Too much happening, all at the same time

Last night I went to a Premature Paddies event (at Danger Doyle's of all places, god help me!) organised by a cabal of alumni groups.

We have the real thing tomorrow...

... with a raft of events competing for my attention (Blackwater at Modernista? The Beijing Beatles at Temple? Steerage somewhere?? Enticing specials at 12 Square Metres and Salud!).

But first, I'm supposed to be going to the opening game of Beijing Guo'an's season - against the reviled Shanghai Shenhua - tonight at the Workers' Stadium.

And then... our favourite blues-rockers Black Cat Bone are doing a reunion/farewell gig at 2 Kolegas, since their long-time drummer Jon Campbell is back in town to promote his book Red Rock at the Bookworm International Literary Festival. I also have a ticket to see him speak at the Worm tomorrow afternoon. It is a toss-up as to which of us will be in worse shape for that. (I'll be impressed if he shows up! The Bone always play long and late at 2K. It could be particularly extreme this time, since the show's been put together at short notice, and tacked on to the end of an existing bill... of three [or four, or five??] bands; so, they probably won't be taking the stage till 1am or 2am, and will be going on till god knows when. It could get UGLY. And then Mr Welton will inevitably insist on breakfast at The Den...)

And then.... on Sunday afternoon, MaoMaoChong is finally (maybe??) supposed to be reopening... if anyone is still ALIVE. I fear it might look a bit like the Zombie Apocalypse...

HBH 277

Waiting forever;

No menus and no service;

Worst bar in the world.

I was enticed back to Danger Doyle's last night - for the first time in well over a year. I was willing to give it another chance, hoping it might have improved somewhat from its abysmal earlier impressions.

It had not. I stayed for all of about 15 minutes - as long as it took to convince me that I was NEVER going to get served.

To be fair, the staff were working quite well under difficult conditions. But there appeared to be NO DRINKS LISTS anywhere (a problem continuing from their early days three years ago!!). There were no lists of the specials being offered for this event. And there were apparently no extra staff laid on (for a quite heavily attended alumni group party). When you're busy, it's really important to let people know what's available and how much it costs without having to ASK every time.

Some table service would have been in order, too. And some attentiveness from the bar staff - rather than all crowding together in the middle of the bar, and pretty much demanding that punters come up to them and grab them by the throat in order to place an order. It was a vision of hell on earth.

Identity parade

My pal Ruby posted a fun challenge yesterday - a poster with cartoon depictions of famous guitarists.

The resolution, alas, isn't that great. And nor are some of the likenesses. Yngwie Malmsteen?! I have a couple of his albums (although I haven't listened to them in at least 25 years), but I quite literally cannot pick him out of a line-up now. There is something of a generic look to '80s metal types... and to early '70s prog rockers.

I nailed about half of them - but more from recognising the guitars than the costumes or the hairstyles.

Give it a whirl.

How not to do it - promotions

Red House (II), the disastrously uncharismatic new dive bar near Dongzhimen (the one thing a dive bar should have is 'character'!) that I visited briefly last week (for five minutes too long), is compounding the folly of its so-cheap-you-don't-trust-it 5-kuai beer promotion with an INSANE 'happy hour' offer.

It's all-you-can drink for 20 kuai (which leads you into the so-cheap-it's-effectively-FREE territory that I castigated here). But it's only for two hours, those hours being 10pm-12am. And it's only one day a week, that day being Friday. And it's only on that we-virtually-GIVE-IT-AWAY-anyway draught lager that's too skanky to drink. So, really, what is the goddamned POINT?

I am sure it will draw some interest from the city's most determined budget drinkers. I am equally sure that they will only visit during the period of that offer, and will not be sufficiently favourably impressed with the place to think of becoming regular customers. Thus, it is a complete waste of time.

