China for the New Year (4): more Beijing
February 12th, 2018 by Roger Darlington
Still in Beijing, in total contrast to our first night here – when I was awake with jet lag – I slept well. So well in fact that, when my alarm failed to go off at 7.30 am because the battery in the iPhone ran out, I did not wake up until Joshua banged on my door at 8.35 am after I had been asleep for nine and a half hours (more jet lag!).
One way and another, it was 11,15 am when we climbed into a cab (Hua always paid with the Chinese WeChat app) which took us to Qianmen Dajie – a recently restored pedestrianised street near the south side of Tiananmen Square dating back some 570 years with now lots of brand name and exclusive shops. It was milder today: ten degrees different at 5C.
I had some photographs taken of me with various bronze statues. Then, at Joshua’s request and to his delight, we spent more than an hour in the Beijing Madame Tussaud’s – an outpost of the original one in London. The quality of the waxwork models was quite high and there was a good mixture of world and local figures with plenty of photo opportunities. Two young people actually asked to be photographed with me – an exotic foreigner.
After some lunch, we walked along Dazhalan Jie, a centuries old pedestrianised shopping street where there were some colourful old buildings and – as everywhere in the centre of the city – a substantial police presence. Another cab took us to our afternoon venue which was totally different from the morning one: the Niujie Mosque in the Muslim quarter of the city. Apparently there are some 35,000 mosques in China and this one is the largest and the oldest in Beijing, dating back to 996, but today’s mosque looks much more Chinese than Arabic.
A third cab took us to the hotel that was the location of our evening entertainment. There was time to spare but nothing to see locally, so we spent an hour at the Friendship Tea House drinking lots of Chinese tea, chatting, and using our phones (the tea house had WiFi).
When we returned the short distance to the Qian Men Jian Hotel, we had a small dinner in the Fu Gong Restaurant and then attended a Beijing opera show in the Li Yuan Theatre. The performance involved excepts from two traditional operas and sounded like squealing cats but the make-up and costumes were amazing. A fourth taxi had us back at the hotel towards 9.30 pm after a very varied outing of 10 hours.
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China for the New Year (3): Beijing
February 11th, 2018 by Roger Darlington
On our first full day in Beijing, we visited two major locations in and around the enormously expansive Tiananmen Square. The security in the square is phenomenal: one can only enter through guarded points where Chinese citizens have their identity cards electronically scanned; at a further security point, all bags are x-rayed; and everywhere there are police and military, not to mention the plain clothes personnel.
In the morning, we went to the National Museum of China. The building was completed in 1959 and the present museum – a merger of two former ones – was established in 2003 so everything is very modern. It receives 7.6 million visitors a year, making it the most popular museum in the world (just before the National Air & Space Museum in Washington D.C.). There are 10 galleries presenting the history of Ancient China from prehistoric times to the Ming & Qing Dynasties – everything from a burial costume made of pieces of jade linked by gold tread and a couple of the world famous terracotta warriors.
Somehow I managed to drop my iPhone without noticing it and amazingly about half an hour later it was presented to me by a museum attendant who had searched the building for me. I have my name on the back of the mobile so it was clear that it belonged to a foreigner and, at this time of year, I was virtually the only foreigner in the place.
In the afternoon, we visited the Forbidden City, entering on the north side of Tiananmen Square where the entrance is still dominated by a huge picture of Mao. The enormous complex is said to comprise 9,999 rooms (only God in Heaven can have 10,000 – a special number for the Chinese). The palace was the residence of 24 Ming and Qing emperors and ordinary mortals were forbidden to enter which gave the location its unusual name.
This was my fourth time in this amazing location so I did not need to take many photographs and just savoured the experience as far as the cold would allow. But it was so bitterly cold (around -10C) that the wide moats were totally frozen and Hua’s iPhone literally froze up. Again I was almost the only foreigner in sight and I was asked to be included in a photograph with a local.
In the evening, we ate at a restaurant specialising in Beijing duck and enjoyed entertainment involving music, dancing, puppetry, juggling and more. A splendid end to a wonderful day.
