Leaving on a Jet Plane...

 “No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow. ” 

Lin Yutang

It seems that, after a mere four week break, that my more far-flung flaneurial duties will be once more resumed in the coming weeks with trips to South China and Thailand. It is a tough job, but someone's gotta do it. In the meantime, I spent the weekend preparing the few odds and sods needed for such a trip. This task was not particularly onerous, chiefly consisting of the obtaining of sufficient funds to get by in my first few weeks in China. This is something one needs to arrange before visiting that particular country, unless one enjoys the hour and a half proceedings that tend to occur every time one endeavours to change money in a Chinese bank in any place other than the most obvious of tourist destinations.
If one already has visas and insurance in place, then it is a simple matter to prepare for such a trip, even when that trip is planned over a period of months rather than weeks. I am sometimes asked by friends and relatives how I set about these things. The answer is surprisingly straightforward; once one has completed such technicalities as visas, insurance and funds, it is simply a matter of getting on a train, then a plane, then….well, that's it...really, that is all there is to it. In the interconnected world in which we live today, such travel is no longer that much of a challenge. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the biggest part of the challenge is the ennui of long journeys on aircraft. Personally, I usually find the 'entertainment' on offer through various films and TV shows very dull, the films being almost invariably of the more commercial type, popular but vacuous. Every now and then a little gem somehow sneaks in, but often as not I scarcely bother these days. Thank heavens for the invention of the e-reader! With this in hand I find I can happily wile away many an hour tucking into the delights of Henry Miller or Anais Nin, or any one of about fifty authors that I am currently indulging in, whilst suspended 40,000 feet above the planet's surface.
In retrospect, I think that the return to the UK at this time of year was perhaps not the best notion that every crossed my mind. The pleasurable part has been catching up with various friends. Oddly, it seems to matter little how far one has travelled or what adventures one has indulged in, on return such relationships, after an obligatory handshake or hug, return to much the same as they were before. This is something that I appreciate very much. Time and distance seem to make little difference, the core of such friendships remains essentially unaffected.
The country itself...hmm, let us just say that absence makes the heart grow fonder, whilst confrontation with the reality of its fundamentally parochial nature, its class struggles, its asinine politics and, on a more banal note, just how cold it is this time of year, soon dissipate one's delusions about the place. The UK can be a very beautiful country, from the end of April to the end of September. If one is fortunate, even October can be reasonably pleasant, the rest of the year it is a struggle simply to survive the cold, the wet, the wind, the mud, the ice and the snow. The days themselves are incredibly short at this time of year, seemingly consisting of a sunrise and a sunset, with scarcely anything in between.
The inward-looking nature of the country can also be a tad wearisome, the somewhat dated beliefs as to its significance bearing little relation to today's reality. There was a time, many, many moons ago now, when Britain was indeed very influential on a global scale. Whether this influence was at all beneficial is another matter. Much of what was done in the name of Empire now looks very dubious with the benefit of hindsight. Numerous examples spring to mind: running India as a company, rather than as a country, the Opium War in which we forced the Chinese to import the drug in return for access to their markets (tea, interestingly, in particular), our efforts in Africa (such dubious efforts as the setting up of the first concentration camps by the British in the course of the Boer War – not as fundamentally awful, admittedly, as later iterations, but still very unpleasant), and...well, I could go on, but suffice it to say that much of the British contribution was not exactly positive in nature, mainly consisting of a ruthless exploitation of raw materials and local populations. Much of the 'civilising' influence claimed was something of an afterthought, the very notion betrays a level of smugness that looks remarkably ill-founded given the pecuniary motivation for almost all of the British interventions.
To be fair, almost every country one visits suffers from similar delusions as to its own influence. America seems to be forever wagging a finger at the rest of the World and lecturing about human rights, whilst conveniently ignoring them on their own escapades around the globe. The Japanese to this day remain in denial of the nature of their occupations during World War Two, a subject that causes much friction with its Asian neighbours. The Chinese and the Russians adopt a slightly different approach wherein they portray themselves as forever victims of foreign aggression, conveniently ignoring the fact that their own leaders were responsible for far more suffering than any invading armies ever inflicted.
And so it goes…
Personally, I rather liked the words of the venerable Thomas Paine on nationalism. This old Thetfordian (interestingly, as I write these words, I am a mere few hundred feet from his birthplace) simply stated:
“My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.”
I could not argue with such noble sentiments.

