Knowledge, and the lack thereof

“TAXI !!”

How often have you shouted that word, or even silently raised your arm on a busy street, secure in the belief that once ensconced in that vehicle you need have no further worries and will be able to switch off for a short while, as you are conveyed efficiently to your destination? You won’t get lost. You won’t be asked any difficult questions regarding the location of or route to wherever you’re going. After all, taxi drivers know everything, right?

Edinburgh taxi drivers do. In fifteen years there I was only ever taken to the wrong place once, and that was forgivable as a lot of the streets do have very similar names. Minicab drivers in York and Southampton seem to have a pretty good grasp of things too, despite having those cities’ tortuous one-way systems to contend with. And in London, of course, all cabbies have The Knowledge.

For my non-British readers, this is a test - allegedly requiring years of study - which anyone wishing to become a black-cab driver in London must pass, and which basically involves learning the name and location of every street and landmark in the UK capital. It’s a BIG place, so the taxi drivers rightly pride themselves on this achievement – particularly as I imagine they must have to keep their ‘Knowledge’ continually updated to keep pace with changes, which is no mean feat these days.

If you’ll permit me an indulgent aside for a moment, anyone who doubts that such an encyclopedic knowledge of a giant mega-city is possible should have met my late father. He wasn’t a cab driver, but I’m sure The Knowledge would have been a breeze for him. He was born and raised in south-east London, and later worked for one of the major publishing houses as their Central London rep for many years between the 1950s and 1970s. He was extremely good at it, and as a result was on first name terms with every bookshop owner, manager or chief buyer in London, which was a great many.

A bi-product of this was that he knew the place like the proverbial back of his hand. When my friends and I started going up to London on our own as teenagers, if any of us wanted to find a specific address, no matter what the area, I had only to ask my Dad and after a minute or two’s consideration he would not only able to advise the traveller as to the quickest route by Tube, but would also draw – freehand and without recourse to reference books – a detailed and amazingly accurate pictorial map of the route on foot from station to destination, showing every turning and landmark - sometimes down to the last tree or lamp-post - with estimated distances or walking times between each.

As a result I was able to travel freely alone around London from the age of about 14 with no fear of getting lost. I’d never heard of an A to Z – my Dad’s maps were all I ever needed. I wish I’d kept some of them as they were works of art, of which he was justly proud. On one’s return home he would enquire with just a hint of a smug smile, ‘So did you find it all right?’, to which one was required to respond with glory heaped upon The Map.

The only time they were ever wrong was when some new development had occurred without his knowledge - something which, it has to be said, he always took very badly. He seemed to expect to be kept informed of all changes, however minor, to the London landscape; indeed, it’s quite possible he half expected them to be run past him first. Any alteration to his beloved native city was truly a monstrous carbuncle. During my student years he occasionally came to collect me by car from King’s Cross when I came home for the holidays, and the installation of any new roundabout or one-way system not only confused and perturbed him but also, you could tell, wounded him deeply. If I or my mother had gone to London armed with one of his maps and dared to remark casually on our return, ‘Yes, thanks, I found the place no problem, the map was great, but incidentally did you know that place you said was a bank is actually now a McDonald’s? And where you said there’d be a big tree on the corner it looked as though they’d chopped it down recently,’ all hell would break loose.

First would come a detailed interrogation to make sure that we weren’t mistaken, or making it up just to annoy him, and that we really had followed his instructions to the letter and hadn’t accidentally – or perhaps wilfully – taken a wrong turning. When at length he was satisfied that we were not either lying or congenitally stupid, the grieving process would begin.

‘McDonald’s?!’ he’d cry, in anguish. ‘What is the world coming to? Been there for years, that bank had. McDonald’s? Christ Almighty,’ and so on in this vein for some time. Or, ‘What, that lovely old tree? Gone? I can’t believe it. Lovely, it was, that tree. Chopped it down? Dear oh dear oh dear. Christ Almighty,’ and at this point would become too choked to continue and wouldn’t speak for the rest of the evening. In the end I gave up telling him. It was less painful for everyone that way.

Knowledge, you see. A powerful tool. Unless, that is, you’re a Chinese taxi driver.

Boss was heard to remark the other week that the only qualification for becoming a cab driver in Shanghai seems to be the ability to drive. To be frank, I would question even that one, but one criterion that certainly isn’t deemed necessary is knowing where anything is.

None of the taxi drivers speak English, so if you don’t speak Chinese the only way to get anywhere is to have your destination written down in Chinese characters and show this to the driver on entering the vehicle. The drill is always the same. They take your piece of paper, peer at it, slowly turn it over and read whatever’s on the back (whether this is the same thing, a different address entirely, or simply your shopping list in English), then with some encouragement from you turn it back to the correct side and read it carefully again, generally while shaking their head and muttering. They may turn to you and ask you a question. When you respond with a shrug, or a wave in the general direction in which you need to go, they mutter some more, throw your piece of paper onto the dashboard and set off, still muttering, which is disconcerting when you can recognise the word for ‘where?’ cropping up repeatedly.

One driver this week did the whole pantomime with my little address note and then turned to me and asked in Chinese which I understood perfectly, ‘Where’s that then?’. And this wasn’t some obscure side-street; our new apartment’s address is on one of Shanghai’s major thoroughfares. It’s like a London cabbie asking you where, say, Charing Cross Road is, or an Edinburgh one struggling to find Leith Walk. What did he want me to say – ‘It’s in Shanghai’, perhaps?

Once mobile, they may start off by going in completely the opposite direction, or take a wildly wrong turning anywhere en route, so you need to have your wits about you and be prepared to shout ‘No, no!’ and gesture frantically – assuming, of course, you know where the place is yourself, because if you don’t, you’re frankly buggered. The only recourse in that instance is to phone someone at your destination, explain your plight, hand the phone to the driver and get them to dictate directions in Chinese. Thank goodness for modern technology.

When they eventually get near – or what they think might be near – to where you want to go, they will slow down and proceed in a very irritating stop-start manner for a mile or so while consulting your paper every few yards. They do this even if you know you’re not there yet and keep shouting at them to go on. Just as they approach the correct place, they will put their foot down and you have to scream at them again to stop, which they will then do, even if this means screeching to a halt in the middle of a dual carriageway and doing a U-turn across several lanes of oncoming traffic.

It’s not just in Shanghai that this goes on. In Harbin, our taxi usage is mostly confined to bringing the shopping home from the supermarket, which is less than a mile away. We have our address, in Chinese, in a text message which we show to the drivers. But not one of them knows where the street is, so Peter always has to sit in the passenger seat and point left and right. In Beijing the other week, Peter was on his way to a meeting and had his cabbie actually lean out of the window while driving along and shout across to a fellow taxi driver driving alongside for directions. Ever heard of sat-nav, guys??

Maybe the trouble is that finding out where places are would involve getting a straight answer out of people, something which you’ll have gathered by now is next to impossible here. The lost taxi-driver in Beijing was only part of Peter’s woes in his attempts to get to this meeting. First of all he had tried to get the hotel reception to give him a phone number for a taxi company so that he could call a taxi to get back after the meeting, as it was out of town. The girl he asked looked a bit perplexed and went into the back office to consult with her colleagues. After a while she reappeared.

