of a bum, a shiftless scrounger apparently surviving mostly on the dole, and devoting his days to fishing, drinking beer in pubs, and having a regular flutter on the horses. He was in many ways disturbingly reminiscent of the archetypal working-class slob Andy Capp (a character also played by Bolam some years later, in a short-lived TV adaptation of the famous comic strip). I would never nominate the loathesome Capp as one my 'role models', however; as Homer Simpson once remarked of him, he was essentially just a "wife-beating drunk", and almost completely devoid of any positive qualities. Terry, on the other hand, could be very sweet-natured, and was affectionate and fiercely loyal to his family and friends - even to his apparent nemesis, Thelma (beneath their superficial dislike for each other, there was a grudging respect - and also, on occasion, a frisson of sexual attraction). He was also something of a barroom philosopher, railing passionately and convincingly against many of the ills of the modern world. And he was, of course, an ultimate exemplar of the 'bad influence', the catalyst of good times who tempts his more staid friend into reckless indulgence and bizarre adventures; though more often, perhaps, his role was to be the terrible object lesson that serves as a warning reminder to Bob and keeps him mostly on the straight-and-narrow. I fear I occupy a similar position in the lives of many of my friends (particularly uptight Indian medic, The Egregious Dr P); they like to exaggerate my wanton excesses because they are secretly envious, and take some pleasure in living a wilder life vicariously through me. If there is one person, one character I could blame for the path my life has taken, it is Terry Collier. No, 'blame' is harsh: I'm not really complaining.

The other secret of the show's appeal was that it fairly oozed nostalgia - an aching regret both for the loss of the more carefree life of childhood and early adulthood, and more generally for the loss of a simpler way of life in the past (Bob and Thelma's bland bungalow and their drab middle-class lifestyle represented all that was worst in the shallow materialism of modern consumer society; and Terry, I think, can be seen as obstinately, desperately trying to maintain an old-fashioned sense of family and community in the face of an accelerating fragmentation of society: these themes were underlined by the opening credit sequence which showed the monstrous concrete housing blocks that had replaced the quaint redbrick neighbourhoods where the boys grew up).

Also, the show had the most wonderfully mournful theme song, with some brilliant lyrics:

Tomorrow's almost over, today went by so fast;

Now the only thing to look forward to's the past...

The YouTube clip below has that song in its entirety (never heard like this in the show itself, I don't think); it is accompanied not by the original opening credit sequence, but by a montage of photos of Bob & Terry.

Review of the Year - The Nags recommends....

My old Oxford buddy, "The Nags", is, as his nickname suggests, a devoted follower of the gee-gees, and a moderately successful one, at that: not the sort of chap who's ever going to give the bookies a serious spanking, but he generally manages to finish the year slightly ahead overall on his turf investments.

This post from the Barstool was conceived, partly at least, in his honour. And there was little doubt that, with a subject so close to his heart, it would prove to be his favourite of the year.

The game was continued in the comments. I rather fear tonight's winner might again be DVD Marathon....

And....they're off!

first posted on Barstool Blues on 3rd April

Quiet Evening In moving into the lead now, Quiet Evening In starting to pull away from the pack.

The rest of the runners are still bunched up, nothing much to choose between them - except for Poker School who, of course, got left at the starting gate today.

Cheap Eats At The Muslim is the best of the rest at the moment. Then its Late Night At Jianghu, Cultural Outing and Fancy Restaurant. Avalanche Of Shooters still looking dangerously strong just behind them - this one often takes us by surprise, seems to go best on a Wednesday or a Thursday.

Behind them it's Pool Bar and Noisy Rock Gig, both looking a little sluggish today. They've each had a great run of results just lately, but you have to feel perhaps they've been over-raced.

Bringing up the rear it's Pick-Up Joint: didn't get off to a very good start, and now starting to lose touch with the others.

Approaching the final furlong now, and Quiet Evening In appears to be fading. Never likes to have to make all the running from the start, and it's starting to take its toll now. Cheap Eats At The Muslim is going to overhaul her soon. But Cultural Outing and Fancy Restaurant are both looking very fresh, perhaps benefitting from having been rested for a couple of weeks; they're now coming on very strongly at the finish. Cheap Eats At The Muslim has the lead now, but Cultural Outing is right behind..... and Fancy Restaurant is making a tremendous surge down the outside.

Oh, oh dear, Cultural Outing seems to have a problem: Cultural Outing has thrown a shoe and has been pulled up. It's Fancy Restaurant and Cheap Eats At The Muslim fighting for the lead now. Cheap Eats still has it by a neck, but Fancy Restaurant is coming on strongly.

