Chip off the block

I used to run this little pony show as a chip shop review blog and quite enjoyed myself doing it, but then suddenly found myself not having written anything on it in a year for whatever reason and decided to have a bit of an overhaul. Are we in a net better position? Arguably not, but we’re here and that’s that.

But it did get me thinking over the weekend as I was sat in a chip shop how much I miss the excuse to pop out and try a new place (“It’s for the website, it’s important”), especially when there’s something innovative on offer. Though any reviewer will tell you that life is much easier when the thing you’re reviewing is bad, because for some reason the creativity flows much better – it’s harder to be nice.

I was in Machynlleth for the comedy festival, which is an absolute treat incidentally, and if you enjoy comedy it’s well worth considering. Unless you hate camping, in which case book a room somewhere for three years’ time and go then.

There are two chip shops down the main strip of Mach, though they are in fact the same place with two different locations – this monopoly doesn’t seem to be harming things, especially their creativity. They’ve come up with whatever the next size up from a jumbo sausage is (like getting a jeroboam of champagne) and my particular favourite from my meal the other day was a battered mushy pea fritter with chilli jam in the middle.

Savoury legume doughnut probably isn’t on anyone’s bingo list, but it’s a delight worth trying. As is the place in Arbroath on the east Scottish coast that does an all you can eat chip shop buffet. It’s a seven hour drive away, but it consumes my thoughts – it’s just a question of when, not if I go up there and eat until I can’t move. And it wouldn’t even be for the website.

I can see clearly now

What a difference a day makes, etc. It’s been largely dry today, but with enough fat dark clouds lumbering overhead that you can’t feel too safe. You still want to take your waterproof coat with you just on the off-chance, even if the sun is shining brightly. Croeso y Gymru.

I saw waterproof, it might have been billed as such when I bought it many years ago, but these days it’s anything but. It lets water in at the seams, and if I stay out in a shower for too long the very fabric itself becomes saturated with moisture.

I have any number of things I could wear that would be drier in a storm than my actual waterproof, and I include the concept of gaffer taping a series of buckets and plant pots together for shelter.

But there’s something psychologically stimulating about deploying my waterproof, and it looks like the sort of thing you should be wearing when the rains come down. Less fashion, more victim.

Still, that’s all moot now that the rain has stopped and the sun reappears briefly. But it will be back. It always comes back. And I’ll be ready (but ill-equipped).

Rain of terror

It is raining a lot right now. It rained a lot the other day, to the extent that the rain started to permeate the tent and it was raining inside. I didn’t like the inside rain, I think rain is definitely the sort of thing that’s best kept outside. Unless it’s in a controlled fashion like a shower or misting your house plants.

The water is puddling on the roof, and I’ve tried various things to stop this from happening, moving the pegs and pulling the guy ropes this way and that. None of it ultimately seems to make a difference, so I just have to assume that the fabric of our tent is going the same way as the skin on my throat and no longer has the same level of tautness that it once enjoyed. I’m getting to the sort of age where my skin looks more like it’s draped than it’s effectively containing whatever is within.

I ran around the tent with a waterproofing spray the other day when it first rained, which seems to have done the trick in stopping the water coming through. I can’t get my head round the fact that spraying something wet can stop other wet stuff from making other stuff wet, it’s magic. I’m slightly worried that it’ll ultimately give up, and that this will happen eventually in the small hours, which are the worst hours to have to deal with a camping catastrophe.

I have decided though that despite it being only 20 past seven that I am now done for the day and can start to burrow my way under my many blankets and coverings with a view to emerging tomorrow when the rain has stopped. A temporary hibernation, if you will.

Feeling tents

I am camping this weekend, which doesn’t necessarily sit too well with me. It’s not just because it’s quite cold and wet where I am (surprise: Wales), it’s also that I’m not naturally outdoorsy.

In fact I very much enjoy being inside, especially when it’s warm and comfortable. Who doesn’t like being warm and comfortable? Well, outdoorsy people.

It’s entirely too early in the year to be camping, even if it is May. I think there’s a sweet spot in early August, but it still gets chilly at night. Sometimes I have to wear a hoodie backwards to cover my face while I sleep, but this weekend I’m contenting myself with three blankets and a hot water bottle.