‘We will call you taxi,’ she said.

Peter explained that yes, that was fine for getting there, but how would he get back? After several repetitions of this cycle, the duty manager got on the case and offered to find a driver and negotiate with him to wait while Peter had his meeting. Clearly the concept of phoning in advance for a taxi was unheard of – indeed, as the taxis have no radios it’s hard to see how this could work. They sent a lad from the hotel into the street to flag down a taxi. Two stopped at once, only avoiding crashing into each other by one of them knocking down a cyclist, who got up and started shouting at the driver and kicking his bumper, thereby allowing the other driver to win Peter’s fare.

It was this man - who apparently resembled a hippopotamus with exceptionally large, hairy, warty ears - who had to ask other drivers for assistance en route, until Peter eventually phoned the person he was going to meet and did the hand-the-phone-to-driver thing – which in view of the warty ears was pretty brave.

On arrival at his destination, Peter disembarked and retrieving (and wiping) his phone, said to his associate, ‘Right, I’m here now. I’m at the main entrance. Where’s your office?’

‘Ah’, says associate. ‘Go out of the main door and we are round the back.’

‘Left or right?’ asks Peter.

‘We are in a building that is not yellow.’

‘Yes but do I go left or right?’

‘It is a low building.’

Giving up, he picked a direction at random, walked for a little while and then phoned again. ‘Ok, I’m standing looking at a big tower thing.’

‘Ah, you have gone too far. Go back.’

He returns to the main entrance. ‘Now I’ve gone back to where I was before.’

‘I did not see you! Look for the building that is not yellow.’

And so, having asked the guy please to come out and find him, he tried again, and on the second attempt discovered that in actual fact when he got to the tower he hadn’t gone far enough.

People say the Chinese will one day rule the world. If knowledge really is power, I don’t think we’ve got too much to worry about. Rule the world? They’d have to find it first.

A moving story

So plans are underway for our impending move to Shanghai. There are various good reasons for this, the main one being that I refuse to give birth in Harbin where hospital provision is somewhat basic and monolingual Chinese, and I won’t be allowed to fly after the end of April-ish, so to attend a hospital in Shanghai I need to be living there. Once the baby’s born in July I will be free to travel, but the baby needs a passport before it’s allowed on a plane, and a visa before it’s officially allowed to live in China – a bit of a joke when you consider it’ll never have been anywhere else – and I’d like it to have had a few vaccinations before I take it on a Chinese flight. So we reckoned about 6 months in Shanghai was the minimum, and might be fun anyway.

We’re quite attached to the hotel which we always stay in when we go there, despite an entertainingly patchy room service which frequently results in breakfast turning up inconveniently late or early and almost always with the wrong cutlery (ever tried eating cornflakes with a knife and fork?). But six months in such a place would not only be horrifically expensive but would drive us (me) insane, not to mention the unfortunate other guests who had to live next door to our screaming newborn (!), so we’ve been forced to find what we have to keep remembering to call an ‘apartment’ to move into.

When I say ‘move’, it’s not so much a move as an ultra-decadent bid to have not one but two homes in China (as well as one in the UK, of course), due to the fact that a) Peter’s job – though do-able from Shanghai – is really based in Harbin and will require him to be here at least two days a week, b) we can’t quite bear to commit ourselves to either leaving our Harbin flat or to leaving Shanghai when the essential period is over, and c) unknown to us, a two-year lease had been signed on the Harbin flat - sorry, apartment. So we did the maths and worked out we could just afford to keep two places going for six months, without having to resort to the elaborate subletting plan proposed by Boss but which, we were told in no uncertain terms by Kevin, our Harbin landlords Would Not Like.

That was the easy bit.

Now, anyone reading this who’s known me for a long time will have an idea of my record on house moves. For the rest of you, you could say it’s, well, What I Do. Some people throw themselves into their careers; some excel at sport; others collect stamps. I move house. I think at the last count it was 22 times, four of which occurred before the age of seven and the remainder after the age of 18. One friend always used to joke that she needed a separate address book just for me. The total could possibly be more, depending on what exactly you classify as a move. For example, if I moved from one part of a student hall of residence to another (about 6 times, I think), does that count? Or if I stayed with parents or friends while in transit from one home to another (at least twice)?

Whatever the case, you’d think by now I’d find the whole thing a breeze. Truthfully, I used to enjoy it. Revel, almost. But as time goes on, to my intense surprise I’m finding the experience increasingly stressful – something which I think has less to do with my age and more to do with the fact that I seem subconsciously to find it necessary to make each move more difficult for myself than the last. I feel as though I’m trapped in a giant computer game called House Move 3 or something, progressing to a higher and higher level each time.

I’ve moved into houses, flats, bungalows, lodgings and hotel rooms. I’ve moved out of basements into third floor flats and vice versa. I’ve squeezed the contents of an entire flat into a room the size of a cupboard. I’ve moved to new towns – and even a new country – with no idea where I was going to live, and I’ve turned up at a new home I’d just bought to find that due to a hugely complicated mix-up, my key wouldn’t work and I had to find a locksmith and persuade him that I did live there, honest.

I’ve transported my belongings by car, van, train, plane, ferry, fleet of taxis and on foot, trundling them to a new place a few streets away in a supermarket trolley. I’ve moved in blistering heat and torrential rain (the latter several times – although snow will, I think, be a first). I’ve scarcely ever called upon the services of removers, relying generally on family, friends, grudging colleagues, a grumpy ‘man with a van’ driver who didn’t stop complaining because I hadn’t managed to drum up any other helpers and it ‘wasn’t part of his job to carry boxes’, and a friend who attempted to drive a van from York to Edinburgh without bothering to look at a map first, and took us via Redcar.

I’ve moved from Devon to Cornwall, Cornwall to Bristol, Bristol to London/Kent, Kent to York, York back to Kent again (and several repeats of this cycle while I was a student), then to France for a year, then back to York, then to the Shetland Islands for a brief spell, then from York to Edinburgh where I managed to stay put for a bit, then to Southampton (via Kent), then lived half in Southampton and half in Edinburgh before moving back to Edinburgh properly, and then finally to China. I must have covered more miles than Marco Polo.

I’ve done moves which involved getting things from four locations into one and vice versa. I hardly possess an item that hasn’t been in storage at some point, either containerised or in an obliging mother or friend’s loft for several years. I’ve carried collections of suitcases totalling considerably more than my own body weight on trains up and down the East Coast main line hundreds of times. I’ve organised a complicated logistical exercise which involved driving my things from Edinburgh to York by van and then transferring them to my mother’s car which took them on to Kent. I’ve travelled by train from north to south and back with plants, a large hi-fi system, and even a cat in a wicker basket.

I’ve moved in with total strangers, made friends, lost friends, gained and lost lovers and made enemies. My flatmates have been male, female, straight, gay, young (the youngest being a baby of 4 months) or not-so-young, rich, poor, tidy, untidy, employed, unemployed, lovely, tolerable, and unbearable. I’ve lived with English, Scots, Irish, Spaniards (lots and lots of Spaniards), Danes, New Zealanders, and even a one-legged Welsh-speaking Glaswegian called Davy Jones (seriously).

