Operation Overlord II (or three middle aged idiots go to Normandy)

I haven't written for ages and I have no excuse. I've just been very lazy. I got back from Shangers ages ago and since then I've been doing mostly nothing, which I confess, I have been thoroughly enjoying.
I got shat on twice by albatrosses. You've seen the picture of the first one but I got dive bombed again in Red Lion Square. This one was reasonably solid with a "miniscus" of calcified slime that landed with an audible thump on my right shoulder, up there near where it joins the neck. Once I'd cleared the solid debris I left the dried miniscus up there as a sort of lucky poo-brooch. I will undoubtedly win the lotto today (10 million big ones my friends. Friend. Rollover.). I haven't got a picture of this new poo. Frankly, for all but the keenest bird shit fancier, once you've seen one bird shit on someone's shoulder, you've seen one more than you wanted to see in the first place.

Anyway I tell a lie. I have been up to something.  Me and two mates went to Normandy to visit the invasion beaches. I think it's something men do when they reach a certain age and they start to wonder if sitting at a desk, a'tapping away at a computer laptop, going to meetings with shitheads, fuckos and bellends and dealing with the day to day inconsequential bullshit that is advertising (and let's face it most of what passes for "work" these days) is, in any way at all, a noble way of living. You reach an age where the glamour of sitting on your fat arse thinking up stupid stuff, getting drunk all the time, having meaningless sex and playing with crayons, starts to pall and for once in your life you start to think of something other than your own hedonistic, solipsistic pleasures.
So we seek to empathise with brave men who did something corageous, noteworthy and terrible. While we test ourselves against nothing more dangerous than a moron in a suit armed with nothing more deadly than a fucking stupid opinion, they tested themselves against the terrible fear of violent, painful and imminent death.
And, not unsurprisingly, we find ourselves lacking. Just my opinion of course. Oh and Samuel Johnson's (who wrote English Literature's most emminent work, namely the first ever Dictionary of the English language) who wrote "Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea."
In the thankfully fleeting moments I have been able to get even close to putting myself, albeit only mentally, in the boots of these men; boys really, I have been terrified.

Bit serious wasn't it? Back to the fooling about.
Dan and Giles are both married with children and I have no concept of taking responsibility for anything. A heady mix of potential stupidity when we are released from the day to day grind of talking bollocks, trying to sound like you know what you're talking about and dealing with "life."
That's right my one reader, we got completely pissed on the first night. The whole night got off to a weird start when the waitress at our chosen restaurant was cross-eyed. Normally you can deal with this by gazing intently at the eyeball that is gazing at you. She, however kept swapping which one she was looking at you with. Sometimes in mid sentence. I think she was doing it on purpose. Needless to say I quite fancied her. Of course we got terrifically over excited (not about her, about freedom) and the scores were thus.
We each had 7 pints of pissy French biere and an equal share of two bottles of vin rouge. We got back to the hotel at 3AM. A good 5 hours past our bedtime. Here's pic of me the next day with one of the hotel's early residents.

He looks a lot happier than I do. I am so hungover here, that my hair was hurting.

I've done the lottery today.

I pretty confident I'll win it. So everyone start being nice to me or you won't get in the will. Why so confident? I'll tell ya. I got shit on by a bird. Not a nut-eating wren or a little berry-nibbling peewit. No. A fucking great ocean-going, seafaring, fish guts-eating, ice cream cone-stealing, seagull/albatross bird.

I estimate the shit was loosed from Angels 25 so it had easily reached terminal veocity well before it reached me and had started to break up. I think I glanced its final approach in my peripheral vision (I have excellent peripheral vision) and it seemed to make a whistling noise as it shot past my ear. Anyway part of it (a satellite portion of shit) hit my neck, but the mothership of shit hit my shoulder with a splatting noise. Another quite small satellite portion of shit struck my thumb and via the action of steering my car, was transferred onto the steering wheel of my car.

Anyway. All this is incredibly lucky so by tomorrow, according to the estimate on my ticket, I will have 10 million big ones. I think I'll splash out on a new cricket bat.

Look at my daft face all upset.

And so we say farewell again.

That's right. I'm off home again. It's been 6 weeks. Hasn't time flown? Good job too because instead of muttering "get out of my fucking way" to Chinese people who block the pavement, I have begun to say it out loud, relying on their inability to speak English to save me from a punch on the conk or a bunch of fives or a kick up the breadbasket.

This is where you can get your boobies tattooed

This complete indifference to other people takes the form of this type of encounter. I will be walking down Shanxi Lu to work in the morning. There's a sort of cafe on the way and people gather there to get breakfast. This takes the form of crowding round, barging people out of the way and trying to get served first. Anyway this crowd spills out onto the street, narrowing an already narrow pavement further. A roadside tree narrows it yet further an there's a railing so you can't skip out onto the road to avoid the bottleneck. So what your looking at is a gap slightly narrower then a person through which every pedestrian on that side of the busy street must pass.

What happens is this. A person walking steadily along in front of me, without stopping, moving smoothly (admittedly at the annoying speed Shanghai people walk - called the Shanghai Shuffle - it's too slow to stay behind and too fast to overtake easily) will automatically choose that very spot to stop and....... and..... do nothing! They don't want food, they don't want to tie their shoelace, they don't want to fish their mobile out of their pocket, nothing. They just want to look at air or something. People here seem to have a 6th sense about what would be the stupidest, most inconvenient, selfish thing they could possibly do and then do it. Pavement wankers.

One of China's picturesque homes

It's uncanny. People walking towards you will veer across the pavement to obstruct you. Once you know this of course, you can use it to your advantage. Whenever you walk around the key thing is to imagine what surrounding people could do to inconvenience you the most. Drive their bike at you, park their car on the pavement, drive their taxi at you at full speed then slow right down to a crawl so that you can't cross the road, veer across the pavement, just walk straight at you, stop suddenly, yell alarmingly.. any number of things. Whatever it is will inevitably happen but because you have thought ahead, you have already mapped out a route to get round the obstruction. When you outsmart them, they find it REALLY annoying. Ha!