The Fat of the Land...

Today I find myself in a wet and windy Exeter, enjoying the hospitality of the library in the city centre which has been thoughtfully provided with a pleasant little coffee shop in the vestibule. The castle backs on to the grounds of a centuries old Norman castle which, in recent years, has been thoughtfully landscaped to provide a very pleasing setting on a warm summer's day. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, warm summer's days are but a distant hope; the ground beneath one's feet squelches to the tread and all is soggy and waterlogged, adding an extra incentive to stay within the confines of the building and enjoy the fayre on offer here.
Apart from a wide variety of cakes and similar comestibles, the fayre seems reasonably fair in this place, in contrast to most establishments I have visited since returning to the UK. What passes for food in this benighted land is normally high in fat, swimming in grease or comes pre-wrapped from a factory, bearing little or no resemblance to anything natural or organic. Quite often these packets come with pretty little labels indexing all the various ingredients and percentages thereof and just how much fat, carbohydrate and protein is contained therein. Little or no food seems to come in its natural form, unprocessed or sans addictive that add little to the nutritional value. 

 
These days, such 'food' is the standard fayre on offer in the UK; if one requires anything beyond the range of these mundane offerings one is required to both search far and wide and to pay out a proverbial arm and a leg. Most don't bother, or simply cannot afford to bother, hence insuring an unremittingly poor diet for themselves and their families.
For all my criticisms of China, and there were many, the diet there is infinitely better (and infinitely cheaper) than it is here. One comes across the odd rotund person in China, but the norm, even into great age, is slim and fit-looking people. The contrast with the UK could not be more stark, and seems to become more and more obvious each time I return from one of my sojourns.
The streets of Exeter seem to be filled to bursting with the rotund, the generously-proportioned, the wide-of-berth, the ample-figured, the big-boned, the plus-sized, the hefty, the chubby, the plump, the obese and even, what we used to call in previous, less politically correct times, the fat. They wibble and wobble down the street, huffing and puffing, panting and grunting; so much so in fact that one is concerned as to their very survival whenever they are met with such severe challenges as an incline, a few steps or a slightly more than normally substantial door..

A close friend of mine insists that these people are their own worst enemies, that the choices they make dictate the state of their bodies, that they really should have the self-discipline to make appropriate food choices and to take a little exercise occasionally. Personally, I feel that is a tad unfair given the type of fayre that is normally on offer in the supermarkets and hostelries of this land. There really isn't that much choice, particularly if you live in straitened circumstances, as so many do in what the Daily Mail insists is economically successful Britain. 

 
Another good friend espouses a type of conspiracy theory wherein the great mass (no pun intended…) of people are fed rubbish in order to render them suitable customers for the pharmaceutical industry as their health inevitably deteriorates. Again, I would not fully subscribe to such ideas, but one has to admit that the average UK citizen is usually imbibing a copious cornucopia of tablets and other forms of medication by the time they reach the ripe old age of fifty. Huge sums do indeed seem to be made at both ends of this equation, firstly in feeding people such poor food as to lead inevitably to obesity, and secondly from the doomed attempts to deal with the concomitant health problems such as cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure and diabetes. 
 
Many moons ago, back in the nineties, I enjoyed an interesting, if somewhat challenging, trip to India. As happens to so many who take on extended visits to that land, I managed to contract a form of 'Dehli-belly' (appropriately enough in Dehli) and came back from my travels some 10 kgs lighter than when I left. The people of the sub-continent were, in those far off days, more or less inevitably slim. A couple of months later, I followed that trip with another to Florida, my first to the United States. The contrast could not have been greater. On my first morning, I came across my first mall and my first food section, stuffed full of fast-food outlets. A few metres in front of me, bound for the same outlets, was a woman of indeterminate age wearing, perhaps unwisely, shorts and a singlet. She must have been at least 150 kgs, probably more. As I observed her ponderous advance towards her fervently desired destination I found myself trying to work out within which folds, of a very high number of folds in her ample legs, her knees were contained. The image reminded me oddly of the Michelin Man in those wonderfully antediluvian French posters.