I’ve moved into a place where the previous occupant’s toenail clippings were still embedded in my bedroom carpet – and there was no hoover. I've lived with a girl who kept the toilet roll in a locked cupboard, and with a Tory lawyer with whom I bickered from Day One. There have been insomniacs, people who managed to sleep through deafening music at 3am, people on odd diets and followers of curious religions. I’ve argued ferociously over heating, bills, and whose turn it was to buy or clean things, and had a lovely Spanish flatmate who used to sell me a few of her cool customised clothes every time the phone bill came in, and I fell for it every time. I even lived by myself for a few years and loved it.

And in all of this I’ve only managed to lose one box of books, and have acquired various useful items, a couple of best friends, and a wealth of life experience quite possibly unparallelled among those I know, and for which I shall be eternally grateful. And now I’m married and I love that too. Better than anything.

But I truly thought I’d reached the highest level of House Move 3 with our move to China. We had to sort our extensive collection of possessions (and believe me, the whole thing gets SO much more complicated once another person’s things are thrown into the equation, particularly when that person is a worse hoarder than I am!) into what we would take with us, what we would ship out for later, what we’d leave behind for our tenant, what we’d throw out and what we’d put into storage. We had piles for each category around the flat, which wasn’t easy as we were short of space to begin with. Things got transferred from one pile to another and back again. My problems with getting someone to transport them to China I’ve documented previously. So let’s just say that it was extremely stressful, and once we’d found somewhere to live in Harbin and our things had arrived, the one thing I DID NOT want to do was move again until we had to go home.

You’ll have gathered that my pregnancy was, if not exactly unplanned, then certainly unexpected, and so I find myself now with no alternative but to uncover some sort of hidden bonus feature on House Move 3 where you can have two homes in China simultaneously, which sounds good but involves new challenges not previously encountered in the main game. These include:

One - Trying to find a suitable apartment in a city a thousand miles away a month or two before you want to move in, in a country where everything is done at the last minute and any properties you look round are always available NOW and the concept of holding it for you is an alien one.

Two - Compiling a list of our requirements to give to a Chinese speaker in the office (so that she could make a shortlist of apartments for us to see), carefully divided into ‘must-haves’ and ‘nice to haves’, only for her to ignore most of the items on the list and send us to lots of quite unsuitable places which maybe filled one or two of the criteria.

Three - Trying to negotiate a lease of unorthodox length (which has turned out to be 8 months in practice) when the landlords just want to make as much money out of westerners as they possibly can.

Four - Getting people in the office to take some initiative when it comes to paying deposits, signing contracts and so forth, when they’re terrified to do anything without explicit instructions from you in words of one syllable, lest they get it wrong somehow and thus lose face.

Five - Sorting all our stuff AGAIN into what to take and what to leave in Harbin, complicated by the fact that Peter will spend several days a week here, and by the fact that I’ll be forbidden from flying so won’t be able to come back for things myself, so I’ll have to be able to tell him the exact location of anything I want brought down.

AND by the fact that Chinese landlords don’t provide bedding or kitchen equipment in their apartments so that we had to buy everything from scratch when we moved in here, and will now have to either take half of all this stuff with us, or else buy everything (including kettle, vacuum cleaner, pillows, plates, pans, etc) all over again. Which of course means we’ll have two of everything when we come back. Three, if you count all the stuff back home. I’m trying to learn to breathe deeply and not raise my blood pressure too much!

I’m so looking forward to the release of House Move 4. That’s where you have to do everything I’ve described above - WITH A BABY.

Freakish

Here’s a thing. And not a Chinese one.

There is a British company (whom I shan’t name since becoming aware of the scary power of Google to watch my every word much more assiduously than any Chinese Big Brother could ever do) which specialises in making boots for women with ‘large or slim calves’. In other words, a shop for freaks, like me.

They’ve only been going a few years, and when I heard about them I got very excited. Fantastic, I thought – I won't feel like a freak any more! No more utterly humiliating shoe-shopping experiences in which I’m reduced to tears by having a helpful but ever-so-slightly patronising girl get every pair of boots off the shelf in the shop for me, and then having to buy a pair I don’t like that much because they’re the only ones I can fit over my fat legs. These ‘large or slim calves’ people claim to have ‘21 different calf fittings’. They also do shoes for wide feet (yes, you guessed it, that’s me as well). Great! They’re a touch more expensive than the average but that’s fine with me, that’s a service I’ll pay for, I thought.

To put this in perspective you need to appreciate the difficulties I have with shopping in China. Now I’m not huge (well, I’m getting huger at the moment, but that’s different!). Curvy, perhaps. But not vast. But Chinese women are all SO skinny that if I want to buy any clothes here - except in the western shops in Shanghai - I have to get the biggest size there is, and even then sometimes it doesn’t fit me. I’ve never bought anything in XXXL before in my life, but that’s often what I count as here. Very often they don’t even have XXXL, and shake their heads apologetically while looking me up and down in a manner which says unmistakably, ‘God, we didn’t know people as fat as you even existed’.

What with this, and the fact that my immigration medical classified me as ‘obese’, don’t forget (as I never shall, grrr), I’ve been heard to protest wailingly that I must be the Fattest Person in China (FPIC). Peter tries to make me feel better by pointing out any fat girls we spot, with a nudge and an ‘FPIC alert!’. There aren’t many, but if you hang around Macdonald’s long enough you’re bound to see one or two.

Unfortunately, even if I could speak Chinese, you can’t exactly walk up to someone and say, ‘Excuse me, you look like a bit of a porker. Would you mind telling me where you bought the vast tent you’re wearing?’ So I haven’t bought many clothes. Don’t even get me started on the bras. Most of the offerings are gnat-bite size. Seriously I think it must be illegal in China to sell anything bigger than a C cup. Even in the maternity section of M&S they don't go above D. Online ordering from the UK is the way to go for me.

Shoes are just impossible for me here, of course, and it was for this reason that I went to the aforementioned ‘large & slim calves’ emporium in Edinburgh. I’d seen on their website that they did a fleece-lined boot which struck me as ideal for Harbin. It was summer when we left the UK so I couldn’t get winter boots then, so had to wait until we were visiting at Christmas before I could try them on. They don't carry stock in the shop so you have to select the ones you want and then they get them in from their warehouse. So they measured my ‘obese’ calf, and found a pair of the fleecy ones I was after which fitted me no problem.

‘Oh’, said the girl, checking her computer. ‘I’m afraid these aren’t currently in stock in your size combination. We’ll have to make them for you. It’ll be four to eight weeks, I’m afraid, with the Christmas break and everything.’

This was on December 22nd. Guess when they turned up? Last Wednesday. That’s March 4th. I make that more than 11 weeks. The company were very attentive and communication was great. They emailed me at least once a month to tell me the boots weren’t ready yet, and cajoled me with increasing desperation to ‘make an alternative selection from our website’. Eventually they apologetically announced – without me even complaining or anything - that they’d give me 10% off and free delivery, which seeing as it was to China was pretty good of them, thereby saving me about £30. Finally they told me which week the boots would be dispatched, and indeed they were.

Seriously though, eleven weeks? To make one pair of boots? What on earth?? The boots are very nice; they don't fit me now, of course, with my ankles all puffed up with pregnancy, but I won't need them in Shanghai and they should be ok for the autumn.