My own beloved 12 Square Metres isn't entirely blameless in this regard, though. I have often carped that their 'happy hour' - featuring a modest reduction on only two items, house wine and draught beer - is not really very happy at all. We can blame the original laoban JK for that: he didn't really approve of the 'happy hour' concept (although he did like indulging his creativity by coming up with bizarre combination offers that no-one [except me] was ever likely to order) and, I think, only introduced one under sufferance - in order not to lose my custom. But the newbies MK and LJ haven't yet seen the wisdom of trying to make the 'hour' a little happier. 

Moreover, while they have shown commendable innovation in coming up with new ideas for events and drinks deals, they haven't always been very effective in advertising them (the website is great, but nobody except me looks at it; you really need to start using Twitter and Weibo, my friends), or consistent about the details. The Australia Day promotion on the Coopers Ales, an established all-day tradition under Aussie JK, was touted as following the same formula this year - but we found ourselves ambushed with a (bizarre, pointless, and scarcely advertised) "only after 8pm" proviso (by which time most people were getting ready to leave anyway, having been on the lash all afternoon). The recent every-fourth-drink-FREE deal on Leap Day was again purportedly restricted (according to an inconspicuous note on the website that nobody but me saw) to after 8pm; but, thank heavens, they saw the error of their ways and in fact offered it all day.

It is NOT a good idea to restrict special offers to a very limited number of hours (or other narrow limitations). And, if you do, you really have to advertise those restrictions prominently and consistently.

Terra's new rum bar, I have just remembered, is offering 'happy hour' prices (or two-for-one, or something) all evening on Thursday for teachers. Well, that's nice. I mean, I resent being reminded of my lowly status and puny income, but I'll take whatever compensatory 'privileges' may be going. But how are we supposed to claim this bounty? Students have a student ID card (at least, if they're enrolled in a university programme). There is no equivalent for teachers. If you teach in a university or a state school, you might have a 'Foreign Expert' card. Are we supposed to bring that with us? Tough luck for many folks working for the smaller private schools, who are left to sort themselves out with a 'business visa' and don't enjoy the benefit of 'expert' status. I suppose it's going to have to work on trust. "Do I not look like a teacher? Let me teach you something..."

I think the all-time winner in this category of ineptitude, though, might well be Tun. The last time I looked in there (it must have been two or more years ago, since Dr Manhattan was with me), a blackboard outside was advertising a selection of daily specials that were: a) mind-buggeringly complex; b) unclearly explained; c) off-puttingly expensive; and d) of rather dubious 'value'.

Alas, I can't remember any of the details now. I wish I'd taken notes. Or a photograph.

Tun eventually went out of business. That is why.

Theatre of the Weird

The other night, I went to see a young Brit called David Thomas Broughton - 'experimental folk singer', crossing over into performance art territory - appearing as part of the Bookworm International Literary Festival (and a joint event, I believe, with the concurrent Jue Festival of art and music organised by Splitworks).

Alas, Mr B doesn't seem to be well enough known - or, what is known of him is not sufficiently appealing - to have attracted a paying audience: a large proportion of the few dozen people in attendance on Sunday night were Bookworm staff or, like me, the recipients of giveaway tickets.

BeijingDaze's Badr was there, and I'll be interested to read what he made of the show. I rather feared it would only serve to further prejudice him against Xiao He - Beijing's nearest equivalent, and an artist whose style Badr has been largely resistant to in the past. However, in fact he was grinning good-naturedly throughout, giving every appearance of enjoying the show.

I, on the other hand, was trying very hard not to keep looking at the nearby laptop on which the Bookworm staff were recording the performance, and making a note of the elapsed time it was displaying. "Is he really going to keep this up for a whole hour? Has it it only been 20 minutes so far??"

For one thing, Broughton was straying too much into the wanky 'performance art' sphere for my taste (it was an ominous sign to me when he began his show by ritualistically taking off his shoes). He's got quite a good falsetto-ey voice, and he's adept at looping diverse samples together in elaborate and often quite effective ways (there was a kind of '50s doo-wop sequence at one point that actually sounded quite pleasant). The prowling distractedly around the room, and challenging his listeners' personal space by loping up to them and rearranging items on their tables in would-be significant ways, was much less winning.