Full of beans, me

The first meal I had at home after I got back from China was beans on toast. That’s dreadfully British of me, and I’m almost embarrassed to admit it, but the stomach wants what the stomach wants.

We stayed at a swanky hotel in Shanghai that actually had beans as part of its breakfast buffet offering, but I thought that I shouldn’t have flown all that way to eat something from home, so I had German sausage and mustard instead.

I should have gone for the beans really, because they would have been the most extravagantly expensive beans I’ve ever eaten. As if it’s not bad enough that they cost over £1 a tin these days. I’m old enough to remember the beans price wars of the mid-2000s when Aldi was chucking them out the door at 7p a piece.

I do have other exotic but basic go to comfort foods, I should add – I love a bit of Korean gyeran bap, which is a fried egg on boiled rice, or Italian aglio e olio, which is spaghetti with garlic and olive oil.

And in actual fact a lot of Brits would weep at what I do to my beans – I add crispy onion bits, lots of paprika, a teaspoon of pickled garlic, a drop of sriracha and a dollop of barbecue sauce and let it all simmer for a few minutes while I toast a bit of sourdough. Yikes, I’ve just this moment realised that I’ve only gone and gentrified my own thing.

Zoned out

Strangely I got temporarily used to the jet lag while I was in China because I stayed awake for the entire two-leg journey out there – I was so exhausted by the time I arrived that I easily slept straight the night (and my alarm the next morning). Once I was a bit more refreshed my internal body clock had a little more trouble keeping things on the straight and narrow.

It’s such a funny thing isn’t it, to be able to travel so quickly and efficiently to the other side of the world, to a place that’s so other that your own body is allergic to being there. Our brains tell us that we don’t belong, and it lends the whole experience a muted air, makes you feel slightly removed from what’s in front of you.

The travel day yesterday blew my mind – it was my brother’s birthday, but I messaged him just after midnight in China even though it was early evening the day before as far as he was concerned. I’m surprised that more birthday hounds don’t use Pacific time to extend their celebrations by an hour or 12. I realised at some point that my Monday was going to be a 31-hour day, taking off at 11am in China and landing at 6.45pm in the UK on the same day after 14 hours in the air.

But thank goodness I’m back in my right time – I had a good night’s sleep, said hello to the cat (she pretended not to know who I was, but that’s just one of her little jokes), and enjoyed a familiar cup of coffee this morning as I contemplated my mortality. And the wash basket. At least I expect to live long enough to get these two loads washed and on the line. Anything after that is a bonus – gifted time, if you will.

Hate and switch

I rarely hate someone, it just doesn’t seem to be worth the investment of energy and emotion that someone you could hate should ever deserve. I prefer a sort of studied indifference, I choose not to spend time with people I don’t like if I can help it.

But there’s this man on the plane I couldn’t help but take an instant dislike to – before we’d even got ready to take off he was sitting in his seat with his headphones on, shouting on one of the members of staff to put his bag up in the locker for him. He wasn’t an old man, in shape enough to have crossed the threshold of a gym in the recent past – not incapacitated, is what I’m saying. He clicked his fingers and shouted ‘ni hao’ across the cabin and it was hate at first sight.

It was the way he pulled his shoes and socks off so that I had to stare at his naked toes for 14 hours, the way he’s raised complaints about everything he possibly can, harassing the onboard staff with his trivial complaints.  He keeps starting films, then stopping them and finding other ones. Some of them he’s started in the middle, then discarded.

I’m aware that it’s completely irrational to have formed such a deep opinion of somewhere I’ve never met (he just sneezed three times in a row and that really irritated me, there was something rude about it), but when you’re tired and it’s a long flight you need something to do. Especially when the wifi wasn’t working and the in-flight entertainment packed it in at one point. I had to spend nearly 20 minutes with my own thoughts, which was fairly harrowing.

It’ll be fine once I’ve landed, because I’ve got no memory for faces and I’ll forget who he even is. Maybe it’s not studied indifference, my magnanimity towards the awful is simply the virtuous side effect of a useless brain. I’ll take it though.

