Fuddland

This weekend my mum forwarded me the news about the senior HSBC worker Bindi Dhanji, caught stealing almost £120,000 from pensioners’ accounts and due to be sentenced a few weeks ago, who committed suicide together with her husband Kishore. Both were found hanging from a bridge near Staples Corner on the North Circular Road, in London.

Kishore Dhanji was my childhood friend. We went to the same primary school and for a couple of years of secondary school before we gradually lost touch. He lived two streets away from me, and with his cousin who lived on my road and a few other friends — all within two minutes walk of each other — we played in and around each others’ houses for several years. We explored the trees around the reservoir at the Welsh Harp Park; we discovered Mario Brothers on the Nintendo and WWF Wrestling on the telly.

We rode our BMX bikes everywhere, and were once chased by a group of older boys intent on stealing our wheels. We ducked into Hendon Police Station and a friendly policeman gave us an escort back to our houses, us on our bikes and he on a big grey-and-white policehorse.

I haven’t seen or heard from Kishore for about twenty years, and I have no idea what happened in those intervening years. But I spent a few hours last night thinking about those childhood days, and its upsetting to think that someone I spent so many fun hours with could have been driven, for whatever reason, to hang himself from a bridge with his wife, just a few hundred metres from where we played as children.

Something I’d not seen before, but is apparently very common here: parents post their child’s personal details (age, height, job, salary — all the important stuff) on a washing line at the park, for other parents to check out and, if they like what they see, set their own child up on a blind date.

70-plus metres high.

Featuring travertine islands.

The naturally-occurring presence of travertine gives the lakes of Jiǔzhàigōu (九寨沟) their amazing topaz colour (but I don’t actually understand why).

Can you see the panda face in the frozen lake?

At Jiǔzhàigōu (九寨沟) National Park, northern Sìchuān (四川).

New year, new weblog entry!

I’ll get back into things slowly with a few photos of my winter holiday to Mount Emei, starting with the candles at Wannian Si (万年寺) — the Temple of 10,000 Years.

Mount Emei is one of the four sacred mountains of Chinese Buddhism, and there are dozens of temples and statues honouring Puxian and his six-tusked elephant.

In the dead of winter there were almost no other people staying in the monastaries, and walking through the winter-wonderland forests there were times when we could hear no sound apart from the crunch of the snow under our feet. Even the monkeys were relatively well-behaved.

To me, that “When in Rome…” expression is merely meant to encourage you to be a little adventurous. It means, “run naked from the sauna and jump into the freezing waters of a lake in Finland”, not “club a baby seal to death while passing through north-east Canada”.

It is not anywhere near a justification for abandoning the common courtesy and manners that you’ve been brought up to respect, just because you have seen some locals behaving in a way that wouldn’t rub in your home country. So while in China it might be—legally and traditionally—all right to light up a cigarette at the table while others are still eating, when you’re British or from the US, Canada and any of the other countries of the world that have realised just how stinky that smoke is, you should know better and I will give you a withering stare over the top of my fork until you stub that filth out.

Similarly, if you’ve travelled by public transport here, you’ve probably seen some Chinese people listening to music on their mobiles without the use of headphones. This is intensely annoying. You know damn well it is, because when you were living in your homeland, whenever anyone had his or her headphones bleeding music into the surrounding air, you tutted and rolled your eyes and exhaled with exasperation. But the thing you haven’t quite got is, they tend to listen to music like this only on public transport—crowded bus journeys that will be over relatively soon.

So why on Earth you—and I’m now talking to the Western man at the table next to me as I write this—think it’s all right to sit in a cafe, playing music on your laptop speakers when there is already muzak on, is beyond me. It’s easy to tune out the muzak, but as soon as you add your inane tinny beats to the mix, it becomes a spasmodically syncopated annoyance that is impossible to ignore. [And you haven’t even ordered anything to eat or drink.]

Last week I had the perfect storm of North American man who had already proven himself to be the worst speaker of Chinese in the whole of Chinadom when attempting to communicate with his local girlfriend, sitting three feet from me smoking a cigarette, oblivious to where the smoke was drifting [yes, all over me], playing Stand By Me on his iPhone speakers and singing along, in a cafe where people are trying to read, at 2 o’clock in the afternoon. The girlfriend was steadfastly ignoring him. I wish I knew her secret.