I’d like to add a bad tempered caveat to James’ previous post – snow is crap. Cold and crap. Unless you’re ski-ing, when it serves a purpose, but there are no hills in a fifty mile radius of here.

Sorry, but as the festive season approaches my mood generally plummets anyway (the plummeting is exponential to the number of time I hear Noddy Holder’s moronic screeching in one day), and since I am stuck in the freezing wastes of Beijing while James and Matt are cavorting with Pandas and pretty backpackers in Xi’an, I’m in a particularly Ebeneezer-like mood. The snow appeared in earnest last Tuesday, when we woke up to find a good five inches had fallen, and since then it has been absolutely Baltic, so much so that there are still frozen piles it littering the road (a week after it fell). I walked to work this morning wearing almost everything I own, looking like the Michelin Man but feeling less hypothermic than the rest of the week, and when I got there, as usual, all the windows were open despite the radiators being on. Why? Why?  Is it a test of character? Are we supposed to be acclimatising? I think it might be the latter, because every time I mention the cold to a ‘veteran’ expat (somebody who’s been here for more than 12 months) they chuckle happily and say ‘it’s only November now, wait ’til winter really sets in’ as though they are Punxutawney Phil, or Nostrudamus, and can predict future climate. I do admit, though, that the snow made everything look very, very pretty, and it gave me loads of material in class since we’ve doing weather at the moment.

Anyway, apart from the cold (and my annoyance about missing the jolly to Xi’an), Beijing is treating us both well and time is racing by towards our flight home for Christmas (five weeks from today), which is odd since we’re so much into the routine of our temporary existence here. My students and I have got used to each other and I actually find myself enjoying most of the lessons, rugby is a nice combination of exercise and weekend alcohol excesses, we’re both able to hold a decent conversation in Chinese, and we can now look forward to food shopping without fear of accidentally buying a packet of chicken’s ovaries or pig’s pituitary glands, or something. Negotiations have opened regarding what to do/where to go/how to earn a lot of money in a very short time without breaking the law after Christmas; we’ve pretty much agreed that we want to head back to Beijing, but every so often something will happen to make us want to run away screaming and never return. Today, that something was queuing in the bank for over an hour then them closing for lunch before I got served, but then I bought roast chestnuts on the way home and met my friends for dumplings, and once my fingers had thawed out I decided I was making a fuss about nothing. I am English, and queuing is what we do better than anyone else in the world.