But what’s all this about ‘my size combination’? My feet are quite an average size once you ignore the width factor, which these guys take into account anyway. Where are your 21 different calf fittings? What’s going on? I'd been hoping for a self-esteem boost but I couldn't have failed more miserably.

Not only am I the Fattest Person in China. I'm officially too freakish for the freak shop.

Happy Birthday, Rover

We know January’s a dull and depressing month back home, so we thought we’d give you an excuse for a celebration.

If you have a dog, today is the day to dress up Pooch in his best party hat, bake him a doggy cake and invite all his little doggy friends over for a few games of Pass the Bone or Pin the Tail on the Postman. Yes folks, according to Chinese New Year lore, today (the second day of the lunar new year) is all dogs’ birthday.

Now what could be more sensible than that? All the pets I ever had were born long before we bought or acquired them, so we always had to make birthdays up for them and more or less guess their ages – with the exception of the cat who had the same birthday as me, although I suspect my parents may have made that one up too out of sentimentality. Here, you’ve got your doggy date of birth all sorted for you thanks to centuries of tradition.

Apologies to cat-lovers, by the way, as the moggies don’t seem to get a look-in on this one. Actually I don’t think many people have cats here; I’ve only seen about three (all on the same day, as it happens – dunno what that signifies!). Most people have what we call SLDs (Silly Little Dogs) of the type beloved of supermodels and elderly Spanish ladies. In fact, prior to coming to China I thought Barcelona was the SLD capital of the world, but Harbin or Shanghai may well have stolen its crown.

Now, while I’m on the subject of New Year lore, here are some Errata (tut!) from the previous post. According to Peter, the fires on street corners are NOT made from coals but from paper. (It looks likes coals to me.) If you want your ancestors to get a car, you DRAW a car on a piece of paper and then burn it, not write the word. (What’s the difference if it’s in Chinese characters anyway?!) The third and fourth days of the new year are the ones for visiting graves, NOT the second day – obviously, you’ll be too busy making jelly and ice cream for your dog on Day 2 – silly of me. And you’ll be pleased to know, I’m sure, that Kevin managed to get a cancellation for a second class airline ticket home so didn’t have to fly first class after all – though having flown second class on Chinese airlines many times now myself, frankly in his position I would have stuck to the ‘Oh no, I can’t get a ticket’ line, seeing as someone else was paying!

So, how did we spend New Year’s Eve? The one two nights ago, obviously, not the real one; we spent that, ironically enough, having a Chinese meal in Wetherby and then discoing the night away with my irrepressible in-laws (the oldest teenagers in town) at the Swan and Talbot, and a jolly good night was had by all. I was about to say that this is the first time I’ve ever had two NYEs in the space of a month, but in fact that’s not strictly true. In 1997, if memory serves, we not only had two Hogmanays but even saw the new year in twice in the same night (on about December 19th) - but that’s another story.

I was thinking we could maybe travel the world in search of cultures who celebrate New Year at other times, and see if we can get into the Guinness Book of Records for the most New Years in a year, or something? We could be like that crazy bloke somewhere in England who celebrates Christmas 365 days a year. I can see us wearing party hats all the time, shrieking ‘The bells, the bells!’ in an over-excited manner whenever midnight came and perpetually singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ while attempting to snog strangers at every opportunity, until everyone was thoroughly sick of us.

But I digress.

The main feature of the other night’s celebrations was, of course, fireworks. We needn’t have worried about not seeing any, or having to stand out in the cold to watch them – they were being set off continuously all evening, in many cases just feet from our window.

In the UK when people do fireworks in their back gardens on November 5th, it’s pretty safe, partly because the fireworks are so – well – crap, and partly because everyone has been so indoctrinated into the discipline of ‘lighting the blue touchpaper and then withdrawing’ (always sounds a bit rude to me) and keeping small children and animals at least 20 feet away at all times, that the frisson of excitement factor is generally nil.

Here they like to live on the edge. Letting off fireworks a couple of feet outside the front door of a tower block, so that the flying, burning bits (and boy did they fly) land on people’s balconies and set fire to stuff? Not a problem. The fire brigade were called, and a few people – but not many, really, considering the size of the apartment block in question, which was just across the street from us – sensibly put on their coats, evacuated the building and waited outside until they could see it was safe to return. But most, including the people in the flat ALMOST DIRECTLY ABOVE the one with the fire, stayed in and watched out of the window.

No fewer than four fire engines arrived, which seemed a little excessive in view of the fact that this scenario must surely have been being replicated a hundred times all over Harbin. Two firemen eventually appeared in the window directly above the blaze, which was about 14 floors up. The flat itself was in darkness, the residents presumably absent and unaware that their precious collection of rotting cabbages or whatever they were storing on their balcony was going up in smoke. The firemen tried to hose out the flames, but were unable to get the right angle. They therefore withdrew for a consultation of the type the Chinese do best, discussing the best course of action at length while the disaster unfolds before their eyes (heaven forbid that anyone should lose face by making a quick decision). Finally the guy from the flat opposite the one they were in (the one mentioned above who’d been watching the whole thing from his window), came out onto his balcony and poured a bucket of water over the fire beneath, extinguishing it completely.

Total time and manpower expended by the fire brigade: twenty minutes, four engines, goodness knows how many fire-fighting personnel in each, and one very long hose. Result: zero. Number of people burning to death in other parts of the city while this fiasco was taking place: unknown.

Apart from this, our chief entertainment of the evening was watching the annual CCTV Gala on telly, helpfully partially dubbed and subtitled by our friends at good old CCTV9. Traditionally, all Chinese families would gather round the TV after their New Year’s Eve meal (much like the Morecambe & Wise Christmas Show in Britain in the 70s) to watch this five-hour extravaganza. Clearly many people nowadays prefer to be outside setting fire to their neighbours’ balconies and deafening unsuspecting westerners with non-stop firecracker explosions, but the Gala is bigger and better than ever nonetheless.

Words are a poor tool with which to describe this event. Sorry to hark back to the 1970s yet again, but that was the last time that we attempted a variety show to even begin to rival this. There was song, dance and, er, ‘comedy’ on a gigantic scale. The costumes were huge. The hair was huger - and more glittery, and more solid. Every performer was backed by several hundred dancers in elaborate attire chosen to reflect the theme of the song. The set had a jaw-dropping backdrop with vast pillars and a constantly changing computer graphic showing everything from swirling flowers to happy children gamboling in the fields, and even a giant dancing ginseng root for the rap song about Chinese herbal medicine. (Yes really. Choice lyrics: ‘The medicine may be bitter but the affliction is more galling’, or ‘I will write you a prescription to cure the ill caused by fawning on foreign things’.) This was performed by a pretty boy in a gold jacket and a tiny six-year-old Michael-Jackson-alike who could spin on his head.

