Chinese New Year wouldn’t be right without fireworks. It would be like celebrating Christmas without a Christmas pud or Brussel sprouts. The celebrations you might see in a Chinatown in the west doesn’t really do it justice. I’ve seen them, a few firecrackers and bit of prancing around with a dragon. Over here, you could forego the dragon, but never the fireworks. Come 4pm New Year’s Eve the city degenerates into an orgy of blinding flashes and deafening explosions that doesn’t let up for about 36 hours.

My first experience came 2 days after I moved to China and was walking to someone’s house for dinner. I turned the corner just as a firework the size of a party bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken detonated beside me. All I heard was an “ai!’ from the guy who had lit the device and retreated to a safe distance, then there was a flash, a shockwave and silence. The next thing I was aware of was the guy standing in front of me looking up and waving his hands at me. Two days later when my hearing had recovered I was standing on a footbridge when someone standing underneath let off a rocket.

And if that seems a little extreme to you, my wife complains that people today don’t know how to have fun and tells me how, when she was growing up in Vietnam, they used to throw fireworks at each other, you know, just for an extra thrill.

As you know from their accident record in the mining industry, China is far more safety conscious. Every year, a sign goes up outside every apartment building bearing the all important red stamp and reminding people to be responsible with their fireworks. They should be set off in the designated areas and only between certain hours. And of course everyone ignores thems.

This year on New Years Eve I was sitting at home and by about 10pm the noise was deafening as the noise of one firework merged into the next. Having been cooped up all day, I went out to watch the pyromaniacs in action. It was strange, but the moment I stepped out, it all went quiet – I could still hear explosions in the distance but it was as if everyone in the immediate vicinity saw the light go out in the foreigners apartment and, picking up their stash, scampered off down the nearest alley.

I finally found a large crowd a couple of blocks away, gathered on the sidewalk of a fairly major thoroughfare, putting match to touch paper with all the enthusiasm you’ve come to associate with the festival. While one Dad was lighting a firecracker for his three year old son, another kid was firing rockets directly over his head. Nearby a dog lay dozing in a shop entrance.

When I first got here, everything was shutdown for these two days, if you wanted anything you were shit out of luck. Nowadays it seems that there are always a few shopkeepers willing to keep their doors open for the sake of an extra few yuan. Another recent development is the firework sellers have begun to diversify; nowadays at one o’clock in the morning you can buy a box of fireworks and pick up 2L of 60% proof rice wine without having to walk down the road to the alcohol store that has also kept its doors open for anyone who might have run dry. Having seen what people were doing when they were sober does make you wonder about the wisdom of this particular sales pitch. I also noticed that some firework vendors were also selling bananas; I haven’t worked that one out yet. I asked one lady why she was only selling bananas “people like bananas” she said…

But I can only be entertained by fireworks for so long, even the most spectacular shows in the west get a bit samey after a while, after all, it’s just a bunch of flashes and bangs if you think about it. Until recently, at the street level, the bang was more important than the flash but I’ve noticed more western style fireworks recently. As I said, I was getting bored and about to head home when someone lit a Catherine Wheel type firework that once lit would launch itself rotating vertically into the air, sending a shower of coloured sparks into the night sky.

As kids, we learned to stand well back while Papa carefully placed the firework on a flat surface, then lit the touch paper and quickly legged it across the garden to join the waiting throng. The bit about making sure that any firework that is going to embark on a vertical trajectory is on a flat surface before lighting was something that seemed to have escaped the people who lit this particular firework. For some reason, instead of placing the firework on sidewalk, they put it on an empty cigarette carton. They lit it, retreated at least three feet, and the heat melted the box and the firework fell on its side just before the afterburner kicked in, launching it into the store that was filled with large boxes of fireworks stacked to the ceiling. I barely had time to think “this is going to be good” before the husband had launched himself off his chair and out of the shop, leaving his wife to try and chase the firework down the aisles. I’ve never seen anyone move so fast.

Even the dog sleeping on the sidewalk raised its head to see what the commotion was all about

I found I was out of medicine so got on the bike and wobbled over to the street around the back of the house, weaved through the crowds and came to an unsteady halt outside the pharmacy. Maybe the pharmacist was used to people asked for stomach medicine in lowered tones, perhaps customers are ushered into a room at the back of the shop where they can be discretely shown an range of anti diaorrheal medication.

I’ve noticed there is no middle ground in Wuhan. People either assume you speak the lingo fluently and talk in hurried tones or assume you are completely incompetent and only communicate in sign language. Nevertheless, from the wide eyed expression and violent shaking of her hands you’d think I’d asked for a bottle of massage oil, powdered rhino horn and invited her and her daughter back to my pad to share my latest dvd purchase from the shop down the road. Mind you, staring down at her with a slightly stoned expression probably didn’t help to put her at ease.