A crane down by Nanpu Bridge on the Haungpu River. Honestly it's pu this, pu that. And, you've guessed it, pu the other.

 For example I must use the lift to get to the ground floor of my apartment block. When the lift reaches the ground floor any Chinese peoples waiting for the lift there will just charge on regardless if there is anyone trying to get off. It has been necessary on occasions to stand aside to let them in before you can get out. Not anymore. As the lift nears the ground floor I stand directly in front of the doors with my nose 1cm from the lift doors. So when they open I am right there in front of them blocking the door. It gives them quite a fright and makes them really cross that they haven't been able to get in anyone's way.

Anyway. As many a traveller has told me, it's important to embrace the customs and traditions of the peoples one is visiting. So I've given up being polite. When in Shanghai, behave as the Shanghaiese do. Barge through, never stand aside, never give an inch.

Yes yes. It sounds like London. But it isn't. It's worse here.

Recently there was a hoo hah about a young girl who was knocked down and then ignored by passers by. It surprises me not one jot. Life is cheap here and no one gives a fuck about anyone else. It is just a race to get rich and embrace all the worst excesses of Western culture.

That was cathartic. I was drinking a beer called Dead Guy Ale last night which may go some way to explaining the vitriol.

The more things change...the more they stay the same.

In The Kangaroo, you are allowed to chalk slogans, bon mots and witty aphorisms on the walls and ceilings. In the old days (last April) when I was here last and before the great Kangaroo Fuck Up (KFU) when they renovated it up, the walls were permanently adorned with all sorts of rubbish and in my mind, all the better for it but, as everyone knows, whatever I think is automatically wrong.
Anyway I was having a lonely pint in there on Friday (actually not so lonely because the barmaids have started talking to me now) and I happened to glance at the ceiling. When you're by yourself in a bar you often find yourself looking in places you don't normally look. Anything to entertain yourself. Anyway I was rewarded for my curiosity with this excellent piece of erudition.

Dutch/ Belgian graffiti on the ceiling of The Kangaroo. The circular object is a ceiling light.

It's not so much the font he's used, the kerning or indeed the sentiment behind his observation that is so interesting. It's the fact that given an empty space and a writing instrument, a bloke will always default to drawing a jizzing cock (a little known fact is that the earliest cave paintings were of jizzing cocks - archeologists hide this fact because they don't want to let on that our earliest ancestors were basically giggling neanderthal knobheads  - Homo Knobheadiens is the missing link. It's not missing at all it's just largely hidden in shame).
However I don't think this is drawn by a British person.  Why? Read on.

Number 1: The name Chris Van V sounds distinctly Dutch/Belgian and those guys don't like to mix.
Number 2: The "jizz" is a sort of.....well I don't know how to describe it.... all wrong. Anyway a plucky British bloke would have drawn a dotted line, curving at the end to show the effects of gravity.
Number 3: The balls are too well drawn The artist has given them perspective. That's a no no. Just two big Mickey Mouse ears drawn with one sweeping line is the British way.
Number 4: No crinkly hair emanating from the balls. Whilst not mandatory, if not under time pressure, a British bloke will usually add 2 to 4 crinkly "hairs" as a kind of artistic flourish. Such as Picasso might do.

Shanghai taxi service

Someone at my apartment block booked a cab from the guys down at BJ taxis. Having seen the driver I don't think I'll be booking them for my trip to the airport. If you know what I mean (and I think that you do)

This is where I get my massages from No.9.

It was China's National Day last Saturday where everyone is so delighted to be living in a repressive regime that they take the week off and go on holiday. This has left me at a bit of a loose end. While most of the population leave the city, leaving only 2% of the population here (8,000,030,000,070 there or thereabouts) I'm here all by myself and a few other white people.
So far I have been doing these things: Running down by the mighty Huangpu River, waking up late, eating pizza, attracted the attentions of a homosexual man (still got it), drinking dark beer (new discovery - it is more expensive than normal Chinese beer so it has the distinct advantage of actually tasting nice), sitting in the office all by myself, sitting in the office with two other people, sitting in a cafe with all the other tables occupied by other solitary white people. And been for two massages.

I went to the place above and asked for a Chinese massage. It's about £7. This is definitely NOT a relaxing massage. A tiny little Chinese girl came into the room and gave me my massage outfit. A big pair of baggy shorts and baggy top. She insisted I put on a pair of slippers so I did. Then roughly 2 seconds later she gestured to the bench for me to lie down which I did. She then emitted a squeak and took the slippers off again. Eh?
Anyhow. Then she got going.

The massage ratios went something like this:

50% Excrutiating agony.
26% Pain.
3% What in the UK would be termed Grevious Bodily Harm.
17% Quite nice.
2% arousing (listen there's a twenty year old, Chinese version of Angelina Jolie wobbling your bum cheeks around. I defy Pope John Paul John Ringo to stay unmoved).
9% wobbling.
2% faintly ridiculous (she grabbed my hand and made my arm make like a skipping rope).

The most painful bits were
1. When she grabbed the two bits of biological string (tendons I think is the  medical term) that go from the lower 'sides' (another medical term) of your neck and attach onto your shoulders. I think they're for stopping your head from toppling off. Anyway she grabbed both of these and started pulling them AWAY from my rest of my body. I'm not ashamed to say, my one reader, that I yelped. You know, like dogs do when you step on their paws. She laughed.
2. She counted down the vertebrae in my back, one by one, until she identified one she plainly took a dislike to, popped one thumb onto it, then balanced her entire body weight on it. Jesus. I don't know what it had done to her but she really took offence.

I think I can truthfully say that it was a "happy ending" in that I was bloody happy when she made little squeaking noises that indicated I was free to go. She pointed to her badge and said "No.9!" I really wanted her to add "me love you long time." Not 'cos it's rude. Because it would have flowed so seamlessly.

