HBH 38

She's back

After long silence -
An unexpected hello.
Heart flip-flops again.

Unhelpful

I mentioned my old pal The Bookseller in a comment on my '300' post just now - probably my favourite of all the anecdotes about him.

However, I thought it was about time I commemorated him again in the wide open spaces of a post.

Once, when we were students at Oxford, we were walking back to college through the city centre late one Friday or Saturday night, after consuming several beers, and I impetuously (oh, don't censure me - it was a lonely impulse of delight!) began kicking an abandoned traffic cone down the street. Unfortunately, there was a policeman in our path I hadn't noticed; and, feeling bored and short of entertainment, and perhaps being rather hostile to the relentless studenty "high-jinks" in that part of town, he decided to make a little bit of an example of me. Now, I repeat: the cone was abandoned in the middle of the street when I found it; someone else had already removed it from wherever it had been placed on duty. And there were, at that time, about a million traffic cones in Oxford; it wasn't as if the removal of one or two was going to constitute any public safety hazard. And I hadn't brought it very far: 4 or 5 kicks, probably no more than a hundred yards in total. In fact, the policeman had probably been able to watch me find the cone (abandoned in the middle of the street) and start kicking it.

A potentially ugly situation. The policeman wants to get all officious, give me the big lecture about how irresponsible it is to remove warning cones from roadworks. I am going to play submissive (but not too submissive) in order to get away from him as quickly and painlessly as possible.

What I really don't need in that situation is for The Bookseller to kick off the conversation by saying: "I'm sorry about my friend, officer - he's PISSED."

Oh, the irony. I'm sure The Bookseller was then - as almost invariably - even more pissed than me. Hell, he tends to sound (and behave!) kind of slurred even when he's sober.

On another similar occasion, I had spotted the police up ahead in time, and had hastily tossed whatever contraband it was we were playing with on that occasion over the side of Magdalen Bridge into the river. Two cops in a parked patrol car had spotted something, but they weren't sure what; so they pulled us up for questioning for a couple of minutes. Much to my relief, this time The Bookseller let me do pretty much all the talking, and I finessed our way out of trouble quite swiftly. As we resumed our walk home - not two yards from the open window of the car the policemen had just got back into - he observed, very loudly: "Phew, that was close."

With friends like this - it's amazing I didn't wind up in jail long ago.

300!

Having tried just about everything to get this blog more widely noticed and appreciated (jokes, bar reviews, political discussions, poetry, 'live blog' interactivity, Googlewhackable phrase-making)..... I thought it might be time to give SEX a go.

I haven't seen this film yet (it doesn't seem to have appeared in the pirate DVD stalls yet.... though perhaps I just missed its brief period of ubiquity: this is what happens if you cease to be a regular shopper), but this is certainly a very striking, very amusing poster. And I've had a bit of a crush on the lovely Lena Headey since her debut (as a schoolgirl, I suppose), ever such a long time ago, in 'Waterland'. Nice to see her getting a taste of Hollywood mega-stardom at last.

[An aside: I had been convinced that she was in Alan Bleasdale's TV series 'Jake's Progress' as well, but IMDB thinks not. How could I have been so mistaken?]

Anyway, in case you hadn't realised.... THIS is post No. 300 here on the Barstool. WOW!!!

A familiar feeling?

"It only takes one drink to get me drunk. The trouble is, I can't remember if it's the thirteenth or the fourteenth."

George Burns (1896-1996)

Bar Crazy

I was just down in Xi'An (one of the earliest capitals of China, and home to the famous Terracotta Army) for a day.

The last time I was there, a few years ago, it was conspicuous for its absence of foreigner-friendly entertainments. It seems there's still a relatively small resident expat community there; the vast majority of foreigners in the city are tourists who stay only for a day or two.

This omission has now been 'corrected'. Yes, Xi'An now has a designated 'Bar Street'. One of those 'triumphs' of central planning. The city government decrees that there will be a 'Bar Street', and lo, a 'Bar Street' there is. I'd be curious to know exactly what mechanisms they employ to bring this about. It's such a wonderfully pointless achievement, but somehow rather impressive nonetheless (rather like The Great Wall and The Three Gorges Dam, you might say). [We have a couple of these White Elephant bar developments in Beijing, too: Yuandadu Jiuba Jie and Nuren Jie. Almost nobody ever goes there.]

I didn't clock the name of this new Xi'an 'Bar Street', but it was parallel to Nan Dajie, a block to the west, and just under a mile south of the Bell Tower Square in the centre of the city. I happened on it quite by chance, while taking a (rain-dampened) relaxing, leg-stretching, exploratory wander on the evening of my arrival.

