The culture gap (again)

Some Chinese friends were telling me the other day that they'd been out to watch the final day of the China Open tennis tournament last weekend.   They admitted that they had a problem with their attention span, that it was difficult to keep their interest up through the course of two fairly long matches.   Well, fair enough - it's a challenge for anyone.  And tennis is still a fairly new and unfamiliar game here in China.  It was scarcely played here at all 20 years ago, and this is not a nation that's grown up watching the game, becoming attuned to its many nuances.  Of course Chinese spectators are going to get a bit restive, disappear for long breaks in the middle of matches.  Only natural.  Not the end of the world.   But my friends also told me that this impatience had grown so severe that many people left as soon as the last match - the Ladies' Final, I believe - was over, and there was hardly anyone there at all to watch the presentation of the trophies.  The way they told me this implied that at least they had stayed to watch the presentation - although I didn't like to enquire too closely about this.  They sounded as though they realised that this was unfortunate behaviour, but they didn't really seem to be disapproving of it - and sounded regretful that they hadn't done likewise themselves.   To me, this seems to be the most outrageous bad manners.  These sportsmen run themselves ragged for two hours or more, entertaining you with their skill and effort - and you can't even be bothered to wait around another 5 or 10 minutes to applaud them?   I mean, you wouldn't rush out of the theatre before the curtain calls, would you??  Well..... if you're Chinese, perhaps you would.     Last night, I was watching highlights of Rafa Nadal's 2nd round match against James Blake in the Shanghai Masters earlier this week.  It was a superb contest.... and the arena was almost deserted.   It looks as though it will be a very long time before tennis builds up much of a following here.  I fear it will also be a very long time before Chinese standards of etiquette at sporting events evolve to what we would wish them to be.

Everyday disasters

Leaving for work in a bit of a rush this morning, I managed to leave the apartment keys behind.   The building management doesn't hold any spares or masters.  I don't have a spare key I can lodge with friends.   I am at the mercy of my landlord.  That is not a good place to be.   He, apparently, had mislaid his spare key.   But, being the phenomenal tight-arse that he is, he preferred to spend a couple of hours ransacking his house to find it, rather than dropping any money on calling out a locksmith for me (which, in this country, would cost, what - 50 kuai??).   Thank heavens, he just showed up to let me in.   This is only the second time I've locked myself out in 6 years.  I'd better make sure it's the last time.

Haiku for the week

First chill in the air, Warning from the icy north. Winter's harbinger.     The skies have been dazzling for the past few days; but, my, it's starting to get nippy.

Paper Republic

I haven't done one of my plugs for Friends Doing Business in China for a while, but since the Frankfurt Book Fair has just opened, this seems an especially appropriate moment to give a long overdue shout-out to Paper Republic, a collective of young translators who run a literary blog aiming to promote contemporary Chinese fiction and poetry (the rare good stuff, which all too seldom finds an overseas audience because of the publishing world's reluctance to invest in literary translation).  The site has lots of translated extracts from the contributors' favourite authors, news, occasional interviews, and a discussion forum.   Two of the team are in Frankfurt for the next fortnight, peddling a selection of pet projects - 7 good books in search of a publisher (you can download an outline of them here).  Best of luck to them.     If you are curious about the state of literature in China today, I do recommend you to go and have a wander around their website for a while.

