Beijing

At Easter we headed north to Beijing.

26 million people live in China’s capital. The scale of the place is breathtaking: from its cavernous, spanking new airport terminal to the broad six lane boulevards that traverse the city.

We arrived late expecting to be met. None of the waiting drivers had a placard with our name on it. Suddenly aware of the helplessness that can neither speak, understand nor read the language we looked around, bemused and a little concerned and returned for a second look at the signs. Our eldest saw it first:

MY.DY
YSDAL
E.MAL
CDLM

He was right, but you’d be forgiven for not having known it.

The next morning the sun is trying hard to shine through the dull, yellow cloud that sits on the city. We are met by our guide who introduces herself as Sweet Lee, But you can call me Sweetie. Or not, I think. Beijing is pleasantly warm, spring like as the leaves bud into a green haze and blossom transforms the winter greyness. It is so different from evergreen Hong Kong where seasons are identified by rainfall, temperature and humidity.

Sweet Tea takes us on a tour of the Forbidden City*. While we admire its vast, ancient, wondrous beauty we are swarmed, at every stop, by crowds of curious onlookers. Mildly entertaining to begin with, it becomes increasingly trying. Sweet Tea does her best to assure us the interest is not malevolent, that provincial tourists may be seeing blonde hair or blue eyes for the first time and are unable to contain their delight at the sight of four siblings. We try to shrug it off and yet I hear both my own and my husband’s voice bark out a loud “No!” in unison when a stranger lifts our daughter from her buggy to snatch a photo opportunity and a cuddle.

We head to Tiananmen Square* where ‘it’ all happened in 1989. It is hard not to think of this as yet another Stalinist parade ground. Chairman Mao lies embalmed in a mausoleum at one end and yet this was a square used for gatherings and festivities, celebrations and fireworks as long ago as 1406 when the Forbidden City was first constructed as a playground for China’s Emperors.

Next we are driven to a silk manufactory, shown the life cycle of the silk worms and how each strand of silk is spun from ten individual cocoons. Sometimes cocoons are interwoven by two worms and these matted fibres are used to make wonderful light weight silk quilts which are on sale at a snip. I decide a purchase is in order for our spare bed where our guests have hitherto had to sweat out the humid Hong Kong nights under a 13 TOG winter duvet. The Pioneering Accountant has simultaneously decided that this purchase is entirely surplus to requirements. He takes an ideological stance against the silk factory on the grounds that we have been brought here solely to part with hard currency. I couldn’t care less if this is the reason. If the cap fits, wear it, I say, and I consider a double silk quilt a bargain at RMB380 (approx £33).

To my intense annoyance I have left my credit card in the hotel and am thus totally dependent on the Chancellor of the Exchequer. All reasonable appeals on grounds of practicality, functionality, usefulness, durability, value for money are in vain. He has entered the valley of stubbornness on a one way street. I feel like a child who has been refused pocket money and thus behave like one for the rest of the day.

My husband then decides on an ill-fated excursion to the Summer Palace just as the children are tipping over the edge of exhaustion and are no longer able to take in any more of Beijing’s imperial buildings. They are cheered by a paddle boat trip on the lake while I sit shivering and resentful on the bank listening to the babble of a million tourists.

By evening we are too tired to hold out our entrenched positions. A visit to the Flying Acrobats Show is on the cards. The children are easy to motivate once more and we enjoy an extraordinary display of Chinese contortions and daring do complete with parrots and lasers yet all bizarrely dressed up as some journey to the depths of time with cavemen, time lords and primeval warriors. For the row of students sitting in front of us we appear to be the main attraction and once more we have to fend off the requests for photographs while the children practise their Mandarin and receive compliments such as Bootifur and Vewy intewigent boy.

At the hotel a Chinese guest asks if all the children are mine. I confess, Have they been misbehaving? Here we are only allowed one child, she explains. There are big fines to pay if you break the rules and sometimes if you work for the government you can even lose your job. People here will think you are very rich to pay all the fines for four children. Forget the fines, I think, what about the school fees, the shoes, the after school activities and, let’s face it, the need for a vast house? It’s self-induced financial punishment, that’s all.

