Bon Voyage

I guess I should get the apologies out of the way first and ask forgiveness for not posting over the last couple of weeks. I had written a pulitzer winning post about my holiday in Cornwall, only to discover my daughter had deleted it from my iPad - please add a trash bin to the next update Mr Apple! Losing something you have written is like losing a friend or a relative, yes you can remarry, adopt or try DNA cloning, but it never has the same passion, the same emotion or energy. Of course you should always make several copies - but as Dr Johnson said in Blackadder the Third - "Making a copy is like fitting wheels to a tomato, time consuming and completely unnecessary".




I couldn't bring myself to re-write the account of my holiday frustrations and memories of my childhood adventures. Sitting in our lounge overlooking Carbis Bay, St Ives and Godrevy Lighthouse provided inspiration, and conjured up memories of camp site discos, hours on the beach, and glorious moments in penny arcades that the back of a Virgin Atlantic seat simply cant match.

Yes you guessed it my inspiration for this weeks blog is another long haul trip on one of Richard Bransons finest. Although this time my journey is quite different, as I am joined on the 12 hour journey from hell with my family, as we are all moving back to China. When I started this new blog, I had intended not to write about myself or my family, but more about my thoughts, my ignorance and my observations whilst returning to the UK after a 4 year absence. I never expected to be sitting here writing about the move back to a country I thought I had left for good only 12 months earlier.

Of course the move has been on the cards for some time, and discussions started some 6 months ago when I was asked to help spec. a job in China for the Group Purchasing organisation. The resulting job spec. meant that apart from the twin brother I don't have, I was also the ideal candidate, ticking every box I had helped form, led to some heated conversations with both my current boss and the family. I thought I had got the Asian bug out of my system, whilst living there I had lived life to the full and had either encountered, observed or endured all that China could throw at me. My time in Nanjing saw me tasting real China, the frozen winters and the scorching summers with little in-between, the strength and power of people thrown into similar circumstances what it is like to have true friends, and how the desires and ambitions of a few individuals can turn dreams into reality when backed by the power of the state. Shanghai was quite different and introduced me to how destructive the differing desires of the west can destroy a company when clashing with the needs of the East, the extremes of China's super rich vs the super poor, and the worse excesses of expatriates.

For all of these and many, many more the decision to embark on another 3 year secondment to China was not taken lightly, my children are growing older fast, as are their grandparents. The need for an expat posting on my CV had already been achieved, and a further 3 years would only prove to pigeon hole me even further - one recruitment expert I talked with about the move even went as far as saying that I would be virtually unemployable in the UK if I returned after another 3-4 years. My son had found girls entertaining, and my daughter had just got to know her grandparents, we had moved to a village where locals still used the pub, horse riding was a job, and Sunday bikers still hadn't found the surrounding lanes exciting yet.

Perhaps it was unfinished business? I hadn't exactly left on my own terms last time and I knew I could offer more. Maybe it was the opportunity to escape a country which has turned into a cliche of itself, with increasing taxes, unemployment and reality TV shows. Everything I love about the UK has an equally annoying counterpart. Stephen Fry Vs Katie Price, Democracy Vs the Nanny state, Proud vs Yob, Class Vs Tattoos and Nationalism Vs Racism. Of course all countries suffer from the same in varying degrees, however maybe its the small size of the UK that leads to enjoying the beautiful gardens or gallery of a stately home, whilst trying to ignore or endure the tattooed, foul mouthed, frogmela and her broad of equally revolting overweight, uncouth brain dead offspring that leads to the feeling that the country isn't big enough for the both of us! Of course there are many things I equally hate about China - but at least I can put that down to them being foreign!

So here I am, flying towards a new job in an old city, moving back to the same home and the children starting back at a school they left last year. I cant promise that it will be as exciting as previous years, I wouldn't go as far as to say that it will be as adventurous, suprising or entertaining, but I am sure that it will conjure up plenty of material to keep me writing.