His improvised (?) 'lyrics' were the worst element to cope with, though; just excruciating. I was soon reminded of Vogon Poetry*; in fact, I was reminded of Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings (who was, according to The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy, the worst poet in the entire history of the universe, whereas the dreadful Vogons were only responsible for the third worst poetry).

Xiao He mostly sings in a deliberately indistinct style, or uses a made-up gibberish language. Hence, his vocals just become part of the music, and you're not distracted by whether his lyrics are actually any good, or have any worthwhile meaning. I think Mr Broughton would be well advised to cultivate a similar technique.

The other big advantage Xiao He has is masterful musicianship: music just drips from almost everything he does; and he can play the ass off his guitar, when he chooses to. Broughton didn't make that much use of his guitar, and although he had quite a nice sound when he did play it, he didn't exhibit much of a technique with the instrument.

I hope Badr, and other experimental music sceptics, will not be put off trying other gigs of this kind. Mr Broughton, I fear, is really not one of the best examples of this type of performer - certainly not in the same class as people like Xiao He and Li Tieqiao.

*  I see the BBC's HHGTTG page has a 'Vogon Poetry Generator' - quite a fun way to waste 5 minutes!

Bon mot for the week

"Every saint has a past and every sinner a future."

Oscar Wilde  (1854-1900)

Return of the Band Names game!!

While enjoying the sanba show at Temple with a couple of girlie chums the other night, we achieved the collective realisation that Beijing bluegrass favourites The Randy Abel Stable are now 'big' enough to warrant their own tribute band (Peter immediately asked if he could join; I don't think you can be in your own tribute band...). We have decided to call it The Unstable Table (perhaps, like Brick Tamland, we were just being inspired by random items in our immediate environment....).

Later, challenged to come up with a name for a friend's new band, I suggested Bye Bye Kitty. This is not exactly a new idea, since haters of the noxiously cute Japanese cartoon character Hello Kitty arguably outnumber the idolaters, but I don't think it's yet been done as a band name. And such opposition seems particularly needful in China, since attachment to the emetic pussycat is almost universal among young women here. I envisage a logo with the loathsome kitten tied to railway tracks...

But this might also do...

Anyway, this sudden splurge of band-naming frivolity reminded me of The Band Names Game - my 'most popular' post ever on this blog, but lapsed into silence for the past two years. Now seems like an opportune time to try to revive it - follow that link, and get naming!

Renovations

A remarkable thing has happened. Beijing bar owners have finally discovered the concept of improving their venues, making changes that are actually useful (rather than perverse, pointless, and retrograde) and executed with some taste and and attention to quality.

Luga's has long been struggling with a variety of problems and challenges: its on-again-off-again expansion into the neighbouring basement space, its ambiguous relationship with its sister Vietnamese restaurant upstairs, the threatened loss of its outside pavement café and restricted access/visibility due to the mysterious erection of blue construction fencing right in front of it for several months last year.  But it's starting the new 'season' strongly, with our diminutive entrepreneur having taken advantage of the slow period over Spring Festival to get the builders in. There's now an impressive new glass frontage (replacing that perpetually wonky sliding patio door), which encloses the staircase up to Pho Pho - uniting the two spaces to allow easy sharing of the food between them (their menus are now combined, so that you can order Vietnamese or Tex-Mex dishes in either part of the venue). Not much else has changed inside, but the place feels significantly more classy.

