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.

Flight of fancy

Even more incredibly than my last post, I’m currently tapping away at however many thousand metres from some unknown point over China. What a time to be alive.

Used to be a long flight was the perfect excuse to be out of touch from the world for a few hours, but jets are connected to the internet now. Can’t escape it.

It does mean I could try and google the plot of the weird Spanish film I’m watching with my dinner where nothing seems to be happening for the last hour. No wait, something just happened. That was unexpected.

We stopped over in Hong Kong for an hour or so, which was nice. Just long enough to enjoy a can of Coke Plus, which is in a red on white can and has added fibre for some reason. Someone told me it helps to stop the body from absorbing fats. I don’t know whether it’s just enough to cancel out your coke, or whether you could drink it with chips and emerge at the other end slimmer. It’s a whole different world in east Asia you know, decades ahead.

In-flight entertainment

I hate to be the sort of person that does this, but I’m currently corresponding from a little business class perch on the tarmac at Heathrow. I’ve got a booth like one of those American films set in a dreadful office, only this time it’s great that I’ve got little walls and a door that separate me from the rest of the riff-raff.

I’ve got a strategy for the flight – it’s a very long haul trip, and my plan is to try and not sleep so that I’m really tired when I get there and sleep a proper night’s sleep. It’s faintly masochistic and I’m not sure that I’ll actually manage it, but I’ve got a lot of time and a nice long list of films to watch.

A curious case

I am terrible at packing. I can’t focus on what I’ll need, I can’t bear to be without the things I want to take for any length of time before I go. The only answer is to pack hurriedly the night before and hope for the best.

I’ve got a trip coming up tomorrow and I started packing on Saturday, which is unprecedentedly early by my standards. I didn’t make a list, I’m not mad, but I did leave some non-specific gaps in provision that I’ll never remember at a later date.

I’ll overpack if I start too soon. I’ve had to ditch three jumpers and a pair of trousers. I like to take plenty of underwear and enough spares to withstand a display of incontinence that would shame a baby. And far too many shoes.

I’ve managed, after much negotiation with myself, to get me down to a level of baggage that I’m not happy with per se, but that I can just about live with. And that feels like progress.

Today’s the day…

I am currently sitting on a patch of grass next to the Thames somewhere enjoying a picnic – the first of the year, no less.

It’s one of those moments where life is good. Amazing how many of those moments involve me scooping hummus into my mouth now that I think about it.

The sun is beating periodically down (gosh it gets cold when that thing disappears behind a cloud), the insects are flooding the blanket and the birds are a-twittering. Not so much the red kites, which glare from a height and seem to have their beady eyes on our homemade sausage rolls. Joke’s on them when they find out they’re made of Quorn.

There’s something particularly British about this form of picnic. You wait for nice weather and once you’ve decided on a moment then you grit your teeth through whatever comes your way. No rain though today thank goodness, just the odd threatening cloud that’s happy enough to float on and ruin someone else’s day later on.

There are certain rules to these picnics – there are vegetable sticks, hummus, crisps and curled sandwiches. Tiny plastic cups to hold whatever luminescent fizzy drink you’ve squirrelled in the oversized picnic bag. A scotch egg if you’re feeling particularly fancy. My mum used to bring cold sausages on every picnic, though I’ve never seen that repeated.

And then there’s the other rule – the one that guarantees you getting a light sunburn at the first picnic of the year. I’m feeling a little overexposed on my sparse head… must remember my hat next time.

I make some soup

We had some bread to use up this evening so I thought (well, I was told to by my wife) I’d make a nice bit of soup it could be dunked into.

I settled on a tasty leek, potato and carrot recipe that seemed to deftly straddle the seasons – you don’t want to be too hearty in spring, it all gets a bit heavy – and started cooking.

This one just involved chopping all the vegetables and cooking them in a pan before adding some stock and then cooking some more. The recipe said to add milk at this point, but I’m allergic so I chucked in some coconut yoghurt instead.

The final effort was blitzed up with the stick blender, though I was fairly convinced by this point of the dish’s blandness.

I chucked in a splosh of Maggi and some salt and began hoping for the best. Whether that was anything to do with it or not I was delighted to taste the soup and realise that it was actually pretty decent.

No interesting moral to the story I’m afraid, just me having dinner.

Birthday celebrations

Today was (and indeed remains) Mrs Burnett’s birthday – an unfortunate clash of professional requirements (I was working) meant that we didn’t get to spend the day together, but I did get to hear her crashing through the house while she got ready to go out.

They’re funny things, birthdays, especially the older you get. I’ve never cared for them particularly – just sitting around getting older doesn’t feel like a particular achievement, and we all have enough of a sense of self-preservation that there’s no skill in having done so. There are any number of people older than me, though I guess if I hung on long enough I might find myself in that excessively exclusive club where you’re the single oldest person on the entire planet.

Not that I would want to be, mind, but the odds aren’t exactly stacked in my favour, not the way I eat. I don’t mind my age as a number as long as there’s some reasonable consensus that I don’t look as old as I actually am. While I type Mrs Burnett is engaged in a passive aggressive fight with the cat over the space on her side of the bed (the cat’s), which is proof if it were needed that age brings you no privilege.

I'm on the train

I just had to pop down to London to pick up my passport because some embassy only went and stuck a piece of paper in it.

It’s amazing the power of that piece of paper, the amount of work that many people have poured in so that this piece of paper could be glued in by an anonymous bureaucrat on a completely random page that’s hard to find (near the back).

The resources expended, the boxes ticked. The heads scratched, frankly. I’ve never been that good with administration and I’m a disaster at filling out forms. I’ve had to scan things, ask for documents, I’ve had to make up find out important information. It’s been a mission.

Despite all that, I think what swung it for me was the fact that a hidden but powerfully influential figure in the concealing shadows of a far flung foreign ministry was persuaded by another powerful friend of mine (I’ve not met them yet mind) to put a little pressure on the right place. I don’t think I mean literally, but you never really know. It pays to have friends in high places, I find. Mostly from my experience of not having friends in high places.

I shan’t tell you where I’m going, because it’s more interesting and mysterious that way. Unless you have access to my work calendar, which is neither interesting nor mysterious.