I drifted back into the street, past the DVD store to my bike and headed off to another pharmacy, further away, but better stocked and manned by staff who are less easily shocked. It was a straightforward purchase carried out both efficiently and professionally and I was back out the door almost immediately.

This pharmacy is inside a shopping mall. Upstairs is an Asda like supermarket, stocked up with low quality goods at bargain prices. Downstairs used to be a variety of small shops including a bakery, a phone shop, a bookshop and a lingerie shop as well as other places where you could get your dry cleaning done, and a passport photo while you were waiting.

Recently it all got remodeled and everything got replaced by an open plan area selling wine. Elegantly shaped bottles of high octane rice wine are locked away in glass cabinets and illuminated by discrete lighting. If you want to inspect more closely you have to talk to one of the assistants. A snort is out of the question, but that is relatively unimportant; what matters is appearance, and how much it costs.

As I was walking towards the exit, my mind more at ease thanks to my purchase, I suddenly noticed how many people were crowded around the counters and, if you listened carefully, you could make out a background clinking of bottles against the general din.

I stopped and looking around more closely I realized that everyone had shopping carts loaded with wine in preparation for the New Year. This is different from hopping across the channel and loading up the car boot with crates of Stella for the excesses of Christmas, these are generally intended either as gifts, or to be consumed during the culinary indulgences leading up to the New Year. It doesn’t matter if the wine is as palatable as diluted battery acid, what is of primary importance is presentation; if it’s a standard bottle of red or white wine, it has to come in a box, and that box should ideally be placed inside a nice bag. I once scored points by picking up a passable bottle of red from France, but shot myself in the foot by failing to gift wrap.

The other option is to pick up a bottle of rice wine. From personal experience it seems that these are generally carted along to a restaurant for immediate consumption with friends or family. In both cases the number of attendees can be many so it’s not unusual to see people wheeling a shopping cart down the street, stacked high with bottles of baiyunjiu, the local favorite. For the less discerning palate there is always erguotou, twice distilled for extra kick.. The former comes in a decorative bottle with a long neck, the latter is available in economy size bottles that are usually used for storing domestic bleach and produces the same initial burning sensation when you take a swig. But you will probably have a marginally longer life expectancy if you stick to ertoujiu and anyway, bleach is more expensive

When I was a student, my advisor was an internationally renowned physicist widely recognized for his research achievements. But even he had his off days. Sometimes we would sit in his office and try and derive a set of equations to describe something. Page after page would be filled with complicated looking formulae. With a complete set of equations we would look at what was irrelevant, which terms could be discounted, which parts held the key.

“these terms are almost constant” he would say “so we can cancel them out from either side”
“but that term is irrelevant, because these terms dominant at high E values” I offered, trying to give the appearance I followed what he was talking about
“right, we means that we can do the same with this, this and this”
“and those two, which means”
“that we are left with….”
“1=1”
“fuck…”

These sorts of real life setbacks are never portrayed in the movies, along with the absolute bewilderment often experienced by real life researchers, the sort of confusion you might experience trying to figure out how to program one of those knock off hard disk recorders to program a tv program.

I had one of those moments last night. I’ve been writing a program to analyze experimental data. If it works it will be quite novel, allowing me to look at results from a new perspective. It’s complicated though, and involves trying to parse out data and create descriptions of relationship that exist between different points – it’s why I’ve not got around to blogging lately. Of course, I might have got it done sooner if I hadn’t got distracted by watching five seasons worth of Dexter or trying to read a stack of novels that I had picked up on a recent trip to the US.

I finally got the most difficult part of it running last night but, unlike the Hollywood version of events, there was no running outside in the pouring rain shouting to the heavens with arms spread wide – for one thing I live on the fifth floor and it was bloody cold out there. I think I stood up, stretched and stubbed my toe against a leg of the coffee table.

The other problem was that under certain conditions it still wouldn’t run properly and the program would bomb. I spent two days trying to figure out what was going on. Part of the problem was I’d written some of the code two months back and it was so complicated that, despite the comments, I’d forgotten how part of it worked. There was no one I could turn to either, I work in a hospital that has a low physicist count; when I try to discuss my work with fellow researchers I am met with uniformly blank expressions which I suspect double up to disguise their utter lack of interest.

I just figured out what the problem was. There was no eureka moment, the janitor didn’t help me, I didn’t go bursting into another lab to share my euphoria. First of all it was 5am and secondly I don’t think I would have been able to fully convey my sense of excitement by speaking Mandarin – “Happy Times! The broken program is repaired”

The problem? The data file was corrupted. I was asleep on the couch and woke up with the realization that I hadn’t checked this. One manual edit and five minutes later my program was running.