Saturday sees us marching along the Great Wall* some 90km north of Beijing. Sweet Pea has once more excelled herself and we stagger and clamber up and down the steep steps that were built to keep the Mongol hordes out. It is a beautiful and impressive sight in as much as we can see: the mist is low but the cherry blossom is out and we are atop one of the wonders of the ancient world. A cable car takes visitors up to the Wall and there is an option to ride down on little carts along a giant zig-zag chute which the boys delight in doing.

As we return to the city, the driver takes us by way of the Olympic village, the Water Cube and the Bird’s Nest stadium. Like the rest of Beijing, their scale is magnificent. They sit unused, but for the steady flow of visitors who are charged Y50 to see the empty insides, a reminder of Beijing’s glorious last summer.

We are herded into a tea ceremony and have four different types of tea brewed up in front of us to taste, and it is assumed, buy. Another opportunity to divest us of our cash but this time we are in complete agreement. We’d swap all the tea in China for a good cup of Tetley’s.

We eat at Beijing’s night market, fried meat on sticks, beef and vegetable wraps, fresh fruit and banana doughnuts, marvelling at yet eschewing the star fish, silk worm larvae, scorpions and river snakes also available fried on sticks.

Sunday is Easter Day and yet there is nothing to suggest it here except the warmth of a spring day, the yellow forsythia and the pink cherry blossom. We are taken by rickshaw to see the traditional Hutongs*, an area of narrow lanes and courtyard homes that once housed all Beijing’s inhabitants before population growth and space restrictions caused many families to be re-housed in suburban apartments. We get to meet the lady of one Hutong and our guide interprets our questions about life in Beijing. I ask her if she would have liked a second child. She asks me if my children fight. Both of us answer with a resounding Yes!

We eat dumplings and fried rice and take in the Temple of Heaven*, another vast complex where the Emperors came twice a year to give thanks for the harvest and to worship their ancestors.

I am pleasantly surprised by Beijing. I had anticipated traffic chaos, pollution and high rise monotony. Instead the city is low rise, spacious and light. The air is heavy with the yellow sand of the northern Gobi desert which blows in during the spring leaving our hair and skin grimy at the day’s end. And yet it is surprisingly organised and modern, clean, but for the smog, and orderly. There are decorative flowers and trees throughout and the parks are well tended and green. High-end designer stores cosy up to the big hotels in the city centre, as anywhere and yet there is an undemanding simplicity to the place, a relaxed atmosphere and a welcome depth, history and culture.

I’d live here, I tell the Pioneering Accountant. I imagine myself learning Mandarin, making Chinese friends and pedalling about on my bike with the children in tow. Whereas a year ago the very thought of China scared me, its size, its pollution and crowds all that has become the substance of the life we lead, no longer frightening, just fact. Or testimony to the ultimate adaptability of the human being.

*I’ve taken pictures but on a new camera and I don’t yet know how to upload them.

Return of the Reluctant HR Manager

Last week I gave notice to one half of the Dream Team. More of a nightmare than a dream of late, if I’m honest. Tired of being held hostage in my own kitchen, of not being able to say, I'd actually like it done this way, for fear of having my head bitten off, I steeled myself and relieved the Turkey Boiler of her duties.

The atmosphere had become unbearable. The Turkey Boiler was threatening and shouting at her younger sibling on a daily basis and I had encountered the sister in silent tears more than once. Whenever I suggested to Annie that she could possibly be a bit kinder to her sister she would bark back that I did not know what Clarabel had done to her. OK, I said, finally, What has she done?

You know those questions you wished you'd never asked? I got the full family history, with knobs on: teenage pregnancy, sibling rivalry, abandoned children, unpaid debts, banished daughters, drug-addicted sons, accusations of rape, drunken husbands and yet could not quite ascertain what Clarabel had done wrong other than giving her boyfriend (who turns out to be the husband that she married secretly just before coming to Hong Kong) special power of attorney over her house and property back in the Philippines. That's her house and property? I clarified. Yes. And?

