The Beijing 'bucket list': 10 things to try before you die

A few weeks back, the Beijing edition of City Weekend magazine did a feature on 'Things you have to try before you leave Beijing' (everybody seems to be talking of leaving these days; although with many, perhaps, it is only talk). I found I had done quite a lot of them; and was quite happy not to have done the rest. (How do you fare? Check it out online, Part 1 and Part 2.)

This seemed like a good theme for a 'farewell post' on here, so I thought I'd try to come up with a similar list of my own (with a heavy bias towards drink-related activities, naturally).

Froog's Top Ten Things To Do Before You Leave Beijing

Have a rickshaw race

As I once managed to do with my erstwhile drinking companion The Tedster. It is damned difficult to persuade any of the rickshaw guys to play ball on this. I don't think they'd ever trust a laowai to cycle their precious vehicle themselves. And they can't be persuaded to go all that fast, even when offtered significant financial incentives for a 'win'. But still, we did once manage to find a pair of drivers who were game for it, and we had a race of sorts around Houhai, early in the morning before there were too many people around. This was about 8 years ago; the tourist throngs have grown much denser in that time. It just might not be practicable at all any more.

Startle passers-by with a bullhorn

Gosh, you used to be able to buy them all over the place; and they were ridiculously cheap - less than 30 kuai, I think. The Beijing government tried to ban their use prior to the Olympics (perhaps the one good thing to come out of the city's over-anxious pre-Games prettification campaign; they used to have a record facililty, so virtually all newspaper kiosks and quite a lot of other small shops would set them on endless repeat to advertise their wares - it could get very annoying). My Mancunian teaching colleague Mad Mike bought himself one, and we spent a very silly hour or so riding around the city in a taxi, hailing random cyclists and pedestrians in our bad but impressively amplified Chinese.

Drink all day

Just because you can, in this decadent expat community! I think my record setting performance was probably the day I christened 12 Square Metres' adoption of 12-hour opening by drinking there from noon to something past midnight... and then stopping in at the Pool Bar for another 4 hours or so on the way home.

Set up a barbecue on the street

Again, just because you can in this crazy country (sometimes, just sometimes, the lack of effective regulation is beguiling). The boys from Ned's bar on Nanluoguxiang used to do this pretty regularly, and my artist friend Stephanie had a little 4th July cookout on an alley just off Bell Tower Square a couple of years ago.

Dance in the rain

The challenge with this one is that your opportunities are limited because rain is so infrequent here. And there's also the problem that when it does rain, the rain is so unpleasant - filled with sand and chemicals; causing instant floods and overflowing sewers - that you tend not to feel very jubilant about it. But I certainly have done this a few times here. The one I remember most fondly was in my early days here, outside my favourite drinking haunt of that time, the 'Adventure Bar'. I got so over-excited about it because I think it was in fact the first rain that I'd seen in Beijing; we didn't have a drop in the first 10 or 12 weeks I lived here. It soon turned into hail, but I carried on dancing anyway, channelling the spirit of Gene Kelly. Or perhaps rather of Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise.

Go on a ridiculously excessive bar crawl

I'm not really a fan of bar crawls, on the whole. I much prefer to find one place I'm comfortable in and spend the entire evening there. Three or four different bars is usually about the most I cover in one night, and that only happens because I've been to a music gig somewhere, or am coming back from working or shopping on the east side of town. However, I do like extreme physical challenges. And Beijing, with its handful of dense-packed nightlife areas, provides a rare opportunity to cram in 10 (or 20, or 30) different venues in quick succession. A few years ago, some friends of mine and I did a crawl along the length of Nanluoguxiang (back in the days when it had more bars than boutiques). I have hankered to try and do the same thing with Wudaoying Hutong; but there is no-one who would accompany me any more.

Go sledding on the frozen lakes at midnight

As I did with my best buddy The Choirboy five or six years ago on New Year's morning. We discovered some bicycle sleds that had been left unchained, and went for a mad, drunken race around Qianhai on them.

Stay up all night to go and watch the dawn flag-raising on Tiananmen Square

Now, I've stayed up all night here far too many times, but I've rarely had the stamina to combine it with an early morning stroll down to the Square afterwards. I think the last time was probably 4 or 5 years ago. I do recommend it, though, if the weather's nice.

Shake Ai Weiwei's hand

Whatever you may think of his art, Ai Weiwei is one of the most important, most influential, most admirable figures in China today. Not many people have the courage to jeopardise their freedom and their physical safety by standing up to the Chinese government. Even fewer have used their wealth and privilege to try to give a voice to people and causes that might otherwise be overlooked. I am proud to have stood alongside Ai Weiwei at a demonstration in support of our mutual friend, the unjustly imprisoned artist Wu Yuren.