If the singing was bad, the comedy sketches reached new heights of awfulness. Unfortunately they didn’t subtitle them fully, just gave a summary of the plot, which didn’t really illuminate why everyone was roaring with laughter or why the flippin’ thing went on for twenty minutes. We did laugh, however, when it came to the sketch which for some inexplicable reason was set in ‘an expensive Scottish restaurant’ in a remote Chinese village. (Someone should tell them there are no Scottish restaurants, even in Scotland.) I think the Scottish theme had been introduced for comedy value merely in order to get a camp waiter in a skirt on stage. This chap’s costume was basically a LONG, tartan-ish skirt, complete with white lace frill around the hem and a strange flap at the side. With this he wore a long, silky, white tunic, a tartan scarf flung rakishly around his neck, and shiny black brogues. Presumably this is how they think Scottish men dress (in their ‘stripy skirts’)!! Regrettably we never found out what was on the menu in this Scottish restaurant as that bit wasn’t translated.

In any case, by then the explosions from outside had got so loud that we couldn’t hear the telly any more. From about 11pm, if you’d phoned us you could seriously have been forgiven for thinking we were in a war zone. It was constant, and absolutely deafening. We had to shout to each other to make ourselves heard. Fortunately, as I say, this did succeed in drowning out the finale of the Gala, which consisted of a number of medleys of very scary ‘Isn’t China GREAT??!!!’ songs clearly from a previous era which shall remain nameless.

At about 1.30am, the noise had just about subsided enough for us to go to bed. They very considerately waited until 8.15am the next morning before starting again. It took us most of yesterday to recover.

Thank goodness we don’t have a dog. I just couldn’t handle the stress of a party today.

The season of peace and glove

A belated Happy New Year to you all – and as you can see, it’s new year, new look, for From Scotland to Siberia. The previous template (chosen in some haste) was just too – well – pink, and that Georgia font, while it looked lovely in our wedding invitations, is a bit too curly for on-screen reading, so I decided to go sans serif. If anyone actually preferred the old look, please tell me, and I might think about it. Or I might just ignore you.

Anyway, you’ll be glad to know they let us back into China - although I did have Amazon’s number in my phone and primed as we came through Immigration, just in case! (See earlier post).

We managed to pass a very pleasant and restful few weeks with our families and friends in the UK, despite spending rather more time than one might wish being forced to read the Daily Express advice on how to avert the recession by not buying anything (not sure quite how that works), enduring endless discussions about the Strictly Come Dancing phone-in votes scandal (what?), sitting in doctors’ and dentists’ surgeries, having injections, and rushing around buying up the entire contents of Boots and Morrison’s, trying desperately to stock up on all the things we can’t buy in China. We bought, or were given, so much stuff that I bravely decided to forego the purchase of more Marmite, resolving instead to eke out my remaining third of a jar until the next visit home. In the end we had to buy another suitcase so I could have carried it after all. It’s a tragedy.

But not as tragic as the tale which I’m about to tell you, concerning the World’s Most Expensive Mittens.

I purchased the WMEMs back in August at Blues the Ski Shop in Edinburgh. I don’t mind giving the shop a wee bit of free publicity there, as they are easily the best stocked, most helpful and definitely the most polite of all the ski- and outdoor shops in the city – and believe me, after last week, I know what I’m talking about.

Prior to moving out here, we had been given a ‘cold weather clothing allowance’ with which to buy outdoor wear suitable for Harbin in winter, and knowing not much about that kind of thing, we went to said shop and told them we were moving to ‘somewhere cold’.

‘How cold?’ asked the nice laddie. ‘Are we talking Alps? Rockies?’

‘Try Himalayas’, we replied. ‘Or Siberia’.

‘How cold does it get?’ he enquired.

‘Ooh, minus 35-ish’, we said.

He promptly ushered us towards a special section labelled ‘Mega Expensive Clothing For Lunatics’ (well, it may as well have been) and proceeded to give us the low-down on coats with ceramic bead inserts, thermals spun from the wool of specially reared and individually named sheep whose progress you could follow on a website (seriously), and last but not least the benefits of down-filled ski mittens. Basically the moral of the story in all cases seemed to be: modern artificial fibres may now be very advanced and capable of withstanding great extremes of weather, but at the end of the day, nothing – apologies to the vegetarians amongst you but this is the word of an expert here – nothing beats natural materials when it comes to keeping out the cold.

Now it has to be said that I do tend to suffer with cold hands and feet, and we’d been warned that ordinary fleece, woollen or even leather gloves simply wouldn’t cut it in Harbin, so getting a good pair was high on my priority list. I tried on a few of the less fancy pairs in the shop but wasn’t satisfied with the fit. ‘OK’, I said in the end. ‘Show me your down-filled mittens. Do your worst.’

Well, it was love at first sight. They were cream-coloured on the back, quilted, with a black leather palm and a fleecy lining. They came down over the wrist like a gauntlet and could be tightened or loosened by means of a velcro strap at the base of the hand. When I put my hand inside, my whole body felt warm, and they fitted like a – well, you know, a thing that fits very well.

They were £55. For a pair of mittens. But I just couldn’t resist.

It was late November before I had a chance to give the WMEMs their inaugural outing. The temperature had dropped to about minus 12 by day, minus 20 by night, but my hands were fabulously toasty. Outside, I couldn’t feel a thing (or, indeed, do anything either, as they tended to lend a sort of toy-soldier effect to one’s hand movements and make it impossible to open doors or pick things up – but hey, I was warm!). Indoors, even in a car, I had to remove them immediately or I’d have spontaneously combusted. The cream colour had already proved to be hopelessly impractical in a soot-stained city like Harbin, but I kept sponging them gently since they professed to be dry-clean only.

As it happened, I didn’t actually go out much during December, so I’d probably worn them on no more than about four occasions when it was time to fly home for Christmas. I reckoned I wouldn’t need them in the UK, and certainly not in Shanghai where we spent a few days at either end of the holiday (though in practice it turned out to be chillier in both places last week than we’d anticipated), and so contemplated leaving them behind, but remembering that we’d be arriving back into Harbin on a January night at temperatures of minus 25, I decided to take them with me.

I wore them as we left the house, then took them off for the car journey to the airport, taking care to put them on the floor with my handbag and not on my lap so that I wouldn’t forget they were there when I stood up. I carried them into the airport, and then, in the check-in queue, frustrated by having too many things to carry, I hurriedly shoved them into the backpack which I was using as hand luggage.

And that was the last I saw of them. Or I should say, of one of them. Peter was getting something else out of the backpack that night at the hotel in Shanghai when he said, ‘Oh, one of your gloves is here.’

‘They’re both there’, said I.

‘No’, he said. He searched the bag. I searched the bag. We searched our other bags. There was, most definitely and most, most tragically, only one WMEM.

I’m not ashamed to say I cried. (It’d been a long day.) I am, however, slightly ashamed by my Paris Hilton-like behaviour which followed.

Knowing I’d had them at Harbin airport, I got Peter to phone Kevin, who dutifully phoned the airport and harangued the lost property department, left luggage and the head of cleaning regarding the loss of the ‘very special and expensive’ glove which his boss’s wife had obviously dropped there. The next day I made him phone them again and do the same thing. But all to no avail.

The next day, we flew to Edinburgh, where I had resolved that at all costs I MUST replace the WMEMs with EXACTLY the same ones. Never mind that we had used up our cold weather clothing allowance. Never mind that I could probably buy something very similar in China and claim the money back. I had to have them, and I had to have them NOW (or at least before that flight back to Harbin).