In the end I pointed out that whilst the family history was no doubt very important to them, what mattered most to me was that they did a good job in my house. Three weeks later we were back in the same place. I began to get that nasty feeling you have when you've done one too many turns on the roundabout.

Last week while I was out Annie went off to do her personal shopping when she should have been looking after three of the children. Her sister was upstairs doing the ironing so there was no immediate danger but when I returned from a doctor's appointment the children were fighting and screaming and Annie was nowhere to be seen. When she got home I raised a quizzical eyebrow only to have her snap back that whilst I always assume she is to blame Clarabel should have been watching the kids.

I'm not blaming anyone for anything, I explained, the point is quite simply that you left your work without my permission, when I thought you were looking after my children. I also explained that the reason we employ two helpers is so that the housework gets done even when one of them has to divert to distract the children in my absence. She argued back and I explained it again, more slowly and clearly than before. When she started to shout I said I was going to leave the room and would return when she had calmed down.

Naive as I am, I did feel this approach was a fairly clear indication that it might be wise to think through the consequences of her actions and to acknowledge, on my return, that leaving the house during paid work hours without her employer's prior consent was not the best way to further her career. But no, hell-bent on destruction Annie would not accept the principle and fought her corner to the very end.

I will admit to being momentarily concerned about the silver and yet dismayed as I was at her stance I was not about to put her on the street. Whilst she has worn me down with her stubborn, sullen manner over the past five months, I was left feeling only saddened that, having given her the chance of a steady income and a relatively secure future, Annie had been so determined to shoot herself in the foot.

She left on Monday. Only after telling the neighbourhood that Clarabel and her friend, another Filipina helper, were to blame for her having lost her job. At one point the friend came marching in and demanded a show-down with Annie in front of me to clear her name. Oh, please no, not that as well! Fortunately for us all, Annie was not in.

I gave her a month's wages and a plane ticket home, took her to the check-in and wished her well. In the taxi on the way there we spoke not a word. Yet oddly enough she did some of her best work in the days after I gave her notice. She asked if I wanted her to continue cooking until she left, Yes please, I said, As long as you're not going to poison us! She laughed and flashed me her most brilliant smile, one I have seen only a couple of times since she arrived. No Ma'am, I'm not going to do that! Did she think I hadn’t really meant it? Or did she believe the charm offensive might win us over? God knows what she thought, but I knew we’d reached the end of the road.

Only time will tell if my analysis of the situation has been accurate or fair and if my actions have opened yet another bitter chapter in that tragic family for Filipina pride is a fierce and unpredictable beast. In the meantime, one thing is certain, that whilst our house may be a little less polished than before, the atmosphere is a whole lot more cheerful.

Hong Kong Sevens

SW15 had its sporting event this weekend, the Boat Race. We would normally have been there, on the river bank, for the start at least. What you actually see is three seconds of the race as the rowers power past before staring at a dull grey empty Thames with thousands of other people similarly wondering why they came.

Hong Kong had its sporting event this weekend too, the Hong Kong Rugby Sevens. It starts on Friday afternoon and draws to a close on Sunday night: a long slog for those who are there to watch the rugby but tougher still for bodies battered by three days of binge drinking at the city’s biggest annual party.

On Friday afternoon it rained and the beautifully prepared pitch was churned up within minutes of the start. It’s rare to see grass in Hong Kong, even rarer to see mud. Players slipped and lost their balance but it all added to the entertainment. The rain could not dampen the spirits of the crowd, however, and the atmosphere was like a carnival. Jugs of beer and Pimms slopped about and the combined smells of sweat and fried food were all around.