Let your NO be NO

I took part in a film shoot just before the National Holiday.  I got paid 1,000 rmb for about 15 minutes of "work" (and 2 hours of hanging around), so I suppose I shouldn't complain.  On a by-the-minute calculation, that's the best rate of pay I've ever made in my life.   But it was miserable - absolutely one of the most frustrating, vexing, depressing experiences of my life.   There was no actual script (there never is).  All the scenes were being hastily - and shoddily - concocted by the director while we were waiting to start shooting.  There was only one "professional" actor, a young Chinese guy who spoke not a word of English.  Poor chap was probably getting paid a lot less than us 'token whitefaces' - but he was dismally bad: not following his direction (such as it was) at all; and not even playing off the other actors very sensitively or intelligently, just charging into his lines while his interlocutor was still mid-sentence.  We improvised our way through it as best we could.   The director was clueless too - hadn't given any thought to how the action was going to be blocked, where and when he wanted us to enter and exit a scene (my line of exit was purposefully closed off by the cameraman, the microphone-boom man, the guy holding the reflector, the director, and the English-speaking production assistant - forming a solid human wall across the sidewalk I was supposed to be walking down).  The cameraman kept jabbing the camera into the actors' faces and then reprimanding us for "looking at the camera".  And ke kept failing to notice bystanders - or the shadow of the boom mike - intruding into the shot (until I, or one of the other laowai, helpfully pointed it out).   It was supposed to be a jokey 'home video' kind of production, just a few minutes long: five or six scenes of 20 seconds or so each.  But the director and his crew were treating it like a Zhang Yimou epic, stroking chins and discussing things for several minutes between each take.  And then requiring take after take after take after take after take - not because the actors had done anything wrong, but because they hadn't properly planned out what they wanted to try and get in the shot.   Complete f***ing amateur hour.  My blood was boiling.  I basically took control of my little segment, showing them how they should shoot it; and then telling them, when they had about 8 or 10 near-enough identical versions of it down, that enough was enough and I was leaving now.   Film-making is always a rather stressful and chaotic process, I imagine; but when you overlay the stupendous levels of incompetence and disorganization of which the Chinese so often seem to be capable, it becomes a little piece of hell on earth.       I've just been offered another similar gig.  The shoot is longer.  The pay is much less generous.  It is an unspecified distance out of town.  It's on a Saturday.  There is no script.   I am desperately short of cash just at the moment, but I can feel that N-word forming on my lips.....

Sardines on the subway

I haven't been on the Beijing subway that much in the past week, but every time I have, it's been absolutely heaved out - even at usually non-peak times like the middle of the afternoon.  Strange.   And the majority of the passengers seem to be swarthy peasant types toting huge wheelie bags and laundry sacks.   We're all supposed to have been back at work for nearly a week now, so it seems a bit late for people to be still on holiday, or only just getting back from holiday.   But.... well, when there's a mass exodus of the ming gong, the city's migrant workers, (as regularly happens during the big traditional holiday of Spring Festival) their leaving and coming back can be spread out over days, if not weeks (we're talking about some hundreds of thousands of people, at the very least; during the frenzy of construction prior to the Olympics, it was very probably in the millions).  It looks as if that's what's going on now.  But the ming gong don't usually leave in large numbers during National Week - because it's a non-traditional holiday, and because most of them can't afford to; usually they can only manage one decent break per year - at best - and nearly all of them scrimp and save so that they can do that for the traditional week (or more) of family reunion around the Spring Festival.   So, I wonder, were they all booted out of the city, to 'sanitize' the environment for the colossal 'I Heart The Commie Party' lovefest we've just had to endure?  I hadn't heard anything about it in the news.... but then, you wouldn't, would you?  That's certainly what it looks like.

Latest thigh-slapping moment on CCTV9

The folks on BizChina have just outdone themselves.  I almost suspect sneaky backroom sabotage.   Yep, the lead story on today's early afternoon round-up of the economic and political news was about Vice-President Xi Jinping's visit to Germany.  But the VT boys segued just slightly prematurely to the next item about the nuclear situation in North Korea - so, the presenter's dutiful quoting of Xi's platitudes about China's commitment to "peaceful cooperation" was accompanied by footage of missile launches.  I laughed so hard I nearly shat myself.

Traffic Report - (very) belated blog stats for the summer

It is my custom to report from time to time - usually monthly - on the quantity of my output, and of my readership; but I have been neglecting this of late.  So, here goes on the catch-up...   In June, I observed 8 or 9 days of silence in honour of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown; I was away on holiday for the whole of July and most of August; and since my return to Beijing I have been finding the level of censorship interference with the Internet to be so extreme that I've often had no functional link to Blogspot at all, and have just been posting 'blind' (I've been creating posts exclusively from my e-mail account for the past 6 weeks or so - less than ideal).   Given these obstacles, the quantity of posting bore up pretty well - surprisingly, alarmingly so: it was well down on earlier this year, but it was still pretty substantial.  I was, in fact, able to use a computer at most of the places I stayed on my travels, but I managed to ration my time on the Internet - breaking away from the dangerous daily blogging habit, and just having the occasional big splurge once or twice a week (but craftily using the 'timestamp' function to space things out!).   Anyway, on  Froogville we had 32 posts and around 12,000 words in June; that fell to 22 posts and barely 5,000 words in July, 31 posts and just over 5,000 words in August.   On Barstool Blues there were 28 posts and nearly 11,000 words in June, but just 21 posts and less than 4,000 words in July, and 25 posts and 5,000 words in August.     Perhaps it might not be such a bad idea if I kept to something like that level of output all the time - a bit less of a strain on my devoted readers?     There doesn't seem to be much of interest to report in the 'international news' - except that The Barstool has apparently acquired a regular-ish reader in Varna, Bulgaria (Welcome!).  In the last month or so, it seems, my readership has been exclusively in the United States and Britain.  I rather assume this is because any readers I still have inside China are being identified through the proxy routings they are being forced to use.  Curse you, interfering Kafka Boys!