Even more surprisingly, grungy music bar Dos Kolegas also had a long close-down over Chunjie to allow for some remodelling.  They've been able to expand into the unit to the rear of them, creating a small seating area behind the sound desk and allowing for the installation of three new loos (which, for the time being at least, are unbelievably clean) with an improbably swanky washroom area outside (including a huge mirror to help you adjust your make-up or groom your Mohawk). The green room has been slightly expanded, and an extension to the bar added (though not in use last night, since Gao Feng was on his own behind the bar) - taking over the space formerly occupied by the notoriously grotty gents loo (somehow, I'll miss that cracked floor sill that always felt as if it was about to collapse underneath you). It's not all good news: the curtain at the side of the stage - which used to allow a great close-up view of the bands - has been boarded up; and the super-tall speaker stacks have returned (although much skinnier than those awful ones they had for a while a couple of years back; and pushed right over to the sides of the stage, so they don't completely obstruct the view this time).

The best feature of the new improved Kolegas, though, is the expanded bar, with a collection of enormous beer fridges (this is just one of three). They're still going to run out of cold ones once in a while on a busy night, but it'll take a lot more than one hour now. (I wish other venues would take note: MAO Livehouse and Home Plate BBQ, in particular!)

[Some musical 'renovations' going on as well last night, with the splendid Amazing Insurance Salesmen emerging from a 7- or 8-month hiatus that had threatened to be permanent. They seem to be enjoying being back together, playing with tremendous energy and exuberance - and, to my mind, sounding rather rockier than before. I like to think that I may have witnessed an historic turning point in Beijing musical history a couple of months back when I ran into their frontman Jean-Seb paying a rare visit to VA Bar's Wednesday night jam session. He had brought along his acoustic guitar, thinking to try out some of the 'experimental folk' he's been devoting himself to recently; but he was persuaded instead to pick up someone's Telecaster for a couple of songs, and he really got into it. The usually rather glum Frenchman was beaming from ear to ear when he came off stage, and confessed to me that he hadn't played electric in six months and had forgotten how much fun it could be. I really think that might have been the moment when he decided to get the band back together.]

HBH 276

Explorer's spirit:

Four or five bars in one night,

A strange adventure.

A funny thing, that, about the bar crawl. Even if none of the individual stops are all that inspiring, the juxtaposition of different bars somehow creates a little thrill all its own. Or perhaps it's just the sense of challenge in seeing how many venues you can shoehorn into one night...

Drinks can be too cheap

I already expounded about 18 months ago on why I think 'Free drinks' events are a BAD IDEA.

I believe very cheap booze promotions can be counter-productive too. I just came upon an excellent illustration of the point with the newly opened Red House on Xingfu Zhongjie (it would be rather more helpful to call it Red House II, to avoid confusion with its parent bar of the same name, a moderately successful student dive up in Wudaokou next to BLCU). It's selling local draught beer for 5 kuai a pint.

Now, I can think of a few places in the past that did this too - the sadly demised Pizze e' Core, for example, a favourite neighbourhood hangout of mine on Andelu 6 or 7 years ago.  Last time I checked, I think the Russian duo of Traktirr and Traktirr Pushkin (and their nearly indistinguishable neighbour/competitor White Knights) were asking just 7 or 8 kuai for a slightly-less-than-a-pint glass of draught. I've even known a few restaurants that gave the stuff away completely FREE, as part of an all-you-can-eat-and-drink buffet deal - most of those ersatz 'Brazilian Barbecue' places and the Origus pizza chain. But you see what these ultra-budget options have in common? Yep, they're all restaurants - so the beer giveaway is subsidised by all the food you're going to be ordering.

5 kuai for a full pint of draught is perhaps not quite below cost, but it must be getting quite close, I would think. That should start alarm bells ringing in the back of your head.

But, more importantly, whatever the profit margin, or lack of one, for the owner, it's just too close to being completely FREE, and so it invokes all of those negative consequences I mentioned in that earlier post: penny-pinching by owners (watering down, giving short measures, buying fake or out-of-date stock to trim costs), bad behaviour by customers (drinking too quickly and indiscriminately, getting arsey with the staff), and a breakdown in respect - on both sides - between customers and bar staff.

10 kuai a pint might work. That is beguilingly cheap, it's going to tempt people into a substantial detour to give your joint a try once or twice, but... it doesn't immediately start conjuring doubts about the economics of the offer and the likely - almost inevitably - shitty quality of the product being pushed.