The antics of the infamous South Stand where dressing up, wild dancing and heavy drinking are de rigueur were beamed up to the rest of us on huge TV screens. The more there are of you in matching silly outfits, the more likely you are to attract the cameras. And the more outrageous your get up, the better. Or the less of it there is. Bare-chested or big-breasted are enduring themes. We saw bands of nuns, Father Christmases, Miss Piggies, High Court Judges, cave men, belly-dancers and milk maids. There were Superheroes, Teletubbies and mankini-sporting Borats, kings in crowns and queens in drag.

The crowd is overwhelmingly Caucasian and when China played England the supporters were all for the English. That said, the stadium crowd loved the underdog and whenever a losing team made a dash for the try line there was huge excitement and a roar of support from the crowd. The best match of the tournament was when Kenya beat New Zealand and the Stadium erupted.

By Sunday everyone has probably seen enough rugby to last a lifetime and yet you have to be there as the rugby gets better and better as the giants of the game meet and fight it out in the fast-moving 14 minute games. I read somewhere that the Sevens game fits the Hong Kong pace of life and attention span. Bite-sized nuggets of the game with 14 fit and wholesome chaps running about in tight shirts certainly suited my attention span.

The atmosphere is intimate and fun. We recognised friends and stopped for a chat, read the Sunday papers and had another coffee. Paper aeroplanes are thrown from the upper stands and a cheer goes up if one makes it to the pitch. Dance music at half time and between games gets the punters on their feet. The occasional pitch invasion is met with rapture in the stands. A Pink Panther made a dash for it and a monk was tackled in jest by a Portuguese player. A grass-skirted limbo dancer complete with coconut shell bikini treated us to a bum wiggle before being received coldly by nonplussed Chinese guards on the touch line.

Our two older boys played showcase mini-rugby games in the Stadium on Friday and Sunday before the big boys came on and all three took part in the Parade on Sunday afternoon watched proudly by parents and sister. Over 3,000 4-12 year olds play mini-rugby at different locations around Hong Kong on Sunday mornings and most of them had not turned down the chance to be applauded by a full Stadium.

It felt good to belong in Hong Kong this weekend, to have an invitation to the ultimate party. I imagine the rest of Hong Kong was noticeably ex-pat free until the Stadium emptied its contents into the bars of Wan Chai each night. Not normally a huge fan of the game, I’ll admit to finding it all highly infectious. Despite the fact that the boys from home did not even make it to the semi-finals and HK was completely trounced by Canada we had a great time. Even our four year old turned to me during one game and said with gusto, “Mummy, this is a real football match, isn’t it?” Errm, almost.

The Sound of My Day

Sometimes I hate being a mother.
It’s a difficult truth. Let me try again.
Sometimes I hate being a mother.
And once more, for those at the back who didn’t hear.
Sometimes I hate being a mother.

Brief pause while I await hellfire and damnation……

No lightning, no thunderbolts. I’ll continue.

Today was crap. The rain, damp and mist persist and no-one can go out to play. So in stead they all fight each other, squabble, squawk, shriek, yell, come crying to me (what can I do about it??) and then ignore whatever I say.