Population

An article in the free Newsweek magazine that accompanied me during my flight to Shanghai, inspired me to write this weeks journal. Newsweek is one of those magazines that reminds me of wikepedia, i'm never sure how true the facts, figures and numbers are? Having wrote the odd study myself, I know how much research is needed to put something together that talks about the differences across continents, countries and cultures. To get your facts correct takes months (or at least weeks) of investigation, analysis and confirmation. Yet Newsweek reals off story after story, full of facts, and figures. Either they have an army of writers, journalists and investigators or they make it up?

Either way the story entitled "The post-China world - The end of the boom is now in sight, and the ripple of slower growth will span the globe", made me think of another impeding crisis heading towards China's meteoric rise to arguably the most powerful nation in todays messed up world.

The story concentrated on the stabilisation of China's economy, slow down in growth and the similarities with Japans boom and bust economy 10 years earlier. It concedes that China's enormous population, and particularly the poor element of its vast human resource will probably continue to fuel cheap labour and cheap export for many years to come, but highlights the lack of passion for internal consumerism as a key reason why it will not be able to balance the drop in demand and competitive advantage it currently sees, as costs and particularly wages increase. True or not the story was backed up by the usual plethora of learned comments and W.H.O. Facts and figures.

The story I would like to tell is one that also suggests the demise of the country I am currently travelling to, and one that seems more like home than any other these days.
I had mentioned previously my old PA Hu Jin, a likeable character, educated in Malaysia and England he was amongst the 1st generation born as result of China's single child policy. Introduced in 1979 by Deng Xiaoping, the Policy was introduced to try and reduce the enormous population growth that burgeoned the countries development, and proved a massive drain on available resources. Growth which led to an extra 15 million people every year! *Growth between 1961 and 1980 ran at 2.2%.

The positives of the initiative are only visible on a balance sheet, it is estimated that the policy has prevented an extra 400 million joining the throngs. However to the foreign visitor, people still hang on for dear life from every nook and cranny, for example, the entire population of Toronto pass through Shanghais underground system every day, and the monthly number of children born in China is equal to the population of some of Europe's major Cities. The effect of this staggering growth leads to numbers like 15,500 new vehicle registrations in Beijing alone - every day! The numbers are mind-blowing, however without the restrictions in place, the situation would be much, much worse.

The negatives of the single child policy are evident only when you know them, and then start to look hard at the situation through the eyes of the young, the elderly, the adopted and the aborted. For every 100 female children born there are 114 males born, which is as a result of unnatural selection. The sexing of unborn babies through scans is illegal, however China has become the home of selective abortion, with more than 15 million official abortions per year (unofficial figures are much higher) or to put it into context, the population of Los Angeles aborted every year, why? Well a multitude of reasons, but mainly because they were female. Like many developing countries, China values sons over daughters, the difference in China is that due to the single child policy - you only get one shot!

The need to have a male son is not as you imagine to do with family name or male dominance in the workplace, in fact in many of the new industries responsible for Chinas incredible growth, females workers are dominant. I once visited a Japanese company called Takarta in a Shanghai suburb, where of the 3000 employees 2980 were female! specifically recruited for their dexterity, obedience and loyalty. Ever since Mao, the female worker has had as many rights as the male, in fact recent changes in employment law favour the female employee - on paper at least.

The need to procreate a male offspring is more to do with a complacency towards the state pension system. It was always expected that the senior son would take up the role of bread winner, carer and provider to his elderly parents come retirement. This was fine when you had 3 or 4 children, the odds were that one of them would outlive the parent, and one of them would be male. The introduction of a single child rule, has led to a concern that if you have a daughter and they get married - that they will be required to support their husbands family in old age, and thus leave the daughters family without a sponsor. The dependance on a son has become enormous and has led to a share increase in both selective abortion and female children being put up for adoption.

This I would suggest is one of the biggest single threats to the continued growth of China. Hu Jin is approaching 30, and his parents have just entered their 50's. They are the lucky ones, they have a son who will continue to provide and care for his/her parents long into old age. for the tens of millions who only have a single daughter, they have to hope that her husbands family are` younger, richer or healthier than them? Added together with the fact that people are now starting to live a little bit longer, and the labour market is getting tougher for the normally less educated middle to late aged employee, a vast problem dawns on the horizon.