They make a desert and they call it 'progress'

I think I have commented once or twice in passing that the north-eastern stretch of Jiugulou Dajie, the major street just south of my apartment, is once again in the throes of reconstruction and shrouded in the ominous blue metal sheeting.   This has been the state of affairs for at least a month or two now, and I have walked past the blue fencing almost every day - but always, I suppose, in a hurry to get somewhere, not really paying attention to the changed geography of the street, not taking stock of what has been swept away and what might be rearing up in its place.  They've taken my hairdresser's, dammit!  And I am very overdue for a trim.  This is a disaster, a nightmare.  I am seriously tempted to just start shaving my head.   It is desperately difficult to find a decent place to get your hair cut in this country.  I find I had been relying on this neighbourhood haven for very nearly three years now.  I am distraught to find it suddenly gone.  Baldness really may be my only option now.

What is it about Aldous??

Something very strange has been going on for the past few months: the comment thread for this bon mot from the end of June (by Aldous Huxley) has been overrun by Japanese 'singles'.  Well, either that, or its just a spammers' graveyard.  My Japanese is a little too rusty to decipher it.   But I think I'd better close the thread down before things get too seriously kinky.

The weekly bon mot

"The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence. He inspires self-distrust. He guides their eyes away from himself toward the spirit that quickens him. He will have no disciple."

Amos Bronson Alcott (1799-1888) - father of Louisa May Alcott, of Little Women fame

Sunday literary moment

"Tuesday had come down through Dundrum and Foster Avenue, brine-fresh from sea-travel, a corn-yellow sun-drench that called forth the bees at an incustomary hour to their day of bumbling.  Small house-flies performed brightly in the embrasures of the windows, whirling without fear on imaginary trapezes in the limelight of the sunslants."     I have been re-reading Flann O'Brien's comic novel At Swim-Two-Birds over the past few days, and have just posted a review of it over at The BookBook.  I am something of a sceptic about this book: I adore O'Brien, but I think this is probably the weakest of his works, and not worthy of its 'cult classic' status, not worthy comparison to his real masterpiece The Third Policeman.  However, it does have passages of the most exquisite writing in it.  Even when, as here, he's just parodying something, his parody transcends the limitations of the thing it parodies and becomes a thing of wonder.  Pointlessly florid writing was never so beautifully done!

Come back, Ed Maher, all is forgiven

I never thought I'd say that, but.... after some two weeks of enduring only Chinese presenters on CCTV9, I can't wait to see the old geezer back.  (Mr Maher is a veteran Kiwi TV presenter who was brought in a few years ago to be the main news anchor on the 'international' TV channel here.)   Most of the Chinese presenters seem to get their jobs through guanxi - their powerful connections within the state-run media empire - rather than through being able to speak good English or any other relevant talent.  Several of them have truly dire, at times almost unintelligible English pronunciation.  I sympathise with the difficulties the English language presents to the Chinese, I really do; but, for heaven's sake, you'd think that people who make a lucrative career out of speaking English in public would actually be good at it.  Almost every student I've ever taught, almost every Chinese person I know speaks better English than these clowns.   Pronouncing final consonants is a particular problem for the Chinese (Mandarin doesn't really have them).  Double consonants can be even harder (again, Mandarin doesn't have them). And the letters 'r' and 'l' are some of the trickiest for the Chinese to say (Mandarin has comparable sounds, but they're not produced in quite the same way and are less clearly distinguished from each other).  Hence, the 'ld' (or 'rld') combination is one of the toughest challenges for a Chinese speaker of English.   However, I don't quite understand how the stress of confronting this challenge so often results in a mangling of the preceding vowel sound (as well, of course, as a complete failure to nail the troublesome 'l').   I am getting fed up of being told about the Woad News every day.  (Or, the other day, it was a series of stories about the Woad Bank.)

On the Barstool....

