Almost Famous

Monday we climbed the “incense burner” (557 metres above sea level) and at the top, first a solitary guy and later an excited group of students asked if they could have their photos taken with me. One of the males of the group commented that I looked like David Beckham (I don’t remember the glasses and earrings phase either).

Tuesday we headed in the same approximate direction to Yuanmingyuan to see the ruins of the Imperial Palace an Anglo-French force destroyed in 1860. Again I was invited to be in a couple of photos. Later, we met up with a friend from London, Maria, who planned this coincidental trip last year and we met her brother and a couple of her cousins, one of whom is David Lee, a Hong Kong movie and TV star. At the restaurant where we ate they got out the camera and took his picture and requested an autograph, then inexplicably asked me to sign too (later I wished I’d signed Tony Blair). At the bar of the five star hotel we went to later, people stopped talking and pointed (not for me anymore) and one awestruck girl came over just to say hello. Jun was pretty starstruck too.
A text from Joss indicated that Richard Lee is making a bit of a name for himself as a penalty saver, performing the feat again tonight as Watford squandered a 2-0 half-time lead to draw 2-2 at home to Cardiff. JJ and Hoskins scored but Priskin got himself sent off (again) and we were apparently under the cosh from then till the end.

First Impressions of a Future

Towards the end of the eight-hour BA flight (with movies on demand and tasty veggie meals), we flew over hundreds of miles of chocolate-coloured mountains, which seemed from above like a combination of millions of toblerone and a vast crumpled blanket. Breathtaking. We had a very short carousel wait for the packs we need and the cases of presents I lugged and were then out of the enormous Beijing terminal onto an equally outsized expressway to the city centre, replete with the obligatory “bad” drivers, including a police car straddling lanes as he spoke on his mobile. Before we reached the forest of fluted high rises, toasting rapid growth, I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of greenery lining both airport transit tracks and the Olympic-sign-blazoned route to the heart of the world’s economic beast, even spying a mountain-biking group in full lycra get-up between the trees.

Not long after I spotted my first foreigner (also cycling), we were at “Convenient Hotel” waiting for our room (we got there before check-out time and the place was busy, as an angry rant from a turned-away almost-guest attested). I decided to wander down a smaller road and passed two street/communal toilets (many homes didn’t/still don’t have their own) before settling on a likely place for a haircut. As I smiled at the hairdresser, she offered “massa massa” but I gestured that I wanted my head shaved. This was gigglingly achieved and then the offer of a massage re-emerged as hands stroked my groin, lips were flexed and I was shown a bed behind a curtain. “Ni bai” (200) was the price but my refusal lead to a halving. Excuses were made but not understood and I got away with nothing more than a blush and an overpriced cut (about £2.50).

After a rest when the room became available, we ate tofu, noodles, mushrooms, spinach and slices of an unidentified root vegetable from an enormous hotpot bowl and I washed it down with Yanjing beer from the bottle, forgoing the use of the shrink-wrapped crockery. Then we taxied it to a bar area near a lake that translates as “back sea”, joined in ti zhenzu (keepy-uppie with a coloured and weighted shuttlecock) and people-watched in a few locations. One of the main points of discussion was the changes that have led to the sort of prices some of the places could charge and Jun put it down to the number of foreigners and the endemic corruption. With absolutely no evidence, I was inclined to believe that at least some of the young locals we saw enjoying their Saturday night had legitimately earned large amounts in the boom this country has enjoyed.

We got back and our forty-hour day was iced with the news that Watford had won their first away match of the season, 3-0 at Southampton. Tamas Priskin scored two and Richard Lee made a penalty-save double. Result!

Throwing away love

Thursday 16th October 2008

Even my final(ish) game (home against Preston two Saturdays ago) couldn’t inspire me. Watford had already lost two away matches in a row (2-1 at Sheffield United and 3-2 at Burnley) and I was hoping that I’d shout my part in a thriller. Although Joss and I had missed the first two goals this time - three already in the short bit-season we have together - I was unable, despite the assurances of the guy behind me that there were more goals to come in a game where the defences were apparently asleep, to do my job as a supporter.
Ennui/dread? Past/present? Either way I was tense. The past has been perfect, the future not simple (thank you Carrie from one of the few episodes I’ve watched). Six minutes after we’d sat, Tommy Smith added to John Harley’s equaliser and promise seemed to be fulfilled but the rest was imperfect and goalless. At the end, the faint resolve I’d had to say “goodbye” to those around me I’d never said “hello” to dissolved in Englishness.
Since then and the international break, it’s been donate, box, clean, and look for tenants. Hardly had time to see people (though haven’t been that in demand anyway) except for the well-attended “Bon Voyage” party I organised last Saturday at Salvador and Amanda and now we’re off. We’ve filled to an eight foot ceiling a 25 square foot storage unit in Wood Green with stuff which is mostly mine. That space does not include the twenty years of letters and cards I was nagged to recycle by a wife who sometimes seems to have no past except when it comes to a memory of my failings.
So, do you get my mood?
Football: Elton John spoke out about the board and the finances. You’re going to have to look into the whole shebang in a lot more detail than I have to decide if he’s right but a season in the premiership (remember the argument about the £40 million income I had at my nephew’s funeral?) and £20million plus for five of our best players in the meantime (Ashley Young, Hameur Bouazza, Marlon King, Danny Shittu, Darius Henderson) and yet there’s no money left and even what was “ring-fenced” for stadium improvement has disappeared. The PM’s belated denial of cash bonuses to those bankers who’ve profited from failure has no equivalent at Vicarage Road. If the economy at large is experiencing a “credit crunch”, the Horns have had a “dividend drain”. Where’s it all gone?
Leaving: I could have improved on the relatively last-minute nature of my boxing up. Having known for months that we would leave, I think I should have planned and selected what to do with what. Instead, I found myself cutting stamps off envelopes containing letters I received before I even got to Manchester from people I still hold dear. Much of that history exists now only in a faulty memory, most of the rest is lost to a mixed-recycling bank that probably means construction filling. I may yet walk on, around on even below part of the mulch of ink and paper that all those words have become.
I felt the love then but not now. As I worked through that trunk of well wishes, clichés, poetry and pretension, I measured my present relationships with those whose past words I cast into the “bags for life” I’d use to carry them downstairs. Some, I’d forgotten: mostly the students who’d signed group “thank you” cards but there were letters from people I couldn’t place. Others were part of the continental drift that ensues from regular movement and change. Most were still there and are still here. I threw away letters telling me of split-ups, requesting advice in the face of temptation, making eternal declarations, describing the most profound feelings and… The hundreds of words of a blog entry are too limited to do justice to the tens of thousands lost to my biographers.

And I am sorry.

Pause