Take over your favourite bar for a party

Well, I've done this a number of times on my birthday - for the last two or three years at my 'local', 12 Square Metres, and once (perhaps the most alcoholic of all) at the old Zoo Bar on Houhai (cunningly renamed Zoom Bar a few years ago by combining the original sign with one that said 'M Bar'), which was a fun place for the short spell that Jackson Bai was running it. But the biggest and best was surely the year that I hired Salud for the night, and got Big John and Zoe Wang and friends to play their Irish folk tunes for us. It was nearly 24 hours before I got home from that one!

And an extra one, just to give me something to continue to aim for....

Re-enact the 'Tank Man' incident with remote-controlled toy tanks

This has been a pet scheme of mine for ages. Of course, if I did do this, it would almost certainly be the last thing I'd ever do in China.

So, there you have it. And 10 of these 11 things I have in fact done already. So, I think I'm good to go; I can leave Beijing without any regrets. It's been fun - occasionally - but it's well past time for me to try somewhere new.

Bon mot for the week

"Nobody can be exactly like me. Even I have trouble doing it."

Tallulah Bankhead (1902-1968)

I have been tempted to enrol Ms Bankhead among my 'Fantasy Girlfriends' over on Froogville, but my attraction to her has only bloomed relatively late in my life, and is based upon what I have learned of her personality rather than her looks - although she was rather striking in her appearance, and she did have an imposing and distinctively husky voice. (I must have seen her in Hitchcock's 1944 film Lifeboat when I was a boy, but that encounter left no enduring impression on me.)

A flamboyant personality, and extravagant in all her appetites, she delighted in flaunting her many vices: she was an outrageous vamp, a chain smoker, a heavy drinker - and completely unrepentant about any of it. In the 1920s, while working on the London stage, she caused consternation in British government circles through rumours that she was sexually corrupting boys from the nearby Eton College, the country's most exclusive private school. On leaving hospital after suffering near-fatal complications from a dose of venereal disease, she quipped to reporters, "Don't think this has taught me a lesson." Her dying words - many years later - were supposedly, "Codeine... bourbon!"

Rather than calling her a 'Fantasy Girlfriend' (to be frank, I think her sexual rapacity would have terrified me!), I think I should add her to the ranks of my 'Unsuitable Role Models' here on The Barstool.

Here's a good brief biography of her. And this fan site includes a complete recording of one of her '50s radio shows, which gives a nice demonstration of her wonderfully 'lived in' voice, and her fine comic delivery.

Great Drinking Songs (35)

Well, I've mentioned Jimmy Buffett on here once or twice before, have enrolled him as one of my 'Unsuitable Role Models', but, somehow, I haven't previously got around to posting his signature hit in this 'Great Drinking Songs' series.

Since today is going to be a day for drinking-and-maudlin-reminiscence - my birthday and my first day off the wagon after a month of abstinence! - Margaritaville seems particularly appropriate. (Although the weather is not tropical enough here any more to support the drinking of margaritas, alas. But I'm sure there will be a few tequila slammers consumed at some point.)

[There's also a little musical treat over on Froogville today.]

Useful words

A few weeks back, I did a post on here about the enigmatic Russian word razbliuto (in fact, it is non-existent, a pop culture delusion). That had been prompted by a post a little before on my other blog, Froogville, about various unusual words in other languages, and the intriguing concepts associated with them, that I'd discovered in recent online noodlings.

One of the most interesting of my sources for these posts was this item (on the TED website) in which a conference of translators nominated their 21 favourite 'hard to translate' words.

On this list there were, for me, a couple of absolute standouts, words which I'd like to adopt into regular English usage:

sobremesa  -  the Spanish for the time after a meal spent enjoying conversation with the people you've just eaten with

merak  -  the Serbian for the enjoyment of simple pleasures like feasting and merrymaking

I am, of course, also fond of the Irish term craic, a somewhat nebulous concept of 'good times' that can be applied simply to entertaining conversation or more broadly to a pleasant evening out... or to improbable drunken adventures. The Irish being the Irish, the pub is most often the context and alcohol and/or music are almost invariably key accompanying elements; but its essence is simply good companionship. However, I learn from Wikipedia that the expression was originally English (or Scots English, anyway?), and only fairly recently adopted into Irish usage (mid-20th century). Moreover, the now common spelling is very new, and an affected Gaelicization; the word was originally just 'crack'. And this spelling is perhaps now even more entrenched in English usage than in Irish, as we have readily convinced ourselves that it is a uniquely Irish word and concept, and thus surely ought to have a Gaelic spelling. Oh well. Print the legend, I say. I think the word has acquired new and distinctively Irish connotations, and the transformation of the spelling is an appropriate reflection of that.

The colours of autumn

Last week, I went to a cooking class at The Hutong, to get an introduction to the East Asian approach to pickle making.