As with all metrics in China the numbers are amazing, it is estimated that a current 134 million people are in retirement, and that this will increase to 500 million by the year 2050, and as the national pension scheme only encourages around 15% of the population to contribute, the planned shortfall is catastrophic. The overall slowing of population growth is one thing, couple this with ageing, lack of pensions system and the imbalance of the sexes all add up to a worrying future.

Nobody knows what will happen when an extra 100 million or two are added to the retirement list each year, but it is a sure recipe for civil unrest, in a country facing so many more civil liberty and unrest issues I wouldn't be surprised if this is the one that tips it over the edge!

Delay

This week has been one of the most frustrating on record, all due to airline delays. It started well with my scheduled flight leaving London's Heathrow on Time last Friday, arriving early Saturday morning in Shanghai. And despite being greeted by a grey, wet an intolerably humid Shanghai my first few days went to schedule and quite smoothly for this side of Asia.

I had planed to travel to Shenzhen on the Wednesday from the newly opened Hongqiao Airport Terminal 2, I had been there during its opening week in March, and was extremely impressed by the cleanliness, efficiency and organisation - but then again after experiencing the worst of Chinese air travel - adding soft toilet paper to the toilets would have been considered an enormous improvement. I was dutifully informed at the check-in desk that flights were seeing some delay due to the volumes of air traffic, when seeking clarity on how long the delay could be, the corporate "at this time were unable to say" response always makes you wonder why you bothered asking. Not put off I quickly traversed the minefield of security and passport control - as a word of advice, don't bother taking off those watches, rings, metal hips and iron lungs when approaching the security metal detectors in China, they are set so sensitive that they can pick up the mercury content in your blood, either that or its just part of the PRC's job creation scheme. Having walked through literally thousands of metal detectors in dozens of airport I have, and have never seen anyone go through without being subjected to a full body frisk afterwards.

One change over the last couple of years in the local airports, has been the introduction of some commercial variety, with the opening of Starbucks, Costa Coffee, Burger King and McDonanld's, you now at least have the choice to clog you artery's with good old western cholesterol, rather than the Chinese fast food MSG. Pudong airport used to be one of the worst culprits with all of the concessions inside the airport being strictly controlled by the local government - which meant selling only noodles, wooden fans, noodles, chop sticks, noodles and tea. So with this in mind I headed to Starbucks for a large cup of Italian Cappuccino and a slice of New York Cheese Cake (try and find the irony there!).

One eye on the notice board I relaxed in the view that my plane would be delayed the regulatory 30 - 50 minutes, and as I was arriving the night before the meeting, any delay was eating into my time rather than the companies. Second bucket of coffee, and three hours later I started to worry that the TV screen in front of me must be broke or I had missed a Chinglish translation telling me that the flight had been canceled. I wondered down to the gate to find several hundred other hopeful passengers milling around the desk, checking watches and bawling into their mobile phones. I sent a few emails, answered some phone calls and made the next couple of hours as productive as I could, then all of a sudden movement, at first a trickle, then an awareness and finally a stampede. I gathered my things, and ran towards the scrum-down appearing in front of me. Fantastic, I thought - we would soon be on our way........er no. The stampede was actually the rush to get the free food that the airline was dishing out to quell the discord within the waiting passengers. You would have thought they were handing out life jackets on the Titanic, but yes you guessed it - Noodles.

The disappointment caused me to do what any red blooded Englishman would do - head for the bar. After my 8th bottle of TsingTao, which I insisted stayed piled up on my table - much to the waitresses dismay and disgust, we entered our 8th hour of delay and midnight. Ushered from the bar as the whole airport came to a shutdown, I depressingly walked back to the gate. Still no action, until an hour later when we were told that in fact we would be leaving soon, however we all needed to collect a new boarding pass as the seat numbering was different on the replacement plane. (The original plane must have still be in pieces with engineers scratching their balls and their heads).
Exchanging boarding cards doesn't sound like scaling the Eiger or swimming the Atlantic but the ensuing riot would have made you think that the crowd had been asked to renounce religion, hand over there first born and accept Tibetan independence. The airport security were called in at first, and them the real police. The crowd displeased with the airline staff, and had taken it upon themselves to trash the check-in desk, tear the boarding passes from the 6 stone attendant, ridicule her to tears and try and storm the plane - I watched on, jaw open, mainly concerned about the additional delay they were causing me, and the handful of other sensible (punch drunk) passengers almost to the point of despair. I squeezed through the mela and finally seated on the plane. We finally took off 10 hours later than scheduled, but feeling relieved, tired, but relieved.