I wasn't going to fall for that one again so the next time I went I had an "Oil massage." And...OK... I admit it....I also asked for No.9. It felt sleazy. A number.

In this massage you wear a pair of disposable blue shorts and that's it. No.9 squeaked a lot again but there was no slipper fiasco. I had taken the precaution of hiding them when she left the room for me to don the blue pant. I lay down on the bench. This massage wasn't anywhere near as painful but there were occasions, mostly when I fell asleep, relaxed as a badger, that she would remind me of her presence by rubbing me really vigorously and getting a good bit of heat going and making my head bounce up and down. She had another go at the vertebrae she doesn't like, though her heart wasn't in it this time.

There was plenty of wobbling and arse cheek....what's the word... ahh yes...kneading. Le mot juste. And surprisingly but not unpleasantly, stomach patting. I know. Sounds weird. Is weird. But really very nice. She does take the precaution of draping a towel over your manservant...ahhh....area and jolly good job too.

I shall be going back to No.9 (or Niney as I have nicknamed her)  for one more massage before getting smashed watching the rugby on Saturday. What a treat for her.

I ask you (part ii)

Look. I discovered the thing on my phone that makes photos look like polies.

Look at this parking. This is fairly typical. Though there is a perfectly good bike parking area about 1 foot away, this person has opted to park his bike right in the middle of the pavement. Not even parallel to the way people walk. No. Right across the fucking pavement. People will often do this with cars so that there is absolutely NO room to get past and pedestrians have to walk into the road. Bizarrely no one gets annoyed about this and they just shuffle past. Which is a miracle because Chinese people seem to get cross with each other quite a lot. The sight of two women standing in the middle of the road (Ruijin Lu if you must know. Right outside the hospital) yelling at each other while buses and cars wormed their way round them was quite entertaining. Not just for me. Quite the crowd gathered.
I can only think that there are so many people here the only way to stay sane is to think you are the only person on the planet and it is quite within your rights to do just exactly what you arseing well like.
Which in a communist country may not be the wisest of choices.

I ask you.

You leave them alone for a couple of seconds and look what happens. Newleyweds. I suppose we can't blame them. Which leads me onto the honeymoon. Why is it called "honeymoon?"
The explanation is laughably simple. The couple are really sweet so that's why it's honey. And, especially in olden days, it was often the first time the groom had seen his wife's naked bottom. From which we get moon.
Thus Honey Moon and from there Honeymoon.

Newleyweds eh? They can't wait.

The happy couple.

Cardboard boxes containing wedding chocolates

One of the tiniest girls in the office got married at the weekend and the following Monday, gave everyone some chocolates in these rather alarming boxes. Naturally I ate them in about 3 seconds flat including a small sliver of ( I assume) paper  that you weren't supposed to eat. I ate it anyway.
What's with the teeth? Everything else is quite sweet. Little feet, nice tits, funny little flies "detail" and western eyes but great big gnashers. A row of giant incisors. That's right, bloody gargantuan Hamspsteads.

Oh, our Chinese cousins and their ways.

Over the weekend, I ran for five miles, ate vegetables and had two excellent naps (well a nap and a pre-nap, nap) and only managed three pints. In a word healthy. So I went to The Blue Frog last night and had a Swiss Cheese Burger and two well earned pints of Tiger. Oh boy. The Blue Frog? Blue Heaven more like.
Was going to go to The Chalet but The Frog has two for one burgers on a Monday night. You get the picture.

I'm back in the mop city

They're going to need more balloons if this baby's ever going to fly.

I'm back in Shangers. Just for a few weeks. Nothing's changed. The Chinese are all mad, the food mostly still has the beak on and mops continue to decorate the boulevards and thoroughfares of this Paris of the East. Named so because everyone is as rude, obstructive and hoity toity as the bloody French farts who live in Paris.
So far I've  done nothing but work.
Work, work, work the live long day. I may as well be in Saffron Walden for the amount of Shangers I get to see.
Anyhoo. I mentioned in past posts about a bar called The Kangaroo. A splendid place. All scruffy, graffitied, and down at heel. Just my kind of place. Well guess what? They did it up while I was away. Man alive! Why can't they leave my stuff alone the bar wankers. They've done it half arsed as well. So it is now,neither nice nor nasty. It falls, my one friend, between two stools. And no one likes that.
Having said that I go there a lot because of two reasons:-
1. It's near.
2. I'm very lazy.
d) It does quite good pizza.

When it was really scruffy I accidentally left my mobile phone there, though I didn't know that was where it was. I went back four days later and got one of the girls to ring my telephone on the off chance that it had slipped down the back of a chair. We heard it ringing and found it on the floor. Meaning no one had swept or cleaned the floor in four days. Nice. 

View from the bedroom window. Much the same as the view from my last bedroom window.

I'm back

How long for I simply don't know. I've finally got ahead of myself and have a spare 5 minutes to type some old nonsense up here. Moving turned out to be far more hassle than I anticipated. So trying to do that and do some work took up a lot of time.

Everything's now sorted (car insurance, breakdown cover, gas, electricity, water, congestion charge, parking permit, council tax, HMRC, banks, building socities, British Telecom, occupants of interplanatery craft, have all been informed of my new address and they have all taken advantage of this knowledge by setting up direct debits to take money from me. Every one of the above pieces of life admin required more the a simple phone call or letter. It required assembling proof of address, proof of identity, copy of gas bill, DNA sample, bone marrow sample etc etc. And each phone call was a "Press 1 if you want to speak to someone about such and such, Press 2 if you want to talk to someone about so and so." And no matter what time you called you were always held in a queue. And a lot of them were in India, which no matter what people say, isn't as easy as talking to someone who has English as their first language and because for some unkown reason my flat number doesn't appear on online registration forms and because of moving flat, living in Amsterdam followed by Shanghai I didn't have ready access to my documents, I was driven to the edge of despair. Here for example is how I spent and hour and a half NOT getting car insurance.