I'm going to resurrect my occasional (well, approximately weekly) series of recommendations of favourite recent posts from my disreputable parallel blog, Round-The-World Barstool Blues.  What with the thoroughgoing Internet blockade in China at the moment, its traffic has been getting a bit thin (although it now, apparently, has several regular "followers") and there's scarcely a comment from one week to the next (one of my long-time regulars, Gary, has just reappeared after a long absence; but The British Cowboy has been hibernating for quite a while now, and even The Weeble has been uncharacteristically taciturn of late).  I must try to do something to rectify this unjust neglect. So....     I have just added what I believe to be an important post on Beijing's curious inability to produce a decent sports bar.   I've also devised a couple of (highly topical, for China) drinking games this week - here and here.   Please go and take a look.

Haiku for the week

Good luck, national pride: Auspicious red everywhere - Too many darn flags!     Boy, am I glad this nonsense is finally over.    I had been caught out about the timing of it, had assumed it must surely end yesterday.  But no, Thursday was yet another day off.  I kept noting passing references on TV to this being "the longest holiday ever", but kept dismissing them - thinking to myself, "Oh, it's just a week, surely.  Whatever are they talking about?"   This year, though, the traditional Mid-Autumn Day holiday fell on Saturday, in the middle of the 'golden week' break for the October 1st National Day.  And that's worth an extra day for itself, of course.   Now, you might think (and I might very well agree with you) that the sensible thing to do would be just to ignore the 'day off' for Mid-Autumn Day this year, since it falls during another holiday (it's only a year or two ago that it started being recognised as a national holiday anyway).  And if the populace are getting uppity at being short-changed on their holidays, well, you could always allocate an extra day of holiday elsewhere (there are plenty of other traditional holidays that aren't yet honoured with a day off work; and some, like Qing Ming, the main ancestor-worship festival, that would benefit from having two or more days off rather than just one).  Or just not require people to work through the whole of the adjacent weekends (which always happens with 'golden weeks', rather undercutting the benefit of the holiday).   But NO - everything about this 60th Birthday Celebration had to be BIGGER than anything we'd ever seen before.  Including the length of the holiday.  So - 8 days it was.  Sigh.

Whose birthday is it anyway?

One of the things that pisses me off most about the current holiday (apart from the fact that it is still going on...) is that to me it really seems to have very little to do with China or the Chinese people.  The Chinese nation is a lot older than 60 years. What we're celebrating here is the creation of a particular system of government in China.  I don't think the French made anything like such a big deal of the 50th anniversary of their Fifth Republic last year (there probably were public celebrations of some form, but I can't readily imagine either the French government or the French people treating it as a matter of very great importance).   Older, more self-confident nations don't need to make such a big fuss of commemorating their foundation (in the UK, we can't easily point to our origin on a particular day or even a particular year; the nation and its political institutions evolved gradually over a very long period).   In fact, it's only autocratic one-party states like China that need to do this - to bolster the identification between government and nation in the public mind, to glorify the supposed achievements of the regime and thereby prolong its grip on power.   What we're "celebrating" here is 60 years of Communist rule in China.  And I don't see that as a big cause of happiness.  The first half of that period, at any rate, was an almost unremitting succession of appalling catastrophes.   And in many ways things haven't really got that much better since the late '70s.  The country might be modernizing and getting richer, but the regime is very nearly as flawed and oppressive as it ever was.  Ultimately, the Chinese Communist Party can only maintain its position of control through the use of force - hence, abuses of human rights are endemic.  It cannot cope with dissent - hence, citizens' rights, the free flow of information, and the independence of the media are all suppressed, and the rule of law (despite some, very slight progress) continues to be a joke.   So, what are we celebrating??     60 years of self-interest and self-enrichment for the cadres   60 years of contempt for the common man   60 years of making a mockery of the Constitution   60 years of abysmal health & safety standards   60 years of man-made disasters   60 years of living in fear - of the police, the army, the neighbourhood committee....   60 years of clinging to an anachronistic and discredited ideology     I'm sorry - I just don't feel the joy, I don't feel the love.

More snark

I haven't been confining my grumping about this interminable 60th Birthday Bash to Froogville here.  Oh no, I've been letting rip a little on companion blog, The Barstool, too.   I did the obligatory humorous review of the Big Parade on there last week, a collection of the little quips and observations I shared with friends during the live broadcast.  (See also this more comprehensive debunking of the event by Jeremiah over at The Granite Studio.)   I've also instituted a competition to try to guess the total number of Chinese flags currently being displayed along the length of the Nanluoguxiang bar street.  (No takers yet, alas.  I guess everyone's on holiday.  Or denied their Blogspot access.)   And I've just added this suggestion for a consolatory drinking game - for people like me who've been stuck indoors too much and forced to watch a lot of Chinese television.