At the time it was known that the US was in the midst of an obesity crisis. Little did I realise that just a few years later many of those same fast-food outlets would be littering the streets of the UK (and indeed, Europe and the World) bringing with them the subsequent problems and deleterious effects on the nations health, perhaps particularly on a younger generation who have scarcely ever known anything better.
Back in the library café, the rain is lashing hard against the windows as I finish this week's offering. Currently in the West country, it tends to vary between drizzle and violent downpour, so I await my chance to get merely slowly soaked rather than drowned beneath a veritable inundation. In the meantime I have treated my self to a second Americano but, in view of the above, resisted the temptation to indulge in the various cakes, muffins and sticky buns on offer ...

So this is Christmas (and what have you done...)

As I start this latest set of meandering musings I find myself back, if only just, in a very wet England. This, as yet, is second-hand knowledge rather than directly experienced. For now, my first act on entering this literally benighted land was to head over to the Caffe Nero in Terminal 2 at Heathrow and treat myself to a large and thoroughly pleasant Americano. I have a soft spot for Nero's, the coffee is excellent and the décor much to my taste – old, tatty, sunken armchairs and sofas, ideal for cogitating whilst one waits, flaneur style, for the hubbub of the evening rush hour to die down before embracing the delights of London's antiquated underground system.
After this particular flight, it is with some relief that I take my seat and sip my coffee. Not only was it an incredibly long eleven hour flight (mostly spent reading and chatting as there was not an offering of note on the 'entertainment' system), but it finished in fine style with the aircraft being heavily buffeted by some very strong winds on the descent followed by visits to both sides of the runway as it slewed and skidded quite alarmingly on landing. Far too much excitement for me, I prefer my landings to be barely noticeable.
In my bag, folded up very carefully, I bring back a gift created by one of the guys at the martial arts club. Jun and I had shared many a conversation in the past few weeks, from politics to policing, wandering to wushu, communism to Confucius. Jun was both a devotee and a well read student of Confucianism. Something of a gentle giant of a man, he expressed himself powerfully through his martial skills, but also rather more subtly through calligraphy, the latter being something of an art form in China. Before I left he had presented me with a piece he himself had created on fine tissue paper, about two foot by four foot, of a saying from Confucius: Ching Xian Wei Fu – which roughly translates as 'Leisure is Happiness' (Jun had come to know me well during my stay in China…).

Would that more of the Chinese people could reconnect with such ancient wisdom. Instead, the words that one hears all the time is 'Ying Gai' which can be translated as 'should' or 'ought to'. Modern Chinese life, much like modern life in the West, seems to consist of rather a lot of Ying Gai; a huge long list of social and civic duties that one should do in order to be acceptable in Chinese society. Formal law in China is nowhere nearly as strongly enforced as it is in the West, but informal law, those pressures and constraints imposed by peers, familial expectations and those from the surrounding culture are very strong indeed. From cradle to grave, Chinese life seems to consist of a long and daunting list of Ying Gai's.
Of course, such societal and cultural constraints and strictures are by no means the exclusive preserve of Chinese society. We all live lives that are an endless reflection of having to conform with so many 'shoulds' and 'ought tos'. A lengthy list of our duties and responsibilities, of what is expected of us to earn at least a modicum of acceptance within our given cultures. This time of year perhaps, such pressures are felt even more strongly as we churn through, yet again, all the rather onerous demands that make up Christmas, often fearful that some aspect will go horribly wrong and we will be exposed for the miscreants that we are! The right cards need to be sent, the right presents should be bought, the requisite amounts of money splashed out, the right people should be seen, the right food prepared. Many at this time of year find themselves feeling pressured, fearful of making some dreadful social faux pas, of creating some dreadful cock-up of a meal or of not including all the people we 'ought to' include, but really, what if a present remains unopened, the food uneaten, the parents unseen, the dishes unwashed, the napkins unfolded, the gifts unwrapped, the crackers unpulled, the bottles unopened, the turkey unstuffed, mince pies unfilled, words unsaid or the wine unmulled? Somehow, I am not sure quite how, but somehow the world seems to manage to go on much the same at it ever did…