And what a strange sight it is. Quite quaint, cobbled, more-or-less pedestrianized, but.... all the bars look the same. Exactly the same. And they all look like coffee shops (this is a common Chinese vice that I have frequently railed against in the comment-threads on my blogs). In fact, most of them call themselves coffee shops - usually with astoundingly naff names (ah, Chinglish) like 'Racy Taste Coffee'. A few of them had some live music. A few of them had customers. Chinese customers, that is. Still no foreigners in sight. No, the Street wasn't exactly doing a roaring trade - and I don't think that was just because of the weather.

The bars all seemed quite nicely, quite expensively decorated and furnished (although, in fact, these things can be stunningly inexpensive in China). And yet almost all of them had at least one or two letters, often more, that had dropped off their signs above the door and had not been replaced - hence such puzzles as 'Blu* **unt*in C**fe*' and 'C**fee M*sic *ar'. I suspect this is evidence that the proprietors splashed a little cash on setting them up but will not spend a further penny on them now that it has become apparent that they are all money-sinks.

Guess how many bars there were. Go on, guess. In a street perhaps a quarter of a mile long. How many?

27. I counted.

I confess I may have got the figure slightly wrong. It really was difficult to tell where one bar ended and another began, since they nearly all looked so similar in style and decor. Some had two entrances and some had one. Some had two signs (the name, and then something like 'Coffee Bar' or 'Live Music'), and some had one; some perhaps had none - or had a sign which had become extremely inconspicuous by virtue of having had all of its letters fall of. Some unobtrusive (easily missed), isolated doorways proved - on closer inspection - to lead to separate bars upstairs or in the basement.

No, the counting wasn't at all easy. I think the true total might actually be considerably more than 27.

Did I go in any of them? Of course not! Naff 'coffee bars' - not my scene at all.

No, I found myself a grotty noodle restaurant and drank two or three of the cheapest beers on the menu.

Unlucky 13

All good things come to an end.

It wasn't long ago that I was eulogising Club 13 as one of the best music bars in town, one of the best pool bars in town, one of my very favourite hangouts. I have been a semi-regular there now for two years or so - since shortly after it opened.

There has always been one black mark against it. It doesn't really make any concession to non-Chinese speakers. Now, I don't have any objection to that in itself. It's not, after all, a bar aimed primarily at foreigners; most of the foreigners who do come in are students keen to practise their Chinese; and it's not that difficult to order a drink in Chinese. However, 9 times out of 10, a failure to employ staff with even rudimentary English is allied to ruthless penny-pinching and a complete disregard of any kind of service ethic. And such, I fear, is the case at Club 13. Few of the staff speak more than a few words of English. Few of them seem to stay there for more than a few weeks (unless they are being constantly rotated to different days of the week??). And the service is often pretty fucking abysmal.

But that's China. Almost every bar and restaurant is like that. You learn to put up with it if a place has enough other redeeming features.

It has been a particular worry to me for some time (a year or so, at least) that Club 13 has been trying to charge for its pool table. You just don't do that; it's silly; it's penny-pinching; it's unworkable. Remember how angry I got about the disgraceful Ball House a few weeks back? Even worse than the purported 15 kuai per hour table charge is the 100 kuai deposit on the balls. The only warning of this is a tiny notice (written in Chinese only) on a blackboard slate perched on one of the nearby tables. The staff always seem to have been very half-hearted about enforcing this. It is a policy, as the saying goes, "more honoured in the breach than the observance". I've rarely even been asked to pay this charge; and when I have been, I've simply refused.... and played anyway. As does everyone else.

Ah, but this week..... The Chairman went to get the balls from the bar. And The Chairman is meek, compliant, weak, a blunderer. He was asked to pay the table deposit, and agreed. I tried to remonstrate with the staff as soon as I realised what had happened, but once they'd got the money we were in a very weak bargaining position. This time, it looked like we'd have to pay for the table. Oh well, not the end of the world. Only 15 kuai an hour (about $2), after all.

However, we only played for just under an hour-and-a-half, and they were trying to demand a 30 kuai table fee. Now, guys, if you want to be like that, maybe we'll just keep playing till 10.05. Be reasonable.