As my old advisor would have said – “fuck…”

Journalists love to write sloppy articles about China, slotting in clichéd phrases about economic miracles and the sleeping dragon awakening and slapping in a photo of a traffic jam on the second circle in Beijing for good measure. Truth is, traffic jams in Beijing are nothing compared to Wuhan. Stand on any major thoroughfare in Wuhan at 5pm on a weekday and I’ll show you a traffic jam son. Things have got so bad I don’t even try riding my moped at that time of day; at least I can pick up and carry a bicycle over my head between the cars.

But as I mentioned above, as the economy has taken off, bicycle usage has plummeted so, aside from an all expenses paid trip to Europe to see how it was done (and one more stop off in London to see the wrong way to do it), it was a mystery to me what exactly they were hoping to gain.

I’d all but forgotten about the scheme until the bicycle lane chain gang arrived outside the hospital last week. Efficient and Mechanized were two words that didn’t immediately spring to mind, Three guys in a beaten up microvan pulled up, talked on the phone for a while and after an hour or so, slowly got out, stretched, stood around, scratched and spat and then sauntered around to the back of the van to stare at the contents in back. Around 10.30 they finally swung into action and began piling up a large number of unmarked yellow cans next to the van and hurling several sacks that might have contained rice on to the ground, until one of them split open from the force of impact, spraying red sand across the pavement.

I went downstairs to investigate. They prised off the lid just as I showed up, sending a strong odour wafting through the air that brought back memories of making 1/72nd scale Airfix models of spitfires, hurricanes and (my personal favourite) the Messerschmitt me109. A major difference was that whereas we had little tubes of cement to glue the bombs to the underside of the fuselage of the Lancaster, these guys were working in units of 10L and one of them was leaning over an opened canister with a fag in his mouth. I retreated to the relatively safety of my office, knowing that any mishap on their part would be announced with a fireball that would probably blow past my window on the top floor.

When I set out for lunch thirty minutes later, they had managed to get some kind of system going and work their way a couple of hundred yards down the road. One guy was painting the glue onto the roadway, while the second guy scattered the red sugar over the top. The smell of the cement was overpowering. The third guy stood on the pavement working his thumb up his nose and then using the same hand to send text messages on his phone.

When I returned after a couple of hours (we get decent lunch breaks in China) the third guy had got his finger out his, er, nose and was carefully laying down a white line over the top of the white line that was already there when they first marked out the bicycle lanes in the city several years ago. The headline should have read “Wuhan to paint bicycle lanes red”.

By the evening, their attention to detail had visibly waned. I wasn’t sure whether it was the toxic fumes or the consequence of liquid bender over a late lunch, but the line demarcating the bicycle lane from the rest of the traffic deviated significantly from a straight line and looked like something that would be better fitted by a high order polynomial function.

It didn’t really matter. The next morning after the glue had dried and the traffic cones removed, drivers seemed to think the bright new surface marked out a new parking area. Within minutes the bicycle lane outside the hospital was choked with empty cars, forcing cyclists out into the road and increasing the likelihood of them coming through our doors as new customers.

Me? now I just ride on the pavement.

an earlier effort before the fumes had their full effect

But this counted as some kind of compensation. If there is anybody who still has one foot in the past, it’s the military. Sure enough, when we pulled up to the front gate a guard peered in and said “you can’t bring him in here, he/it is a foreigner”; nice to see that all that had training paid off and he wasn’t just a pretty face in a nice uniform. Instead we went around to the back gate where a far more inattentive guard waved us straight through.

The purpose of my trip was a bit vague “we need your help looking at some data” – it sounded like something out of a Michael Caine cold war thriller that would culminate in someone finding me floating face down in a moat three days later and some dishy Chinese woman helping my brother figure out what really happened. In reality, everyone was quite friendly and after a few introductions they took me to a rather nice hotel and said they’d get a student to take me to dinner.

Accompanying me to dindins wasn’t really necessary because I used to live in the city and they had put me up in an area I knew well. By 7pm, when the student had failed to turn up, I gave them a call and found they had cleared off with a friend who was also attending the meeting and told me I could get something to eat in the hotel restaurant.

I think this unusual lack of formality originated from them discovering I could speak the lingo. I wasn’t too bothered, I picked up a book and headed out to a restaurant I knew that was around the corner. I’d just ordered when my phone rang

“where are you?” said the voice at the other end of the line with a Beijing accent so thick it was almost unintelligible “I just knocked on your door and there was no answer”
“I’m a restaurant about to eat dinner. What’s happening?”
“you are supposed to meet us for dinner in the hotel”

One cancelled order later and a brisk walk back to the hotel I found myself seated around a circular table in the company of 9 gents, who were clearly people of significance, but none of whom were familiar to me. A large number of dishes were ordered, complemented with several bottles of strong alcohol. One guy shied off, claiming health issues and then proceeded to only cram down meat dishes, one of which appeared to have been prepared by killing the lamb with salt poisoning, one mouthful and I was nauseous and gasping for a drink. Another bloke popped two large pills that looked like they were some kind of horse medication and then attempted to drink twice as much as everyone else. I’m afraid I put in a rather shabby effort, limiting myself to two glasses of the stuff, excusing myself on the grounds that I had to finish preparing my talk for the first morning session.