This is the result of my labours: jars of Szechuan-style pickled vegetables (three kinds of radish and a smattering of other veggies - string beans, carrots, celery, cabbage, spring onions - flavoured with a generous handful of fresh Szechuan peppercorns and some wickedly hot pre-pickled baby chilli peppers) and batons of daikon radish in a brine suffused with ginger and turmeric and another wickedly hot pepper (a sweet'n'spicy combination, apparently a southern Chinese speciality). And we also made LOTS of Korean-style spicy cabbage - which will probably take me two or three months to eat, and is stinking my fridge out in the meantime. No matter: I love my kimchi.

These two pickle jars are unexpectedly pretty. I'm almost reluctant to empty them. I'm supposed to leave the radishes etc. to steep in their pickling brine for a bit, but they'll be ready for eating soon; and I imagine - pickle nut that I am (something else I can probably attribute to my German grandmother's influence) - that they will disappear very quickly.

[Well, except that I am perturbed by all the air bubbles collecting on top of the Szechuan vegetables. I suspect this is evidence of some unwanted fermentation going on, which might well have spoiled them. Bother!]

An obscure gem

Turley Richards, I have recently discovered, is an awesome vocal talent. Now in his 70s, he's still performing and teaching voice, but mainstream commercial success has always just eluded him - although it seems that he enjoys something of a cult following, including a number of celebrity admirers in the music world (Fleetwood Mac drummer Mick Fleetwood produced and played on his 1980 album Therfu; I was led to check out some of his music on Youtube by this interview with Mick I was reading last weekend, in which he mentions one of the Therfu tracks as amongst the 11 favourite things he's recorded in his long career). You can check out Turley's own website to find out what he's been up to lately.

This might have been the moment when he came closest to breaking out into major fame: an appearance on the Johnny Carson Show in the late '60s, when he was 28 years old.

He's singing Gershwin's Summertime*, which some might object doesn't quite fit into the concept of my ongoing 'Blues Week' on here; but I've always felt it was pretty bluesy (though it was written in the early '30s, somewhat before the classic blues had emerged, at least as a recorded music). And I find some support from the musicologist K. J. McElrath, who writes on the Jazz Standards website: "Gershwin was remarkably successful in his intent to have this sound like a folk song. This is reinforced by his extensive use of the pentatonic scale (C-D-E-G-A) in the context of the A minor tonality and a slow-moving harmonic progression that suggests a 'blues'."

* Trivia note: I hadn't previously known that the lyrics are credited to DuBose Hayward, the author of the novel Porgy on which Gershwin's well-loved opera was based.

After-love

I did a post on Froogville last weekend about the unlikely-sounding word mamihlapinatapai. This I had stumbled across as a result of this post by my old blog-friend JES, which referred to the word razblliuto. This, according to many an online source and the book cited by JES, They Have A Word For It by Howard Rheingold (which offered up mamihlapinatapai as its next example), is supposedly a Russian noun for "the feeling you have for someone you once loved, but do not any more".

Alas, the word appears to be unknown to Russian speakers (although an intriguing theory has been floated that it is a corruption of razlyubeno, a verb meaning to fall out of love, and supposedly originates from an episode of the '60s TV spy series The Man From U.N.C.L.E. [American scriptwriters naturally being likely to mangle any attempt at using Russian!]).

My scepticism was immediately aroused by the fact that it doesn't seem to be a very plausible word, since it does not define any distinct concept.

I can't see any value in having a word that means "whatever feeling you have for a former lover". If it meant simply "not in love any more" (as would seem to have been intended, if that "scriptwriter's goof" theory is true), that would make sense - but it wouldn't be an especially resonant word/concept. If it meant - as anguished romantics naturally assume it does - a sense of wistful longing for a lost love, then it would be more resonant; but surely there are plenty of other words or phrases for that?

According to the definition usually given for this word, it is seemingly intended to denote a particular emotion that exists between former lovers. And I don't believe there is any single emotion one finds in that situation. It depends on so many factors - the circumstances of the breakup, how long ago it was, whether the people concerned are now involved with someone else, and so on.

I tend to have a lingering wistful fondness for all of my exes (at least, the ones with whom I was in love) - though not a raging, obsessive passion, nor any urge to try to revisit and revive the relationship. But the range of other emotions we find in this situation is almost limitless: everything from fanatical hatred through bitterness and resentment to complete indifference or strictly Platonic friendship, and out on the other side to a flirtatious frisson of continuing attraction or easily rekindled lust, and, at the furthest extreme, undying adulation.

And though I would have doubted it when I was a young man, I now realise it is entirely possible after a lapse of many years to (almost?) completely forget that you were once sexually intimate with someone.

Furthermore, I think it's quite rare that one finds identical feeling on both sides of the relationship (before or after breakup!).

The (probably mythical) word razbliuto, then, appears to me to lack any definite or useful meaning.