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China for the New Year (2): arrival
February 10th, 2018 by Roger Darlington
My two-week trip to China began with some problematic flights with Air France. Thanks to snow in northern France, our flight from London Heathrow to Paris Clarke de Gaulle was delayed by about three quarters of an hour and we worried if we would make our connecting flight. We did – but only just. Then we found that we sat on the aircraft for a long time while they de-iced the wings and, in the end, we took off almost an hour and half late. It was a turbulent take-off and landing and, as we descended to Beijing, poor Joshua repeatedly threw up.
Here in Beijing, we’re spending three nights at a wonderful boutique hotel located in a hutong (the old pre- modernisation remnants of the city) near the Houhai Lake on the northern side of the centre of this vast city of some 22 million. The Shichahai Hotel is dedicated to the preservation of the art of shadow puppets and, as we ate a light dinner in the small covered courtyard, we watched a performance of this amazing art form that predates cinema by about 2,000 years.
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China for the New Year (1): introduction
February 9th, 2018 by Roger Darlington
Top of my bucket list is the wish – so long as I have reasonable health and adequate wealth – to have visited as many countries as my age. I am currently 69 and I have visited 71 countries.
Outside of Europe and the United States, it is unusual for me to visit a country more than once, but today I start my fourth trip to China. The previous ones were in 2000 (an organised tour), 2001 (a professional trip), and 2010 (a visit with my Chinese ‘family’ who live in Oxford). This latest visit is again with my Chinese ‘family’ – mother Hua and son Joshua (almost 11) – and timed to enable us to celebrate the Chinese New Year in China.
I’m not sure how much access I will have to the Internet and Facebook on this trip but, if I can, on a regular basis I’ll post text to my blog NightHawk and photos to my Facebook page.
Meanwhile you might like to check out accounts on my website of my first visit and my third visit. I think these observations are a good short overview of the country and the people.
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A review of the new film “The Commuter”
February 8th, 2018 by Roger Darlington
“The Commuter” – a teasingly down-beat title for an action thriller – has the same director (Spanish Jaume Collet-Serra) and the same star (Irish Liam Neeson) as the earlier “Non-Stop” and indeed has essentially the same plot: a troubled hero with law enforcement skills trying to identify a key passenger on a tubular form of transport, last time an airliner and this time a commuter train. There is some flashy camera work, including a long shot seemingly taking us continuously the length of the train, and even an “I’m Spartacus” type scene.
It starts really well with a Hitchcock-type scenario where a mysterious woman (played by Vera Farmiga of whom we see too little) offers a recently sacked insurance saleman who used to be a cop $100,000 if he will just find someone who is not actually commuting before the train reaches the end of the line. The tale becomes increasingly twisted and unlikely but, at the time, it is entertaining enough with plenty of thrills and spills unfolding in near real-time.
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What has caused this growing tech-lash?
February 7th, 2018 by Roger Darlington
It seems as if almost every day there is a story expressing concern about some aspect of the Net and attacking the likes of Facebook, Google and Amazon. Why is this?
“Governments are concerned that they are not paying their fair share of taxes in the countries where they generate the most revenues; regulators are worried that they are stifling competition and crushing smaller players; politicians fear the impact of fake news and filter bubbles; parents and teachers are anxious that children are becoming addicted to the small screen.”
This is an extract from the latest (97th) in my 15-year series of regular columns on Internet issues. You can read the short piece here.
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Contemporary cinema (3): “The Post”, “Baby Driver”, “Blade Runner 2049”
February 6th, 2018 by Roger Darlington
I’ve now attended three more weekly sessions at the City Literary Institute in central London of an evening course called “Contemporary Cinema: The Best Films Of The Year” conducted by the American John Wischmeyer.
So far, the pattern has been that we view and discuss clips from an acclaimed recent film and then compare it to a couple of significant older movies.
