The wife and I went to England for two weeks on the 7th of December (or thereabouts).
A few things happened.

1) We went to White Hart Lane to watch Tottenham Hotspur play Liverpool.
Tottenham won 2-1, and the teams were kind enough to score all three goals at the end we were in, which was nice.

Strangely enough, this was my first ever visit to the Lane. When I was younger, my family could have afforded either tickets or the train fare to London, but not both. And then when I was studying in London, a phase of relative lack of interest coincided with soaring ticket prices, and it wasn't until I moved to Beijing that I got back into following Spurs. I first saw them play in the flesh at the friendly against South China AA in Hong Kong, and a chap we met who'd travelled from London to see it was kind enough to offer CK and me the use of a couple of season tickets in which he has a part share.


2) I was best man at a wedding. The groom is second from left here:

The suit hirer furnished me with an incredibly small waistcoat, which meant I had to keep my jacket on all the time, but that was pretty much the only thing that went wrong. My speech went fairly well, although the reception venue - an Elizabethan manor in Oxfordshire - was a little intimidating. One section of the guests stood upstairs in a minstrels' gallery for the speeches, giving the whole performance something of the air of playing the Apollo. Surprisingly, my speech was the most serious of the lot, although me and the bride's brother both managed to mention that time the groom wore a Spider-man costume designed for an 8-year-old. Shockingly, he's done it twice.

Other than that, we were up and down to London a few times - mostly to catch up with friends, but on one occasion for work. I had agreed to supervise the first day of a recording session. I've done some voice work myself, but it was very impressive to see top pros at work. What separates them from part-timers like me is the ability not only to turn the voices on and off but to keep them going, and to sing, gasp, sound like they're being tickled and so on, all in character.

A little over two weeks ago I was in Beijing on my first ever business trip. I've decided that business trips are a bit rubbish. It's like going on holiday except you have to do stuff you don't want to all the time.
Mind you, at least this one was to Beijing, where I could catch up with people I know. On Friday I'm flying from Shenzhen to Nanchang to attend some kind of trade fair. I'm not sure I'd even heard of the place before.

I caught up with former flatmate Paul in Beijing. He was doing his weekly DJ slot at Q Bar, which apparently pays reasonably handsomely, and I enjoyed hanging out with him and the staff. He even put on my punctuation-themed dance track "Apostrophe" at one point, and amazingly the bar didn't clear out.
Our friend and classmate Kevin was also there, in good form but now dangerously single-minded on the pursuit of women. This must be what it's like socialising with a great white shark. No conversation, just the relentless pursuit of prey. At one point, a girl from Leeds University was talking to me and, frustrated by my lack of 'action' on account of being, you know, married, Kevin physically shoved me off my barstool while she wasn't looking and took my place.

Due to working on Sunday morning I was unable to attend the reportedly riotous Halloween party in Dashanzi, but I went to a pre-party thing at my friend AJ's flat, where she plied me and the other guests with Special Party Treats, which may not have been a great idea really, but hey.

The photoshoot itself was not too bad. Friday was a long day, and followed by dinner with people from the hosting company. My Mandarin seems to be OK but I don't really have the vocab for semi-formal dinner conversations, and I'm not sure if I ever did. Something to work on.

Sunday afternoon was also somewhat wearing. I'd checked out of the hotel with my bags and planned to just mooch around a bit, go up to the station at Dongzhimen and take the train to the airport. However, the hosts were insistent I take the company car, which meant spending hours with one of their staff members hoofing around with my luggage and stopping for a coffee. Not actively unpleasant, but also not what I'd planned. It also meant, I realised at the airport, that I still had a Special Party Treat in my wallet, which I had to dispose of before going through customs - how rock'n'roll.

That lad's got a foot like a traction engine

We won the Anfield Cup on the 1st of October, a mini-football tournament for fans of various English teams - this year it was us (Spurs), Liverpool, Chelsea and West Ham.

Crucially for me, I finally scored a goal for the team. Very satisfying and kind of a relief. I'd gone through a whole season without scoring, although I suppose you could say half a season, since half the time I'm a fullback, and they're not expected to score too much. But the 50% of the time on the wing had created, in my own mind at least, a weight of expectation.

It was nice to get a first goal that meant something too, rather than just in a friendly or something. I started the final match at right midfield, against the Chelsea team. We needed a win to be sure of the trophy. Three or four minutes in, I lost my marker and found myself in the 6-yard box in time for a marvellous cross from our newly acquired Croatian left-winger Ivan, and all that was required was to shank it into the net from a few metres out.


Above: Goooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaal!

Our friends in the north

I have a work trip to Beijing over the weekend of the 16th/17th, flying up on the Friday.
Apparently I will be at the Shenzhou Hotel. I can only assume this is a hotel assembled out of leftover parts from China's space programme, which will be excellent.
Sadly I will be working all weekend - it's for a photoshoot, but there's nothing glamorous about it. Even VOGUE shoots seem pretty unglamorous, from what I gather via America's Next Top Model, and this is for a college Chinese textbook.
My one slim hope is that our mainland partners mess up the scheduling so I don't have to do anything. There's not a high chance of that happening, but probably more than you would expect. Especially since all of China is on holiday at the moment and has been for two weeks, mostly.