But wait - Late Night At Jianghu is suddenly making a storming run on the rails. Got boxed in at the back there for a while, but has suddenly come through from nowhere and is rapidly gaining ground in 3rd. Then it's Pool Bar in 4th; Avalanche Of Shooters still hanging in there in 5th. Quiet Evening In now 6th and still going backwards. Then it's Pick-Up Joint from Noisy Rock Gig bringing up the rear, both looking rather out of touch now.

And as they enter the home straight I think Fancy Restaurant has got a nose in front, but Cheap Eats At The Muslim refuses to be beaten...... and Late Night At Jianghu is finishing very strongly indeed, nearly drawing level with them now. It's a thrilling finish, it could be anybody's race, and as they come to the line the winner is............

Well, in my world - it could be all three of them. Decisions, decisions.

Review of the Year - Tony recommends....

My new blog-pal Tony - author of my "find of the year", the wonderful Other Men's Flowers - chooses this description of my home as his recommendation, a post which he says "succinctly conveys a great deal of information on an important topic". I suspect he is being facetious, as usual. And perhaps, too, he is mischievously seeking to taunt me with this unhappy reminder of my thwarted avarice. Way back in the early summer, I still thought there might be some Olympic tourists this year; not many, but some; and that I might just possibly find a lucrative summer sub-let for my apartment. Hollow laughter. Bitter tears. Chewing of rug.

Or perhaps the dear chap is afflicted with a goldfish memory, and had to look to the sidebar for inspiration in making his selection.

I rather liked OMG's comment on this one.

The nicest apartment in Beijing?

first posted on 29th April

Well, I think so.

It's not as swank as some, but it is very spacious, and has an extremely enviable location.

I'm just outside the North 2nd Ringroad, adjacent to the Shichahai district - one of the last parts of the city centre where a substantial amount of the traditional hutong-style low-rise housing still survives. I'm close to a subway station and some useful major bus routes (27, going west to the Zoo; 60, going south to the Wangfujing shopping district and the Temple of Heaven), only about a 15-minute walk to the historic landmarks of the Bell Tower and the Drum Tower, and the attractive Houhai lakes area, and not very much further from Nanluoguxiang, these days one of the nicest bar and shopping streets in the city, and some very good live music venues (MAO Live House for rock'n'roll, East Shore for jazz, and some others too).

What's more, I am more or less mid-way between The Forbidden City (about a 40-minute walk due south), and the Bird's Nest Stadium (just a bit further away, north and east).

I have a large, L-shaped dining/living room, two large bedrooms (the second with an ensuite shower/bath), a further shower room/toilet/utility room, a modestly well-equipped kitchen (toaster, microwave, mini-oven, blender, coffee-maker, two-ring gas stove, extractor hood, large fridge/freezer), and a study which can serve as an additional bedroom (there are a couple of sofa-beds in the living room too). And a rather nice enclosed balcony which overlooks a small park. Nearly 1,500 sq ft in all. Air conditioning in all the main rooms.

It's on the top floor of a quiet, clean, fairly modern building. No elevator, but it's only 6 storeys. It is 'Chinese housing', so the level of decoration and equipment isn't quite what you'd hope for in a Western-style apartment, but it's perfectly comfortable.

I have a broadband Internet connection, and I am contemplating getting an international satellite TV hook-up.

An ideal place to spend the summer in Beijing! Is anyone still thinking of coming to the Olympics? Do you need a place to stay?

Drop me a line. I am looking to sublet for a while.

Review of the Year - Jeremiah recommends....

Jeremiah - an American historian of the Qing Dynasty who maintains (albeit somewhat intermittently) the excellent Granite Studio blog (mostly on Chinese history, but with a seasoning of more personal and quirky stuff), as well as being a regular contributor to leading China blogs, The Peking Duck and The China Beat - is, like me, a Beijing resident. He thus tends to have a soft spot for those posts where I go off on one about the distinctive challenges and irritations of working in this country (I try to avoid the typical 'China rant', which is, I feel, an overworked genre among expat bloggers here; however, if I do indulge in one occasionally, I like to think that I do it better, and with more reason).

This one, he informs me, caused him to "shoot potato chips out of my nose" when he first read it. (This was not an image I wanted to have called to mind as I wrestled with massive post-Christmas turkey indigestion!)