This is what my day sounded like: Turn off the telly. It’s breakfast time. Sit down. I think we have a rule about toys at the table. Yes, but you should have gone before the meal. Please don’t kick him under the table. I can’t understand what you’re saying when your thumb is in your mouth. No, I haven’t seen your German folder/maths book/spellings. Yes, I can wipe your bottom. Have you got your homework diary? Oh, please stop whining. Don’t forget your trumpet. Can you use your spoon please? No, not to poke your brother. Yes, I’ll push you in. Yes, I’ll spread it. No, I think you can feed yourself. But you haven’t finished your breakfast. You can’t be full, you haven’t eaten anything. No you can’t watch telly. Yes, I’ll get you dressed. Have you cleaned your teeth? Turn off the telly. You DO need socks. Where’s your school bag? I thought we agreed you were only allowed telly at the weekend. Why aren’t you dressed? No it’s not Show and Tell today. I said no telly! Put your shoes on. Hurry up or we’ll be late. Not those ones, it’s raining. Because you’ll get wet feet. I’m sorry you don’t like it but it’s what we’re having for lunch. Well if you don’t like it you can always go to bed. Are you eating or playing? Please get down from there. Last time you did that you fell off and hurt yourself. Please don’t play with that. Because I don’t want it to be knocked oh… Get a cloth! Have you ever heard me say we don’t play football in the house? How was school? Have you got any homework? Oh, please let him have a go. Trumpet practice? Please, just to stop him yelling? That wasn’t half an hour. He won’t break it. Only when you’ve finished your homework. Get off the table! Why is she crying now? Because we have to share. Can you come over here and say sorry please? Homework! Supper time! Look, I’ll mend it. Turn off the telly! What happened? Look you two, sort it out! Try saying that again with an empty mouth. What do you mean you left it at school? Hand in front of your mouth when you cough. There’s no need to shout! For goodness sake! Please might help. Leave him alone! Hand in front of your mouth! You have to have some veg. Because it’s good for you. But that’s life. When you’ve finished your supper. Can you put it away please? Bath time! Which part of NO TELLY do you not understand? Whoever told you life would be fair? Have you had your shower? Please pick up those books. What’s the matter now? Because I said so. Can you hang up your towel please? Why did you hit her? Teeth! There’s no need to scream. In the dirty clothes basket. Two wrongs don’t make a right. In the cupboard. It IS there. Well then I don’t know where it is. Have you packed your bag for tomorrow? No, it’s late. Lights out. Because it’s late. Good night. Yes, I’ll get you some water. No, you’ve already cleaned your teeth. Well you should have eaten your supper. Stop talking you two. I’ve read you two stories and now it’s time to go to sleep. Because I’m tired too and it’s late. No more talking now. Boys! GOOD NIGHT.

Day after bloody boring day I sound like a scratched record. I sound like a nightmare. The Pioneering Accountant has pioneered off to Beijing and I was meant to be going to Shenzhen for a day of cheap copy shopping with the girls. Then I realised my passport was at the embassy for the purpose of getting, ironically enough, a China visa. Without it I couldn’t cross the border so I had to stay at home. Stay at home, stay at home. It’s what I do. And today I didn’t like it.

What do I do?

I’ve been filling in forms. School application forms to be precise. Often times when it comes to the bit about Family Details I am unsure what to put. Name: obvious. Nationality: no problem. Occupation: this is where it starts to go wrong.

I always baulk at writing ‘Mother’ in these boxes. Is it my generation of highly-educated superwomen, or the one before us that fought so hard for women’s lib, that makes me feel this is not ENOUGH? Whilst it would be honest to write ‘Just a mother’ I am inclined to think I need another occupation.

Supermother of four? Breed mare (thoroughbred of course)? Housewife? Sorry, I draw the line at that. And anyway, with all the home help there is available in Hong Kong no-one would consider that a valid way to fill your time.

The more American ‘Homemaker’ makes it sound as though I sit around reading House and Garden type glossies, consulting with an interior designer and heading off to Pimlico to choose a beautiful piece by David Linley or some such. And what does a homemaker do when she’s finished making her home anyway? Move out and start another one? What if she liked the first? Is she an unemployed homemaker? No, that won’t do either.

Back in London there were kindly folks who would tell me, every so often when I doubted, yes even in 2008, that home was the best place for me to be. Put like that it sounded as though I might be a liability in the work place. Come to think of it, I probably was a liability in the work place.

There were a number of workplaces actually: my first job post university was with a gap year charity based on the Isle of Coll in the Inner Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland. I seem to remember I was forever in trouble for giggling during meetings or for chatting when I should have been working quietly at my desk.

When I left Coll I qualified as an EFL teacher and, nervous that I would be conspicuously tall and blonde turned down a job in Tokyo in favour of one teaching English to jobless former socialists in east Germany soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Unbelievable really.