The fears that bind us

It's nice to see my old blog-buddy Jeremiah over at The Granite Studio returning to the fray after a summer of almost total inactivity.  Unfortunately, he's decided to dispense with comments, which does make the old Studio rather less of a salon these days (although I can quite understand why he's done it; it can get very tedious trying to moderate comments from all the crazies out there). He had a particularly stimulating piece yesterday on the fears that colour the political outlook of the Chinese people, suggesting that China's historical experience, particularly in the 19th and 20th Centuries, has imbued its people with a deep-seated anxiety about the danger of 'social instability' - rather in contrast to America (and most of the rest of the world, I would venture; at least, most of the developed world), where it is the fear of 'tyranny', a wariness of the dangers of oppression by one's own government that dominates the political consciousnesss. It's scarcely a novel insight, and it very much accords with my own impressions of a commonly encountered Chinese mindset: China suffered terribly under the disintegrating rule of the later emperors, a century or more of warlordism, foreign exploitation, anarchy and famine. That kind of chaos is terrifying; and strong government is seen as the reassuring bulwark against chaos. The common defence mounted of Mao's rule these days is that he was at least a strong leader, even if he wasn't a very good one.  And that seems to have been the subtext of Zhang Yimou's film Hero: China's first emperor Qin Shihuang was shown to be a wicked man, but he was a strong ruler and he united China - so that made him all right (or 70% right, at any rate). J's comparison with American political instincts is interesting, but I'm not sure I buy his implication that it's just a case of "America's history makes her like this, China's history makes her like that."  (And I'm sure he doesn't really mean to suggest it's that simple; but his was only a brief post.) For one thing, it's not just a matter of the history that happened, but how that history is remembered, and how it is taught.  American schoolchildren doubtless imbibe - perhaps quite unconsciously - many of their views about the proper values their government should uphold from their textbooks on the Revolutionary War and bad old King George.  But I'm not aware of any single interest or institution in the USA that is co-ordinating the effort to inculcate those beliefs in the country's youngsters: some of it comes from the churches, some from the schools, some from the national political parties, some from major lobbying groups like the NRA.  But there's not a unified central programme.  In China, there is.  The narrative of 'harmony, good; chaos, bad; authoritarian government is necessary to restrict social instability' comes from the Chinese Communist Party, and it suffuses just about every word written and spoken in every imaginable form of media.  If people in China fear the hardships that social instability may bring (and they do), I very much doubt if it's got much to do with ancestral tradition, with the local oral histories of the horrors of the last two centuries; it's much more to do with the fact that they're being reminded about this history almost every single day in the state media. The selectivity of the history invoked by the CCP in this account is quite staggering too.  You'd think, wouldn't you, that for most Chinese today the most terrible examples of instability and chaos - the ones that are still within living memory - came not from the twilight years of the Qing Dynasty, nor even from the terrible days of the Japanese occupation, but from the Mao era.  If these were not airbrushed out of Chinese history and Chinese memory (and, of course, they can't be completely; that's another problem the CCP is storing up for itself, I think - continuing to ignore or deny crimes that prey upon the minds of the whole nation), it would be much harder to get people to accept the notion that the 'strong government' of the CCP is China's guarantee against another descent into chaos.  (Even if one accepts, as J suggests in his post, that the ten years' lunacy of the Cultural Revolution can be seen as an anarchic period, a breakdown of the usual institutions and practices of government, earlier Mao catastrophes like the The One Hundred Flowers Campaign and The Great Leap Forward were clearly impositions of the central government.  And it's not as if we left that kind of horror behind with Mao's death or the advent of 'reform & opening'; the One Child Policy, for example, has resulted in countless atrocities.) Also, I'm not at all sure that you could really call the attitude of the Chinese people "support" for the CCP.  I hardly ever come across anyone who's got a good word to say about the CCP (other than those being interviewed on CCTV, of course), not even Party members (a lot of young people still feel obliged to join for the sake of their careers, but it seems to me that not very many of them take it all that seriously any more; having to go through the motions like this inspires, rather, contempt and resentment).  No, I'd say "acquiescence" would be more the mot juste for the majority.  Most people put up with the CCP because - in many ways - it's not doing such a bad job.  And also because, at the moment, there just doesn't seem to be any viable alternative on the horizon.  (Which is not to say that people don't look wistfully towards the horizon.  More and more businesspeople and young professionals I talk to make noises about the Party needing to liberalize and democratize in order to become more accountable to business interests and the rapidly growing middle class.) Finally, I would say that to equate 'political reform' with 'instability' as the CCP seeks to do is a fallacy.  While there will be risks in any transition to a new political system in China, I would think that the dangers of long-term inertia would be far worse.  Most governments around the world now incorporate at least some elements of liberal democracy and the rule of law, and they mostly muddle along OK.  Yes, some of them might look like scary examples of the 'instability' bugbear, but it's not the political system per se that leads to that, but the social and economic changes those countries are trying to negotiate.  I believe the CCP is going to create a shitstorm for itself - and the country - if it doesn't find the courage to move forward. I daresay a Chinese critic will pop up from somewhere to accuse me of being 'culturally imperialist' for daring to suggest that the political priorities I am familiar with in my country may in fact have some innate advantages over those that pertain here - but I'm going to do it anyway.  To live in constant fear of disaster, of the worst that could happen, is not a healthy state of mind.  This kind of fear is not a good motivator, not a good guide for action; it tends to lead to indecisiveness and inertia; it does not inspire innovation and progress.  Fear of the improper or excessive use of government power, though (I would prefer to call it 'wariness' or 'caution', not a paralysing anxiety but a sensible watchfulness), should be a key concern for everyone.  The horrors the Chinese fear, the horrors they've witnessed in their recent history, are more likely to fall on them from their present government than from anywhere else.