I have asked a friend what the weather is like there. I need to plan ahead if I need to dig any warm coats out of our long-term storage.
Mind you, Hongkongers should be getting their arctic gear any day now, as the temperature has plummeted - PLUMMETED - to 25 degrees. I wish I had their attitude to heat, it would let me wear my autumn/winter wardrobe.
It was still around 29/30 last week and scarves were sighted even then.

Still, it will be interesting to see the old place - I haven't been since CK moved to Jakarta, about three years ago. I'm told a lot has changed. I shall try to stop by my old flat. The thing they were building next door all the time I lived there has been completed and I hear won a bunch of architecture awards.
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Junk trip
After several years in Hong Kong without going on one of these quintessential posh kids' outings, I seem to be doing a lot of junk trips, barbecues and - most recently -barbecues on junk trips.

This latest one was a birthday excursion for a fellow Spurs fan, and the passengers were not so posh as all that, but the classic junk trip content was all there: drinking, swimming and a boat. Looks like the Pimms-and-shouting brigade were onto something.

After a pootle round to Tai Tam where the lilos kept escaping out to sea, and an impressive cake (Spurs shirt, new Autonomy logo and everything), the boat moored in South Harbour for a while.
Somewhere in the preceding couple of hours all six litres of the vodka-heavy punch had been drunk. A large portion of it seemed to have gone into the boat-owner's wife, who had been sitting next to the jug unattended. She was now falling over things and yelling at the husband, and sure enough a row broke out.

This was sufficiently awkward that everyone decided to jump overboard. Some cans were chucked over the side as supplies. Note for the future - Sunkist doesn't float. Neither does lager, but it sinks slow enough for you to catch it.

We decided to swim for the beach. Eventually, this included my other half CK, who is not a keen swimmer and particularly dislikes swimming in the sea (can't touch the bottom), but she was persuaded when she realised that the last other non-combatant, our mate D, was not sticking around.
So, lagging behind somewhat after the lengthy 'come to the beach' and preparation session, I set off towing CK, who had opted to lie across the pink lilo for safety.
We soon caught up with D, himself not a strong swimmer, who had been left with minimal flotation, some kind of bendy foam rubber staff.
We joined forces - I kicking froglegged on my back and pulling the lilo, the other two hanging on at the back.

We caught up with the peloton at the shark net about 200m from the boat, where I gained the birthday boy's aid in dragging my human cargo to shore, probably another good 200m.

And then we played beach football with a half-deflated volleyball. This may have been the first time I've scored twice in a match in any kind of footballing competition, so I was quite pleased with that.

The return journey was slower, on account of the beer on the beach and the running around kicking a ball, but all was peaceful by the time we got back on board.
The moral of the story? If you've left your house keys and wallet on the boat, you can swim a lot further than you think.

It's a wig!

The missus and I went to see Slash at the end of last month.
It was excellent, although AsiaWorld isn't really a good venue. It's miles out of town, costs a bomb to get to, has no atmosphere, isn't organised very well (if you're going to have a 20 minute break between the support act and the headliners, tell us - we promise to spend cash on beer and souvenirs) etc etc.

But the concert was great. I actually found the new stuff more fun than the classics. Slash knows his audience well, the 'play it like on the album!' crowd, and so while it's still very cool to see the Original Guy doing the solos from Nightrain, Paradise City, Rocket Queen and so forth (and that wah solo on Civil War really is very good), there's none of the enjoyment you get from the unexpected - a creative phrasing, something innovative in a tune, just new songs, I suppose.

As an aside, Slash's singer for the tour was Myles Kennedy, whom I had never heard of before. He is top notch and I don't know why he isn't more famous.

More interesting than my pedestrian opinions on his gig, though, is what Slash did the night before the gig. He went out. Specifically, he went to the Wanch, a music venue in Wanchai I've played at a few times and which is managed by John Prymmer, a very cool guy without whom live music in HK would be a fraction of its current shadow of a self. John met Slash. John did not believe he was really Slash.

Or so I read via the Dark Side:

"Much to Slash’s surprise however, Prymmer was somehow unconvinced that the performer was who he claimed to be. “Slash? Sure you’re Slash,” he noted, with a rye (sic) smile on his face. “Just not in this lifetime.”

Despite the mosaic of Slash posters covering the bar’s outer façade, Prymmer’s mistake was perhaps forgivable, given the uncharacteristic beard and ponytail the artist was sporting that night."

I caught up with John last Friday after the Transnoodle gig at Rockschool down the road. I mentioned that I heard he'd met a celebrity recently.
"Oh man," he said. "That dude's hair is as grey as mine! That black hair you see on stage? It's a wig, it's gotta be a wig."

The whole episode just proves my claim to my wife that Slash would be hard to recognise on the street without the trademark gear. It also provides a tiny amount more evidence to back up my suspicion that the Hat, Glasses and Hair are all joined together as a unified, removable piece of I Am Slash apparel.
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Post-mortem evidence

Video of the gig is now up on Youtube, so you can make your own judgements.
Due to camera limitations, the set had to be videoed one songs at a time, so you miss out some interesting bits between songs, such as where I take five attempts to get a capo on the second fret of my guitar.