I should add that this brief spell of teaching has entitled me, in the past, rightly or wrongly, to put ‘Teacher’ in the Occupation box although I never seem to be the sort of teacher that people actually want. A school I was trying to get one or other child into rang me recently to discuss the application and asked if I was interested in doing supply teaching. Are you primary or secondary? she wanted to know. Neither. Nothing as useful as that.

Still in eastern Germany I managed a side-step into a small firm producing wooden toys that needed a bilingual sales and marketing assistant. Low moments of that job involved cold-calling on Kindergartens throughout Germany with my briefcase of wares as I sold puzzles and board games around the country.

From there I returned to England to work in direct marketing for a mail order company selling historical (hysterical) artefacts with tenuous links to Britain’s past to the Germans, and other nations gullible enough to buy such tat. There was seemingly a limit to the number of Victorian nightdresses and Celtic brooches that could be sold worldwide and soon after I left to join my new Pioneering Accountant husband in our first joint overseas adventure, the company went down the pan, due, I am told, to over investment on overseas operations. Draw your own conclusions.

In Frankfurt I recreated myself as a Research Consultant for a high-end American head hunting firm and would sit on the telephone, day in day out, trying to persuade Germans that I had a better job for them in tile manufacturing or fashion design or insurance. It felt like a non-job. You have to be very charming and very good at selling. I was neither.

I continued part time and from home for a year after our first child was born but was forever being caught on my mobile in the supermarket or in the sandpit, once even with my trousers down, quite literally, in the changing room of a dress shop, completely unable to remember the details of the position I was meant to be selling to that particular candidate.

That, in essence is the story of my brilliant career. With one embarrassing admission. On arrival in Hong Kong, yet another opportunity to recreate myself, I can never resist, I was asked by my son’s teacher what I do. I’m a writer, I replied smoothly. Oh wow! She enthused, you’ll have to come and talk to the class about how you work and how you put stories together and get your work published. We’ve never had a writer in the class.
Er yes, great idea, time to go. I replied and hurried off.
That’ll teach you, said my husband as he followed me out.

But at long last a friend has thrown me a lifeline to my missing identity in the form of this so I have decided that from now on I will fill in all occupation or profession boxes of awkward, nosey and demanding forms with “Geek Mum”.

The Colour of Rain

Hong Kong rain is colour coded. This morning it was raining so hard that raging torrents rushed down normally dry drainage gullies and the steep mountain sides were transformed by the sudden appearance of multiple waterfalls. We had umbrellas but still got soaked as we waited for the nursery bus. This was Amber rain: more than 30 mm falling in an hour. The danger is more to do with landslides than any fear of getting wet. I can’t wait for Red.

The persistent low cloud and grey mist of recent weeks are getting to us all.

Last week I turned my ankle over playing tennis. More than painful. I applied ice and hoped for the best. It is now the size of a balloon and I can’t hike, play tennis or do yoga. The other foot has swollen up either in sympathy, or else because it just doesn’t like it here. It’s not a good look and I feet fat and frantic and distinctly short of the endorphins I require on a daily basis.

One option is to sit on the sofa with my injured foot raised on a cushion while I watch films and eat comfort food: I have developed an appetite for baked potatoes smothered in butter and salt, Mmmmm. This may be an unwise long term strategy when I consider my latest attempts at shopping for summer clothes in Hong Kong. When asked what size I was I replied, somewhat optimistically, S sometimes, maybe M? The sales assistant looked me up and down and replied, An Asian L. Help! I have become LARGE without even properly indulging my baked potato fetish. So unfair.

Shopping for shoes is no more satisfactory although the thought of squeezing my ugly sister feet into a glass slipper is not appealing right now. When I named my size the assistant’s reaction was, Size 39? We don’t stock larger sizes. I’ll have to call the warehouse. So now I’m an L with enormous feet. None of this is helping my self-esteem.

My skin hates this place and has rediscovered its misspent youth in the form of adolescent spots which are not mixing well with the 41 year old lines that are making themselves at home on my face. I sit in the plastic surgeon’s swanky waiting room reading leaflets on liposuction, face lifts and tummy tucks and wonder if he’ll give me a discount for a job lot. Instead he removes my daughter’s plaster, dabs ointment on the stitches before banging on a new plaster and charging me a cool HK$500. I could have done that for nothing.