This is where the whole idea of table charges in bars falls apart. In a pool hall, OK - two people share a table for an extended period of time. It's easy enough to monitor, it's reasonable enough to impose a charge. In a bar, pool is a more broadly social pastime. You don't want to hog the table if other people are waiting for a game. There's usually a board for writing up a waiting-list of people wanting to play. In serious pool bars, there's almost always a winner-stays-on-the-table convention. So, unless one person wants to treat everybody else to an hour or so of play (I suppose in China, that could happen - they're big on the idea of one person picking up the dinner tab for everyone), it's impossible to tell who owes what. Having a deposit on the balls is even more problematical: is each new player expected to hand a 100 note to the player vacating the table for him?? And 100 kuai really is a huge amount: I'm pretty sure a set of balls doesn't cost that much. And I also find it pretty fucking rude - what, you don't trust me? I've been in your bar 20 or 30 times playing pool, and you still think I might try to run off with a complete set of balls?!

And then - guess what? They didn't want to give us our deposit back. The waiter we'd given the money to claimed he didn't have the money and couldn't give it to us. He asked the girl behind the bar to give us the money, but she claimed she couldn't, claimed she didn't know where the money was. (It's right there, in that open cash tray behind the bar, 12" away from me!) They'd already been dicking The Chairman around for quite a few minutes before I intervened. Then they dicked me around for quite a few minutes more. We were, at this stage, still asking quite politely why we couldn't get our money back. But the girl behind the bar, the one in charge of the money, decided that she'd rather pout and scowl and be doing something terribly important with her mobile phone (and it wasn't even as if she were making a call or writing a message; she was just gazing dumbly at the screen, maybe playing one of those inane games on it, or reading her day's text message spam) rather than pay any attention to us.

Now, these idiots had already hit nearly all of my hot buttons in quick succession, but that was just the final straw. That girl was the most senior member of staff on duty (just about the only visible member of staff on duty - the various waiters mostly lounge around indolently, looking like customers; or else disappear into the shadows altogether), the owner/manager's obvious representative, the one in charge of the money. There is no way someone in that position should EVER be paying more attention to their mobile phone than to customers who are trying to talk to them. That is SO FAR BEYOND RUDE...... words fail me!!!

I went completely fucking ballistic on her. I'm not proud of myself. I rather wish it hadn't happened. I would never dream of making such a scene anywhere else, in any other country I have ever visited. It is a learned behaviour. Even when I am furious (and I was), I vent my fury in a controlled way, to a directed purpose. And you know what? It works. I find it deeply unfortunate, but this is the culture here: this is how the Chinese complain; and sometimes, alas, it seems to be the only behaviour that recalcitrant staff will recognise and respond to. If you shout and scream and stamp your foot and throw in a few choice swear words and attract the attention of other customers...... they'll give in and give you what you want. They'll sulk and back-sass, but they'll give you what you want. I really do wish it wasn't so bloody difficult.

"PUT THAT FUCKING PHONE DOWN AND GIVE US THE GODDAMNED MONEY - RIGHT NOW!" Job done. But I don't feel good about it. And it had taken nearly 15 minutes.

Alas, Club 13 is now on my 'Hate List'.

Maybe I'll give it a reprieve in a few months, after my summer break. After all, it's still a good music venue. It has good bands. A good pool table. The booze is cheap.

Insanely bad service we must simply learn to tolerate.

Will I be allowed back? Oh yes, I expect so. There's not really any concept of 'barring' people here. And I doubt they'll even recognise me; they didn't seem to recognise me from my numerous previous visits (the Chinese do tend to be bad at discriminating between foreign faces; they often claim that "all foreigners look alike"). In fact, I think all the staff that night (except for the super-annoying girl behind the bar) were new. And they'll probably all have been replaced within a month or so (including the super-annoying girl, with any luck).

It is a sorry occasion, though, when one of your best-loved haunts turns so emphatically, so catastrophically to SHIT.... just as you're about to go on your summer holiday. Ah, China....

HBH 37

Hiatus

Empty Thursdays loom,
Our weekly therapy lost.
One guitar missing.

Yep, no more jazz nights at Jianghu for a couple of months, as my Django Rheinhardt-channelling guitar buddy takes a restorative summer break back in France. I've only been going once a month or so - rather than every week like some people - but I'll miss it. Perhaps Dan will continue to gig on his own occasionally....

This haiku brought to you early, but time-stamped for Friday anyway - to maintain a semblance of order in the world.

Beware of NLP

While writing my little post last week on the pleasures of watchlessness, of timelessness..... I managed to lose my watch.

Since I was already late leaving for the office, was departing for a working trip to Shanghai that evening, would be in need of accurate time-keeping for the 3-hr presentation I had to give the next day.... this was somewhere beyond inconvenient.

I spent a fruitless half-hour (making myself even more late) scouring my apartment, gnashing my teeth.