It is rather a long post, but it does touch on several of the most characteristic shortcomings I've found in Chinese colleagues: poor organization, poor time-management, poor communication on the telephone, inaccurate or inconsistent naming of buildings and institutions, complete inability to give directions.... and the knee-jerk impulse to blame you for their fuck-up.

I worry sometimes that people reading my posts in this vein might be discouraged from taking jobs here (I think it has happened at least once). Please don't be. You do get used to this stuff quite quickly, and I take the view that it's "all part of life's rich tapestry" - you have to laugh.

More exasperation with Chinese employers

first posted on 3rd April

So..... I'm supposed to be giving a presentation for a UK education company in one of Beijing's more remote universities. The event is being "organized" or "co-ordinated" (the inverted commas are entirely justified here, as you will see) by a Chinese educational publisher.

As is typical for this kind of gig, the administrator at the UK organization gave me contact details for the person in charge at the publishers and told me they would ring me to confirm the details. They didn't. Surprise, surprise. No big deal. Yesterday morning, I tried to contact them - sent an SMS asking them to confirm start time, address, when and where we should meet prior to the presentation. I had been given only a Chinese name for this contact. When someone called me back, they gave me only an English name. They didn't explain who they were or why they were calling (no surprise there!). Then I got another call from a different person - again no explanation of who they were, or what their relationship was to the person I'd previously spoken to. One girl, one guy. I really have no idea what's going on.

Anyway, the girl is the person whose contact details I have been given, so I call her back to try to firm up the arrangements. There is a problem. The start time has been moved back an hour (or I'd been misinformed about it in the first place; the Chinese administrator at the UK company has quite a flair for uselessness on occasion as well; we had been talking about these arrangements only 24 hours previously, and I had mentioned several times my anxiety about getting away by mid-afternoon because I was due to be lecturing in another university - way, way, way over on the other side of town, some 20 miles or so away - a couple of hours later; but she hadn't noticed or bothered to correct my expectation of the timetable, which I'd stated to her about three or four times). Annoying - but not disastrous. I could still make it to my early evening lectures across town: it's just that it might be a bit of an unpleasant rush, and I probably wouldn't have any time to stop and grab some food along the way. I did ask if they could bring the start time forward a little, perhaps to 2pm. No. Oh well.

The girl I've spoken to (shrill, over-excitable, doesn't speak very good English - pretty much par for the course for an educational publisher specialising in English teaching books!) has promised to send me the university's address in Chinese via SMS (again, an utterly standard, absolutely vital aid to ensuring that your presenter can find the venue and arrive in plenty of time). She failed to do so. I sent her a reminder. Still no reply. I try to phone her before I get in a cab. She's not answering her phone. I try repeatedly over the next half-hour that I'm in the cab, but she's not answering her phone. Although reluctant to disturb her (because she's told me that she is delivering a presentation herself at lunchtime on this day - although that turns out not to have been true), I try to contact the UK administrator by phone call and SMS: no reply from her either. Eventually, the publisher girl calls me, but she's pretty incoherent (in Chinese as well, apparently - not much help to my taxi driver). By this stage, anyway, we are literally within sight of the target university - but unfortunately we have missed the exit off the ringroad we should have taken, and end up having to do a big loop back that takes us several miles further than we needed to. Despite all this anxiety (and a not-terribly-smart cab driver: he had an old registration number, but admitted to being unfamiliar with this part of town), I make it to our rendezvous point with one-and-half minutes to spare. I am so relieved. And quietly proud. Punctuality is important to me. Luckily, I had known the location of the university (I used to teach there a couple of years back); it was just that I hadn't known the roads well enough - and didn' t have good enough Chinese - to tell the taxi driver exactly how to get there.

Well, 5 minutes or so prior to my arrival, I've received a phone call from the mysterious publishing house guy. He tells me that he's already at the rendezvous point - the university's south gate - and is waiting for me. That's reassuring. Except of course, that when I arrive - he's not there. I try phoning him. He doesn't answer. I try phoning the shrill, rambling girl. She doesn't answer. I try phoning him again, several more times. He still doesn't answer. Several minutes pass. I'm getting anxious. I'm getting paranoid. When I first spoke to the shrill girl that morning the English name she had used for the university had been different from the one I'd originally been given (similar, but different; a somewhat bizarre departure, given that the university in question has an official English name which appears on its logo, its crest, etc.; it's hard to see how this girl could both be unaware of this official name and so creatively mistranslate the Chinese name for herself, but......). I began to wonder if I'd come to entirely the wrong place, if there weren't another university with a similar name in quite another part of town. Despite having attempted to confirm the real English name of the university in question with the shrill girl, and having confirmed the approximate location, and (later) having had her give directions to the taxi driver about the address and how to get there in Chinese, it did still seem all too horribly possible that in fact there were two universities and I was at the wrong one.