However... sometimes words command our thoughts, and our thoughts may direct our feelings. If a language did have such a word, and it was understood to mean one particular emotion - a useful, healing emotion: a small ember of past love that was capable of engendering forgiveness of supposed wrongs and allowing a continuance of friendship... the existence of this word might work a gentle magic in the realm of romantic relationships; it might condition us to expect, to know that this is how we will feel after a breakup, and preclude the possibility of our experiencing any more powerful and potentially damaging emotions. I think the existence of such a word might be a blessing. Perhaps we should invent one.

By the way, I notice that the Wikipedia entry on The Man From U.N.C.L.E. that I hotlinked to above begins with the note "THRUSH redirects here." Oh dear. That might cause some confusion for people seeking medical advice.

Drat! Blogger pisses me off again

For the past six months I've had links near the top of the sidebars on both my blogs for a rather useful 'list view' - summarising the last 30 posts on each.

This feature was obtained by simply adding /?m=1 to the end of the blog URL. I'm not aware that Blogger ever advertised this anywhere; so, perhaps it was only ever a fortuitous glitch. And it now appears to have been "repaired": those links now direct only to the regular blog homepage. Damn.

I am particularly saddened by Blogger's withdrawal of this facility not because it was being widely used and appreciated (I suspect it wasn't), but simply because the tip on how to set it up had been sent to me as a parting gift by Tony B, a very entertaining blogger who had also become an e-penpal of mine over the last few years. He was fairly elderly and in ailing health, and he passed away only two months later. I had liked having this permanent reminder of him in my sidebars. Dang you, Blogger!

A birthday present

Mike over at booksandmusicandstuff - just about my only surviving commenter on here these days - was kind enough to nominate this little blog for a 'Sunshine Award' last week.

Alas, I felt I had to decline the honour, since I don't really approve of these 'meme' things - and I can't think of any other blogs to pass the award on to (you're supposed to nominate ten, for god's sake!). Still, it's nice to get a little favourable recognition. And, since Music Mike is quite plugged in to all this 'social media' whatnot, there is perhaps a chance that his recommendation may bring in some new readers here. I'll keep a hopeful eye on the stats!

It was a happy coincidence that Mike should offer me this accolade just as this blog was approaching another major milestone (drum roll) - its 6th Anniversary. Yes, Round-The-World Barstool Blues started off with this post six years ago today.

I have determined to put the blog (both my blogs) to bed around the end of this year (I may change my mind, of course; but it's good to have a plan) - so, enjoy it while you can. Only three months or so of The Barstool left!!

This picture comes from a diverting 'visual history' of the barstool I found on a photo blog of unlikely treasures called La Dolfina. You might also check out this rather disturbing Scottish design, a barstool supposedly crafted for the greater comfort of kilt-wearers. This Barstool of mine makes no such concessions to your convenience - try not to fidget.

Excuses

Now that my great run of birthdays/anniversaries/leaving parties/housewarmings is finally over, I had been intending to embark in earnest upon an extended spell of abstinence TODAY.

But Wikipedia informs me that today is Independence Day for Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. And it's also Battle of Britain Day back home in the UK (although I can't ever recall there being any special celebrations to mark this event; it tends to pass completely unnoticed, which is a bit of a shame).

And tomorrow is Mexican Independence Day - which seems like an irresistible pretext to get busy with the tequila.

Maybe I'll give up drinking on Monday...

"Sorry, old man. Not following your banter."

Before I decided to illustrate this post with the classic Python skit, I was browsing the Web for some Battle of Britain pictures and turned up a number of interesting sites: Battle of Britain Beacon, The Spitfire Site, Fighter Pilot University, and Barry Weekley Art. Well worth checking out.

Top Five Songs That Make Me Weepy

This topic came up when bantering online with Music Mike a few weeks back. He had suggested there were some songs that brought a tear to his eye simply because they were so good. I'm sceptical of that: I think that for a song to act on the tear ducts there has to be some innate sadness in its content, and/or in the personal associations that it has acquired for you.

Since I am hugely prone to depression and melancholia, there are any number of songs that can have this effect on me (and only a few that can snap me out of it). I might well have to come up with one or two further posts on this topic. But these were the five that came most readily to mind. [They are also very good songs, Mike; but that's not what tears me up about them.]

Top Five Songs that bring a tear to my eye

5)  Radiohead - Fake Plastic Trees

I know, I know, it's a bit of a cliché. It might seem that only people born around the beginning of the '80s, people of the generation that experienced the emergence of this song in their moody early teens, should really be entitled to get exaggeratedly emotional over it. But the lyrics speak to me powerfully of middle-aged exhaustion and disillusionment and despair. There's something about the way Thom Yorke sings "It wears him out..." that leaves me gutted every time. Here's the original video. (There's also an excellent live performance video from the 2003 Glastonbury Festival.)