The absence of formality continued through to the next day when I realized I had no idea what had been planned. Fortunately, on my arrival, I had noticed a sign in the hotel foyer welcoming participants to the meeting so I headed down there after breakfast. There was the same geezer with the thick Beijing accent who took me to meeting room at the back of the hotel.
“How many people attending this meeting?” I asked by way of conversation
“about 20 or so” he estimated with confidence.
As we walked into a meeting room packed to capacity, he revised his estimate
“20ish, 200ish” he offered as I was guided to a seat in the front row.

I thought I was attending a meeting on the upcoming 12th 5 year plan but it was only when I stood up to give my presentation at the beginning of the meeting that I noticed the sign at the back of the hall said something like “working towards completion of the 11th 5 year plan”. Shit. Fortunately there was no specific mention to which plan I was referring in my presentation so I was able to modify my opening comments accordingly and sound like I had some idea what I was talking about.

I gave my opening comments in Chinese and then switched to English
“can you give the speech in Chinese” shouted someone in the audience
I thought about it
“if I speak Mandarin I guarantee there is no way you will understand me”
“It was fine at dinner last night”
“yeah, and you were all pissed out of your minds thirty minutes after I arrived” I thought to myself

I settled for English while someone periodically interrupted to explain a particular concept, and I in turn would interrupt them if they translated it incorrectly. In this way, we dragged out a 90 minute presentation into something closer to two and a half hours and by the end the audience was utterly bewildered. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing since it meant there were no tricky questions I couldn’t answer.

The continued absence of formality was refreshing. The organizers forgot to tell me where lunch was being held, so after I had finished dealing with the students circling around for a copy of my presentation, everyone had cleared off. I was about to clear off back to the restaurant around the corner when a couple of minders were sent out to retrieve me. bugger.

Fortunately, I never seem to suffer from seasickness and even the most aggressive conditions only serve to fortify my appetite. I took one crossing back in the mid eighties with my French girlfriend which was memorable in that spouts of water were being ejected from the toilets and the entire ship was decorated with people laying on the ground next to pools of vomit. The next morning we were the only two people in the restaurant energetically tucking into a hearty breakfast. And then there was the time we had what I considered to be a relatively mild crossing where I spent the night sleeping peacefully under a table in the restaurant, primarily to save myself the walk in the morning. My mate seemed fine when he woke up, and even when he ordered breakfast, but one moment he was there, the next he was gone. I was just polishing off the last mouthful of croissant when he showed up again. He looked okay, but after looking a little more closely I said “you threw up didn’t you”
“How did you know?” he asked
“You’ve got vomit in your hair. You still want that croissant?”

Suffice to say I was expecting some adventure on the crossing last night. The afternoon was defined by squalls of rain and winds that flattened the plants in the parents back garden which further raised my hopes. However, when we headed down the motorway to the ferry terminal the roads were dry and when the tips of the funnels came into view there was no sign of any cars.

I’m so used to train stations and airports that I find ferry terminals a little confusing. I’m accustomed to coming out of the tunnel at Heathrow airport and being inundated with an array of multi-coloured signs directing me to five different terminals, rental car return, short and long term parking and the bus station. At the ferry terminal there is a single sign saying “Cross Channel Ferries” and as soon as you turn the corner the road fans out into 12 lanes for three different ferry companies, and somewhere off to the left was a sign that said “oh yeah, and the passenger terminal was back there on your right” which was a shame since we were in the far left and about to drive onto the ferry to Bilbao.

The other thing that threw me last night was the complete absence of cars. Usually, whenever I roll up to an overnight crossing the port is a hive of activity with a mass of people milling around a sea of cars. Last night there was a single lane of 15 cars lining up for the crossing.

The terminal was similarly deserted. I walked straight up to the check-in counter and after a cursory glance at my passport I was handed a ticket and a seat reservation and wandered over to the café where there were three people sitting around watching a Sky newsflash about a toxic waste spill in Hungary. A fourth guy was asleep on a row of benches and there was a young couple getting passionate in a dark corner by the payphones where presumably no-one ever goes these days.

50 minutes before departure an order was barked out instructing foot passengers to make their way to the coach that would drive them to the ferry. First of all we were subjected to a similarly enthusiastic ticket inspection and then the bags were run through an aged security scanner that failed to detect my belt and rolled all the bags down into a big heap at the bottom of a ramp.