In Week 3, we focused on “The Post” [my review here]. This film has only recently been released so we could not see clips but viewed a review on the BBC by Mark Kermode. We then compared it to the earlier (1976) “All The President’s Men” (which I have seen) – both movies movies concern the “Washington Post” – and reference was also made to another newspaper-centred film “Spotlight” [my review here].
In Week 4, we turned to “Baby Driver” [my review here] and viewed clips of the opening car chase sequence and the following buying-the-coffee long take. The obvious comparison film was “Drive” [my review here] but we also looked at a clip of the car chase in the much older (1968) “Bullitt” (which I have seen).
Week 5 was all about “Blade Runner 2049” [my review here] and we watched – with 3D glasses – extended sequences from this long movie. Again there was an obvious comparison: this time the original “Blade Runner” [my review here] where we took in the sequence where Dekker first meets Rachael.
I’ll miss the next two sessions of the course since I’m about to take a trip to China to celebrate the Chinese New Year.
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So, after the leaking of the Paradise Papers, how is the UK doing on tackling tax evasion and avoidance?
February 5th, 2018 by Roger Darlington
Figures from HM Revenue & Customs suggest that a series of measures to tackle offshore tax evasion will only bring in £349m a year – £650m a year less than had been hoped for.
Meanwhile a total of 28 anti-avoidance measures introduced under the Coalition and Conservative governments are bringing in less than expected, and the gap between the tax take originally expected from them and the revised forecasts total £2.1bn, or 25%.
Time to get serious with the tax dodgers.
More information here.
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A review of the new film “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”
February 2nd, 2018 by Roger Darlington
When so many movies are franchise works or sequels or remakes, it’s such a pleasure to find a genuinely original film like “Three Billboards”. The plotting is unconventional with unexpected developments and most of the characters are complex (unfortunately two young women are presented as stereotypically dumb and a black cop as overly honourable).
This is a social drama in the vein of “Manchester By The Sea” where the central characters are suffering great pain and anguish but, unlike the earlier film, what starts with a sense of vengeance ends in a kind of redemption. Much of the credit for the movie’s success has to go to the British Martin McDonagh who both wrote and directed, as he did in 2008 for “In Bruges”, but he is well-deserved by an excellent cast.
Frances McDormand, Academy Award winner for “Fargo”, is simply brilliant as Mildred Hayes, the mother of a girl who – as the middle of the three billboards states uncompromisingly – was “raped while dying”. Although she initially has the viewer’s unqualified sympathy, we are soon treated to words and actions from her that make clear that this is a woman who will say or do almost anything to advance what she sees as a righteous cause.
Woody Harrelson and especially Sam Rockwell give subtle performances as good cop and bad cop respectively in the Ebbing police station and, as the story develops, they – like Mildred – do not behave as you would expect. There is much physical and mental pain in this tale but also some black humour and unusual friendships. A real must-see.
Note: There is no Ebbing in Missouri and the film was largely shot in Sylva in North Carolina. The film has echoes of a use of billboards in a similar fashion over a long period in a place called Vidor in Texas where the killer has still not been identified.
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Time to Talk Day 2018
February 1st, 2018 by Roger Darlington
Two thirds of UK adults feel they have nobody to talk to about their problems, a survey has found. Of the 2,500 people questioned, 66% said they had no one to speak to about mental health, relationships or money. Difficulty finding the right time or place to talk were given as reasons behind the trend, the survey by mental health campaign Time to Change said.
More than a third (36%) of those questioned said they could never find the right time to raise their problems, while 28% said they had not spoken to anybody as they could not find anywhere appropriate to raise their concerns. Just over 22% said they had waited for a year for the “perfect” moment to discuss their issues.
The survey by the Time to Change project has been released to coincide with Time to Talk Day, which is backed by charities Mind and Rethink Mental Illness.
Too many people with mental health problems are made to feel isolated, worthless and ashamed. Time to Talk Day is a chance for all of us to be more open about mental health – to talk, to listen, to change lives. Wherever you are – at home, at work – have your conversation about mental health.
Some advice here.
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