I didn't find it again until my return on Sunday evening. I had put it in my cutlery tray in the kitchen. Why? I never take my watch off in the kitchen. I never leave it in such an improbable place. Since I'm not cooking at home very much these days, it might well have been some days, or even weeks, before I happened upon it there. I could probably have looked at it and not seen it, because that is such an outrageously improbable place for me to have left it.

These are the dangers of Neuro-Linguistic Programming. I inadvertently self-sabotaged myself by writing words in praise of being without a watch. I am checking myself every few seconds while writing this to make sure that I haven't again unthinkingly taken my watch off and left it somewhere stupid.

Beware, my readers, beware. Your mind can fuck you up in the most unlikely ways.

Traffic Report - blog stats for June

31 posts and nearly 10,000 words here on the Barstool last month.

Not much sign of a cutting back in output at all! Particularly when you consider that I contributed several thousand more words to a single comment thread, during my month-long war of words - on guns & cigs, and attempts to restrict the harm they do - with my opinionated drinking buddy, The British Cowboy.

I will try to be a little more moderate this month. Honestly. In my drinking as well as my blogging.

Oscar's

I haven't yet found a bar I like in Shanghai.

I rather doubt I'm ever going to find one. It just doesn't strike me as being a fun town - in the sleazy, low-rent kind of way that I so enjoy.

I've been there 5 or 6 times over the last 18 months, and the only bar I find myself seeking out is an American-style sports bar named Oscar's.

On my first ever visit, I found that it was a convenient place to wait for the friend who was putting me up to get home from work (it was only a few minutes' walk away from the apartment she had then).

It's quite central, and easy to find - so I've found myself going back there almost every time since...... merely a slave to convenience and familiarity; I have still developed no real enthusiasm for the place.

Same story this weekend. My friend L (a different one, living over by the river, to the north) was busy most of the day on Saturday, and didn't have anywhere in her building complex she could leave a key for me. I was done with work by lunchtime, and facing a sweltering afternoon of hauling my luggage around the centre of town until I could rendezvous with her that evening. I tried exploring, sightseeing, shopping for a while, but the humidity was ugly. Then I got my bearings, realised Oscar's was only a mile or so away, and set my course.

Now, the place does have a few things going for it. There is a good selection of imported beers. The beers on draft mostly taste pretty good (something that you rarely or never find with any consistency in Beijing). There's a fairly decent pool table upstairs (though one of those loathsome American designs with the super-slick cloth, rock-hard cushion rails, extra-wide pockets, and sharply angled pocket jaws - not good for a Brit like me; not good for anyone, really, who favours a tactical game over flashy - but not terribly difficult - potting). And they keep their beer mugs in the ice-box to frost them (an American quirk I've grown rather fond of). Also (and this is probably the main reason it has become such a regular destination for me), they always have a pile of free tourist maps of the city (I've only ever seen these at a few other places. 'Tourist Information' offices certainly don't have them! In fact, they are now rare as hen's teeth. Oscar's seems to have laid in a stock of thousands of the things.... although I notice they are still labelled 2006....).

A promising haunt, then. So, what's not to like? It's hard to put a finger on it, but the place is strangely charmless. It probably doesn't help that I've usually only been there in the afternoons, when the place is pretty much deserted. And when there are people in, they are exclusively expats. There are a few places in Beijing that share that vice - and I avoid them too. I didn't come all this way to live in a fascinating, crazy, fast-changing country..... and then spend all my time hanging out in places where the only Chinese faces I would ever see belonged to the serving staff. Some people seem to like that kind of environment; I don't.

Ah, yes - and it's bloody expensive. There's an "all day" Happy Hour until 8pm - half-price drinks. Very nice, you might think. Except that the regular prices are very nearly twice as much as you'd pay in Beijing. And I don't just mean twice as much as you'd pay in the sort of low-rent, student-friendly dives that I favour. No, twice as much as you'd pay in a comparable bar, an upmarket, affluent expat bar.

And that's pretty standard for Shanghai. Shanghai is wince-makingly expensive. That's the reason why I only go there 2 or 3 times a year. That's the reason why I never go to Oscar's after 8pm.

Reasons not to love an airline

There is no beer on China Eastern.

Enough said.

Back to Hemingway (Bon mot for the week)

"An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk in order to spend his time with fools."

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

George Jean on WOMEN

George Jean Nathan, my 'find' of the month, had so many smart things to say that I could probably use him as a source for my weekly bon mots for another 2 or 3 months. However, I thought I'd better move on to new inspirations for my Monday epigrams from next week; so here is a round-up of the leftovers, GJN's most penetrating comments on men, women, and love.

"A man reserves his true and deepest love not for the species of woman in whose company he finds himself electrified and enkindled, but for that one in whose company he may feel tenderly drowsy."