Another bon mot

A little while ago, I was trying to perk up a friend who was anxious about a forthcoming public speaking engagement, and so sent him an encouraging text message. He replied glumly: "It'll be fun when it's over."

My response: "Ah, they say that about wars too. But the real fun is dodging the bullets."


That's my approach, anyway - to teaching, lecturing, life...

Dark metaphors

Well, it's been ages since I posted one of my poems. That's because I haven't been writing any. This one from the archive, though, fits pretty well the mood of glumness that has prevailed during this loony week in China. I wrote this - composed it, perhaps I should say - in the space of about an hour, while out for a run. The first line is adapted from something my friend The Poet (a proper one) had shared with me. Once I'd hit on the basic formula, any number of variations readily suggested themselves to me. That's the appeal of 'list' poems - they're pretty easy! It's possibly a bit raw and unfinished. I never did any polishing on it; just jotted it down exactly as it had first occurred to me, and then promptly forgot all about it. That must have been a couple of years ago. Bleak, yes; but not without shafts of humour. (And the Metaphor Game is one you all can play.) The city screams itself awake, The screaming never stops. Love's being tortured on the rack, Charity's in chains; Delight's a missing person, Enchantment's on the slab, Aspiration's choked at birth, Progress has lost its way; Compassion's on a hunger strike, And Friendship's bought with bribes; But the screaming never stops, The screams fill every day. Hopes are shoved in cattle-trucks, Ideals hounded down; Joy’s being suffocated, Illusions body-bagged; Justice proved a turncoat, And Mercy's out of style; While Truth's a wriggling prisoner To test cosmetics on. And the screaming never stops, The screams go on at night; The screaming never, never stops Till all our dreams are dead.