Sadly there wasn’t time before Christmas, so it was last week, early in January, when I eventually went back to Blues and talked to another helpful young man. No, they didn’t have those, but they had the same make in white for £70. Even I baulked at this. Or these, which were not quite as good but very similar, and which felt actually a bit less toy-soldierish and were only £40, but they didn’t have my size. They could try their Glasgow branch? No, I said, I’m leaving the country tomorrow. He suggested a couple of other shops.

I then spent two afternoons trudging up and down the central shopping streets of Edinburgh in search of down-filled ski mittens. No one had them. ‘People don’t really use down much these days’, the uber-cool dude in the snowboard shop informed me, condescendingly. ‘Down tends to be a bit too warm for skiing’, grunted a very surly Northern Irish guy in another shop. ‘Did I say I wanted them for skiing?’, I barked back in intense irritation, being by now in at least my seventh shop. By then they didn’t even have to be the same ones, but I was unshakeable on the down. Thermal micro mega-warm ultra-therm-tech go snow-proof hyper-fab heat-shield super techno fleece just WOULD NOT BE WARM ENOUGH.

Finally, crushed and defeated, I bought a pair of ordinary thermal gloves in Milletts for £12. It was the coldest day in the UK for – ooh, some number of years – check the papers. ‘Do you want to wear them now?’ asked the nice young lad. ‘Most people are, today.’

‘No thanks,’ I replied, ‘I’m going somewhere MUCH colder than here.’ ‘There’s nowhere colder than here,’ he said glumly. I couldn’t help but disabuse him. He apologised.

There was just one slim hope left. On our return to China, I kept the single glove in my hand luggage to show to the lost property people at Harbin airport, just in case they had found the other one and had kept it for me for all these weeks. Our flight into Harbin on Saturday night was delayed, and our poor sweet driver, Mr Li, had been waiting patiently for us for an hour. Despite this, I still insisted on keeping him hanging on further while I found out where the lost property office was. This took some time, as the first six people we asked didn’t speak English, and when Peter found the appropriate word in his phrase book and showed it to them, they kept trying to usher us through the security gates and couldn’t understand that we had just arrived on a plane.

In the end we phoned Kevin again and got him to explain that I was looking for a glove I’d lost on the 17th December. When prompted, I waved the remaining WMEM at them. Eventually the message got through and they went to check, but came back shaking their heads. Alas, all hope was lost. I sat, grieving, with my poor lonely WMEM and contemplated hanging it on the wall as a trophy, while wondering how on earth I would be able to go the Harbin Ice Festival in inferior gloves. It was a sad night.

…..

Last night, Peter went to the supermarket, and took my (now empty) backpack – which I had carried the length and breadth of Britain for three weeks, and unpacked and re-packed at least four times in the process - to carry home the shopping.

He had finished unpacking it when he said, ‘Hang on, there’s something heavy in the bottom’.

‘No there’s not’, I said. ‘I emptied it.’

‘I’m telling you, there is!’, he insisted, and reached down and pulled out a slab of cheese which he’d just bought. ‘I think there’s a secret pocket at the back here’, he said. ‘And – oh! –

HERE’S YOUR OTHER GLOVE!’

So much to blog, so little time

With our festive jaunt home to Blighty hurtling rapidly towards us, there seem to be a million things – well, at least three – each of which I could have written a whole article about but simply don’t have time. There follows, therefore, a smorgasbord of observations about this crazy world in which we find ourselves, which if I don’t get them down now are in danger of falling into the vast black hole that I once laughingly called my memory, never to be seen again.

So. Last week we had to call Building Management out again, when another dodgy bulb tripped all our fuses for the second time. It seems that they’d been trying to get in to see us for several weeks to check our water meter, but every time they came to the door we didn’t understand what they wanted so they hadn’t been able to gain access. We don’t like to call poor Kevin too often.

Anyway it appears that our water meter is low on money. The landlord says he will come ‘sometime’ and put some more money on it. He is unable to tell us when ‘sometime’ will be, despite the fact that we’re going away tomorrow for three weeks, but until then we are ‘not to worry’. This is typical of the Chinese total inability to plan anything in advance. They simply do not, will not, or cannot do it. On the day before our party, at about 4.30pm, Kevin sidled up to Peter looking a bit embarrassed and said sheepishly that ‘the girls’ had asked him to find out if we would have the party that night instead, as it suited them better! Attempting to order diaries and calendars as New Year gifts for his customers, Peter has been frustrated by the lack of any with space to write down appointments. When Kevin saw Peter’s own (British) diary he was baffled. ‘But why would you want to write down what you’re doing in the future?’, he enquired. ‘Chinese people do not do that. Sometimes they think about tomorrow. Or maybe, sometimes, the next day.’

Often Peter arrives at work in the morning to be told he has a meeting with an important client in half an hour’s time, which has just been arranged. They arrive to find about 10 local dignatories, bureau heads, factory bosses and the like who have all assembled at what appears to be a moment’s notice. After the meeting, they progress to an apparently equally impromptu but sumptuous lunch of unidentifiable but delicious dishes, be it at the most expensive restaurant in Harbin or a transport caff in a dodgy rural town (where all conversation stops and all heads turn as Peter walks in). Much ‘Gan bei!’ and general hilarity ensues, even when the interpreter has to leave early, leaving him alone with a group of monolingual Chinese bigwigs. Business here is strongly based on the principle of ‘guan xi’ which translates as ‘business relationship’ but basically seems to mean ‘getting people to trust you by getting drunk with them outside work before anyone signs anything’. No wonder he’s enjoying his job!

Some of the places he’s visited on these jaunts have been eye-openers. Parts of Harbin itself are quite poor, but outside the city it’s another world. Last week he went to Acheng, which he described as ‘like Castleford or Pontefract in the 1970s’ (not, I gather, a recommendation) but which still boasted huge wide streets, impressive amounts of public artworks, and the entrance to the town was guarded by a huge arch, fabulously decorated in vibrant colours. In another place, they had to drive through a market, squeezing between stalls where people were selling frozen meat and fish - frozen by the air temperature, that is; no need for freezers here! They had almost reached the end when a vehicle appeared, blocking their way. With no way to turn round, Mr Li, our ultra-resourceful and ever-smiling driver, reversed the entire length of the market, back between the stalls down the narrow, winding lane, with frozen fish being flung back and forth and a guy on a tricycle behind him, who would only reverse a few yards at a time until Mr Li got out and remonstrated firmly with him. The whole process took about an hour.

Needless to say, the weather fazes the locals not one jot. Peter’s first farm visit took place on the first day that the temperature dropped to minus 11°. Everyone happily tramped about in the snow and ice looking at maize pellets or whatever. In the UK such an event would have been cancelled on the spot. (Though of course this does presuppose that it would have been planned in advance!). But then they were all no doubt wearing the ubiquitous, the redoubtable, the indispensible - Harbin Thermals.

Thermals. God how they love them. Especially longjohns. You could almost hear the collective sigh of relief after they were able to get them on when it got vaguely cold at the start of November. Of course some people hedge their bets and never take them off all year round. We even saw brides wearing them under their wedding dresses on a hot day in May (truly). There are shops selling nothing but. I’m not saying you don’t need them of course – the wind doesn’t half bite through your trousers when you go out otherwise – but the problem is that if you go out, generally you’re going TO somewhere, like the shops, or a restaurant. And the shops and restaurants are BOILING, which makes the wearing of thermals quite unbearable indoors.