If you offer your beer at 5 kuai a pint, I am expecting the worst.

And the new Red House fully lived down to my negative expectations: the cheap draught beer was absolute skank, and all four of my companions and I left our glasses almost untouched on the table, and walked off within 5 minutes without bothering to risk any other sort of drink there.

I'm afraid it doesn't have anything else going for it, either: the solitary barman looks bored and surly, and hasn't got much of a clue what he's doing; there's absolutely zero ambience; and it doesn't even look like a bar from the outside (the brightly illuminated white sign with oddly inconspicuous red lettering - and no other design at all - being more evocative of a noodle joint or a hairdressing salon, to my mind). There had been two Russian lads in there, but they left within seconds of our arrival (I think they'd been drinking something other than the skanky draught, but hadn't stayed for more than one or two).  This Red House, I would say, is looking DOOMED.

Getting a decent barman and raising the price of the draught beer would be a big help, though.

For always roving with a hungry heart

A special event at 12 Square Metres tonight: Steven Schwankert, founder of SinoScuba, will be coming along to talk about some of his most interesting dives, and also about the Explorers Club, of which he is a member - a distinction shared with such famous figures as the polar adventurer Roald Amundsen, the astronaut Neil Armstrong, and legendary Kiwi mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary (above).

I have a particular fondness for Hillary's famous explanation of his reason for taking on Mt Everest - "because it was there."

That restless spirit of curiosity has been a key motivator in my own life - why did I stop into this bar, order that drink, chat up this girl?

[Unfortunately, I am pledged to another event earlier tonight - the old Beijing curse of too much happening, all at the same time - so I will be struggling to get there in time; I hope to at least catch the second half. It promises to be a fascinating little soiréé.]

Blogger is vexing me

My blog platform, it seems, is conspiring to kill off what little comment thread activity I have left - first by infiltrating a gremlin into the word-recognition security feature, such that it won't approve any comments (at least, if you're trying to use the 'Preview' feature; I was told that, originally, it was still OK if you dispensed with trying to 'preview' your comment), then by introducing a pointless and offputtingly ugly 'new look' for the comment window, and then by inexplicably choosing to remove the 'notify me of new comments by e-mail' facility.  All rather galling.  And unfathomably stupid.

I have been deluged with complaints about all of this (well, five people have e-mailed me; that counts as a lot on this blog!) over the past week or so.  Therefore, I have - reluctantly - decided to disable the word-verification feature for a while.

Doubtless, the perversely resourceful techies at Blogger will find some new way to frustrate attempts to comment. And I'll soon be inundated in spam.

But commenting has been so QUIET on here lately, even spam might be quite diverting for a while.

Bon mot for the week

"When people like me, I'm 'spontaneous'; when they don't, I'm 'unpredictable'."

Froog

A long walk home

It has become impossible to get a cab between 11pm and midnight.

Especially in inclement weather, such as the spasm of damp cold that has suddenly gripped Beijing again for the past couple of days.

And especially on a weekend night. And most especially on a Friday.

And in Sanlitun??  Forget it.

Last night I walked back all the way from The Bookworm to Gulou, a distance of getting on for 7 miles. NOT ONE free cab. I must have passed dozens, no, hundreds of people (mostly young Chinese) waiting hopefully for one at the side of the road. Many of them may be waiting still.

This is what's happened to our taxi service provision over the last four or five years. With the increase in access to the distant suburbs through the opening up of new subway lines, and the explosive growth of the 'middle class', the number of people looking to use cabs - at least at peak times - has probably gone up four- or five-fold; but the size of the fleet has contracted.

I used to say Beijing was the best place in the world for picking up a cab. Not any more. Not on a Friday night.

Froog Solutions (24)

Froog's solution to the cerebral meltdown induced by trying to edit Marxist literary theory for 48 straight hours...