List of the Month - Shameful Pleasures

My blog-friend JES shared with us the other day a few of his 'guilty pleasures' (in the comment-thread to his post reviewing Stuart Neville's thriller The Twelve [UK title; just published in the US as The Ghosts of Belfast]), and he challenged me to produce a list of mine.   As you can see from my post title here, it's that word 'guilty' I have a problem with.  I've never been much of a believer in guilt, finding it one of the most superfluous of the emotions.  I take a kind of pride in my more eccentric habits and preferences, and feel not a shred of guilt about them (well, with the possible exception of playing computer games, that is - I do give myself a bit of a hard time over that on occasions).  If I am wary of discussing these things openly, it is only because I fear provoking a censorious response from others.  I know that these are tastes which are perhaps not widely shared, and which may in some cases even arouse moral disdain or physical disgust.  I know that these are habits which I can really only practise in private, and must abandon altogether whenever I have a houseguest, flatmate, or girlfriend.  At the very least, I fear my friends may be shocked or disapproving - or just disbelieving - of these revelations because they do not seem to be consonant with their general perception of me: surely such a sporty chap can't revel in gluttony so?  surely a man of such culture can't enjoy heavy metal music?  surely such a cinema snob can't have a soft spot for chick flicks?   My circumspection, then, about discussing such matters should properly be attributed not to guilt but to shame.   Here then are (some of) my favourite...       Shameful Pleasures     Computer driving games I have occasionally played other kinds of computer games - role-playing, strategy, shooters, etc. - but soon start to find them terribly dull. Even with games involving multiple elements, like Driver, The Getaway, and Grand Theft Auto, it was mainly the driving that appealed to me about them.  Only driving games really seem to tap into my obsessive streak, my passion for the pursuit of perfection: I love gradually whittling down a lap time, a few tenths or hundredths of a second at a time, over the course of dozens, perhaps hundreds of repetitions.  I rather fear that, after so many years of relentlessly pushing up to, and somewhat beyond the ragged edge in driving simulations (and finding crashing really rather fun!), I wouldn't be safe behind the wheel of a real car now.     Eating ice-cream out of the tub Ah, decadence!  I am quite capable of eating a half-litre tub in a single sitting (although I try to restrain myself from succumbing to such over-indulgence too often).  Rum'n'raisin is my favourite of the flavours readily available to me out here in China; although mango is also good, and I can occasionally get a decent cookies'n'cream.     Eating baked beans out of the can Heinz Baked Beans, that is - the lurid, unnaturally orange and dangerously sweet ones that have long been a centrepiece of every UK childhood, but are apparently uknown around most of the rest of the world.  Intermittently available as a 'luxury import' from certain of the foreigner-oriented supermarkets here.  Eating them warm on buttered toast is, of course, the classic childhood nostalgia fix, an ultimate comfort food.  But for me a very close second favourite means of consuming them is the perhaps rather rarer - maybe even unique? - method of spooning them cold directly out of the can (ideally, with one or two pickled onions dropped in the top, to vary up the flavour and texture).  I have had (female) flatmates who thought this utterly appalling.     Apartment-bound naturism One of the best things about living alone (and on an upper floor, with no neighbours within any kind of snooping range) is that you can spend a lot of the day naked.  I particularly like going out on my balcony early in the morning to do some starkers tai chi - aping the elegant movements of the old ladies in the park below (I can see them, but they can't see me!).  Of course, it can lead to embarrassment when the man calls to read the water-meter.     Drinking in bed Even more than eating in bed, this seems to me the height of cosseting self-indulgence.  I quite often retire to bed for the night with a small can of beer or a snifter of whisky, while I try to finish off a chapter of a book.  There are few moments of more perfect relaxation in my life.  Of course, it does quite often lead to messy spillages, if I fall asleep before I've finished.     The music of AC/DC This is one of those I alluded to above, a pleasure which those who don't know the music will find it difficult to appreciate; and something which many people seem to regard as an unlikely enthusiasm of mine.  I grew up almost exclusively devoted to classical music, an avid listener to BBC Radio 3 throughout my childhood.  I disdained my elder brother's rock'n'roll record collection, most of which seemed to be fixated on odd colour references - Pink Floyd, Deep Purple.  I didn't develop much of an interest in rock music until I started at college (in fact, I discovered AC/DC serendipitously through a fellow student, who had a room a few doors down the corridor from me and was playing some very loudly on the first day of the new term; that was how we met 25 years ago, and we're still best friends).  Many of my friends still seem to picture me as a high-brow nerd; I badger them to come to classical concerts with me, and even to the ballet.  My profound admiration for AC/DC seems to them somehow out-of-kilter with these other tastes.  And heck, even admirers of the genre are sometimes disparaging of AC/DC, suggesting that they are a little simplistic and repetitive, jeering that they have made the same album over and over again (I think I've complained on here before [although I can't now find the link] that Angus only just makes it into Rolling Stone's list of the 'Top 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time'; I'd put him in the Top 20).  Tosh!  They are the best rock'n'roll band ever, with dozens of - quite diverse - classic head-bangy anthems.  And Angus Young is just an exquisite, heavily blues-influenced guitar player.  If you don't get this, you have no soul.     Romantic films And I don't just mean rom-coms here (although I have a weakness for them too) but slushy romantic melodramas - particularly from the good old black & white days.  I used to watch hundreds of old films on afternoon and early evening TV when I was a kid, so there's an element of personal nostalgia tied up with my continuing fondness for this kind of film now.  My heart flip-flops a little whenever I come across a golden oldie like Random Harvest or Queen Christina or Portrait of Jennie in my local DVD store.     Horror films Again, an untypically low-brow taste.  A film snob such as myself probably shouldn't indulge in such trashy delights.  But again, it's a habit I developed in childhood: the treat of being allowed to stay up late on a Friday or a Saturday night to watch seasons of the 'classics' has invested this sort of film with a special charm or excitement that they perhaps don't really deserve.  Yet I'm now so well-versed in the history and conventions of the genre - I've seen just about everything: from the great Universal Studios Dracula and Frankenstein series of the 1930s, through the 'creature features' of the 1950s, to the slasher pics of the 1970s, to today's fixation with gore, 'body horror' and zombies - that I can appreciate these films on so many different levels; I can, as often as not, delight in their very badness.     Blogging Silly, silly habit.  I am always somewhat reticent about confessing to friends, and even more so to strangers, that I am a blogger.  Perhaps this one might be characterised as a source of guilt as well as shame.  I do worry that it's becoming something of an addiction; and I really feel that I ought to be doing something more useful with my time.  It does, though, bring me a lot of pleasure.  And it seems that other people enjoy my witterings too, at least on occasion.     The BBC Shipping Forecast Another of those comforting memories from a childhood spent listening to the radio.  The shipping forecast was usually the last thing I'd listen to before retiring to bed.  There was something amazingly soothing about that incantatory repetition of the names of the sea areas off the British coast, always checked off in the same order, progressing clockwise around the islands.  And what wonderful names! "Forties, Dogger, German Bight..."  I always try and get a fix of this at least once or twice on my increasingly rare trips back to the UK.  I have been told it's possible to listen to it here in Beijing, via BBC World Service Radio online - but I haven't worked out how do do that yet.  I'll have to look into it.  I think it might coax me into slumber more effectively than the snifters of whisky.