We arrived at out destination Shenzhen at around 4am, the temperature was 36 degrees in the airport, with a humidity similar to that of an under water sauna. Making my way to the luggage carousel I captured a strategic slot to embrace my case and escape to hopefully a waiting car and driver. 5 minutes passed, 10, 20, 40 - if your looking for the reason why the Chinese are so slim, stand in Shenzhen airport in July, and watch the fat literally ooze out of your skin.
The ground staff started to look bemused at this point and started pointing at the conveyor, they realised it had broke and they would have to man handle the luggage to overcome the problem. I finally arrived at the hotel at 6.00am, I had a meeting at 9am and collapsed on the bed. The alarm sang out at 8am and despite my body being tied to the bed with high tensile steel I managed to get into the shower,then just time for a shave - I looked into the mirror to wonder who the pimply teenage youth was staring back at me, then a quick inspection of the rest of my body revealed that the spots on my face were not the result of some adolescence hormone imbalance, in fact I looked like a child had sat there with a marker pen and tried to cover my whole body with red ink, I would have been better off sleeping in a bath of hungry Piranha - the Mosquitoes had attacked.

The return journey wasn't much better, a four hour delay, a process of unchecking and rechecking baggage, purchasing a 1st class seat on an alternative airline to try and beat another mammoth delay to find out that this flight would also be delayed, a 50 minute wait for a Taxi in the same sauna as before, and running out of cash to pay the driver, all culminated into a longing for a western airline, with western staff and a flight home. So as I sipped Champagne sitting in my Virgin Airways flight the following day, I relaxed in the smugness one can only feel as a true Brit. Only to be quickly punched in the face as the Pilot indicated a 3 hour delay due to Chinese air traffic control - oh joy!!!

Cars

Why do people drive crap cars? Now I'm not talking about the just left school rusting iron can that we all start off in, I too have been been there trying to squeeze the last drop of fuel out of what my son calls a "Nissan shitbox" ( actually I think the line is from the Transformer movie - but is still relevant, and must mean a great deal to him, as he gets a clip around the ear every time he says it, and he says it a lot!)

Like most red-blooded men I salivate over pictures of the Bugatti Veyron, or the Audi R8 Spyder , yes I know suggesting that car worship is only a male thing is sexist and old fashioned - but when you have been surrounded all your life by females who choose cars by what colour they are, if they have a pretty name, or look as if they have a smile on their face, you will forgive me thinking that women who like cars in the same pornographic way as men - must be either lesbians, transexuals or trying to impress a man, or all three! You see men like cars because we are immature, we are just big kids who think that a Ferrari will instantly make us a rock star, hide the fact that we are overweight, cover our bald spots, inflate our bank balances and lengthen our brain repository. We all want to be George Clooney, David Beckham, Mick Jagger or Jenson Button, and believe that owning a flash car is like putting on a magic cloak that instantly turns us into a Brad Pitt looking, Formula 1 driving, Glastonbury playing male porn star - doesn't it?

If you don't believe me, tell me why do car manufacturers, design, make, market and sell cars in this way? Why are billions poured into advertising penis extensions on wheels? Why does every Porsche 911 owner look like Danny De Vito rather than Pierce Bronson? And do you really think the scantily clad girls holding numbers on the race grid are there so the drivers know which car to get in? Yes more and more cars are being selected, paid for and driven by women - but most automotive PR and marketing directors are male, as are the designers, engineers, production staff, financiers and senior management. They make cars to satisfy their own manic craving for ego boosting satisfaction. If women ran the car industry we would all be driving sensible, fuel economic, environmentally friendly, practical, reasonably priced, comfortable, durable, reliable and safe vehicles that we kept for ten years and that would be just plain stupid!