Give up, and go and get some fresh air! It's Friday, for heaven's sake!! A leisurely walk over to Sanlitun will take me the best part of an hour-and-a-half - by which time, it will be decent to start drinking.

HBH 275

Tin whistle magic,

A Gaelic stomp in the hutongs;

Old tunes prick the heart.

A new Chinese Irish band has just popped up on the scene, the first one for many a long year.  Calling themselves Streetrag (your guess is as good as mine! Aha - seems like that was just Time Out's extravagant mistranscription of Steerage, which is a much more sensible sort of name for an Irish band!), they made a low-key debut at Modernista last night - essentially playing for a small group of their friends. A gang of youngsters - music students, I would imagine - who've only recently discovered this music, they're a bit under-rehearsed, but they play with a lot of heart, and technically they're quite impressive; they're fronted by one of the best tin whistle men I've heard in years, and also boast a decent fiddler and a bodhran player (which is not something we've really seen here in Beijing before). Very promising. If they could find an accordionist somewhere, they'd be all set; at present, they're filling out the sound with an electric keyboard player, which doesn't quite work for me.

They don't have a St Patrick's Day gig confirmed yet, but I'm sure they'll soon be much in demand.

New Picks of the Month

Gosh, March 2009 was rather a busy month. It was, for instance, the occasion of my Photo Gallery Week on Froogville, during which I shared some 45 of my photographs. What were the other highlights?

Well, from Froogville I'll pick Miscommunication, another of my funny-sad tales of failed romance.

And on The Barstool, I'll go for this Bon Mot.

Traffic Report - the blog stats for February

Another solid month of fripperies; I seem to have hit a fairly consistent frequency/volume of output now - still probably rather too much for any but the most avid reader to consume in full, but no longer so much as to make me fear that I need more of a life.

Last month, there were 36 posts and around 10,000 words on Froogville.

There were 30 posts and nearly 7,000 words on Barstool Blues.

And we have a new reader in Slovenia, it seems. Welcome.

Also, rather spookily, two of my old university chums - with whom I had lost touch for nearly 20 years - have recently found me through my record collection. 'Tis a small world, indeed! I wonder if they're now living in Slovenia.

Buy 28, get 1 free!

The latest of my insanely inventive bar promotion ideas, a little something special for Leap Day!

I imagine MB might be a little more willing to trial this down at the bar than my previous suggestion of a 'Singles get doubles' promotion for Valentine's Day. My friend, JK, the previous landlord, however, would almost certainly have felt that it would bite into his margins unacceptably.

[In fact, MB is taking a years rather than days approach to the 'leap' phenomenon, coming up with an altogether more realistic Buy-3-Get-1-FREE deal. That I might have to check out...

JK, I suspect would have favoured a Buy-4-Get-1/365th-Free formula.]

Just what the doctor ordered!

I hadn't got out to Mai very much since the New Year (well, I haven't got out anywhere very much), but I caught up with owner Jeff there again last week. I was hankering for my favourite of his cocktail offerings, the Penicillin - but the dear chap had a bunch of new stuff he wanted me to try, so I didn't get around to it. The hankering grows stronger. Particularly after my recent dose of 'flu-from-hell.

Penicillin, you see, an invention of celebrated barman Sam Ross, is basically a cold toddy - Scotch whisky with honey, lemon, and ginger. Purists say you should infuse a honey-ginger syrup, but I think Jeff just uses honey and muddled ginger for simplicity. The drink is given an extra layer of sophistication by having a dribble of peaty Laphroaig floated on top (Jeff keeps the price down by using a perfume dispenser to lay a fine mist of the stuff over the top: works magnificently for the aroma, though obviously you're missing a little smokiness in the drink itself).  Served with big rocks of ice and a generous slice of raw ginger (which I quite often find myself eating: I love ginger, especially when it's whisky-infused!), it is heaven in a glass - even if you haven't got a cold.

Bon mot for the week

"It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life."