And.... we're back!

Well, sort of.  I'm coming to you via Tonga this Friday, I believe.  What larks!   I don't know if there's been an immediate relaxation of the censorship regime after the October 1st shenanigans have been got out of the way, but I am - glitchily - back in touch with Blogger and Blogspot (via Tor; all of the web-based proxies still seem to be blocked, and I haven't got around to subscribing to a VPN service yet) for the first time this week.   I had a splurge of catching up on comments earlier this afternoon.  Sorry about the interruption of service.

The weekly haiku

How stiffly they march! Little joy in this party. How stiffly they smile!

Do you find me WISIBLE?

Er, yes.   I had been anxious for the past few weeks that today's Big Parade would be a rather sinister and depressing affair, but..... well, it was so riotously over-the-top, so unself-consciously kitsch, so downright camp at times, that it was impossible to take it seriously.  The only appropriate response was to smirk and chortle.   Honestly, those soldiers strutting primly by with that - somehow rather mincing - attenuated goose-step.... I'm sure I've seen some of those boys down at Destination (Beijing's most famous gay bar - I wonder if that's Google-able?).  My buddy The Choirboy had no hesitation in pronouncing this "the gayest parade I've ever seen" (I would like to think he meant it as a compliment, at least in a roundabout way).  Confirmation of this implicit theme of celebrating China's homosexuality seemed to come near the end when one of the English-language announcers (both of whom delivered their dire script in a permanently perplexed monotone which seemed to suggest that they were having to sight-read it [very possible - 'state secrets', and all that!] and/or that they couldn't believe what they were being asked to say) referred to "The Tiananmen Gay Towers" (ah, final consonants - hours of fun!).  And did you notice the big rainbow picture at the north end of T square?  Yep, I think one of the designers of this spectacle managed to smuggle in a HUGE gay sub-text, which entirely passed over the heads of the glibly smiling septuagenarians on the rostrum.   Just about the final words of the TV commentary were "another important event that happened on Tiananmen Square".  Oh dear.  Of course, the most important event that's happened there still finds no place in public discourse in this country.  Until it does, it will be impossible to take anything the CCP says or does seriously.

Damn, they're good!

When I went to bed at around 2.30 this morning, Beijing was still cloaked in a putrid smog, and there was no sign of the (artificially induced) rain which had been promised to disperse it.   By the time I awoke for this morning's "festivities" at 8am, the visibility was limitless and the sky was that sort of eerily perfect blue you usually only see in paintings.   One cannot help but think that Satanic rites were involved somewhere...