1. Go onto GoCompare website to get quotes


2. Get marvellous quote knocking £80 off of last year’s quote.

3. Want to check my no claims and whether my points are still on my licence.

4. Search for paper licence, can’t find it.

5. Call insurers and ask for those details. They are about to tell me when I get a call from Shanghai, which I have to take.

6. Shanghai rings off as soon as I answer it.

7. Call insurers back . Nice lady helps me and gives me my info.

8. Go to GoCompare to buy my insurance.

9. Can’t remember my security password for my creditcard.

10. Instead of just letting me change the password like it normally does, it freezes my card.

11. Call Egg. Unfreeze my card.

12. Go to GoCompare to buy my insurance.

13. My address does not appear on the drop down menu because it does not exist.

14. Computer won’t allow me to change my address.

15. Call GoCompare. Get man in India who says I should go to the edit screen and change it there.

16. Go back to GoCompare. Find edit screen. It still won’t let me change it.

17. In the meantime my quote has gone UP £25 quid!

18. Call GoCompare. Talk to lady in India whose computer has broken  and who suggests I call back in half an hour.

Start crying.



Here's me poking my head out of the window of my new flat.

The reason it looks like it's falling down on the right hand side is that  it is.





Just made on offer on a flat.

If that gets accepted I'm moving in and I'll be able to post some more regular crappy posts instead of hardly any crappy posts. These will take the form of hilarious observations of Britain and my fellow Britons' behaviour. Oh yes. We're just as daft/irritating/bastardy/cretinous/occasionallly lovely, as everyone else on this lonely world, spinning endlessly through the vast cold, empty reaches of space to no avail whatsoever.

I'm back in Blighty

Yes back home now and I've got to spend my time sorting my life out. I had to leave for Amsterdam in such a hurry back in November, that I couldn't organise all my life admin and it's all unravelled while I've been away. It doesn't help that I can't remember any of my passwords or PINs either. And I have to find a place to live. 47 is no age to be living with my mother. Anyway things might go a bit quiet while I sort it all out.
Laters duder (as the young people say - the twats).

Crikey

This was outside the restaurant we went to for our leaving dinner. Not sure I'll be partaking in their signature dish.

And so we say farewell.

Yes, my one reader, I'm coming home. After three months in the Paris of the East, it's time for Andy B to go home again to the land of pubs, warm, flat beer and quite a lot of bastards (in my worldwide travels I've noticed that they're everywhere).
But hold fast (I'm Edwardian) I still have four days left. Four days to say goodbye to all the friend I've made over here (the barman at The Kangaroo). Ha ha ha ha ha. Only joking. There's lots of nice people at work and I'm hoping to bid them all fond farewell in time honoured fashion. Yes, a traditional Chinese tea drinking ceremony in the Yuyuan Gardens followed by floating traditional Cherry Blossom  Xiangyuas (a sort of small boat) onto the Huangpu to symbolise moving on and then we all sing a traditional Chinese Song of the Double Happiness Return.
Actually sod that. I'm off to the Kangaroo to drink traditional beer, play traditional pool and start to believe that , over the time it's taken to drink three pints, I have somehow become charming, hilariously funny and Brad Pitt. Then polish the whole splendid evening off by traditionally getting run down by a 9ft pile of carboard on a tricycle. With a man somewhere in it.
It literally does not get better than that.
Fact.

Me wistfully contemplating the busy metropolis that is is Shanghai, whilst simultaneously balancing one end of the Lupu bridge atop my big fat head.

.

The Great Shanghai Boat Race

I was taking a stroll down by the Huangpu River last weekend and accidentally found the Shanghai equivalent of the Croisette in Cannes. It's an 8.5km stretch of uninterrupted riverside walk that, unlike the Croisette, is refreshingly empty of French people. Indeed at one end of it, it was empty of people entirely save for one handsome chap revelling in the rare solitude. Yes. Me.
Shanghai is notable for many things (The Helicopter Blow Job for one) but emptiness is not one of them. There's not a square inch of the city that doesn't contain someone else or isn't being swept, or spat on, having a fish descaled on or driven over with a tricycle.So you can imagine my surprise when I found this oasis of calm.
So I walked along for about half of it and was lucky enough to witness the annual Shanghai Shitty Boat Race. This race is open to every salty seadog, pirate and jolly jack tar with a shitty old tub in Shanghai to hurtle downriver to the sea. Here's some pictures of this year's race.

The Peleton

This was first, second and third until....

....the one in the middle started taking on a lot of water, flooded her bilges, swamped her gunwhales and sunk. These are her final moments.

Winner of the crappiest boat competition.HMS Xziazhouchanglelu.  Which is Mandarin for HMS Lotus Blossom Flower.

I'm getting there.

Been a bit busy at work. Here's a nice picture while we all wait for me to get my arse into goddam gear. It's me but I accidentally cut my head off (self portrait). But somehow, I think, it still works. Might be a bit better for not having the old Brittain conk taking up half the frame.
Your thoughts?

China. The most mopped country in the world.

Mops, mops, mops. Today you discover me investigatively reporting on China's long-established mop making industry that dates back to the Ming dynasty. A little known fact is that Ming vases aren't actually vases at all, they are early pottery mop buckets (we know this because an ancient Ming bucket unearthed in a recent archeological dig contained remains of a liquid which turned out to be coffee, which the ancient Chinese used as bleach - ironic when you consider that they are now using bleach as coffee).
The Chinese peoples take mopping very seriously and the mop industry is the 3rd largest industry in China, behind bicycle maintenance and security-guard uniform manufacture. China is at the forefront of mopping technology and most of the mopping innovations that we currently enjoy in the West, made their debut right here in Shanghai, the centre of mop innovation. Indeed, Shanghai is known throughout China as Mop Valley - Home of the Mop.
So much a part of the Chinese way of life is the mop, that proud owners of impressive models will display their mops outside their houses. I present to you here just a small selection of the best examples I saw during just one 14 minute stroll to work.

