Dear J.,

this evening I found myself sitting in a Japanese restaurant with a Welshman in China, telling A. all about Checkov and projection and character work, spilling out my theater experience onto the hotplate, so to say, and holding on tightly to the memories with my chopsticks. So there we were, two people with actors inside them somewhere, munching on scallops and fisheggs, and wide-eyed like a child A. soaked up what I shared before he d… Continue

I was in a rush so when I dashed into the China Construction Bank branch at New World Garden, leaped at the ATM machine and slipped in the card, I did not notice the blank black screen. The card disappeared and jumped back out. I pushed it back into the slot just to see it reappear a second later. Frustrated, I pushed it back in. It came back out. “Arrrr” I announced. “Machine out of order!” a grumpy voice informed me from inside the machine. I instantly snapped out of my mad-dash-mode. “Oh, I'm… Continue

You cannot:

Use a year-old German newspaper to pad out a China Post box containing a gift for a friend in Germany…it’s considered ‘sensitive’ packaging material.

You can:

Pepperspray a robber until he’s crawling on the ground wailing thinking he’s forever blind, kick him in the stomach and alternately in the butt, whack him over the head with your smiley face umbrella numerous times, and take home the new carpet cutter he held against your throat; you needed one anyway.… Continue

The sudden rainstorms in Beijing last Tues (16th June) cause a flutter of tweets, speculating that the Beijing Weather Modification Bureau aka 北京市人工影响气象办公室 has wreaked havoc and caused irreversible damage.

I never thought we would talk about the weather in Beijing as much as the Londoners are wont to do. But we did.

Bemused, I decide to write an ode to the apocalyptic weather that unexpectedly visited Beijing :

Wind and The Rai… Continue