It was only about 50 yards to the ferry but I suppose health and safety prevented us striking out alone over such a long distance. I didn’t mind because it had started raining again.

If a grand total of 18 foot passengers on the bus hadn’t alerted me to the possibility the ferry might not be filled to capacity, the fact that the escalators had been turned off and we had to zigzag our way up a ramp all the way to deck 7 in order to board certainly brought the matter to my attention.

There were a couple of crew members to welcome us on board after our successful ascent and a couple of passengers standing around looking as if they were wondering whether they had boarded the wrong ship.

A brief inspection of the upper decks revealed 20 people in the one restaurant that they had bothered to open, six people getting pissed in the bar (all British) two people in the duty free (also British) and another 50 or so milling around in the lounges trying to find their assigned seats. I couldn’t work that one out; in spite of the ship sailing at 5% capacity and leaving 10 minutes early because all the passengers were on board, everyone seemed to be careful to ensure they sat in the correct seat. There were 100 seats in my lounge and only 10 people, but I had been assigned a seat next to a portly gent who was already spilling over into my seat. Even if he hadn’t chosen that moment to break wind I still would have found someone else to kip down.

I wandered off to some executive lounge where the seats reclined an additional 3 degrees and were upholstered in a dark purple rather than a garish orange and lay down to sleep by the window. I slept peacefully until four retired blokes came in at around 2am and then turned on their flashlights to try and find their seats. I should point out there were two other people in the room and I was laying on the floor so there were 98 seats to choose from, but it was clear they wanted to match the seat number with the number on their ticket. I’d spotted them in the café earlier and overheard them discussing the merit of having a spirit level on a camera tripod so I knew they could be trouble, nevertheless I didn’t think they could spend 10 minutes fucking around in the dark each holding a high intensity halogen flashlight.

I think I may have been laying in front of one of their seats because I suddenly became aware of someone standing over me. i turned over and looked up to see which fuckwit was shining a flashlight in my face and the guy started talking to me in bad French with a Yorkshire accent. It only took a moment for him to comprehend the expression on my face and he wandered back to his mates where I overheard him say “there’s a French guy in my seat, I’ll just take one of these empty seats” Bingo.

I woke up at 5am and the four guys were already up and drinking tea out of a flask and eating sandwiches they had prepared for the trip. I went for a final inspection around the decks, the emptiness was starting to spook me out. There were a couple of guys in the corridor drinking lager from cans, two more sitting in armchairs exclaiming in loud voices how much they hated France and a French guy out on deck smoking a fag. It was as if we dropped down to 1% capacity overnight, I certainly didn’t notice us making a port of call at any point during the sailing.

It turned out everyone else was in the café wolfing down lukewarm English breakfasts and drinking mugs of tea. I got myself a coffee and listened to two blokes who were settling for a liquid breakfast talking about the perils of long distance truck driving.

When it came to disembarking a small crowd gathered around the deck 7 and we were off the ferry, through immigration and into France in 3 minutes. It was then I realized I’d left my Euros on the shelf in the hall at my parent’s house.

I chose to go to one of the street dealers to get my tyre. It wasn’t because you can get black market models, or exotic women to perform the installation, it just happens to be convenient because there is always someone flogging their goods just around the corner, and it’s always good to support local business.

I pass this place almost every morning on my ride into work. It is manned by an elderly gent who positions himself by a small gate at the intersection of two narrow lanes. In the morning he is laying out his wares on a small door mounted on bricks. If I come back past at lunch time he is usually kipping in a chair and by the time I return home in the evening he is long gone.

In short, it is usually quite hard to catch him around to buy anything. I once passed by a little later than usual because I had a puncture but when I approached him he was just tucking in to a bowl of noodles and waved me away with a dismissive swing of his chopsticks.

But I decided to give him another chance. Although my new bike had never been ridden, it needed a new tyre, lack of quality control in a factory that harked back to the true communist era and all that.

I rode up to him on my old bike, got off, and leaned it against the wall next to his “shop”. He stood up when I approached him and I realized that he was less than 5 feet tall

“morning ” I said “I want to buy a tyre”
“a bicycle tyre?” he asked, and immediately I knew this was going to take some time
“yes, just like the one on that bike” I said, pointing to my ageing steed.

He ambled over to it and after inspecting it he said

“why do you want to buy a new tyre? It looks okay to me”
“I don’t want to buy a tyre for that bike, it’s for another bike” I countered
“where is it? Why aren’t you riding it?”
“because it needs a new tyre”
“well what’s wrong with the old tyre?”