The Hazeldene S1000

Known as the Lazy Hazy, this beauty hit the bucket in 2009. She's  aluminium-shafted like her predecessor, the S100, but that's where the similarities end. Look at the business end (or "head"). Those cloth "flaps" are a breakthrough in absorbtion technology. She'll suck up 3 times the amount of liquid than the S100, making short work of your mop-based chores. It's from this astonishing absorbtion ratio that she gets the nick name "Lazy Hazy" because you're hitting the sofa 3 times faster then if you'd used her predecessor. This fine example is finished in an eye-catching yellow and has been displayed "head up" next to a road crossing for all to admire
In the background you can see a purple shiny helmet which I wouldn't be surprised to discover has been burnished to a high sheen by this very mop.

 A Simpson 14 (M Series) and a Fitzwilliam.

I know. I couldn't believe my eyes. It's a treat to see a working Fitzwilliam but to spot one head to head with a Simpson 14 is something that any mop spotter (or mopotter) would give their mopping arm to see. No wonder the proud owner had these on display. Balance issues discovered when test-piloting the Fitzwilliam (or Fitzy as she is known throughout the world) were swiftly solved when engineers incorporated a vulcanized rubber flange at the base of the shaft and the rest is history. The Fitzy became THE classic mop. The perfect combination of form and function she is the go-to mop for novices and experts alike. And to see her next to the futuristic M series "Simpo" 14, the mop she inspired, is a real treat. We all know the teething troubles with the L series (or the "Bloody L" as it became known), so it's no surprise to see that this one is an "M." No more words. Just absorb (pardon the pun) the view.

The Xiajiangchangshu Kenlu

You won't see many of these babies outside China. She's the Communist Party's People's Mop. She's a high flap-count, no frills, back-to-basics mop. Yes she's got a good action and yes she's got absorbant flaps. I put my hands up. She's good. But where's the balance? Even the similarly wooden shafted (and cheaper!) Beaujolais L/1200 had a more pleasing centre of gravity for goodness' sake. And the L/1200 came out of the aptly named but  notoriously badly managed (and now unsurprisingly defunct) Shanghai Mop Factory. I suspect this example is being displayed using the trendy "Window Ledge" mount, more to impress the local Party members than anyone else. I know, I know, I'm being very disparaging about a mop not designed to be aesthetically pleasing and it does incorporate  innovative shaft loop technology (from which it hangs) but, to me anyway, she promises more than she delivers. Mopwise.

The Dirt-be-gone.
 Ha ha ha ha. I couldn't resist putting up this picture. It will be no surprise to see this ill-fated mop sitting in a tree beneath a block of flats. Undoubtedly hurled over the balcony by a furious would be mopper. As you'll remember her appearance astounded the mop community when she appeared last year. Had she lived up to her designer's bold aspirations, no doubt she could have taken the coveted title of "World's Best Mop" from The Fitzy. But as we all know, far from absorbing dirty water, the ludicrously complicated head arrangement merely spread it about a bit.
 So there we have it. There are precisely 9 more pictures of mops that I took on this one 14 minute journey. Many of them design classics but I'll save them for another post.  In the meantime, please enjoy this last picture. That's right lady or gentleman, I present to you......the dazzling, the beautiful, the exotic, the one and only.... Flamenco 3300ZZ.

What will they think of next?

The hotel I'm staying in has installed an "Age Guessing" pod. It's a pretty cool piece of technology that examines your face, skin tone, blood pressure and heart rate and tells you what your "Body age" is. I filmed the procedure and I present it to you here. Have a look in awe and wonder. Good old the Chinese.

Pizzas and prostitutes

I was out until 2AM on Friday night a’drinking beer and a’laughing and a’messing about. Anyway that resulted, as it so often does, in a big old hangover. Spent most of Saturday either in Wagas (my favourite café in Shanghai) drinking coffee and stuffing egg and bacon sandwiches in my big fat face or on the sofa watching the World Cup cricket final.

Any old hoo, there was the offer of a drink on Saturday night but I was too knackered so I resolved to stay in and watch a film and eat a pizza. Soabout 8:15, I left the building and walked over the road to that famous Shanghaiese restaurant “Pizza Hut” to get a takeaway pizza. The service, as ever, was swift, polite and efficient and before long I was ushered  out the door with a 12 inch Hawaiin (a pizza, not a euphemism). On my return to the apartment complex I was accosted by a polite young Chinese bloke who asked me if I wanted a massage in my room and showed me a picture of some naked women. He was quite insistent that I would enjoy the massage and promised a “happy ending.” As he followed me along brandishing this picture of, admittedly quite saucy looking birds, it dawned on me that he was a pimp offering me the services of what amounted to nothing more health giving than a shag with a Shanghai hooker! Fuck me! Or in this case don’t fuck me. Anyway I turned him down with a polite,

“No thanks, mate.”

But he was insistent and kept following and kept brandishing, so I waved my pizza at him and said

“Pizza.”

And that was that. He gave up and buggered off.

What I like about this lengthy story is that, despite the massive difference in culture and understanding, he instantly appreciated that the prospect of eating a pizza was a perfectly reasonable excuse for not wanting a shag.

And it warmed my heart. Truly the yawning chasm in Anglo-Sino cultures is gradually disappearing. A welcome rapproachment with pizzas and prostitutes in the vanguard.

PS. This post doesn’t count in the poll. The next one does. Oooh what’s it going to be about? Exciting isn’t it.

Why not have a vote on my wonderous poll?

Go on. It'll be great.

Ahhhh look at her little face.

Her name is Xzhouxiangzxinledongzxh. She's quite old and lives in an alley that I use to get to work every morning. An alley, that I find out a full 2 months after I got here, is called Death Alley. So that's nice.

Anyway she occupies this spot because it gets the sun. They put a newborn puppy next to her a couple of days ago and she was licking it. Ahhhh very sweet.

Anyway. On an unrelated note my time out here has been partially spent in a quest to find a decent cup of coffee near to work that doesn't make one involuntarily shout "HOW MUCH!" when they tell you how much it is. I tried a new place yesterday.