Joseph Campbell  (1904-1987)

Mardi Gras leftovers

In Tuesday's hasty - caught with my trousers down, is it really that time of year again already? - posting of a great live performance of  I Wish I Was In New Orleans, Tom Waits's nostalgia-drenched paean to life in The Big Easy, I had to pass over a number of other intriguing oddities I turned up.

This, for example... a so-called "Calligraphy Animation" by Glen Epstein and John Richard (although the handful of lyric captions scarcely counts as 'calligraphy', and there's no animation at all; it's just a montage). The use of - mostly rather scarily intense and grotesque - figures from the sketches of Egon Schiele is quite compelling; and it does seem to be the only convenient posting of Waits's original studio recording of the song, from the Small Change album.

Even odder, I discovered that Scarlett Johansson produced an album of Tom Waits covers - Wherever I Lay My Head - about 4 years ago. This song is rendered as a breathy lullaby, with a ponderous plink-plink glockenspiel that soon becomes irritating. It's interestingly weird, I suppose (which Tom would doubtless like), but it doesn't inspire me to check out the rest of the record (although NME apparently rated it their 23rd best album of 2008 - so, perhaps it doesn't completely suck...[I'll have to take Wikipedia's word on that, because the NME site only lists their Top 10]).

A more satisfying discovery though was this, a different song of the same name by Ben Prestage, a rising star of American roots music. Here he seems to blend zydeco with delta blues to produce a zestful and upbeat stomp, a complete contrast to Tom's song, which is slow and introspective, all lilting melancholia. Apparently, Mr Prestage honed his craft busking in the blues Mecca of Memphis, Tennessee. He is someone I should look out for more of.

And finally, here's Tom again, doing a very gentle version of the song (followed by $29 from the Blue Valentines album, with some great sax on it!) at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1981.

A simple plan

The other day, I was succinctly explaining to a friend my sudden - but probably short-lived - return to going out in the evenings:

"I unexpectedly earned some money at the start of this week. I aim to drink it all as quickly as possible, and then return to monasticism."

HBH 274

Everybody's left,

Or leaving soon; life empties.

End of an era.

Three of my best friends - and those with the greatest number of years in China under their belt - all despaired of the place and quit last year. Three more are getting set to do so. And of the handful of my hardcore friends who still remain, just about all of them have got tied down with wives/girlfriends, steady jobs, mortgages, and have completely renounced their social lives.

My plan for a great farewell tour of erstwhile favourite bars - before I embark upon another spell of 'clean living' - has been rather hindered by having NO-ONE to accompany me on it. And now by a humdinger of a dose of 'flu!!

Great Dating Disasters (9)

I blame The Bookseller.  He set me off on this doomed path.

Perhaps I might not even have been at this wedding, but for him. (A strange story in itself. The bride was someone I'd met and become friends with at a wedding a few years before. I had introduced her to The Bookseller and they'd had a brief fling. Not so very long afterwards, she'd found 'true love', raced into marriage... and, unfathomably, put The Bookseller on the wedding invitation list. The Bookseller - a man of colossal indiscretion - is not to be trusted around his exes. So, I was obliged to attend to keep him out of mischief.)

The Bookseller's goading words to me, within just minutes of our arrival at the reception, were: "There's only one pretty girl here. And you'll probably monopolise her, like you always do."

For once, his assessment was remarkably astute, almost uncannily predictive. My friend, the bride, was an odd girl, a bit tomboyish, 'one of the lads'. She hardly had any female friends, and what few there were had all got married before her. The groom, recently moved to London from South Africa, didn't seem to have any friends at all. It was, thus, quite a sparsely attended wedding, and the guests were almost exclusively older family members.

There was only one single girl in the entire party. She didn't strike me as particularly pretty at first glance. And she was dangerously young. But she had something about her that drew a second glance, and a third: intelligence, vivacity, spirit.