I began to understand why he was 60 years old and still flogging his gear on a back street.
I didn’t feel like trying to explain how the other tyre kept blowing off the rim everytime I pumped it up

“so, do you have any tyres” I asked, glancing over at the rather sorry collection leaning against his door/countertop
He thought for a while

“what size do you want?”
“same as the one of that bike”
He wandered back over for a second inspection
“you want an tyre or an inner tube?”
“a tyre”

He considered the bike a bit more and for a moment I thought he was going to start asking me more irrelevant questions about the other bike. Instead he simply asked

“you want a ba tai?”

Well, tai was tyre, but ba means eight, but he wasn’t asking if I wanted eight tyres because there was no unit of measure in the sentence.

“an eight tyre?” I asked
“an eight tyre” he confirmed

I was about to seek clarification when I heard someone behind me say

“what’s an eight tyre?”

I turned around and there was a husband, wife and kid watching what was going on. I made the mistake of engaging them in conversation

“You don’t know what a eight tyre is either?”
“I’ve no idea what he is talking about” said the husband “you ride a moped don’t you” he added
“yes I do”
“why are you riding a bike then?”
“because petrol is too expensive”
“you speak pretty good Chinese” offered his wife
“I can’t speak that well” I said “I can’t understand what grandfather is saying”
“no one can” she said. “He speaks some weird dialect from another province”

As I watched him fumbling through the tyres I couldn’t help but feel the odds were stacked up against him. He finally came back with an eight tyre that looked pretty much like any other bicycle tyre I’d ever seen.

“you want me to install it for you?” he offered
“I’ll do it myself thanks” I declined, not really fancying the idea of letting him loose with a couple of screwdrivers for tyre levers.
“why not? I can do it for you”
“because it’s for another bike”
“why do you have two bikes?….”

And then I tried to pay with a 100 yuan note.

He eyed it suspiciously, he held it close to his eyes, he held it up to the light, he rubbed it uncertainly with his thumb, he crinkled it to listen to the sound. I think he would have licked it if the other guy hadn’t interrupted and inspected it himself and assured him it was okay.

“I’ll have to go home and get some change” he said “Wait here okay?” and he slowly limped off up a side alley.

I passed the time chatting to the husband and wife until he returned with a wad of small denomination notes rolled into a tight bundle.

He counted them out slowly. Three times he lost count and had to start over. The tyre was 26 yuan but when he had counted out 75 yuan in change he realized he didn’t have any 1 yuan notes. He was preparing to go back to his crib when I dug into my pocket and gave him a one yuan coin. That just served to confuse him further and he started counting back down again and tried to give me 65 yuan.. I think the onlookers were more frustrated than me and everyone started stepped in to try and explain it to him.

I got my change, I picked up the new tyre and put it across my shoulder and was about to leave when a slightly chubby guy wearing nothing but a pair of shorts and carrying an empty bucket sidled past. When he saw me he stopped and stared for a moment and commenced the usual spiel of asking where I was from, where I worked etc. It wasn’t so much he was speaking Wuhanese as the fact he was delivering it with highly effeminate overtones – a bit like that Dick Emery character that had the catchphrase “ooh, you are awful….”

Consequently, I couldn’t really understand much of what he was saying, so he started criticizing me for living in China and not speaking the language. As you do, he repeated each question more loudly, in the belief it might aid my comprehension. “how are you going to communicate with your coworkers?” he asked me, with a hint of anger in his voice. I thought he was going to hit me with his bucket.

Fortunately everyone stepped in once again to back me up. He seemed he was known to the neighborhood. “Lao Wang, if you spoke standard Chinese, he might get what you were saying” shouted someone from the back of the crowd. As he turned to confront them I jumped on the bike and, with a wave of the hand, took the opportunity to get out of there.

Next time I think I’ll go to Halfords.

Anyway, the bike company had warned me I would need to put on the pedals by myself otherwise the bike wouldn’t fit in the box. It wasn’t a big deal, after all, every time I put a bike on a flight it has to be semi dismantled and so, on a hot summers morning at the beginning of this month, we headed over to pick it up – the other guy had to come along to show his ID since he was the one who ordered it.

When we arrived, it was apparent which package one was mine because the delivery guy had left two large gashes along the length of the box (which was leaning against a tree in front of the shop with the arrows indicating up pointing out into the road)

It was also immediately clear that when they said “you’ll have to put on the pedals” what they really meant was “and the handlebars, both mudguards, the luggage rack, the saddle and the kick stand. Oh yeah, and the rod brakes will be in pieces.” I don’t think I missed anything.

I’d had the foresight to bring more than one spanner, some screwdrivers and a bicycle pump, but I hadn’t thought to bring pliers (which I needed for the rod brakes). It quickly became apparent that this wasn’t going to matter because it was going to take some time to put it all together anyway and a sidewalk on a hot on and humid Wuhan morning wasn’t the place to do it. We decided to attach the major components to the frame and then freewheel it back (we were both riding bikes) and pour everything else into the oversized bag I’d also brought along.