Right, now I have that of my chest, and have just alienated more than half of the population, back to the topic - why do people drive crap cars? This question raised itself last night when trying to get home whilst following a Hyundai Theycouldntbebotheredtomakeanameupbecausethedesignerdiedofboredombeforefinishingthecar 1.1l Diesel, driving at 16.3 miles per hour along a 50 MPH limit route. Due to the speed I had a long time to look at the back of this vehicle which was new, and red, which is all i can remember as I might as well have been looking at a bowl of green pea soup. The car as it was new probably cost the best part of £10,000 to buy, and was worth exactly £0.64p in the nano second after the transaction was complete, which is reason number 1 not to buy something like this, reason number two is the brand, buy a Hyundai and your telling your neighbours you have terminal cancer and no longer see the value in living, either that or you couldn't afford the Golf. But what about the 5 years warranty I hear you scream, well that's like saying Aids is better than a cold because it lasts longer - why do you think Hyundai give 5 years warrant? - because that's the only way they can get people to buy them!

I'm not just having a go at Hyundai, add to the list Daihatsu, Mahindra, Geely, Fiat, Suzuki, Daewoo, Tata, Kia, Proton, Isuzu, and anything French. In fact any car that isn't Ford, GM, Japanese(excluding Suzuki), and European (excluding Fiat). . These are all going to seriously damage both your wallet, personal standing within the community and cause your kids to get beat up at school. You don't have to have lots of money to retain your dignity and prevent your children from being both mentally and physically scared for the rest of their lives. You just need to buy a car with your heart not your brain (or if your a man with your dick). Buy a second hand VW Golf, a newish Ford Mondeo, Fiesta or Focus, a Honda Civic or Toyota Yaris. if you have a bit more money get a second hand Audi A3 or the old style 3 series, and to be really extravagant go and get a high mileage Mercedes E class, Land Rover or Volvo, all of these are practical, and are at home outside Aldi or Harrods, buy them when they are a couple of years old and they will have already devalued like BP shares and are infinitely more reliable.

You will notice all of those cars are either saloons, hatchbacks or 4x4's, that is with good reason. If Diesel is the devils sperm, then People carriers and MPV's are the piles on the backside of Lucifer. They were invented by the French, just like the Guillotine, syphilis, Goneria and Gittes (which are barns for poor people, or alternatively luxury wood cabins for gullible British Tourist), and like anything French it probably started off as a joke that everyone else took seriously because they thought it must be fashionable, or "in-style", because as we know all French people exude style?

Buying an MPV is like saying "a car is just a means of transport", "driving is about getting from A to B", or alternatively it's like saying "I have nothing left to give, I am a hollow vestal devoid of emotion, pride, self esteem and self respect. I have given up hope of ever feeling emotion again and if I was a horse you would shoot me". You want lots of luggage space buy a hatchback or a roof rack, you want a high driving position buy a 4X4, you want 7 seats buy a Land Rover or a Volvo, you want lots of cubby space - stop buying so much crap and treating your car as a bedside cabinet.

Clarkson continually derides the bus lanes, saying no one ever uses them, and they should be abolished. I say let's make it law that all crap cars should be allowed to use it. At least then they can continue on their "journey from A to B" without getting in the way of those of us who still live for a short section of clear Tarmac. While we are at it, why don't we include all MPV, caravan towing and St Georges flag waving vehicles into driving in this select lane, at least then they can bask in their smugness and continue to pretend that they really couldn't care what car they drive, or what people think about them.

Calm down Paul, take 3 Aspirin and count to ten!

60000

Following the euphoria of iPad heaven and the move over to Wordpress, I failed to mention that my blog(s) had also reached a milestone – 60,000+ hits or visits or people who had searched for something completely different and had Google mistakenly divert them to my ramblings.

I started the blog on the 2nd April 2007 with an account of my move from Nanjing HQ to the new MG Production facility in Pukou. (First Day in the New Factory).

I felt that this episode in MG’s long history should not have been missed and even if it was down to someone who had only ever written cheques before, the next chapter in this famous British brand needed capturing.