4)  Simon & Garfunkel - The Sound of Silence

A song of creepy intensity and an ultimate wallow in nihilistic despair and disgust with the world, the prettiness of the tune only serving to create an additional tension with the suicidal tenor of the lyrics. Moreover, of course, it has acquired further dark resonances from its use over the devastating closing shot of The Graduate - Dustin Hoffman in the back of the bus, having apparently gained his heart's desire but suddenly realising he has no idea why he wanted it or what he's going to do next. Here's a live TV performance from 1966. (The original album version can be heard here.)

3)  K.D. Lang - Outside Myself

A powerful representation of alienation and despair so great that it leaves one emotionally numb. I grew dangerously attached to this song during a spell of particularly bad depressions in the later '90s, and again following the death of my mother shortly after I moved to China. This is a performance from the BBC music show Later... with Jools Holland in the 1990s; slightly dodgy sound and picture quality, unfortunately, but a great performance.

2)  The Pogues - Kitty

A beautiful traditional ballad, hauntingly sung by Shane MacGowan at the end of the Pogues' marvellous debut album Red Roses For Me. That whole record has had the power to move me to tears since my student days, but it is this song that works most powerfully on my heart-strings. Songs of farewell are a particular weakness of mine; songs of failed or thwarted love, also; and outlaw songs of men wronged by a harsh government, too (yes, I know, I'm a hopeless Plastic Paddy at times). Kitty combines all three genres into three-and-a-half minutes of distilled heartache. Here's a rather nice live performance from Glasgow's Barrowlands in 1987.

But in the No. 1 spot this time we have....

1)  Fleetwood Mac - Storms

This has been a late-night depression-wallow staple of mine since the early '90s. I think I'd initially been attracted to it as a poignant account of a failed love affair, but I'd been listening to it a lot just before my father died and so it has become associated for me not just with separation but bereavement. I also identify with the defiant celebration of a tempestuous temperament at the close of the song: "I have never ever been a blue cold sea; I have always been a storm."  Here's the album track, accompanied by a nice montage of photos of the delectable Stevie Nicks. (There's also an interesting 'demo' version of the song here.)

A pocket full of moonshine

Gawd, am I really coming back to THIS?????

Well, NO. Much as I have loved to drink to excess over the years, and curious as I am to try new types of alcoholic beverage, reckless as I often am of my own safety, and indulgent though I be towards many of the less obviously appealing quirkinesses of life in China... I have never liked erguotou.

Even though it is the cheapest way of getting drunk in Beijing (and perhaps in the whole world), I have always believed that, above all, drinking should be a pleasurable experience. I can tolerate most forms of baijiu (Chinese spirit); tolerate with difficulty, but, yes, tolerate; and there are just a few varieties that I even quite like. But erguotou is the cheapest and crummiest of the lot, wildly uneven in its taste and quality - varying from nasty to disgusting.

There are very many things that I have enjoyed about drinking in China over the years, and may enjoy again, but... the hip bottle of erguotou is not one of them. You can use this stuff for disinfecting work surfaces or for lighting a barbecue, but for drinking - never!

However, in searching out the above photograph just now, I was fortunate to stumble across a new China blog in which intrepid laowai Derek Sandhaus is attempting to cultivate a genuine appreciation for the 'subtleties' of baijiu by pushing himself beyond its alleged 300-shot threshold of acclimatisation. 

Good luck to him! I'm glad he's doing it, so that no-one else has to. 

[Although, come to think of it, I must be getting pretty damn close to that consumption total myself. In fact, I probably exceeded it on my first visit to China 18 years ago. And I have found no signs whatsoever of getting over the distaste for it.]

The 'lads' are preparing my 'Welcome home!' already...

Another nail in my heart

The Carpenter's Arms, on Nelson Street, at the bottom of the Jericho area of north-west Oxford, was my 'local' in the early '90s when I returned to my student stomping grounds to work for a couple of years. A little later, my oldest drinking buddy The Bookseller lived for a year in a nice basement flat on Walton Crescent, almost directly opposite this little gem of a pub, which extended my close acquaintance with it for a little while longer.

The ambience wasn't marvellous: it felt too much like the living room of a private home, with plush beige carpet throughout (most of the pubs in that area had indeed originally been private residences, many having been converted into commercial premises in the mid-1800s as a result of the Beerhouse Act). But it had a friendly landlord and landlady, a mixed crowd of regulars (partly thanks to having the Oxford Synagogue next door), some decent bar snacks, and a very well-kept pint of Guinness. It also had three other conspicuous attractions: a good dartboard (I don't play much; but I like a game occasionally, and having a decent quality board that won't spit your darts back out on to the floor half the time is a major incentive to take your arrows out with you more regularly), an excellent jukebox (including a lot of The Kinks: Sunny Afternoon, Lola, and Apeman were particular favourites in there for a while), and..... an Aunt Sally court (the BEST pub game ever: like an aerial version of skittles in which you have a single wooden 'dolly' mounted on top of a post as the target, and you hurl great billets of wood at it from some yards away; most miss and thwack into a sheet of canvas or plastic stretched behind the target to catch them; it is very satisfyingly physical - and a great fun competition for anyone to join in, because it's very simple but almost no-one is really that good at it).