Her mother was evidently appalled that she was spending so much time with this 'dirty old man' (although I was at this point only just past 30; I was in very good shape, after returning from my round-the-world backpacking year, and could still pass, I think, for early to mid-20s; and I'd just gone back to university to study law, and so was once again acting - and feeling - as if I were 19 or 20). She kept dragging her off to speak to some "nice young man" or other - well, I think there were only two of them, and they both looked to be in their first or second year at university. Evidently, the daughter did not find these nice young men very interesting, because she'd detach herself from them after a few minutes and come and seek me out again.

Very flattering, it was. And, my, yes, we hit it off. We had so much in common. In particular, she was a passionate film enthusiast; she liked Tarantino, and could give detailed arguments why; best of all, she shared my view that Reservoir Dogs is a more satisfying narrative than Pulp Fiction because of its perfect tragic arc, the epitome of Aristotle's conception. I'd been struggling to persuade The Bookseller of this for years; now, here was a young girl who made the case even more excitedly and cogently than I did.

So, I asked her if she'd like to come to the cinema with me some time in the following week (it didn't even feel like asking her on a 'date', the conversation was flowing so easily). And she said she feared she would be too busy. "Tough week at work?" I queried, trying not to appear too crestfallen. "Well, I have to finish a big art project for my A-Level," she said. I tried not to let my jaw sag too obviously. (A-Levels - 'Advanced Level' studies - are the senior high school exams in England. The most dazzling girl I'd met in years, the girl I'd just tried to ask out on a date was still at school - and perhaps as young as 16. She had seemed so mature; I had convinced myself that she must be at least 20, perhaps an undergraduate. The world started to spin around my head when I discovered she was possibly 14 or 15 years younger than me. I began to understand her mother's horror of me rather better.)

Well, it turned out she was only a few weeks shy of her 18th birthday - so my interest in her, our interest in each other, began to seem not quite so indecent. Her mother's guardedness towards me seemed to soften over the course of the afternoon. And the girl eventually managed to obtain her parents' permission to join the small after-party at a pub around the corner in the evening. Now I had her all to myself. I lost track of who else might have been there (even The Bookseller's notorious ineptitude was not going to mess this up for me!). I only had eyes for her.

Then, she realised she'd left something behind at the reception venue, nearly half a mile away - a pair of gloves, I think it was. I offered to walk with her to try to recover them. It had just begun raining, and we didn't have an umbrella. On the way back, the rain became a downpour. We kept on ducking into doorways or telephone kiosks every few yards down the road to try to get some shelter, but we were both absolutely soaked through. And every time we took cover from the rain in some archway or bus shelter or whatever... we kissed, passionately, exquisitely, at great length. Possibly the finest erotic memory of my entire life.

But wait, I hear the imaginary reader cry, that's not a dating disaster, is it? Quite the reverse!

No, indeed - but then, neither really was it a date.

When we did get together for a date, those really didn't go so well. The 'maturity' I'd so admired at the wedding party was evanescent. With make-up and a posh frock and entirely adult company, she'd been able to play the grown-up. But it wasn't yet her natural register. After an afternoon of cushion fights in her 6th Form Common Room, she was goofily juvenile - still quite charmingly vivacious, but not nearly as impressive as she'd been on that first meeting. After a couple of weeks, we reached a mutual decision that it wasn't working out, that the age gap was a bit too much. (We remained friends for a while, though. She sent me some postcards from her gap year; and I saw her again a year later, just after she started at Oxford - a Platonic catching-up-with-each-other 'date'.)

She was the youngest girl I've ever been out with (since I was at school myself, that is), and it was much the biggest age gap I've attempted to span (although a difference of 14 or 15 years seems less improper if the woman is over 30; I suppose it's possible I might set a new record here at some point).

I mention this now because of a very vivid dream I had at the start of this week, a dream in which I found myself attracted to a very young girl (not illegally so, I hasten to add; but still rather shamingly, inappropriately so - much too young for me), and felt myself consumed with guilt over it. But that, I think, is a story for another time and place.