'Don't sweat the small staff', a modern day apophthegm appropriately assures us. Without apology, I would go a step further and urge the non-sweating of the big stuff too. Remarkable as it may seem, despite all the dramas, big and small, personal and impersonal, urgent and non-urgent, somehow the world keeps on spinning, the sun comes up, the sun goes down (or, if you are currently in the UK, it just keeps on raining...). People work themselves up into apoplectic states of annoyance and vexation, indeed, some seem to specialize in such posturing, spending much of their time in such a state of mind. Scarcely, perhaps never, does all this sound and fury, whether it be externally expressed or internally withheld, result in anything positive, useful or even significant.
Back in Caffe Nero's, I take a sip of coffee and realize that with all this cogitation my Americano is now completely cold, although still surprisingly tasty. Tis a problem I commonly face when working on these blogs (if one can call it 'work' – it often feels like an indulgence to yours truly). I find myself looking forward to a few weeks of clean, fresh air after the challenges of the Chinese environment, but I am guessing that pretty soon the inclination to resume my travels will have me yearning for other places, other climes. The UK is a very beautiful country … from May to September; the rest of the year has me dreaming of other realms, other shores. We shall see...

The Old Boys Club...

  “When Small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set.”
Lin Yutang

Early May in the UK, and I find myself enduring the fairly typical weather in these islands. It is generally cold, wet and windy, although happily it is about to improve, at least if the forecasters of the BBC are to be believed. The one day in the last week that was an exception to the ongoing gloom was Thursday, the day on which the general election was held. In the UK, the advent of decent weather for such a day was supposed to improve the turnout. It did … in Scotland at least. South of the border the turnout was much the same as usual, at around 65 %. As the winning party managed to poll 36.7%, this effectively meant that only about 1 person in every 4 actually voted for them. In the strangely undemocratic democratic system of the UK, this is enough to give the winning party a majority.
There was much frustration all around, perhaps none more poignant than than of UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party). Personally, I have little sympathy with their views, but much empathy with their frustration. On the day they polled 12.6% of the vote, approximately a third of the Conservative party's 36.7%. The result? The Conservatives end up with 331 times the 1 seat that was given to UKIP in this bizarre system.

UKIP also managed to attract something like two and a half times the number of votes that the SNP (Scottish Nationalist Party) polled. Again, their 3,881,129 votes gave them just the one seat, whilst the SNP's 1,454,436 gave them 56. One wonders if this is an example of the kind of 'democracy' that the West has been so keen to impose on the rest of the planet in recent times. The 'first past the post' system employed in the UK seems to be a pretty random form of democracy at best.

In the end, the conservative with a 'small c' United Kingdom ended up with a Conservative with a 'big C' government, as is their usual wont in these islands. The only interruption in the last 36 years of Conservative rule came when the Labour Party essentially ditched any notion of being socialist and became instead a mirror image of the Conservatives. Basically, they out-toried the Tories. This seems to be just about the only way they have any chance of being elected in this somewhat insular country. Napoleon Bonaparte was perhaps displaying a fair degree of insight when he made the observation some two hundred years ago: “L'Angleterre est une nation de boutiquiers.”

One of the things I have not missed about the UK is the class warfare, although it seems to be a battle fought by just one side these days. The wealthy, and those many politicians who represent their interests, seem forever engaged in finding new ways to dis-empower the poor and make their plight ever more desperate. The poor, for their part, are just struggling to keep their heads above the ever rising tide. The word class is perhaps particularly apt in this context, given that many of our current crops of Tories, at least the influential ones, shared the same school, Eton. Some of these, notably Messrs. Cameron, Osborne and Johnson, went on to Oxford, joining the (in)famous Bullingdon Club and having a jolly spiffing time...

Oh well, as an old friend used to say, 'If things don't change, they will stay the same.' Or perhaps the Thai saying, 'same old, same old' is more applicable here.
Within a week or two, after the euphoria of victory, it will be back to the internecine in-fighting that the Tories specialise in. If things revert to the normal pattern that the Conservative Party loves to indulge in, there will be endless trench warfare within the party, factions within factions, particularly over the issue of Europe. One of the joys of travelling is leaving all this far behind.

Hopefully, within a week or two, I can set out once more for another part of the world and leave the rather dull, archaic and downright illogical machinations of the UK's political system to its own devices. There is some chance that I will be able to head off to Spain, perhaps Girona, Barcelona or Tarragona, in the very near future. If all goes well, I intend to spend at least a day or two in Madrid as well. Given the current state of the weather, and the current state of the politics here in the UK, the continuation of my travels cannot come too soon for this nomadic flaneur.