At Harbin airport they have countered this problem by supplying little changing booths near the baggage reclaim (with signs in Chinese, English and Russian), for the purposes of changing into your longjohns after arriving from somewhere hot. How brilliant an idea is that? Now if the shopping centres and supermarkets did that, it would be ok. But as it is, you have to put your thermals on immediately before leaving the house and then make a run for it (seeing as it’s constantly 27°C in our flat – and I mean constantly). Then by the time you’ve arrived at your destination and are just about feeling a bit chilly and glad you put them on, you’re back indoors into a super-heated place with huge padded curtains over the doors for insulation, and pouring sweat while carrying your coat around. Something’s not right there. No wonder the locals acclimatise so well to their thermals that they’re terrified to take them off.

But otherwise they’re remarkably well-adapted to the weather. When it snows – which is disappointingly not that often, actually – an army of men with broomsticks materialises from nowhere, and with rapid efficiency they clear the snow from the roads and pavements within what seems like minutes. There’s none of the head-scratching and wondering what this white stuff can be that’s falling out of the sky, which accompanies the UK’s every annual snowfall. Once that’s done, being a very dry climate, there’s no slush to contend with, just icy patches here and there. Still, we do find it quite funny that people are sending us Christmas cards with snow-scenes on and writing things like ‘Bet your weather’s very different to this!!’ inside. Er, no, it’s not. It might be 27°C in our flat, but in the unheated utility room/balcony, a 3-litre bottle of water turned to a solid block of ice overnight.

And talking of solid blocks of ice, preparations for the famous Harbin ice festival would appear to be underway! Yes it seems this is one thing they CAN plan in advance for! So by way of Christmas greetings to you all, here are some pics of the embryonic ice sculptures – or more like ice constructions – which are shooting up around Peter’s office and our flat.

Tomorrow we’re off to Shanghai for the company expats’ Christmas lunch - at the Hilton, no less, where we get to behave like old colonials for a day – and then home for the festive season. So I’ll say Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all, and see you in three weeks.

Long lost friends

The boxes are here!! All 19 of them arrived first thing yesterday morning. Here's the living proof.




These babies were last seen departing our home in Edinburgh at about 11pm on 22nd August, after we had helped a poor lad from Beijing load them into his almost-too-small van in torrential rain. ('Harbin?' he said. 'Why do you want to go there?') Here's what we looked like afterwards.

This was after they had sat all that day in the stairwell of our flat due to a cock-up which meant the van which was supposed to pick them up earlier in the day had failed to materialise. So they sent the lad up from Manchester to collect them, and then drive back to Manchester with them the same night. I think the London-based freight company thought Manchester and Edinburgh were quite close together - both being north of Watford, of course.

This in turn was after we had had to enlist the help of two friends to carry them down from our second floor flat, as the company (who were otherwise brilliant) didn't offer this service. And after our flat had looked like a bomb site for two months while we packed everything, with boxes in various states of construction, and the items to go into them, littering every surface and at one point getting wet when water poured through from the upstairs neighbours' window in another torrential rainstorm (Edinburgh gets a lot of those in August).

And while simultaneously we were trying to do up our bathroom, which we'd left far too late and failed to anticipate things going wrong like all the tiles falling off the wall when we got the new bath put in.

Or the new bath having a hole in and having to get another new bath. Or, at the same time, the sewage pipe which drained our only toilet becoming blocked by a tree root that was growing out of it two floors up, and not being able to get a scaffolder to come and fix it, and our insurance company refusing to pay for it because it was 'above ground', and having to argue with all the neighbours about paying their share of it, so that for two months our toilet was prone to block up completely and without warning so that I had to go into town to do a poo in Debenhams on two occasions.

And this was after I had spent a month tearing my hair out trying to get ANYONE to give me a quote for transporting our stuff to China - which Peter's company said we had to get three quotes for before they would pay for it - rather than just say hurriedly, "Oh, er, I'll call you back" - and then never do so - when I mentioned Harbin and they looked on a map and saw where it was. Praise be for the marvellous Sherzod ("Don't worry!") who took the whole thing in his stride to such an extent that when his firm said they could do the job - and gave us the lowest quote into the bargain - I even said to him, "No offence, but do you actually know where Harbin is?"

So you can understand why we are BLOODY GLAD to see these boxes. Even if we did have to pay a horrendous customs charge because apparently we had some dodgy items which they shouldn't really have let through. Don't know what - maybe the mandolin and the accordion, or most probably the Tampax; I reckon they're banned in China (see here). And even if the Chinese delivery guys did dump the boxes outside the front door at 8.30am and drive away, so that we, Kevin and a passing cyclist hired on the spot for the purpose (I kid you not) had to carry them UP the stairs again to get them into the lift to our flat.

Of course, most of what's in them is utter crap which we don't need. And the things we really do need (a serrated knife, teatowels) we didn't think to send out, not realising you can't get them here.

But at least, here, the saga comes to a close.

Until we need to send the damn things - plus everything we've bought since coming to China - home again in two years' time.

But I'll worry about that later.

The Master Plan

So, Mr Bond, we meet at last.

The time has come for me to reveal (to those of you who didn’t hear about this before we left Edinburgh) our Grand Project for Harbin, to which I alluded in my previous post.

Viz: to bring ceilidh dancing, and Scottish/Celtic traditional music in general, to China, and turn Harbin into the Ceilidh Capital of the East, with the ultimate aim of having a Celtic music festival along the lines of a mini Celtic Connections, here. Anyone who doesn’t know what a ceilidh is, please click here. Please note it is NOT the same as Scottish Country Dancing.

We call this Operation Ceilidh Culture (name shamelessly pinched from Edinburgh’s own small annual traditional music event – sorry guys. It’s a only working title!)

Why? Because it sounds crazy enough for us to try it; because Peter never got a chance to start his ceilidh band before we left Scotland; and because God knows the Chinese desperately need an injection of some kind of quality music, if the trash that we hear on our built-in shower radio (yes, that’s right) or piped blaringly loudly out into the street outside shopping centres is anything to go by. Frankly, it’s Eurovision-style pop of the cheesiest kind, and much though you know I love Eurovision, they really need to be educated on the musical front. Plus Peter has a theory that the pentatonic scale is the same as the range of chords used in most Irish tunes (or something) so therefore the Chinese ear is predisposed to like that kind of music.

And hey, if it fails there’s always my backup plan, which is – on the strength of the above – to bring Eurovision to China instead. It’s broadcast in Vietnam and Korea, apparently, so why not here? I’m thinking of writing to Sir Terry, now that he’s become disillusioned with European political voting in ‘our’ contest, and suggesting he expand his horizons. Why not an Asiavision Song Contest? Bad music and nationalism combined – it sounds right up China’s street!

But I digress. How do we intend to bring our project to fruition? Well, it pans out like this.

Peter’s original plan was to find some fellow musicians and start a ceilidh band. All he really needs is a keyboard player, someone with a rhythm machine of some sort (both of whom could be Chinese), and either a guitarist – in which case Peter could play the melody line on the flute – or, preferably, a fiddler (who would probably have to be an expat) so that Peter can play guitar or mandolin instead. I could probably even manage to learn a few simple tunes on the accordion.