Back in those days, the place also had its resident eccentric, a rather sketchy character of indeterminate age (though a little nearer to 60 than to 40, I would guess) called Dave, who, despite appearing half-cut most of the time, was a formidable opponent in any kind of pub game. I was reluctant to take him on at cribbage or dominoes, having seen him trash others of the regulars at these uncomplicated games. But he mentored me for a while at Aunt Sally. And he taught me a very good betting trick at darts.

Another unexpected delight of the place was that most weekends I would find my old friend Mohammed in there. I was a little taken aback when I first bumped into him there, surprised to find that, although a 'good Muslim', he was fond of a pint of Guinness. I was also impressed that he still recognised me, quite a few years on from when I'd last seen him. Mohammed had been one of the first guys to open up a kebab van in Oxford (nowadays, there are a dozen or more such mobile food stalls around the city centre; when I started there as a student there were only four, and only one or two of them sold kebabs, the others being burger or baked spud places; but there was a veritable 'kebab explosion' during the mid-80s, with new vans appearing every term). He was also one of the best (my college made him an honorary member of its Junior Common Room in gratitude for his contribution to keeping the student body well fed); and even after he gave up his own van after half a dozen years or so, he'd still occasionally reappear on a new van somewhere, sharing his experience with a young friend or relative to help them start up (the benefits of his input did not always persist for long, but you could guarantee that any van on which he had been sighted would have excellent salad and a properly fiery chilli sauce for a month or two afterwards).

So, although I was only hanging out there for around 18 months (and, most especially, during the month or two that my old college pal Richard - the one who seduced me into coming to China! - stayed with me during a break from China one summer), I have a host of fond memories of that pub. And I had been looking forward to popping back there on this visit - just one drink, for old times' sake. Alas, it was not to be. The place has closed down, and been converted back into a pair of terraced houses. According to The Lost Pubs Project, this may have happened at some time in the later '90s - though I'm pretty sure I recall it still being there in 2000. Well, whatever, it's gone now; and I have a lump in my throat.

A day later, I noticed the Horse & Jockey on Woodstock Road was gone too; closed in 2002, apparently. I have fewer regrets about that: it was a large and fairly charmless pub, never a favourite or regular haunt of mine - although I did drop in occasionally during my student days, since it was the last pub heading north out of the city on this road, and was a convenient stop-off if visiting friends at the adjacent St Anne's or St Anthony's colleges.

It seems we've lost something like half of the pubs we used to have in the UK 40 or 50 years ago, and, if the recent rates of attrition persist, we could have lost half of the 60,000 that remain in another decade or so. I hope this won't happen: the situation seems to be stabilising a bit now, after a few brutal years of closures precipitated by the smoking ban and the crash of the economy. But it is dispiriting, disorienting to find that so many of the landmarks of my student days in Oxford have now disappeared forever.

The 3rd Avenue crawl

It's a curious facet of Manhattan's development that the richest bar-crawling areas are a couple of blocks in from the shore on each side of the island. You might have thought that the riverfront would be prime residential real estate, but in fact most of the shoreline is dominated by docks, and much of the area immediately inshore is given over to warehouses or other industrial use. The high-tone areas are mostly clustered more towards the middle of the island. Close to the river, it's mostly a bit of a wasteland, not much residential property, and what there is often very low-end. It's on the third block in that you start to find a lot of amenities for the working-class population. And so 3rd Avenue and 9th Avenue are the two best bar strips in the city.

The other week I hooked up with former Beijing drinking crony Dr Manhattan. Since he now works in Manhattan, and indeed near the lower middle reaches of 3rd Avenue, we arranged to meet there for a night of debauch.

On a few of my previous excursions to the Big Apple I had stayed in the Vanderbilt YMCA, which is in Mid-Town, in the upper 40s midway between 2nd and 3rd Avenues. The nearest bar I'd discovered on one of those trips, and still one of my favourites in the city, is a no-nonsense Irish boozer called Muldoon's. I therefore nominated that as our initial rendezvous.

Muldoon's is, I believe, unlike so many bars of its kind in America, genuinely Irish rather than faux Irish. The bar staff always sound pretty authentic to me, anyway (and on this occasion, one of them was a dazzlingly pretty blonde girl). And it has something of the subdued, occasionally funereal, atmosphere of pubs in the 'old country', where people slump solitary at the bar, silently contemplating their own thoughts. If you feel yourself in need of a spell of gloomy introspection (and I often do!), this is just the place. It is pretty much the perfect template of a bar for me: a long narrow space, low light, lots of aged wooden fittings, and a LONG wooden bar - just the right height for leaning. 