It was a five minute walk away so not far but in a touristy place. I ordered the cheapest coffee on the menu. Only after she’d started making it did I read on the menu that it would take 10-12 mins to make.

Fuck a Peking duck. 

So I had to stand there hopping from foot to foot in frustration while she selected the correct jar of beans, ground the beans, poured the resulting coffee dust into a little paper funnel, placed that in the top of a thimble sized paper cup, then poured hot water, drop by agonising drop, onto the coffee dust and let it soak through and drip into the cup until the cardboard thimble was half full. By which point I was knobbing furious, and sweat was dripping down the walls. I paid…wait for it… £2.50! I walked back to work to enjoy what I thought was going to be the coffee equivalent of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling only to discover that she had spent 10-12 minutes making 2 inches of tepid dark brown water. 

Done like a fucking kipper.

I have no idea what this says

I liked it though so I took a picture of it.

What I do know is this. If it said "Come along to the Chinese Communist Party Are Poofaces Workshop. We need between 5 and 30 people.Nibbles will be served." then  two things would have happened:-
a) it wouldn't still be there for me to take a rather snazzy picture of.
and 2) the workshop would have been raided, the workshoppers arrested and the nibbles probably dashed to the floor in the inevitable scuffle.

Yes my one reader, today you are alarmed to find me exploring the dumbfounding world of totalitarian regimes. While I've been out here in Shanghai, people throughout the Middle East have been trying to throw off the yoke of totalitarian regimes and the Chinese government are worried that it will spread here. Here it's called the Jasmine Revolution and there have been tentative online attempts to organise protest here in Shanghai and also Beijing.  Censorship is increasing noticeably. For example one of the only four channels that broadcast in English out here is CNN, the American owned news network. I have been watching and whenever a report comes on that mentions protests in China, the feed is cut and the screen goes blank. This happened to a report that was about to mention the censorship in China. They censored the censorship.
There was another story that a bloke in China was chatting to his girlfriend in the States. She was banging on about something (as they often do - probably kittens or knitting) and he said "The lady doth protest too much" he repeated the same Shakesperian phrase later in the conversation (probably recognising that she was talking so much she hadn't heard him first time round) and at the second mention of the word "protest" the line was cut off. No word of a lie.
And the Chinese people I work with say they often hear people talking or a clicking on the line when they have a good old chat on the phone.
And Google are cross because they are getting fed up with Gmail being looked at all the time. This post is being posted via a server in Taiwan so I presume it won't be censored but you never know.

Anyhoo these last two posts have been a little heavy haven't they? I promise to post something superficial and irrelevant next time. Possibly with a picture of a little old dog sitting in the sun. In fact definitely.

I got this email recently.

My hotel room door. The Lost in Translation Hilton (Shanghai).

It’s from my mate Dan Izbicki who was on a business trip to Prague and it got me a’thinking. Here it is:

“So I'm alone in Prague contemplating whether to go out for a solo meal or order room service. And I figure 'Andy is a man who'd know the right decision', having no doubt faced a similar scenario on occasion. Trouble is you're probably asleep.

Anyway I took the executive decision to go out for steak and chips (they do a mean steak and chips in Prague) and they got my table booking wrong by 1 hr. At least that what the stupid Czech bird said. Personally I think they gave my table away to 2 people for the extra cash. Bastards. So now I'm stuck in some sort of solo traveller netherworld. Do I wait or give up?  Stick or twist?

Needless to say I've retired to a bar to contemplate this decision. It's the smallest bar in the world and they only serve wine (ponces) and I'm the only person in it. Apart that is from the bar maid with whom I've tried to start up a conversation but with limited success. We seemed to run out of topics once I'd complimented her on the wine.

Anyway it seemed as good a reason as any to drop you a line. Hope life is treating you well. You must be back soon? Do those Chinese fellows allow skype these days?  Haven't noticed much Brittain onlineness of late. Your blog made me chuckle today.

Guess I'll read a chapter of my book. It's about WW2. I know! A real expansion of the horizons.

Dan”

Why did it get me a ‘thinking? Well for a start it’s funny, has the word “ponces” in it, includes swearing, says my blog made him laugh and it’s always good to hear from friends when you’re 3000 miles from home. But that’s not what sparked the Brittain grey matter out of its traditional weekend shutdown and into full…you know…thinking about stuff mode. No it wasn’t. It was the mental picture of the loneliness of the long distance advertising idiot (of which I am proud to consider myself one) that Dan so wonderfully evoked in his kind email.
Speaking from my own experience, and I’m sure it’s not the same for everyone, I find something exquisitely melancholy about business travel that if you're not careful you can start to enjoy. As elaborately coiffured American songster, John "Juicy" Mellencamp so loudly crooned it, “Hurts so good.” 

Why the words "if you're not careful?" I have no one else to ask this question of but myself, so I'll...you know.... have a go at answering it. I think, it's possible to get addicted to it. It's so keenly felt. I'm not saying you don't feel other things like happiness and sadness but compared to the cold, overwhelming blankness of a life lived, albeit temporarily, in a strange land, miles away from the ones you love, amongst people it's impossible to communicate with, they seem insignificant. 
Although it's not a pleasant feeling, it is at least a big feeling. It snaps you out of the hum drum, day to day crap of existing and cruelly reminds you that you are alive. 
I know that other events evoke this too but not many. Bereavement and teenage heartbreak are ones that I can think of but the "good" thing about this excruciating loneliness is that it affects no one else. No one has to die, no one has to hurt anyone. And the best thing is, it stops instantly. You meet up with your silly friends, they tell you about some reassuringly irrelevant nonsense they've thought of and your world  is once more back on it's stupid axis.
And that is why I think it's addictive. If you think I'm wrong then actually you're wrong and no returns.


Brittain out.

Steet vendor. I wonder what he sells.

He's either selling chairs or remarkably strong handcarts.

Been a bit busy.