This was all taking place up a small side street so naturally people began to gather and watch the foreigner try to assemble a bicycle on the sidewalk. I wasn’t bothered by the attention, it comes with the territory, nor that someone might try to nick something. The problem was people kept trying to be helpful and so, while I was trying to insert the seatpost in the saddle, someone would say “you’ll need this” and hand me the kickstand. At one point, some old bloke informed me that he had “put the front wheel on” and of course I naively took ‘put’ to mean ‘attached’, so when I turned the bike over the wheel fell out the forks and rolled off down the hill watched by the sizeable group that had assembled.

Since I didn’t have any brakes, I didn’t bother putting any more air in the tyres, figuring this would provide me with a little inertia when I guided the bike in the wrong direction up three lanes of congested traffic.

Once back at the hospital, I wheeled it through the front doors as if it were a gurney bearing a patient teetering on the brink and straight into the elevator before anyone said anything. In the quiet of my air conditioned office I was able to apply myself to the task of assembling the bike more correctly. After all, I’d worked in a bike shop as a youth, how hard could it be?

Very hard as it turned out. It wasn’t so much the complexity of the task as the quality of the components. It was clear from the beginning that frame had been decorated with paint that was obviously lifted from an Airfix kit (given the frame colour it must have been the one for Waffen SS staff car) and diluted with gasoline to bring it up to volume; it was possible to scrape it off with a fingernail. Moreover, the screws were manufactured from some cheap alloy and the saddle upholstered in the finest quality plastic. The wheels were built with the thickest spokes I have ever seen and so were badly out of true it was hard to position the brakes shoes so they weren’t clipping the rim on one side or other during the course of a single revolution ( i used to build my own wheels, but i wasn’t confident of the quality of the components).

Another interesting touch was the absence of any oil on the chain. This turned out to be a good thing because, in order to get the back wheel in the frame, I had to worry about the mudguard, the kickstand (which was mounted on both sides) and the luggage rack, as well as two adjusting screws to centre the wheel in the frame.

My old bike was a Fei Ge (Flying Pigeon – it sounds better in Mandarin). After talking to some locals, this time I went for a YongJiu (which means Forever) because it was (supposedly) better quality. If British Leyland had made bicycles, this is the sort of product they would turn out. It was like comparing the Austin Allegro to the Austin Princess. They were equally ugly, had that really shit mechanism for the door handles, but the Princess came with that fake wood finish on the dashboard that came unglued within the first year. Similarly, if there was a difference between these two bikes it was subtle, although I did get some cute stickers with the YongJiu.

Once I finally had it all together, I pumped up the back tyre and found it had a puncture. Off came the mudguard, luggage rack, adjusting screws and kickstand so I could remove the back wheel and tried to get the tyre off the rim, snapping a tyre lever in the process. I fixed the puncture, poured it all back together and the tyre blew off the rim as soon as I tried pumping it up. After pulling out the back wheel a second time and reseating the tyre I pumped it up to 20psi and it blew right off in a different place. I once helped my Dad switch out the gearbox on his Citroen and I’m pretty sure it was more straightforward. I began to suspect the “Forever” was referring to the time it took to get the bike on the road.

I finally went out and bought a new tyre from the old geezer who runs a one man show in a small alley on the way home, and that episode is a whole blog in itself.

This time the tyre stayed attached to the rim and yesterday I finally headed off up the road on the assembled machine. I had become accustomed to my progress being accompanied by an array of noises as metal grinds against metal, aging springs groan under the strain and, the absence of decent brakes, my foot drags against the tarmac to control my speed. A student said it sounded like a donkey treading on a chicken, I always felt more like a 3 pack a day smoker in his later years slowly coughing and hacking his way up the road with a Zimmer frame.

But today there was none of that. The bike glided up the road; the silence was unsettling. No one heard me coming and pedestrians (who always walk in the road) jumped out of the way at the last minute with a whimper or crying in terror.

I give it about a week until something breaks.

But, as I said, they do like to fight. (If you don’t believe me, just go and look up the role Wuhan played in the Cultural Revolution. I’d give you a link, but for some reason I can’t Google it…) And it’s not just the men, the woman folk will get in there too, and if not raining blows down upon some victim who has exhibited the faintest hint of weakness, will at least contribute verbally to further provoke the situation, knowing it will be their husband and not they who will get the shit beaten out of them. It’s in these situations that I realize that maybe I’ve lived here too long because nowadays I find myself stopping along with everyone else to see how things will unfold. There was further evidence that I may be becoming inured to the violence when I was in Beijing and found myself watching a scuffle that was the most pathetic show of testosterone I’ve witnessed in a while and found myself thinking “for fuck’s sake will you stop shoving and throw a punch”

Fights can often be the result of a traffic ‘incident’. Two cars barely have to touch and the drivers will be out to inspect the damage. I was on a bus once and car pulled over to cut us off, causing the driver to brake so sharply that everyone was off the seats. The car driver accused the bus driver of scratching his car and things degenerated to the point where I was getting off the bus to try and defuse the situation.