Since I started blogging it has been enjoyable, sometimes painful, but has almost always been done with a sense of release. However for every blog published there are another 10 sitting on my hard drive. These are the blogs about what I really think of the Pheonix Four (Five), the car with Zero ENCAP rating, my explanation for the demise of Longbridge and MG-R, the time I met the people investigating the ‘missing millions’, exploding Taxi’s, the real reason why Chinese Senior Managers have male PA’s, journalist tantrums, sharing showers with 10 other men and all about Li ShuFu, the man, the entrepreneur, the lunatic, to name but a few. The blogs will have to wait until I am either financially secure or have been entered into a witness protection program, for now they sit guarded on my hard drive waiting for me to grow a new set of balls.

One of the fascinating things about my blogs, is that I haven’t got a clue who reads them, my wife confesses to have never found them interesting – which is amazing since she has made this assessment without ever actually reading them, there isn’t enough death, blood and guts in them for my Xbox crazed son to bother with, and the rest of my extended family cant understand how to change the web page from facebook. I don’t have what you could traditionally call ‘friends’ as I have always been such a miserable bastard. So I guess it could be past work colleagues, as I have had enough of those to form an army equal in size only to Kim Jong II’s. Who reads my blog has always been a mystery to me, so I employed the help of IP technology! A little piece of software that sits on your web site and records everything about who, when, where, what and how.

The application I have been using is called ‘sitemeter’, and scarily it can hunt down whoever visits your website. I only take the free offering which only identifies new IP addresses (for those who are not network literate – this is the individual address assigned to a computer on a network) and how many times they visit, stay online etc. whilst I only see the city, state and country of my visitors – I only subscribe to the free service, god knows what you can find out is you actually pay for the search?

So now I know that people in:

USA
Allamuchy, New Jersey and Laurence, Massachusetts

Australia
Caboolture, Queensland, Brisbane, Melbourne and Ashfield NSW

Canada
Picton and Belleville, Ontario

Auckland, New Zealand

France
Limoux, Languedoc-Roussillon

And, all over the UK people have at least mistakenly ventured onto these pages, and a whole host of "location unknown" which I presume are from behind the great fire wall of China? The fact that at least someone out there reads this, makes me continue to spend the odd couple of hours putting finger to keyboard, but before I get carried away with the popularity i did some simple maths;

60,000 hits in 38 months or
1578 per month or
394 per week or
52.6 per day
2.3 per hour or
0.04 per minute

If I take away down time, the hours people sleep, all of the times I have posted, edited, looked at and read my own blog then i come up with a figure closer to 1 hit every every week - so I was right, nobody does read it!

(Just in-case anyone does - drop me a note, and cheer me up, after all it is fathers day!)

Speed

The arrival of the postman these days nearly always means another bill, or a flyer from someone trying to sell you insurance cover for the pet gerbil you haven't got. since the introduction of mobile phones, text messaging, and email took over the worlds communication the art of writing with ink on paper has become the sole domain of school children and doctors, the fact that in both cases whatever written is barely illegible, probably makes most of us thankful for the cell phone, computer and printer.

It was predicted that the explosion in alternative communication would decrease direct contact with others and a drop in interaction, however talking, sharing views and exchanging ideas has increased in volumes way beyond anyones expectations, and in ways that none of us could have anticipated or even dreamed of just a few years ago.

I started traveling abroad with work about 15 years ago, and on those week long trips we were allowed a single phone call back to our families to say that we had arrived safely. more frequent interaction would have required either computers the size of your average industrial estate, or smoke, a blanket and a high mountain. Soon after this I did a stint in Georgia, USA, this involved spending 3 months or so at a time in a place just around the corner from the dark side of Jupiter called Brunswick, and aside from the initial phone call the only other means of communication was via a 56k dial up modem and email, although as we never had a computer in our home this proved fairly pointless for communicating anything other that telling work that you were still alive, and hadn't spent all of your company expenses - yet.