Then the shrill girl calls me: "Where are you?"

Me: "I'm at the south gate. Where we agreed to meet. Where your male colleague just told me that he was already waiting for me. But he's not here."

Shrill girl: "Why are you at the south gate? We are at the west gate."

Well, you know, because I've now had, like, 3 phone calls each with you and your disappearing colleague, in every one of which we had both agreed to meet at the SOUTH gate. I even have it confirmed in a text message still stored on my phone. And The Invisible One just called me 10 or 12 minutes ago to volunteer the information that he was waiting for me at the south gate (which was evidently a complete LIE; and no, it wasn't just that he can't tell 'west' from 'south' in English - he hadn't been at the west gate either; and this university only has the two gates).

I was moderately fuming about the whole business by now. But, at least it was a nice day. And we still had a little time in hand before the scheduled start of the presentation (though, of course, it kicked off 15 minutes late, and then overran by 15 minutes - because of a horribly protracted textbook raffle the shrill girl suddenly sprang on me after I'd finished - which left me with a mad scramble to get to my other university teaching gig in time). I was - amazingly - able to relax, and see the funny side.

I think I am more wound up about it in retrospect. It is so representative of everything I find exasperating about trying to work in this country.

There's incompetence. There's Chinese incompetence. And then there's Chinese incompetence in the education sector - which is just a whole order of magnitude beyond anything you could possibly imagine.

Review of the Year - The British Cowboy recommends... a haiku

Two-for-the-price-of-one today! My long-time drinking companion - and Barstool regular - The British Cowboy also recommends a haiku.... but less for the original haiku than for the fact that he created an all-haiku comment thread to go with it. For a heady couple of weeks, Tulsa, Mothman, The Cowboy and myself were communicating solely in haiku. So, do please go and check the original comments - and add one of your own.

An illustrated haiku

first posted on 7th March

Rustling tumbleweed
Skitters down deserted streets.
Blog with no comments.

Things sure have been mighty quiet around here lately. As Tom Waits' lonely Minneapolis prostitute put it, "Everyone I used to know is either dead or in prison." In my case, everyone who used to comment is either ill or on holiday.

Tulsa, the stalwart of my commenters, is away for the whole month. Last time she went walkabout, her friend HiK deputised admirably - but it seems she's now too busy to do so again. OMG is just back from Thailand, but still reeling from the jetlag. Moonrat's snowed under at work, and about to depart on a holiday. The Mothman - where is he? Probably too busy with his hobby of becoming a Bulgarian property tycoon. And my old Oxford drinking chum, The Bookseller, can rarely be goaded into a comment - preferring to be a perpetual 'lurker'. (I hope he is at least still 'lurking'. The last time we had an extended spell of being out of touch, he eventually reported in: "Sorry. June was a bad month. Broke car, arm, and computer. All in separate incidents." Ah, that's why I love him.....)

Cowboy, Snopes, where are you??

Mighty, mighty quiet.

Review of the Year - Jeremiah recommends... a haiku

Well, actually Jeremiah's top pick is following in a moment, but he did also especially enjoy this haiku from the middle of the Olympics. You could take a look at the original comments to this, too: I objected that to single out just one of my haiku for praise tended to imply a snub to the other 200 of them, and he mocked me for womanish oversensitivity!

The weekly haiku

first posted on 15th August

Summer Rains

The sky saves its change
A long time, then all at once
Empties its pockets.

Review of the Year - The Harvster recommends....

My old friend The Harvster (now exiled to Australia for stealing a loaf of bread), nominates this golden oldie as his abiding favourite of the year - and something he tells me he has shared with many friends and work colleagues. Strictly speaking, this did not fall within the last calendar year; but it's close enough, since I first posted it on New Year's Eve a year ago.

As a bonus, I add the follow-up post from a week later in which I list other songs we'd like to see the dancing Filipino prisoners perform to.

1,000 Convicts

first posted on 31st December, 2006

...... pretending to be zombies........

Incredible, but true.