"Love demands infinitely less than friendship."

"Women, as they grow older, rely more and more on cosmetics. Men, as they grow older, rely more and more on a sense of humor."

"So long as there is one pretty girl left on the stage, the professional undertakers may hold up their burial of the theater."

"A man admires a woman not for what she says, but what she listens to."

"A man's wife is always a compromise with the illusion of his first sweetheart."

"I know many married men. I even know a few happily married men. But I don't know one who wouldn't fall down the first open coal hole running after the first pretty girl who gave him a wink."

HBH 36

Nights always extend,
And the mornings come too soon.
Dull brain, heavy eyes.

Oh dear, another night at Jianghu last night - the day ahead at work is going to be an ordeal. Work tomorrow (Saturday!) is going to be just awful.

In Hankou, without watches

I am greatly looking forward to the imminent visit of my old friend Richard and his wife in a couple of weeks. They come to China, singly or together, almost every year, and have been threatening/promising to come and see me here in Beijing almost every year since I first came here. And yet, somehow, it has never quite come to pass.... until now. Quite apart from the fact that I love having guests and showing people round (though they will scarcely need my tour-guidery!), there will be a fitting sense of balance and completion about this visit - a closing of the circle - because it was they who gave me my first China experience, more than 13 years ago now; it was they who first lured me to this country.

That was probably the greatest holiday of my life. (Certainly the longest - nearly 3 months!) I had so many wonderful adventures then, so many great times, so many extreme drinking experiences (mostly frenetic baijiu banquets with the English Faculties of the various small universities and teacher training colleges I was visiting) - more of which deserve to be written up on here one day.

However, I think perhaps my favourite memory of all, the best evening I enjoyed during that first visit to China, was one of the simplest.

Richard was teaching at the Jianghan University in Hankou. His Chinese wife had gone far across town (Hankou is part of the sprawling 3-city conurbation of Wuhan: it was then one of the biggest cities in China, although it has since been rather outpaced in its development by scores of cities along the coast) to visit friends, and was staying over for the night - so we were enjoying some rare time alone, a chance to catch up on old times.... a lads' night out.

For some reason I can't now recall, Richard suggested we leave our wristwatches behind in his apartment (I think he might have been concerned not so much about the possibility of being robbed as simply the fact that a watch was a luxury item, and, as such, an undue fascination/taunting provocation to the locals, a potentially unwelcome prompt to conversation). We didn't go very far, or do very much. It was early summer, and already steamingly hot (Wuhan is notoriously one of the 4 - or is it 5? - 'Furnaces', the hottest cities in China). We just went to the nearest hole-in-the-wall restaurant, a few yards across the street from the University gate, pulled up a couple of stools at a collapsible formica table on the sidewalk, and ordered some beer and dumplings. And talked. And talked and talked. And, of course, ordered a lot more beer. And, here and there, a few packs of pickled garlic shoots (a great snack, which I have yet to discover here in Beijing). We developed a wordless camaraderie with some Chinese drinkers at the next table, and exchanged a number of rounds of beer with them. And talked and talked some more.

Nobody else had a watch either. There were no clocks. We had escaped - into a world without time, into a blissfully calm, unhurried, infinitely extended mellow moment: the kind of experience encapsulated in the U.A. Fanthorpe poem I posted over on Froogville this morning.

When we did finally turn in (having to climb over a low wall into the 'foreign guest house' compound in the University, the bao'an - the distinctly unthreatening gate "guards" - having long since retired for the night), I think we were guestimating that it was shortly after midnight. It was in fact more like 4am.

It's good to lose track of time. Liberating. Cathartic. I don't think I've ever done it again quite so thoroughly since that night.

Farewell to smoking bars....and smoking guns....

For those of you who might have missed it, for nearly 4 weeks now the comment thread to my post 'Shanghai'd' has played host to a ding-dong duel of words between my DC-based drinking buddy, The British Cowboy, and myself.

This should not have happened. Not there, anyway. The post was actually about the differences between Beijing and Shanghai, both in the bar scene and more generally. That topic could, should have provoked quite a lively discussion...... if I had any significant number of locally-based readers. Clearly I do not.

No, instead Denmark-based artist, 'The Earthling', posed a question about smoking in bars here in China. Which prompted The Cowboy - a semi-reformed smoker - to start bemoaning the imminent banning of smoking in bars in DC. Which prompted me - rather because I felt his debating skills were getting a little bit sloppy from recent disuse than because I actually disagreed with him all that much - to get on his case about that. And, well, one thing just led to another.... and another.... and another. And just when the smoking ban issue might just about have run its course, I rashly tossed in another provocation, by taunting the Cowboy (not yet an American citizen but thoroughly assimilated into the culture) about his sympathy for the American fetish with gun ownership. And so the whole thing got a second lease of life.

