Last year we went straight from a Sunday night roda to the Burns supper and generally felt great. Through some freak event I was the only fellow to wear a kilt and so was “volunteered” to give the toast to the lassies.

This year I feel much worse. I am not sure if this is medical problems, the effects of being back on a full dose of medication, work stress, the weather and travel, Helen’s studies or a grand mixtur of them all, but I will not be wearing a kilt this evening.

Out of the three capoeira classes since the beginning of the year I have missed two from injury. I need to feel more alive.

What the fancy panniers don’t do is make it any easier to ride face first into the snow — that was exciting! — or salve my extremely sore bum from my ice slip this morning.

I think I just need to make it a rule that I don’t ride straight out of the station in the morning until the weather improves. That short stretch of road isn’t well used, is twisty, sits on a hill and is in the shadow of the rising sun. A recipe for pain which I would do well to remember.

As if to start, this evening I went to a Glasgow TechMeetup. There are Edinburgh equivalents that I never attended so I don’t know how they compare. The format was:

• beer and pizza at 6.30. Next time I must remember a bottle opener!
• a welcome about 7pm including an introduction from everyone in the room. There must have been about fifty people in the room so it took about half an hour!
• a few minutes to chat amongst ourselves, particularly with anyone who sounded interesting or employable.
• a talk about web design
• a talk about http caching

The first talk was pretty dull and I was ready to call it a day at that point. Thankfully I didn’t cos the second talk was well worth the entry fee, even if it was free. If you bump into serialseb he gives a great talk - funny and informative.

I thought I’d list my currently completed for now, to provide some kind of status update. I’m currently working on Wuthering Heights, which is proving much more enjoyable than I thought it might. Frankenstein on the other hand, which isn’t actually on the list anyway, was really boring and I gave up.

1. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte — Really great, and now The Eyre Affair (Jasper Fforde) makes more sense
4. Harry Potter series, JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee — Not as good as I thought it might be
6. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
7. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
8. Catch-22, Joseph Heller — Fantastic and endlessly fertile source of cultural references
9. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien — Looking forward to the film!
10. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
11. Chronicles of Narnia, CS Lewis
12. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, CS Lewis — Yeah, I don’t know who compiled this list. This is cheating!
13. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernières
14. Animal Farm, George Orwell
15. The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown — I’m ashamed; but it was awful
16. Lord of the Flies, William Golding — Forced to hate it at school? Yes
17. Atonement, Ian McEwan — Brilliant, and the film’s not bad either
18. Life of Pi, Yann Martel — Don’t bother
19. Dune, Frank Herbert — Weird. For some reason I even read one of the sequels, though I didn’t even particularly enjoy the first book.
20. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon
21. Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
22. Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas — A huge, creeping inexorable powerhouse of a book.
23. Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding
24. Dracula, Bram Stoker — Great fun and surprisingly creepy at times.
25. Notes From A Small Island, Bill Bryson
26. Swallows and Amazons, Arthur Ransome
27. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro — Quiet, reserved, evocative and restrained. Emotionally draining too.
28. Charlotte’s Web, EB White
29. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
30. The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks
31. The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas — More whimsical than Monte Cristo, and a good sight shorter too!
32. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl

Amongst other things, this has turned my thoughts to bike safety when cycling in low light conditions. As Helen pointed out, the first thing to do is investigate the findings of the Evidence-Based Biking community. What is actually effective on the roads in darkness? The Cochrane Library, source of “independent high-quality evidence for health care decision making”, has a survey covering the topic of night-time visibility of pedestrians and cyclists. Sadly if you pin your hopes on the studies available you have to be content when they say “not enough evidence to make a conclusion”.

The one interesting aspect brought up by the review is summed up in this statement from the results summary:

Retroreflective materials enhance recognition, in particular when arranged in a ‘biomotion’ configuration, taking advantage of the motion from a pedestrian’s limbs.

I was very aware that while my bike was reasonably visible (lights, reflectors) my body was not. So actions like signalling were largely invisible, especially in rain where everything is glistening and car windscreens are harder to see through. So it’s odd that high-viz cycling jackets don’t emphasise either the arms or the general human body shape in their design.

I’ve got myself a new rear light just to be on the safe side. But on my searches I came across this extremely cool Tron-light-cycle system which is still in development, which looks like it has great potential to push us from bike lights being “torches strapped to bikes” to something which is designed around the bike itself. I wish the developers luck with their project. And maybe in a few years we’ll all own lights like this…

I was initially quite afraid of the ride through the centre of Glasgow. There are lots of one-way streets, really steep hills and traffic lights. I was even contemplating leaving the bike at the station overnight and commuting through town by subway. But a few more days of the inner-city commute set me at ease. It can be a bit daunting but I know the route now, and I know the tricky points and where to position myself so I’m not trapped by buses and so on.

The train is also good. There’s a bike carriage on every train with six hooks to hang bikes. The biggest problem is caused by station staff who create deliberate bottlenecks (!) on the platform ends during peak commuter times, which cause all the following trains to be late. I honestly can’t believe it’s more worth their while to start off the day behind schedule than to just employ enough conductors for the trains.

My work isn’t the most cycle-friendly environment. There’s nowhere particular to chain up a bike, so mine gets tied to the banister at the foot of a stairwell, next to the mops and Slippery Surface signs. Classy! There’s also no shower/changing facilities and the toilets are a bit of an offence to hygiene, so things could be better. But then who puts an office in an industrial estate in the middle of nowhere anyway?