The twin responsibilities of work and making calories be in my body have got in the way of updating the old blogola. So apologies. I had a pizza at a really nice pizza place last night. What was it like? I'll tell you. Imagine James Bond is in Shanghai and he wants to meet a fellow spy (probably a bird, raven hair, large boobs, called Honey Blowjob or something) in a mid-priced, smart BUT discreet, pizza joint. This is where he'd go. If he was Yu he'd find the dough a bit chewy but otherwise he'd be pretty pleased with it. If he was me he'd be delighted with everything especially, you've guessed it, the price of the Tsing Tsao and he'd be trying to look at the bird's knockers without being caught.
Anyhoo. As I said, it's a bit busy at the moment so here's a few pics.

The Pudong (no really) from a bar at the top of a bloody big building.

Literally a Chinese dentist. Ha ha ha ha ha aha ha ha ha.

Two boats on the mighty Haunagpu. Some smog in the background. Some water in the foreground.

I like Chinese

Today you find me waxing lyrical about my host's plus points. Yes, they'll happily mow you down with their mopeds and yes, they'll cheerfully block a pavement by parking their car actually on it but before I go getting on my high horse let's consider the wonders of China and the Chinese peoples.
And while we're at it let's not forget that perhaps I have faults of my own. Yes, my one reader, I'm not so blinkered that I don't realise that, contrary to what every one of all my three friends would undoubtedly say, I am not perfect. Maybe I'll deal with that in a later post.  A post in which we can join hands as we set out together on an adventure, a journey if you will, to explore the Andy Brittain psyche. We'll stroll through the sunny glades of Andy Forest, bellyflop into Lake Brittain and quaff deeply from Andy B Fountain. Maybe not the last one. Unless you're a lady.
But hold fast ("hold fast!"what am I medieval all of a sudden?). Back to the Chinese peoples and their pros.
1. They throw nothing away. Everything is recycled. Shoes. Clothes. And for all I know, specs. But especially the cycles. When one breaks or goes wrong, they don't throw it away like we in the West do. They repair it. There are bicycles here that predate The Revolution (the bicycle puns just keep on coming). Nothing is wasted and you'll often see a 9 foot pile of cardboard seemingly cycling itself along the street to be recycled into more cardboard.
If you stand still too long a tiny little bent old man comes along, spits alarmingly and picks you up, puts you on the back of a 1911 tricycle (converted to an electric one by attaching the electric motor from a 1956 hairdrier and adding a battery the size of a tricycle - top speed 1.2 mph) along with other bits of old crap and cycles off somewhere to convert you into another tricycle. Sadly as they get richer, they seem to be embracing all the worst traits of a Western society so quite soon you'll be being flattened by an idiot on a shiny new bike instead of a rusty old shitheap.
2. They completely ignore Health and Safety. People take responsibility for themselves and if they die that is shrugged off as being generally good for the gene pool. Weeding out the dumb and unlucky. Luck plays a great part in Chinese culture. I mention it here but not as a plus point. It seems to hamstring them somewhat ("somewhat!" now I'm Edwardian). No one has a helmet (on their head) or drives sensibly. Indeed the roads are something of a free for all in which a long blast on the old horn is thought to render the vehicle indestructible and so can be driven completely without recourse to the, hitherto regarded as immutable, laws of physics. Specifically the parts of Newtons Laws of Motion that deal with the outcome of two bodies colliding.
And as for fireworks, every New Year the hospitals are overwhelmed by smouldering hoards of blackened revellers. I watched people planting a big box that in World War 2 could have been used to flip a Tiger onto  its back, into the middle of a six lane road and then retire a couple of inches to admire the artillery it unleashed. Cars simply drive round it. And not only was returning to an unexploded firework not frowned on, it seemed to be compulsory to pick it up and pop it in your pocket.
3. Look what they do to their dogs! Ha ha ha ha ha. When I saw this spectacularly silly display, I had to take a picture. The woman who's dog it was, also owned three other less idiotically coloured, yappy little wankers, which she proceeded to threaten me with. I was sat on some steps while these four tiny dogs yapped at me and bared their microscopically pathetic teeth at me. She went away when I laughed at them. Honestly. What did she expect? Her dog is bright pink and yellow and orange! People are NOT going to stare? Handsome white blokes are NOT going to take pictures?

Ha ha ha ha ha...wheeze...ha ha ha ha.....cough....ha haaaaaaaaaa

4. They have a refreshingly straightforward approach to the art of having a poo. They treat it as a normal bodily function that is nothing to be ashamed of. And of course they're right. I realise that I have an unusually severe case of anal retention and so I find myself envious of the way everyone just gets on with it. The loos at the office are even  designed to blast a jet of warm water at the old "rusty sherrif's badge" that I also admire and, once I'd got over the initial surprise, like. Sometimes I give it a blast even if I haven't had a poo.
5. They have a cool flag. Sweet.

That's all I can think of for now. I'm not going to go into how great the economy is because frankly it seems to be built on the backs of poor people doing things for a pittance. Also I'm no economist. If anything I'm an econopissed (for my American , and probably only, reader I  mean pissed as in drunk, not annoyed).

Brittain out.

It's haircut time.

Seems very reasonable

That works out to about £3.90 but it turns out the blow is when they dry your hair with a blow drier.

Never mind. It was the best haircut I've ever had. At that price it's almost cheap enough for me to fly out here every time I want  the Brittain bonce attended to.

Shangsterdam twinned with Amsterdanghai

I was struck by the similarity between Amsterdam and Shanghai recently. Allow me to list them.
1. There are bloody bikes everywhere. Admittedly there are more per capita in Amsterdam (or The Dam) but they are driven equally recklessly and without recourse to the Highway Code, common sense or even the instinct for survival.
2. There is nothing to eat. Well of course there are things to eat but nothing that actually tastes nice. Well of course there are things that taste nice but they are usually miles away. And expensive. The locals, naturally, are highly patronising and take great pleasure in belittling anyone who pales at the thought of eating predigested Pea and Sausage soup (The Dam) or Pigeon Sick(The Anghai).
3. On the pavement locals in both cities do not acknowledge the existence of anyone else on the entire planet.
4. Dog shit. It is ubiquitous. Though in The Anghai it seems drier. I have no explanation for this.