52 comments (by far the most active thread of any of the posts on either of my two blogs in their first 9 months of life), and more than 12,000 words (at least half of them mine!). It has become a 'blog within the blog' over the last few weeks.

But it has to STOP. It is becoming far too time-consuming.

Perhaps the Cowboy and I will resume our amiable feuding again at some later date (quite probably at some smoke-free, gun-free bar in his manor); but for now, I think we both need to take a rest, and get back to the more pressing business of our lives.

That stream of comments, though, is a fascinating little backwater of the blog - and well worth a visit..... when you have 30 or 40 minutes to spare.

The allure of the barmaid

I have commented before (most notably here, on Froogville - but also frequently here on the Barstool) on my weakness for barmaids. It's a common male vice, I know. They're nice to us, they talk to us, they even flirt with us - and they keep us supplied with drink. How can we not love them? Perhaps even the physical barrier between us - the bar acting as a kind of chastity belt - is a strange, perversely alluring provocation. So near and yet so far away......

Yes, I've had it bad for a few barmaids in my time. (I ought to write about The Anchor on Polstead Road sometime.... [done now!])

Luckily, this is one frustration I am spared here in China. Girls are common as waitresses in bars, and sometimes even as spangly-skirted promotional houris plugging some expensive beer or other - but, for some reason, they are just about never seen behind the bar; here, that is a strictly male preserve. (Perhaps it's just that most Chinese girls wouldn't be able to see over the top of a bar?)

No, here the idle infatuations are limited to the waitress, the DJ, that cute girl dancing on her own.....

George Jean on LOVE

"Love is an emotion experienced by the many and enjoyed by the few."

George Jean Nathan (1882-1958)

Rain stops play

It's been a fairly miserable week here in Beijing, weather-wise. Lots of overcast, lots of humidity, lots of smoke (an official 'weather condition' in these parts: in the last few days, apparently, it was mainly due to farmers in the surrounding countryside stubble-burning after completion of the early-season harvest) - and on the few occasions when a clear-ish sky has appeared, the temperatures have zoomed ferociously too. Ah yes, and there have been occasional torrential spells of rain too, usually in the late afternoon or early evening. This is pretty much the pattern for the Beijing summer, from mid-June through till the beginning of September. But this week has been especially bad: so many days of clammy, oppressive greyness; the air chokingly polluted, visibility down to a few hundred yards; the sky but a memory, a rumour.

Today I was to have been going to an early evening garden party at the British Ambassador's residence. It was promoted through the local Oxford & Cambridge Club, although I'm not sure that it was entirely 'their' event. A bit too 'posh' for me, really; but the potential for fun had seemed to be there.... if the sun had shone.

Well, we had some sunshine earlier; but by mid-afternoon, it had turned grey and horrible again; and an hour or so before the party was due to start, the heavens opened. I assumed there would be 'wet weather' arrangements, although I don't think the flyer I was sent mentioned any; and an indoor event would be much less fun. And it seemed pretty likely that most of the guests would stay away in these conditions. The only part of the afternoon I'd really been looking forward to was a stroll over there - probably stopping off in Ritan Park along the way - but the gathering gloom (mine and the weather's) had put paid to that plan long before the downpour. It is next-to-impossible to get a cab in this town when it's raining. And I didn't really want to to be turning up for a hobnob with Sir William dripping wet.

All convenient excuses, as it happens. I had been losing enthusiasm for the event all weekend - having catastrophically failed to find myself a 'date' for it (I admit I am being something of a lovesick teenager, brooding morbidly over the wretchedness of my prospects with the lovely-but-uninterested Madame X) - and had been very half-heartedly making my preparations to go (ironing a shirt, would you believe?) when the thunder began to rumble out to the west; I waited hopefully for the rain to follow 10 minutes later, thinking to myself, "Hooray - at last I have a good reason not to go!"

Of course, that is now three networking events in the space of five days that I've chickened out of. Three strikes and you're out - I may never be able to show my face at one of these business mingly things again.

There is a problem here. My depression has deeper roots than just the relentlessly dreary weather or the soul-sapping ennui of the new job or the familiar agony of becoming smitten with a woman who thinks of me as lint (though these things are certainly bad enough to prompt an overflow of melancholy). Yes, this is a bad time of the year for me: I am still haunted by a bad thing that happened three years ago, and I fear my present extreme emotional flakiness and disinclination to sociability arise largely from the imminence of that anniversary.