In contrast I am now able to tell my family when I am about to go to sleep, when i have woken up, what I had for lunch, how bad the taxi driver smelt, and how soft the toilet paper is in the hotel, in fact technology allows us all to record, display and share every second of our day to anyone anywhere in the world, as it happens, and in full colour. Whilst I can not deny helping my son do his maths via msn, as I travel in a taxi somewhere in the middle of Swaziland is useful, or that checking-in online for a flight to allow yourself the luxury of an extra 30 minutes in bed is a great treat. However i do think that this can all go too far, first we had email, then text messaging, instant messaging, blogging and now twittering.

As a blogger myself it may seem hypocritical for me to dispel twittering as a fad or a craze that doesn't have any real merit. However (although it may not always seem like it) I only use email, texts, or instant messaging if I want to tell somebody something, or conversely find something out. You could still argue that blogging in this context is pointless? I suppose, my original purpose was to let family and friends know what I was up to, However i found that I enjoyed writing and have used it as a way to capture what was going on in my life, my thoughts, ideas and at least it gives me something to do at the airport.

I don't twit, or twat or whatever the correct term is, and I don't post pictures of my shoelaces on Facebook. The idea of twittering doesn't fill me with any excitement, knowing the precise time when your next door neighbour has emptied his bowels or brought a new dishcloth, isn't top of my "things to understand before I die" list. I can see the appeal of following a 'celebrity' if that's your bag, but trying to fit my life into 120 words would be a big problem for me, and besides I have enough problems trying to make my blog interesting using 1000+ words each week, let alone making every 5 minutes seem at all worthy of publishing.

So for the moment I will still to my blog, although a couple of things will/have changed recently, the first is that I am slowly defecting to wordpress, after several years of sticking with Blogger, i have grown tired of not being able to access it in China without engaging the type of technology used by the worlds espionage fraternity. I have also had many problems with reading blogger via Internet explorer and having to revert to the more accommodating Mozilla. Which despite being superior to Microsofts offering, isn't as widely used or even known by many people.

The other event is one that I am bursting to tell, just like a small child would be when wishing to tell everyone where the last friend is hiding in a game of hide and seek, or if his brother had just kicked the football through the kitchen window and his burgeoning desire to denounce any responsibility to his parents. Some people in the press have suggested that the event I am talking about can compare with the feeling they had at the birth of their first born, how stupid - it is far more important and emotional than that, and it doesn't require feeding every five minutes, it doesn't smell like the devils armpit and isn't subject to screaming fits.

Of course the event is the introduction of my new new toy, I am writing this blog on the equivalent of Moses tablets of stone - the Apple iPad. Yes I must be crazy to buy into an unproven technology and of course this isn't as revolutionary as we may have all hoped and dreamed of during the longest labour in history, but it is pretty spectacular.

But surely it's just an overweight iPod touch? But that's like saying the Bugatti Veyron is just a faster Fiat Panda, Concorde was just a sleeker Bi-plane or Buckingham Palace is just a large house. the iPod touch and it's brother the iPhone reinvented the mobile phone market, love or hate Apple you cannot deny the impact these products have had on the industry - especially now that everyone is running to try and catch up.

I have had all 3 generations of iPhone and despite the obvious limitations have loved each one, the iPad just does everything the same just bigger and better - ask any women if size matters, and if they say no, they are trying to protect your ego!

With a desire not to sound like an Apple nerd I won't jump into a 5000 word essay on why it's brilliant, but I will sum my views into one word - speed. Any one who has lived with a windows laptop, will know that the boot-up time can feel like passing a kidney stone, as can the time to find a document, or switch between applications. I can now understand why Steve (The Messiah) Jobs couldn't understand the need to run multiple applications at once, he obviously hasn't used one of Mr Gates windows products, if you don't keep your applications all open at the same time, you die of boredom between waiting for one to open up. The introduction of running multiple applications on the next OS 4.0 may make some people happy - I just hope it doesn't kill the ipads single biggest advantage - speed!

Sleep

One of life’s real pleasures is sleep, although for most its not until you have been through the ‘joys’ of parenting that you realise just how precious those 8 hours of slumber really are. Sleep can be overlooked as an inconvenience, getting in the way of our busy lives, interrupting schedules and quality time, we take it for granted and abuse our bodies by preventing what should come naturally.