There's another fairly similar - but rather livelier - Irish bar called O'Neill's a block or two further north, which often has some great traditional musicians playing there. Alas, I didn't get to go there this time because the Doctor was lobbying for us to wander southward. He had his heart set on a bit of country/bluegrass music at a place about sixteen blocks away, but... that's a modest walk, and it was intermittently spotting with rain, so we had to duck into another bar en route to break our journey. There were many to choose from, but I plumped for the endearingly named Black Sheep, another Irish joint, uncannily similar to Muldoon's inside: LONG bar, good selection of Irish whiskies, tasty bar meals, and a chirpy, fresh-off-the-boat barmaid (although a sceptical Dr M wondered if she was in fact a resting actress who was merely putting the accent on; I am reasonably convinced it was authentic). Its distinctive quirk is that the bar top (which must be a good 25 yards long) is entirely covered with 'pennies' (1-cent coins); trying to estimate how many coins there are in total is quite a challenge to booze-fuddled powers of arithmetic.

I could quite happily have spent a longer part of the evening there - the curly fries were excellent and the barmaid was charming - but Dr Manhattan would have his music, so we pressed on to the Rodeo Bar at the corner of 27th Street, an expansive C&W joint that I think my friend The British Cowboy would approve of. Most of the space is given over to a very decent looking BBQ restaurant (although I didn't have a chance to sample the food), but the narrower left-hand side of the establishment is more of a bar, with the long room focused on a small stage at the far end. There are live music shows every night, mostly of a country-ish flavour, and the majority of them FREE. The Dr and I were fortunate enough to catch the excellent Dysfunctional Family Jazz Band (you can check out some of their music here). I found myself becoming rather smitten with their gorgeous singer Melissa, but I gather she's married  to - or divorced from?? - one of the other band members, or something....

The most memorable thing about the Rodeo, though, is that in the music bar section their bar is actually... a chuck wagon. Yep, they have rolled a complete (well, they might have removed the engine) mobile taco stall into the bar to dispense their drinks from - check it out.

This had been a thoroughly excellent evening: three great bars, cheap drinks, superb free music - not a single disappointment. Ah, but it wasn't over yet. Oh no, this is Dr Manhattan we're talking about....

Keeping tabs

The other day (don't ask me how!) I happened across this handy online booze consumption calculator. If you input the type and brand of booze you were drinking (from a fairly extensive range of standards; though you may find yourself ticking 'other' a lot of the time - especially in China!), the approximate size of the measure, and how many of them you knocked back, it will tell you how many 'units' of alcohol that amounts to... and how many calories.

It's the latter I'm more concerned about at the moment. My weight has ballooned over 220lbs in the last year or so, and despite two months of healthy living (mostly very light beer and food consumption, lots of fresh fruit and veggies, daily exercise), those extra pounds are refusing to drop off again.

For most of my adult life my weight was uncannily stable at or a little below 190lbs. It started creeping up a bit at the end of the 1990s, but was still only about 195lbs when I moved to China in 2002. Middle-age spread and cheap Yanjing beer soon started getting the better of me here, but I was still fairly easily managing to keep my weight in a 200-205lb range until recently. Something BAD has happened to my metabolism!

But I am not going to take this lying down (tempting as that is, when you're a fat bastard!). Oh no! I am going to get back down to 195lbs... if it kills me!

Enough already, eh?

The Nanaimo Bar is indeed a delicious confection. But it is extremely sweet, and not the kind of thing you would sensibly indulge in more than a handful of times a year... well, not more than a few times every month, anyway... and certainly not two or three times every bleedin' day.

It is, I feel, much the same with posts about Canada: one can have too much of a 'good thing'.

Ubiquitous bar blogger 'Beijing Boyce' came up with a fun idea for promoting Canadian food and drink around Beijing, and for enhancing/extending the celebration of this year's Canada Day (July 1st) with a mini-festival he calls Canada Grade Eh Week.

Unfortunately, he has gone completely overboard on this pet project, deluging us with a dozen or more posts and some thousands of words about it - virtually the entire output on his bar & restaurant review blog for the past 10 days. I don't think I'm the only one for whom Canada Ennui set in about a week ago... I rather fear that the effectiveness of the promotion - at least for the non-Canadians amongst us - may be undercut rather by this extravagant oversell.

I hope the event passes off well, and that the yummy Nanaimo Bar might afterwards become a permanent fixture in some of the capital's bakeries and cafés. But I also hope Mr B doesn't then devote another 5,000 words to telling us how well it all went.

A Happy Canada Day (and Grade Eh Week) to you all! Don't eat too many Nanaimo Bars!

My kingdom for a horse sports bar!

Some things are no better in England than in China.