Rain, rain, go away.......

HBH 35

Rapido

Bubbles teem, froth spills;
The glass banged on the table;
Fizzing in the brain.

Tired of networking.....

Ah, networking, alas, is essential to survival here in China.

And mostly I enjoy it. Mostly, I think, I am very good at it. I am genuinely interested in meeting new people, and that tends to make a very positive impression on them. People remember me. And - once in a blue moon - they may mention me in a commendatory sort of way to a friend who has a friend who has a cousin who has a university 'classmate' who works with a guy whose neighbour is looking for a.... (insert name of job here - there aren't many I can't do, or won't attempt, or haven't tried in my long, erratic history in Beijing). Yes, sometimes - not very often, but sometimes - I actually get a job out of all of this.

But occasionally a certain ennui, a stifling failure of enthusiasm sets in. This week I have twice wimped out of a networking event I had planned to go to. One was a recruiting junket for a corporate training firm I have quite close ties to. The other was an alumni event for the University of Toronto (I almost qualify: I spent a year in Toronto as a law student on a scholarship, and had an option to pursue a Master's at the U of T, but I chose - perhaps unwisely in retrospect - to concentrate instead on gaining practical experience as a legal intern; though I still regarded myself as an 'honorary' member of the University, made some friends in the debating club there, judged one of their moots, collaborated with one of their Professors on some arguments we prepared for a case going before the Supreme Court...). Oh, I had my excuses - I've had a gruelling week at work, the weather has been life-sappingly grey and humid (and when it threatens rain in the early evening, it is pretty much impossible to get a cab anywhere), and the venues (Brown's, the Goose & Duck - both soon probably to be inducted into my 'Hate List') sucked mightily. But the real reason, I fear, was that I just couldn't face that whole networking scene this week. I was feeling too glum, depleted, and depressed to fake the necessary bonhomie.

When you're tired of networking, you're tired of life, they say (at least, they say that around here). Yes, it may be so.

Ball House

Tulsa asks me (in her comment on the preceding post) if I know of or would recommend this joint? Yes, and NO.

This is apparently what it's called, although there is no sign bearing a name - in Chinese or English - either inside or out, so it's all a bit hypothetical really. Is it a clever play on 'Bauhaus'.... or just another piece of inept literalism in the Chinese use of English? I think more probably the latter.

The place is pretty much impossible to find: behind an unmarked door down an unmarked alley - an unmarked alley that during the daytime is often partly blocked by the workbench of a neighbourhood carpenter. This 'hidden treasure' quality might be rather charming if the place were a treasure, if it were actually any good at all: it could be an "our secret" kind of place, where you feel glad of the privacy, the exclusivity.

In fact, it's charm begins and ends with the space: the space is great. It's a large, rambling courtyard house with high ceilings, bare wood beams, a mezzanine loft; discreetly decorated. Yes, promising.

Unfortunately, everything else about it sucks.

Its gimmick - not a 'unique selling point' perhaps, but certainly its main distinctive feature - is that it is supposed to be a pool bar. But it's not. It has 2 or 3 tables. They're all shit. Nobody ever plays there. (The main thing a good pool bar needs is a coterie of regular players to provide you with some testing competition.) The reason nobody ever plays there - apart from the tables being shit - is that there's a 25 or 30 kuai per hour charge for them.... which is just utterly f***ing outrageous! Bars do not charge for pool in this town. Pool halls generally charge barely half as much as that per hour; and they provide good tables. What's even worse is that this charge is not advertised (at least it wasn't the last time I went there), and is not mentioned by the staff until you finish playing. It is, quite simply, a con, a rip-off.

Pool is very dear to me. Thus a bad pool bar is something I particularly despise. And a bad pool bar that tries to extort money out of people retroactively for playing on its bad tables is just EVIL.

Not that the place has any other redeeming features either. The staff are grumpy and obtuse. The prices are high. They are reluctant ever to turn the air-conditioning on for you.

Tulsa wondered about the atmosphere on 'busy nights'. I think that was a busy night, Tulsa. Two groups of people at the same time?! I imagine they might sometimes go a month at a time without that happening.

I have heard of certain foreigners in the area forming a slight fondness for the place. They like the Starbucks-coffee-shop feel of it, and the fact they can have the place all to themselves.

Call me a curmudgeon if you will, but I ask rather more of a bar than a veneer of trendiness and a complete absence of customers.