Train of thought

In the UK a high-speed train is merely one that’s moving – it’s hard to conceive of a world in which fast trains are not only as fast as they say they are, but also smooth and comfortable into the bargain.

I’m currently writing at 217mph, and while the number is remarkable, the journey itself is impressively dull. If anything I’m probably a bit chilly with the aircon working aggressively to undercut the 30ºC heat of a baking Chinese spring.

You have to go through an ID check (a lady with a little belt-mounted speaker to amplify her voice when shouting at people let us through a side gate, you need a national Chinese ID card to get through the main gates) and then you ease down to a hushed platform where the high-speed train awaits.

There’s no messing around, these trains leave as punctually as you like. The timetable allows for two-minute stops along the route, but we actually get going out of Beijing main station an entire minute early. In London I wouldn’t even know what the platform number’s going to be yet.

The station itself is a world apart from anything we might be used to in Europe, a cross between a sports stadium and international airport. Roads swoop around the outside of the sleek building and you go through a thorough security scan before you’re allowed onto the concourse within. It’s a jostling, purposeful atmosphere, none of the arresting confusion of a British railway station.

The countryside is the washed out green of a hot day, the horizon distantly shimmering, the occasional hills flitting past. We pass through immense metropolises, with scores of identical tower blocks clustered around each other. The first stop is in a city called Jinan, that I’ve never knowingly heard of, but is home to 9.2 million people and is a steel centre for China, with the related heavy industry crammed in about the furnaces.

It’s barely even a glimpse at the scale and busy-ness of China as a country, but it’s an impressive enough insight merely to zoom past at incredibly efficient speed.

That's motor show business

Oh dear, I missed another day. But it’s OK because I have a note from my mum. Yesterday I was at the Beijing motor show, which was as busy as these things get (17 halls to power walk round, with minimal information about what’s what).

Obviously we had to get there very early, because time is money or something. It’s actually my favourite part of the day watching the handymen (handypersons?) rush to finish the last few bits and pieces, gluing the carpets down and desperately applying last minute bits of health and safety information.

I was up at 6am (11pm UK time, my body remains very confused by the turn of events) for a quick breakfast and  dash out the door once I’ve filled my bag with fully charged equipment and as much water as it’ll fit inside. I didn’t sleep well that night because I left my curtains open to help me get up with the sun and evidently those bad boys had been doing a lovely job of filtering out the worst of the honking on the busy road outside the hotel. The angry horn pressing seemed to quieten down around 4am, but even then I only managed a fitful sleep.

Sprinting between stands at a motor show is a great way to wake up though – I love a good old fashioned set of halls with obscenely expensive displays of automotive prowess arranged within. The carmaker I was visiting the show with had a two-storey set of rooms at the back of its stand, with a cafe area upstairs and a lovely little sun terrace nestled in below the spotlight rigging. A delightful spot to sit with a drink of water while you furiously type away about whatever it was you were just looking at.

I managed just under 19,000 steps, which is the sign of a day well used in my book – significantly less than the 28,000 steps I did the first year I went to the Frankfurt motor show, mind. I just hadn’t realised that the halls were all so far apart, and I’d arrange interviews all over the place and spent most of the day sprinting up and down travelators like I was the contestant who falls over in the Gladiators finale and just tries to finish because their family is watching.

Jet lagged

I am in Beijing – and have managed to get through the day remarkably well considering I arrived late last night in a daze.

The daze was because I was trying an extremely ill-advised strategy of not sleeping during the 16 hours of flying so that I was tired enough to get to sleep at what my body would otherwise have been fairly convinced was lunchtime.

Even as I type it’s early evening in the UK, I’d just be winding up a day’s work at the office, but here it’s past midnight and barely a soul is stirring in the streets below. Actually I lie, there are horns tooting and even though I’m 11 floors up I can see a frankly concerning number of people wandering the pavements below. Maybe everyone’s body thinks it’s eight hours ago, could just be a China thing.

One of the upsides of not sleeping on the plane was that I managed to watch seven films while I was in transit. I wouldn’t have chosen to watch all of them if I wasn’t trapped in a tube hurtling through the air at many hundreds of miles an hour, but still.

Now, if you’ll excuse me I should try and get to sleep properly, I’ve got to be up early.