Shanghai...no wait... Amsterdam... errmm.... hang on a minute... it's perpendicular (albeit temporarily) so it's Shanghai.

5. Shoddy buildings. Shoddy, shoddy workmanship Ted. As you saw from my previous postings from The Dam, the whole city is in an advanced state of falling down. A lot of The Anghai HAS fallen down and what little remained was flattened. Instead hundreds and hundreds of poorly assembled high rises have been slung up instead. It's only a matter of time. Structural integrity, in both cities, is taken with a pinch of salt and is regarded by architects as being "for girl architects."
6. The absolute necessity of keeping your wits about you at all times. Not for crime. No. For absolute knobheads on Bicycles. Citizens of both cities use The Probability Method (TPM) of cycling. ie. There probably won't be anyone walking past when I burst out from a side street, that pedestrian will probably hear me hurtling towards them from behind and get out of my way, that red light is probably green, my parked bicycle probably won't be in anyone's way. You know, that sort of thing.
7. Both cities seem quite safe. Crimewise. In The Anghai it's because criminals get shot. In The Dam it's because no one can be arsed.
8. Mice. In The Dam they are on the stairs, where on the stairs, there on the stairs, right there, little mice with clogs on, going clip clippity clop on the stairs. In The Anghai they're on the plates, deep fried and eaten. With a nice Tsing TSao (if they can afford it). Thiffs, thiffs, thiffsz. Clarice.

Grab the shaft , play with the balls

That's right, my friends. Pool!

Look at the concentration. Look at that bridge hand. There's no question of where that ball is going is there? Hurtling round the table on the basis that if I hit it hard enough something's bound to go in and sending the cue tip through the baize with a satisfying ripping noise. Another pool table bearing silent but damning witness to my cueing skills. Truly, when it comes to putting on international displays of pool skills my game knows no boundaries. A style of play I have entitled Pool Sans Frontieres . Others have rather rudely entitled it Pool Sans Talent. The bastards.
And those aren't breasts. That's my T-shirt just flapping down a bit. Yu hustled me and I lost 3-2. This is in a bar called Kangaroo. You might think it would have an "Aussie" theme. But no. The theme was "A crappy bar with no one in it" which they pulled off spectacularly well. Don't get me wrong. There's nothing I like more than a crappy bar with no one in it, so I was as happy as a stick.
Funnily enough it's right next door to The Constellation (see below) who's theme, if it had one, would be "Exactly the opposite of a crappy bar."
Rest assured that even though The Kangaroo was crappy they were still putting a 376% mark up on the price of  a bottle of Tsing Tsao. I think, if I had a theme, it would be "Moaning about the price of a bottle of Tsing Tsao." In England my theme is "Moaning about the price of Fosters." This takes the form of me yelling "£7.50! That's what's wrong with this country!"on being served two pints of pissy Australian lager.
Consistency. Consistency. Consistency. The three C's.

Told you

This lady is combining the twin Chinese passions of wearing pyjamas during the daytime and doing incomprehensible things that to western eyes look a bit...you know...daft. In this case going for a jog with her slippers on.
Glad I got a picture of someone wearing jimmies during the day. I was worried people wouldn't believe me and it is bloody cold out here so the opportunities to capture one on camera are pretty rare. This lady got round the temperature question by running and by wearing quilted jim jams.

The Constellation

The Constellation is a stylish bar in The French Concession (see post below). It is a tasteful, very expensive Japanese/Old Colonial fusion.

We're talking dark wood, sumptuously upholstered leather chairs, smartly attired waiters and what conversation there is, is hushed and high brow. The bogs are smarter, bigger and smell better than my flat, the lights are low and one buys one's favourite tipple (mine's normally beer but it's not that kind of place - it's whisky, vodka, gin, that type of thing) by the bottle, which one writes one's name on and on your departure, they store it in darkened, padlocked, air conditioned cupboard from which they reverentially bring it forth on your return.

Yu and I were so impressed we splashed out £137 on a bottle of 12 year old, Single Malt Japanese whiskey.They proffered it to me and I checked the label, then they gave me the special pen for writing my name on the bottle. Oh dear.

I'm 4 arseing 7 years old. What was I thinking?
 

Hey Andy I thought you were in Shanghai! Not France!

Cite Bourgogne? Qu'est ce que c'est que ca?

Am I "en France" (literal translation - in France)? Non (no).
The simple explanation is that this building has been built in an area of Shanghai known as The French Concession but I don't know when. Parts of Shanghai were divvied up and ceeded to other countries such as good old Blighty, The French, the USA and other countries and the Chinese government were obliged, by the use of artillery and gunboats bobbing about on the Huangpu river, to rent these areas to foreign powers.
The British and Americans and all the other nations eventually just lumped their bits all together and called it The Shanghai International Settlement. The French, as per, kept their bit separate and went about doing what they always do ie. exactly what they bloody well please and more or less the opposite of anything anyone else wants them to do. Whatever it is. Even if it's sensible. Like women.
No doubt their typically haughty Gallic preference for keeping themselves to themselves went down rather well with everyone else in 1920's Shanghai. It meant they could get on smoking opium and shouting at Chinese people in English, without bumping into Guy de la Nez or whatever his bloody names is, looking down his enormous French conk at one.
These days it's probably the nicest area of Shanghai and home to many expats. So it is now full of Oirish bars, British bars and other bars which think that just because they have a flappy velvet curtain over the doorway, play Bryan Adams and turn the lights down a bit, they can sell a bottle Tsing Tsao (really quite tasty) for £3! When it only costs 40p in the tatty shop next door to where I live.
I ask you.
Not only that, they're full of exactly the kind of people you try to avoid in London.