This raises another question about the bar industry in Beijing in general. This place is next-to-impossible to find, does nothing to advertise, offers no appreciable service, often goes for days at a time without attracting a single customer, and rarely manages to collect its exorbitant pool table fee even when it does (I just flat out refuse to pay every time). It must be haemorrhaging cash. And yet it is now in its third year of operation. There are many, many bars like this in Beijing. The usual theory to explain this is that they are vanity projects of rich idiots who are more concerned with being able to brag to their friends that they "have a bar" than with actually making any money...... and/or that they are money-laundering fronts or extravagant tax write-offs for gangsters and other dodgy businessmen. An alarming reflection.

So, no, Tulsa. I don't like Ball House. It has been on my boycott list since shortly after it opened. I go back once or twice a year, to see if there has been any improvement. I usually judge that the place has got even worse. My least favourite bar between here and The Tree!!

An improvised Sunday evening

Yesterday suddenly became a 'free' evening. I had been pledged to an acquaintance's birthday party, but she took sick and called it off at the last moment.

I was in a way quite relieved. I hadn't been in a mood for heavy drinking - particularly as I had a lot of 'work-related' things to get done today, and a projected 8am start. Also, I had been quite excited about the prospect of catching some of Ziyo 'unplugged' at the music bar closest to my home, Jiangjinjiu.

Ziyo are one of those bands that I've been meaning to track down for two years or so, but somehow keep missing out on. Everybody says they're good, but they don't seem to play that many gigs, and never at times when I'm free to go. I have rubbed shoulders with their rather lovely lead singer, Helen, once or twice at the bar in Kolegas, but that's about it.

I missed out again last night. I'd never been all that confident the gig would go ahead. Even the listings magazines seemed doubtful about it.

Now, I like Jiangjinjiu a lot. It's cosy, atmospheric, you practically sit on the stage. The draught beer's usually decent; they do some very nice snacks; and they even have bottles of Sam Adams Boston Lager on offer (one of the few American beers I'll touch; and, to my knowledge, they are one of only two bars in town to stock this). One of the few things I don't like about it quite so much is that its programming is so haphazard and so poorly advertised. And they are uncompromisingly 'Chinese'. The only indication of what acts may be on is a crudely (illegibly?) written list in Chinese only on a small blackboard outside the door. Even foreign bands are identified only by obscure Chinese 'transliterations' of their names. Even Chinese punters seem quite baffled by these scrawly hieroglyphs most of the time. Last night, I don't think they'd even bothered to update the blackboard, because as far as I could tell (they at least use the Western number system) the dates mentioned were all the previous week.

Luckily, a friendly Chinese girl outside took pity on my bafflement and assured me that Xiao He was supposed to be on at 10pm. Result! I love that guy. Until then, we had a pretty decent house band (well, a duo) providing the entertainment.

I have to say, it was one of the less involving performances I've seen from Xiao He (maybe I've just been spoiled: he's absolutely blown me away the last few times I've seen him), and he only played one fairly brief set. Having The Choirboy bending my ear throughout about some dodgy real estate development in Qingdao was a non-ideal distraction as well. Still, even a sub-par Xiao He gig is better than just about anything else you can hear in this city on a typical night, so it was not a bad evening.

And, being free of music by 11 or so, we were tempted to look in on the nearby Pool Bar afterwards - where I was once again soundly spanked (though the margins between success and failure each time were tantalisingly slim) by the resident champion, the very cute but utterly ruthless NaNa. So much for my 'early night'. So much for my 8am start.

These days, even a so-so, nothing-much-planned kind of evening seems to turn into something.....

George Jean says....

"Beauty makes idiots sad and wise men merry."

George Jean Nathan (1882-1958)

Here come the hordes???

From time to time, I spend 10 minutes or so noodling around with Google or other search engines to see if I can get any good search results - or any results at all - for my two blogs, the Barstool here and Froogville.

And lordy, lordy, what did I just discover? "Favourite bars in China" currently returns only TWO results - BOTH of them for the Barstool.

OK, maybe that isn't such an obvious search term combination. But it doesn't seem to me as though it would be a very uncommon one either.

I wonder what would happen if I changed that category title to 'Best Bars in China'?

Damn, there are only THREE returns on that. This could be my route to fame & glory.

Then again, 'fame & glory' was never really my thing. Tried it once, didn't like it.

Continuing the experiment, I find that there are only 6 returns thus far for 'Best bars in Beijing'. And 9 for 'Worst Bar in Beijing' - one of which is my post on the execrable Centro (I worry that even bad publicity may profit their wretched business); and another of which is that post plagiarized on an EBizDeal, a compilation of China news used as an advertisement for an IT services company.

My 'visibility', it seems, is improving. What will this mean for the future of this cosy little 'den' that Tulsa has begun referring to as her 'basement'???