My thanks to Leah for alerting me to this oddball delight - although it seems we both come somewhat late to the party. Apparently, this video of Filipino prisoners performing Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' dance routine has been quite the sensation of YouTube since it was first posted 5 months ago, and has recently been featured on a number of American TV shows. Time Magazine, I learn, has just rated it No. 5 in its list of the year's 'Top 10 Most Popular Viral Videos' (Damn, what are the others?? Got to go check out that list!). On YouTube, it has already drawn more than twice as many hits as Michael's original video of the song!

We have one Byron F. Garcia to thank for this. He works with the Philippines government as an adviser on prison security, and a year or so ago he had the idea of developing a new exercise regime for inmates, based on dancing to pop hits. The scheme - implemented at the Cebu Provincial Detention & Rehabilitation Center (CPDRC) - was an immediate success, and quickly became famous throughout the country (they've even had the surviving housemates from the Philippines 'Big Brother' show bussed in [blindfolded] to perform a dance routine with the prisoners as their 'challenge' for the day - worth checking out because the girls are very cute).

Now, my first thought when I saw this was that it must be a spoof, a fake. But no, it appears to be genuine. Then I had qualms about the power-dynamics of it - are these prisoners being forced to take part against their will? (I very much doubt if such a programme could succeed in my native England, a nation of notoriously reluctant dancers.) The hours of practice required must get pretty gruelling; and it would be a hugely embarrassing activity for anyone as self-conscious as I am. I have qualms too about the economics of it - the prison is now earning money by allowing tour groups in to view these mass-choreographed performances.

On the other hand, I suppose it's a lot less exploitative and demeaning than sending these guys out to work on road gangs. And they do seem to be having a whale of a time doing these dance numbers. Perhaps Byron really has come up with an idea of genius here, an exercise programme that is fun, and that gives the prisoners a sense of pride and achievement - something that could be truly rehabilitative. How long before we see this kind of thing in prison exercise yards all over the world??

Byron's posted over 20 videos of his prisoners doing their thing now: 'Radio GaGa' is pretty good, too, but 'Thriller' is the classic. My New Year gift to my loyal readers. [I've posted a video for you to enjoy over on the Barstool today as well - go check it out.]

List of the Month: Top 10 Dances You'd Like To See The Cebu Prison Inmates Perform

first posted on 5th January

In case this reference somehow passes you by, take at look at this post of mine from a week or so ago about the strikingly innovative 'rehabilitation through dance' programme they've been developing at the Cebu Provincial Detention & Rehabilitation Center in the Philippines.

Counting down in reverse order on this one.....

10) I Want To Break Free

(I'm not sure that there is an established dance routine that goes with this, but what the hey - I'm sure Byron Garcia, the svengali behind the dancing prisoners phenomenon, could come up with something appropriate. And I'm sure a lot of these guys would love to replicate the transvestism of the original Queen video. The song would surely strike a chord with them as well.....)

9) The Monkees Theme

(OK, not much of a dance, but this has been a favourite of mine from earliest childhood. To have 1,000 or more prisoners advancing slowly across the exercise yard doing the 'Monkees walk' - that stiff-legged swagger, legs akimbo, one leg overlapping that of the person to your left or right at each step - would be awesome.)

8) Agadoo

(Yes, an appallingly irritating novelty song and a really pointless dance - but somehow kind of compelling nonetheless. And scarcely more irritating and pointless than 'The Algorithm March', one of the Cebu prisoners' first-ever routines.)

7) Bad

(Since the prisoners have obviously already established an affinity with Michael Jackson [Thriller is their biggest 'hit' on YouTube], this would seem to be a natural next step for them. Well, either this or Smooth Criminal, of course!)

6) Walk Like An Egyptian

(Perhaps the boys could pick up a few moves from this 'classic' - incomprehensibly popular! - British vaudeville act of the '20s and '30s....)

5) Tiger Feet

(Again, not much of a dance - but what there is, is great.)

4) Macarena

(Do dance crazes get any cheesier than this? But these boys love cheese!)

3) Haka

(It would be pretty fucking scary to have that many people doing the traditional Maori war chant made famous by the All Blacks rugby team. I wonder what the world record is currently for the largest simultaneous performance? Another shot at the Guinness Book of Records for our boys, methinks.)

2) The Time Warp

(Perhaps Byron himself could preside over this one as 'The Criminologist'....)

And the winner is........ of course, what else?....... WHY haven't they done this one yet???

1) YMCA

Keep checking YouTube for the latest releases. I'm sure some of these will be appearing over the next year or so. [Update: Yes, in fact it seems that YMCA and the Macarena have now been done. We should lobby for some of these others.]