But to have a ceilidh we needed to find some willing guinea-pigs for the dancing. We were stuck as to how to go about this, until we met Magi. As I mentioned, he is something big at one of the universities, and as a teacher of English he is very keen for his students to learn about British culture as well as the language. It also transpires that he is a bit of a Scotophile, has visited Scotland (even staying in the same hostel on Skye where we went on our choir tour in 2006), and is interested in Scottish music. When Peter mentioned his ceilidh band plan to him, Magi became very excited.

‘You provide the music’, he said, ‘and I will provide six thousand students!’

Sorted. The Chinese seem to love doing strenuous organised activities in large groups, particularly if they can be shouted at while doing it - and none more so than young people still in the education system who have known nothing else all their lives – so ceilidh dancing should suit them down to the ground. We just tell them everyone in Britain does this every week. They don’t need to know it’s a purely minority interest confined to Scottish people, and mainly those over 40. And once the blokes realise that they not only get to touch girls but that the girls can ask them to dance, we should be on to a winner. Six thousand of them might be a bit much, but hey, why aim low? Now THAT's a big Strip the Willow.

So, to recap.

One: get Magi to organise his students to come to a ceilidh at the university. How he pitches this is entirely up to him. If he wants to give them course credits for it, that’s fine by us. We’ll need a Chinese person with a loud voice, a good memory and a sense of rhythm to learn the steps and then call them in Chinese. Maybe they could do simultaneous translation as someone (who by a process of elimination I’ve just realised would probably have to be me – argh – I only know two dances!) calls in English. As we won’t have a band ready in time, we use Scottish CDs, of which we have many. Chinese students dance the night away enthusiastically. THEY WILL LOVE IT.

Two: meanwhile, we find out where the expats hang out, and advertise both there and at the university for musicians to join a band to play Scottish and Irish music. If a couple of Chinese musicians come along and learn the tunes, so much the better. THEY WILL LOVE IT.

Three: building on the success of the inaugural ceilidh, we make these a regular event at the uni. Ok so maybe ALL 6000 students don’t have to come EVERY time. But those who do will LOVE IT. Once the band is formed and has got a repertoire together, we replace the CDs with live music, and then everyone will LOVE IT EVEN MORE.

Four: word gradually spreads about this new dance sensation, leading to ceilidhs (small ones at first) being held in the city for people other than students. We will have laid the groundwork for this by teaching a few friends some ceilidh dances at our parties (see previous post) whenever we have the chance. Soon Scottish music and ceilidh dancing become a craze in Harbin. This curious new development attracts national attention. Harbin becomes known as ‘The Scottish City’. We are featured on CCTV News. People flock from all over China to sample the exciting new cultural experience. THEY ALL LOVE IT.

Five: since everybody in Harbin now LOVES Scottish music so much, we decide it’s time some real Celtic musicians came over to do a concert. We find out how one goes about raising money for such an event in China, we get the money (ok so this part of the plan isn’t quite thought through yet!), and approach some of the stars of the traditional music scene to come over. We reckon Aly and Phil may be slightly out of our league at this stage (though boys, if you’re reading this, we’re huge fans, and any time you feel like waiving your fee in return for the trip of a lifetime, the invitation’s there!), but maybe some of the younger generation might be up for it. If we could get Jenna Reid, that would be fab. Or one of the big ceilidh bands like Shooglenifty. Although more of them, so more expenses.

Six: back home in Scotland, Aly Bain turns on the news one day and sees a piece about two Brits who have brought Scottish music to the northernmost reaches of China. He phones Jenna (or whoever), who says, ‘Oh aye, I went to play there. It was great. Those guys in Harbin LOVE Scottish music. You should see them ceilidh!’ Aly gets our number and calls us. When we’ve finished saying ‘We are not worthy’, we discuss our plans for a major Celtic music festival in Harbin – perhaps every two years. No need to be over-ambitious.

‘The trouble is, Mr Bain,’ we say, ‘it’ll be very expensive and we don’t know how we can raise the cash’.

‘Leave it with me, pal’, says Aly. [Not sure if Shetlanders say ‘pal’, but you get the picture.]

Seven: in 2011, the first ‘Celtic Connections East’ - no, let's call it 'Celtic Connections China'; better logo potential - festival is held in Harbin. We have had to use our contacts to get Harbin airport to start running international flights to places other than Vladivostock just for the occasion. Everybody LOVES IT, it is a resounding success, and the 2013 one is bigger than ever. Harbin is the Ceilidh Capital of the East. We become slightly rich, and have changed the face of modern China forever.

…..

WHAT?????

It could happen.

Spot check

Here’s a good thing about China.

Cursed as I am with somewhat oily skin, I have spent the past 20 (ok, try 25) years in a perennial quest for good skin products to help with same. In the UK, this is an extremely frustrating task. There isn’t much on the market, and what little there is tends to be found in the ‘teenage’ section of most chemists, which is not only a rather embarrassing place to be seen shopping at my age, but also means the products are cheap and, ergo, useless.

From time to time, one of the higher-end cosmetic firms brings out a product aimed at the grease-coated among us. I buy it, use it for a few months or, if I’m lucky, a couple of years, and start to think my troubles are over. And then one day I go to replace my almost-empty bottle or tube, and am told the product has been discontinued ‘due to lack of demand’. This happens every time without fail.

‘Demand?!’ I want to scream. ‘I’ll give you demand! If you’d taken the trouble to ASK, or WARN ME [they never do] that you’re about to discontinue the damn stuff, I’d have bought every bottle within a 100-mile radius! There may not be many of us, but those of us who do buy these things REALLY REALLY NEED THEM so please could you just NOT do this? Please?’ Yes you, the ex-makers of, among others, Christian Dior Ultra-Mat lotion, Clinique Turnaround for Oily Skins, and even the late lamented Body Shop Lemon Oat Facial Wash (ah, those were the days), it’s YOU I’m talking to.

So, imagine my delight when I first entered the toiletries section of a Chinese supermarket, to see aisle after aisle of products ALL for oily skins! Good ones. This was incredible! It was like I’d died and gone to acne heaven. But you know what? Most of them were by recognisable western brands, but the products themselves were unfamiliar to me. Which can only mean the bastard manufacturers are making these things purely for the Asian market.

I feel cheated! There I’ve been, chasing some holy grail of blackhead removal all over the UK for decades, when all the time Chinese women have had this stuff on tap. Clearly some market researchers have concluded that western women are ‘all’ worried about ‘dryness’ and ‘ageing’, while their Chinese counterparts’ concerns are shiny noses, blocked pores and zits. Do the Chinese have greasier skin than westerners? I can’t say I’ve noticed, but then they’ve had access to good products.

But now I’m on to them. So, while any western woman coming out here should make sure she ships out plenty of deodorant, good soap & toothpaste, disposable ladies’ razors, fake tan if you’re into that kind of thing, and above all tampons [why, China, why?], oh and I suppose products for dry skin if you do have it!, I will be shipping back, when I eventually leave, vast quantities of cleansers, toners, facial scrubs, masks, spot creams, oil-free moisturisers and matifying lotions.

And the best thing is, when I run out, I know where to go to get more.

I love you, Chinese women, every spotty, greasy one of you.