Jack Fruit

On this one journey, the coach – a sleeper – stopped on the side of the road for an hour whilst this pile of jack fruit were loaded into the boot and then when that was full into any spaces left under the beds. It was hot, so this girl did all her share of the work with her umbrella balanced on her shoulder. And we had three hours to wait at the ferry port anyway. What’s the hurry, eh?

views from our window

We’re on the fourteenth floor, north-ish facing: the building is oval with a empty space in the middle, so it looks a bit like the inside of a prison, and echoes. But with the door open the air moves nicely through the room and it’s a comfortable temperature. And at night it’s dark and quiet. We’ll be here in Haikou for about two months I guess.

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2008

2008 was a good year. Firstly, I kept running through the +30C humid south-of-China summer, which seemed to last all the way into November. And then suddenly as it started to get cooler, everything became easier. I ran 5000m in 20:36.

I kept a training log and looking back at the beginning of the year I noticed … well, why I got injured a couple of times. So over the last few months I have slowly increased weekly mileage by 1 or 2 kilometres a week, so that now I’m on 54km a week, 250km for the last five.

Because of the heat, this isn’t really the time for a new set of targets, those will come during the summer, but on Friday I ran a mile in 6:02, 10 seconds faster than last year: slow improvement and remember to stretch.

Oh, more blogging about running, that can be a target for 2009, heat independent.

October’s running

Late! Late!

Slowly increasing the mileage and, as the temperature drops, the pace too. I’m trying to do more days with bare feet – a few blisters and my ankles sometimes ache as I’m getting started. But they soon warm up.

One time a farmer in a village held up a largest snake as a ran past – the rice harvest. They spread the grain out to dry on the concrete sideroads and rake it and winnow it. They use a small hand-powered threshing drum out in the fields and carry the grain in on the their motorbikes, a sack at a time.

But the last couple of days I’ve been running on a dirt oval, for a change.

alders

That was in the lane, two years ago. This is in the folded field. Again, a drama: a gateway, with no gate; the stoney end of the farmyard; an old disused lane, still the main artery of this rural scene; a meadow, another, and then a bank.

Before I left I recorded five minutes of the music of the stream – water running over the black stones and around the roots of alders. Two years later I took photographs of the hills and the fields and of the sky and oak trees.

After rice and chicken I sit in a restaurant with a flock of waitresses in orange T-shirts in Guangzhou, the noise of China around me. The five hills: my bicycle disappeared there, into a hollow opposite the police station.

2005

To practise again the inner alchemy of writing, another new note book for telephone numbers, and walking back to the house there is Sam and her mother taking an evening stroll. I play with paper and eat bread, light the mosquito coil and fill the water bucket. The water goes off from 11.30pm until 7am and I might want an early shit. Sam was wearing white trousers; she’s just spent 4 weeks studying Spanish in Beijing; she resists going to the mountains. The idea of going to the mountains I should say.

she moved trees when I stood outside – my smile a false immodest sorry

A goal should be to avoid looking too much into the past: there is another, I mean enough, present in the now to occupy my attention; the future grows out of the present; the present is all the processing the past needs; a fly circles the rim of my bowl of tea; it’s 10.30 and Sam has not called; I want to go to the mountains today but it’s hot; I have eaten four peaches for my morning food.

September’s running

September was a good month, with 173km evenly spaced over five weeks. August was more difficult: it was so hot, I was teaching both more hours than normal and kids, and we were moving around a lot. I only managed 80km. Now the temperature has dropped out of the 30s and my is it easier. During the summer I needed to drink every 4 or 5K, but yesterday evening I did 12km, three laps of the campus, without stopping. A good end to the week.

And I think I’ve finally understood the 10% rule. Last winter I’d run 12km and feel so elated that I’d try to put in 40km weeks after running an average of about 30km. What’s wrong with this calf muscle? So I promise to be more careful this winter, although it’s not really “winter” here in south China.

Oh, and we got married.

how i make coffee

Here’s how I make coffee these days.

I start by grinding about a square inch of cinnamon bark with the blue slate pestle and mortar. It’s easy to get down to a fine powder, first cracking the square into small pieces with sharp blows of the pestle, then breaking these down more carefully until they become small fibres, and then your classic circular grind to get the fine powder. Three cloves. These add a kind of “edge” to the cinnamon. A kind of an “edge”.

We use the small yellow chinese teacups – the chinese tea being drunk out of the cute little glass cups. Give it to you in ml? Can’t do that I’m afraid – maybe they’re about a shot each. a wee dram, ye ken? So enough water for three goes into the pan with the cinnamon, and cloves and a small lump of crystal sugar, to taste, and that heats on the smallest flame whilst I grind about 35 coffee beans.

It’s the tropical summer here now, dampish, and we’re near the end of the jar of beans: the grinding is nor easy, nor fine, nor pretty, but it serves. And the cinnamon is now at the boil, so I lift it off the gas, tip in the coffee snd circle the pan just high enough above the gas so it doesn’t boil again.

Strain into two of the little yellow teacups, call the girl and drink quickly slurping before it cools. And that’s about enough for the day, heart warming without brain frying. (The third cup of water? Steam perhaps, or soaked into the grounds.)

actually

After almost exactly 7 years in China, teaching, what have I learnt? I’ve read a lot of Shakespeare Joyce, I am fitter stronger healthier. I live with a girl and we practice ecstacy and eternity.

The Shakespeare is Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear, those three plays over and over, the Joyce is Ulysses, over and over. I ask students to write prose but have no facility, no habit of doing so myself. This could be remedied easily – Q: “One thousand words a day, tripper?” A: “Start somewhere easier, time to edit and polish.” And I have to, next time, enforce their re-writing. Daily description, memory, narrative, desire. She is. I have also not used dictation. Next week I will bring my guitar to these three classes.

This is the beginning of June and examinations are approaching. The students begin to panic, like chickens before feeding time. “There is plenty to go around, everybody will get enough, although some will get more than others.” Ability, luck. Anxiety spreads to the teachers. They are unaware that the anxiety is not their own and also that the anxiety helps support the fiction that these examinations, this education system, actually mean something, something to do with expanding mental range, power, flexibility and genius. (A quick list).

The birds – something like blackbirds – singing outside. Always this reassuring blackbird – I can browse in restaurants and shelter beneath my stamped papers, wash in the sea: thalata, thalata.

Some of them write, some use the time to play with their mobile-phones.

Music

The pianoplayer downstairs is very forte, something very modern and probably Russian; I would love a little Bach. Or a silence in which I could listen to the birds.

I want to learn more about John Donne and Spanish gold, it’s effect on economy and all that stuff; there’s an article linked on Luminarium.