Interestingly, quite the opposite happens when a car strikes a pedestrian or a cyclist. Occasionally, these can be quite horrific. When I was about 10, I saw a Rumbelows van hit a woman when it was doing 60 in a 30mph zone, so I get quite wound up seeing stuff like a guy knock down a woman and drive over her leg because he is on the phone.

Most of the time however, the accidents are far less dramatic. For example, today I saw a driver clip the handlebar of a moped with the door. The cyclist went down, got up immediately, exchanged some words with the driver and then, when he saw he was calling the insurance company and police (because he had scratched the door) the cyclist went back down and stayed down.

He sat in the road wearing a forlorn expression until he saw the police arriving and then slowly lay on his back, occasionally raising an arm or trying to turn on his side. It was a classic performance, a bit like watching a Sting movie. From looking at him you could tell this was a man who would be haunted by nightmares for months to come, there would probably be survivor guilt too, along with dizzy spells, nausea, fainting, numbness in the extremities, ringing in the ears, spates of bed wetting and memory loss. Heck, I would have given him 500 yuan for his efforts. He probably scuffed his trousers too.

Recently I was beginning to feel some sense of achievement. I was talking more easily with the locals, I was following a bit of what was going in the meetings, never an easy task when 10 people are shouting at the same time. Last week, I even watched the first few minutes of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon before I realized I’d forgotten to turn on the subtitles. But today I went to B&Q.

I don’t usually frequent western shops, they are expensive, crowded, and never have anything I want. However, when it comes to buying hardware, they are probably the best choice because they stock foreign brands. Anyone who has ever purchased a screwdriver set from the 99p bin will know what I’m talking about. They are fine for removing the screw on the back of a battery operated alarm clock, but attempting anything more ambitious is likely to result in catastrophic equipment failure.

Another thing I like about the B&Q in Wuchang is it is never crowded, I always find visiting the store a very calming experience; there are always more employees than customers. The staff always gather at the end of an aisle and engage in conversation in lowered voices; they remind me more of librarians, except librarians don’t wear heavy duty aprons and they usually know where the books are located. I’ve never encountered a member of staff at this branch who managed anything more than waving me in the general direction, and even then they were often wrong. I once went in to buy some screws and was told they didn’t sell screws. When I finally found them, they were randomly placed on the shelves with imperial and metric mixed together.

The first thing I wanted to buy was a drill bit, that was easy enough, but I was drilling bathroom tile and needed a carbide tipped head. It was only when I was in front of the drill bits (again, randomly ordered) that I realized I didn’t know how to say carbide.
“I want to drill bathroom tile” I said.
“Yes” he said “these are the drill bits”
“No” I countered “I want to drill very, er, hard thing, hard bathroom tile”
He looked at me blankly
I was visited by a moment’s inspiration
“carbon chemical thing headed drill bit?” I offered
“oh yes” he said. “we have those”
I felt like punching the air and doing a somersault
“where are they?” I asked
“I don’t know”
he left me to scan the extensive display to find what I needed.

Next I needed electrical masking tape. There was a time when I used to look stuff up before I left the house, but no one could understand what I was saying and it was too much effort; so started winging it and see what I could dig up from my limited vocabulary on the spur of the moment. “jiāodài” is adhesive tape, but that could mean anything from sellotape to packing tape. I tried to qualify things by adding “it’s black and you use it for wrapping wires”

I’d been wanting to buy cable ties for a while so that was good, even though they were white. I still don’t know how to ask for them, but at least I know where they are.

I knew the last item was going to be a bitch. I couldn’t even begin to think how to ask for a solenoid valve. I figured “magnet valve” would get things going in the right direction but the look on the woman’s face indicated I had suggested something rather obscene. “Electric flow switch” got me directed to the light switches. “electricity goes off, switch goes off” got me to the relays but “electricity goes on magnet stops current” finally got me to the solenoids. I asked them how to say it in mandarin. “luóxiànguǎn” well, “xian” was line and “guǎn” was pipe, but what the hell was luó? “net?”, “mule?”, “gong?”
“the thing with the shell”
Oh, that luó.
“snail line pipe”

When I got back home, I called the missus who is currently in the USA, and who speaks fluently.
“how do you say solenoid in mandarin””
“what’s a solenoid?”