My next steps are to get some panniers for the bike, to reduce the need for a rucksack (which just makes cycling hotter and sweatier) and get more familiar with maintaining my trusty steed. I would have said “I can probably pump up the tyres without assistance” but since the front inner-tube was involved in a “rapid deflation event” last time I tried to pump it up maybe that’s not true! If I suffer a puncture en route I just have to walk it to my destination as I don’t have the immediate skills or materials to patch things up.

We first walked through the streets at the base of the walls, past the calligraphy stands and the vendors of tourist tat, and came to rest in a quiet garden just outside the walls. We sat in the shade with other people enjoying the calm, just two minutes walk from the main busy roads.

This was our first step from industrial China into something reminiscent of ancient China from films. The greenery seemed right, the pigeons were suitably exotic and even the concrete shaded walkway was made to a different design than it would in the UK.

The people lazing around us got in some good staring at this point. The gawping never really disappeared, though it was less common in Beijing than Xi’an. The only occasions on which we weren’t the centre of attention was walking down the street with my brother and his girlfriend — a Chinese girl and a pasty Westerner holding hands attract much more attention than we ever could.

When we found the steps up to the wall itself it was a bit disappointing. If the air had been clear we could have seen across the city in all directions. But Xi’an is enveloped in a cloud of perpetual smog. The temperature is in the mid-30s but you never see the sky. In the late afternoon we often looked into the sky and though “oh look, it’s the moon”. It was the sun, shining as hard as it could but still looking wan and inconsequential. There were no shadows on the ground. The temperature didn’t really drop at night. It was all very disconcerting.

We walked a quarter of the wall, or a bit less than, until we were tired and hungry. We then wandered the streets getting stressed and angry, and ever more lost, until we found something to eat. And food fixed everything.

Inside the house are my brother, his girlfriend and five (!) cats. The tale is that he used to have two cats but one died. He bought a companion kitten for the lonely cat that was left… but this kitten turned out to be pregnant. This kitten, illustrated here, is now known simply as “Mama”.

And she’s no longer a kitten, obviously, because she’s got three of her own — Milk, Chocolate and Milkshake, who are white, black and a mixture of the two colours, respectively.

Life revolves around the low table in the living room, and in drinking tea.

This is the same style of tea-drinking that my brother treated us to for my birthday when he visited Scotland last year. It involves lots of heating cups and rinsing the tea and very fast infusions (seconds). The tea is poured into tiny little cups, like espresso mugs. It was very different from British tea-drinking — and the ceremony (well, the process anyway; there was no formality) was something that became quite comforting for all its strangeness.

Near the flat there were a couple of supermarkets which gave us our first glimpse of Chinese consumerism. Oddly, many of the shops reminded me of Chinese supermarkets in the UK. I wonder if the same holds for other immigrant supermarkets? Are all the Polish convenience stores on Leith Walk just like they are in Poland?

It’s amazing how little one can determine from some packaged products. You’d think many mass-produced items would have simple pictures to let you know what you’re dealing with but that isn’t actually the case. And any English description which did appear could be suspect to say the least:

We saw many great Engrish slogans, and t-shirt watching became a full-time occupation in the crowded parts of the city. The glossy branded products were also not above some awkward or ill-advised English text:

Not really in the spirit of the One Child policy, is it?

We left Edinburgh airport at some unreasonable hour in the morning and arrived in Charles de Gaulle airport for six hours of hardcore sitting. I read my book and Helen slept for much of the time, though we took some time out from this rigorous schedule to pay through the nose for a bottle of Coke. Even €3.80 wasn’t enough to dampen the spirits:

Then we hopped on the second leg of our journey to Beijing, which was longer and less comfortable. Ten-and-something hours later we landed in an extremely foreign country. The words were not related to any words we knew, and the writing even less so. Somehow, through gesture and confused looks we got a bus to Beijing West train station and then onto the sleeper train to Xi’an.

The restaurant car was our first attempt at prolonged transaction and ordering a meal. We got some things on plates and a couple of beers, and that was all we could really ask. The staff and train crew sat and smoked underneath the no-smoking signs.

I’ll spare you the picture of my bleary-eyed face as we pulled into Xi’an the next morning. Just be assured that I had really needed that sleep and that the train could have been stationed in a steel works all night and I still wouldn’t have stirred.

Outside the train station in the bright lights of another strange and bustling city, we managed to call my brother’s mobile and get him to meet us. He lived with his girlfriend, Joy, at the edge of town (er, city) which was an hour’s ride away on the bus.

I will introduce you to his house in the next post!

Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at “Philosophy”

I tried it by starting out in the first thing I thought of, category theory, and ended up looping back round. Mathematics is a closed loop under this rule, as is Breadpig…

Category theory, Mathematics, Quantity, Change, Social change, Social progress, Social enterprise, Uncorporation, Breadpig, xkcd, Webcomic, Comics, Graphics, Visual system, Central nervous system, Nervous system, Biological system, Biology, Natural science, Science, Knowledge, Fact, Information, Sequence, Mathematics

I had to use some judgement because I ended up on a disambiguation page at one point, so I chose the first real article on the page. And there’s also a good chance I misclicked somewhere and broke the circuit.

Edit: I spotted the problem. Someone edited the Quantity page to break the chain… crafty, but inevitable.