Well, the concept of the 'sports bar' isn't widely recognised here. When Rupert Murdoch's Sky network secured exclusive rights to show most of the major matches in domestic and European club football live about 15 years or so ago, when few people even had satellite TV yet, and fewer still were willing to pay the high subscription for premium sports channels, most pubs quickly acquired a satellite dish and one or two TV screens to start showing the big games. It transformed the atmosphere of the English pub: overnight, almost every bar became a 'sports bar'.

Sort of. But not really. Most pubs had only one or two screens; and often not very big ones. And they tended not to show all sports, only the big football games. Things haven't changed very much in the decade or more that I've been away. Although the terrestrial channels have clawed back some of the rights to domestic league games, and have always been guaranteed access to international events like the current tournament, watching footie down the pub has become entrenched as a central part of national life in the UK. But the pubs haven't gone out of their way to accommodate that demand.

In Oxford, anyway, the situation is pretty dire. The few pubs I used to know that had a reasonable amount of space and more than two screens all seem to have closed. A lot of the pubs have given up having a TV at all (or never bothered with one); no-one has gone to the trouble of getting one just for this European Championship tournament. The pubs I've tried watching a game in all have only one or two small screens... and won't turn the sound up loud enough for you to hear the commentary properly. I've started watching the games at home.

I have been tempted to go down to London for the upcoming quarter-finals, where the beer will be more expensive, but I imagine at least some of the pubs will have a large screen.

I find I am almost missing Beijing's sports bars - ill-organised and inadequate though they are! I am NOT missing trying to stay awake for a 2.45am kick-off/4.40am finish, though.

Supplement - Apocryphal tales on the Internet: I have found an online listing for a proper 'sports bar' in East Oxford, not too far from where I am staying, which is supposedly HUGE: 20 or more screens and the capacity for hundreds of people. I really should go and check that out. Unfortunately, folks I know who live nearby have never heard of it. And its website, which is supposed to advertise upcoming events/matches, doesn't seem to have been updated in about two years - so, I fear it is now defunct (if indeed, it ever existed in the first place, and was not just an elaborate practical joke). I may investigate further, if it ever stops raining.

A song for the Euros

I've been hunting for this classic piece of Neil Innes for ages, but it only recently seems to have turned up on YouTube. One Thing On Your Mind was one of the highlights from his superb '70s TV show The Innes Book of Records. It is possibly the best Country & Western song I know, and quite astute in the way it nails the typical - disingenuous! - female complaint that men are preoccupied with sex, while they become even more dissatisfied with us on realising that we are in fact far more obsessed with sport. [This is a rather long excerpt, but has much better sound quality than other postings. And it has the added bonus of being prefaced by a guest appearance from 'punk poet' John Cooper Clarke, reciting one of his best-known pieces, Chickentown - a sort of Slough for the '70s/'80s.]

I can't think of any song more appropriate to accompany the start of my three-week immersion in Euro 2012.

I suppose this is probably the best place to attempt to kick off  a discussion thread on the tournament. Four years ago, the banter got pretty lively here. I may have to send out a few warning e-mails to The Lads.

[By the by, Neil is now arranging a petition to lobby the BBC to re-show both series of The Innes Book of Records. He's been in a bitter rights dispute with the Beeb for decades, which has thus far prevented the show from being released on video or DVD.]

Somewhere to watch the footie

The irrepressible Badr Benjelloun (of music blog BeijingDaze and foodie blog The Noodle Diaries) has for a while been harbouring a mad ambition to open a little bar of his own. I hadn't known this until recently, but apparently football is another of his great passions; and, like me, he is thoroughly dissatisfied with Beijing's current provision in the 'sports bar' sector. Hence, his plan is to open a little hutong haven in central Beijing where we can enjoy watching a game without having to endure the chronic overcrowding of Paddy O'Shea's, the crappy beer and surliness of The Den, the hopeless disorganization of Luga's Villa, or the high prices and dire service of the Stumble Inn.

He began looking around for a space in earnest a couple of months ago, and finally secured a lease just a few days prior to my departure at the end of May. After a lightning-quick refurb, he's aiming to be open in a day or two, just in time for the start of the feast of international football that is the European Championships. He's calling the place Cuju (that's 蹴鞠, an ancient Chinese ball game that was somewhat football-like - a neat name for a sports bar).

Sharing also my concern over rising drink prices in Beijing's bars (though I don't know if he was directly influenced by this post), he assured me that he would be offering the capital's "best range of beers under 30rmb".

I'm very sorry not to be around for the opening night. I hope all goes well with the venture, Badr. And enjoy the football!!

Taking my leave

Music-loving blog friend JES introduced me to Canadian folk trio The Wailin' Jennys and their haunting a capella rendition of the poignant Irish/Scots farewell song, The Parting Glass, a little over a year ago. I immediately responded with a post of my own on the song, but omitted this version. I confess I got just a little tearful when I was digging it out again yesterday. There have been a fair few 'parting glasses' this last week or so (and one or two cups of coffee too).

JES originally posted the girls' album recording of the song, but I discover they can also nail it live.