That’s the physical side but mentally things are little better. I am fretting about schools. Having decided we must move our 10 year old I have fought off the boarding school debate and am left with an inadequate choice of places to send him. In London we were spoilt for choice. Here we are not and anyway most schools have a waiting list as long as your arm. We’ll have left by the time we get him in to any of them. I thought we’d decided. My husband did too. And now I’m having a major wobble of ‘the devil you know’ sort. I need my husband to talk me off this particular ledge but he is cross at the illogical nature of my concerns and thinks I have cried wolf. I have been left to stew.

The 10 year old is asserting his independence and newly discovered sense of style and has cut his own hair. At school. With a pencil sharpener blade. His first attempts were quite good but success went to his head and he tried again. Now he just looks odd.

I am forced to conclude it is a pathetic fallacy type of day. I’d better draw a veil over it and hope that tomorrow is not a Black rain day.

The Empress and I

Last week I stumbled across the Hong Kong International Literary Festival when an acquaintance mentioned in passing that she had seen Markus Zusak at the Fringe Club. How on earth did you know it was him? I asked, before waking up to the dull thud of my own stupidity.

By the next day I had tickets to see Margaret Atwood in conversation at the Canadian International School on the topic of 'Devastated Environment: Not Just Science Fiction'.

She was introduced by fellow Canadian and novelist Charlie Foran as being the embodiment of Canadian literature. What he actually said was that when asked to name a Canadian author, rather worryingly only 24% of Canadians could. Of those who could, 75% named Margaret Atwood.

The diminutive Ms Atwood reminded me, with her high cheek bones, long nose and tight little smile, of a Tudor portrait. The conversation felt distinctly stage managed and yet she was interesting and witty and despite her huge status on the stage of world literature even managed to be a little self-deprecating. After about an hour she had clearly had enough of CNIS students and their questions and the rest of us who'd paid to see her but weren’t invited to pose one. (Had I been, I might have wondered how, with all her cabin-dwelling greenness, she expects China to turn back the tide of development just as its population is sniffing the possibilities of urban capitalist wealth and live her rural idyll. Ha, Ms Atwood, get out of that one!) Instead I was reminded of a phrase quoted by the inimitable Jaywalker, “The Empress is tired. You must leave her now.”

I left in a hurry but not before trying to buy her new book. It was sold out and there I stood cursing my bad luck just as the Empress sat down at a table right beside me in readiness for a long line of book signing. She looked up and said, very slowly, as if talking to a delinquent child, Well, it’s available in the city. We stared crossly at each other and then I heard myself say in a cringe-worthy sycophantic Blackadder type way that I had enjoyed her talk and had heard her read from her newly published Cat’s Eye at Blackwells in Oxford 20 years ago since which time I had been an ardent fan. She didn’t look even slightly impressed. I might have added that on that occasion the booksellers had been a darn sight more organised and had made sure there were plenty of copies of her new book available for signing. “The Empress is tired. You must leave her now.” I left.

A couple of days later I was at the Fringe Club for 'Making a Splash’ with debut authors Janice Lee, The Piano Teacher and Rana Dasgupta, Tokyo Cancelled. They were far sparkier than the Empress and by this time I had begun to enjoy the intimate and accessible nature of the Literary Festival so much that I was back again the next night for a discussion on 'Bloggers: Should they be taken seriously?' This time it was Jeffrey Wasserstrom, an academic and founder of the China Beat blog in conversation with former CNN Beijing correspondent and scholar of the Chinese internet Rebecca MacKinnon. I think they were trying to tell us that good blogging does not all have to be about what I ate for breakfast confessional nonsense but on that I beg to differ! And I beg to inform Ms Atwood that her book is NOT available in the city. It is between editions. But perhaps her publishers were too scared to break the news to the Empress.