As an infant you have no recollection and no control (it seems) of when you wake up and subsequently when you wake your parents up. According to research, new born baby’s sleep for 16 hours a day, reducing to 13 hours by the age of 3. I am not sure who investigates, researches and prints such tripe, but my experience suggests that babies don’t sleep - ever, and when they are awake they have some incomprehensible power to suck the energy from their parents with a force greater than that of a collapsing star!

I have suffered from mild insomnia and have therefore been used to only sleeping for 3-4 hours a day for months on end, however even this could not prepare me for the worst form of Nazi/Japanese 2nd World War prisoner of war torture, dished up by the cute bundle of love in the pink bunny suit! If you see a women or a man walking the street splattered in food, excrement, and puke, looking as if they haven’t slept for 6 weeks, with creased clothes, un-cut, uncombed hair, odd socks and grey lifeless skin – don’t worry its not an invasion of zombies its merely the result of having a baby in the family.

Things change as you grow from a baby / infant into a child, this is when your parents send you to bed when you’re wide awake, and wake you up when you’re in deep sleep – the value of sleep when your young is not necessarily recognised or appreciated. Sleep gets in the way of fun, in the way of playing with friends, riding your bike, building dens and generally enjoying life. The fact that your parents pull you out of bed with a full 5 minutes before school starts amazes most kids, as does the need to shout the time every 30 seconds just in case you never heard the 120 decibel scream the first 18 times. I do remember being a child’s (honest), and I do remember being pulled out of bed by my toenails as my parents tried to extract me from the pit of foul teenage smells. With the resurgence in vampire movies this has become even harder, my son is only 12 and thinks he is one of the Nosferatu, staying up so late we pass on the stairs – me off to work, him off to bed.

As you get older and enter your late teens, sleep is only essential for recovery from hangovers, relationship disasters, and other activities that will endanger my ‘child safe’ website status. Previously the role of university dorms, bed sits and flat shares, it has moved more mainstream family homes, as more and more ‘young adults’ stay home festering and leaching on their parents goodwill rather than risk spending a Saturday nights money on rent or mortgage repayments. Acceptable and almost expected behaviour in your own (or shared) abode is becoming the norm in family households. Including the half naked friends wandering around at all times, the drive festooned with all sorts of scrap iron dressed in spoilers and GTI badges alongside the ‘man’ of the houses Volvo, watching your utility bills treble despite spending more time away from home, and resigning yourself to the fact that you will never find any food in the cupboard despite spending the entire Royal Navy’s canteen budget each week. The dream of repossessing your home, your bed and most importantly some sleep, like the dreams of retirement have to be shelved and put back to a point where they cross and happen sometime after death.

As you hit middle age, you find that sleep is addictive, although somewhat untouchable. I crave for 8 hours deep sleep, and then find myself guilty after only 6. Panic sets in that you are being selfish and ‘sleeping’ your life away. I get out of bed at 6.00am every weekday morning, weekend, bank holiday even whilst on vacation it takes about the same amount of time for me to start to relax, as it does for the early morning start to catch the plane back. Your body becomes conditioned to rising early, and if my father is anything to go by, I have another 20-30 years of this. That is not to say you don’t grab a sly afternoon snooze once in a while, my favourite is to snuggle down on a winters Sunday afternoon following a large lunch and a copy of Harry Potter or Pirates of the Caribbean on the TV – both instant insomnia cures, not that they are bad films, just that my ability to watch a film longer than 36 seconds without snoring is legendary.

Grabbing 20 minutes on a Weekend afternoon, between flights or train journeys is like earning a bonus, buying something decadent or receiving an email from someone thought lost. Those small moments of pleasure when your snoring causes other airline passengers to ask flight attendants to check the aircraft status with for fear of a mechanical disaster, the awkward looks thrown at you from the train passenger next to you as they wipe the remains of your dribble from their shoulder, and the groans from your children as you jump up and declare that you were only resting your eyes as Hermione Granger turns Jack Sparrow into a toad.

As all of my anecdotes and stories recount my times in China, it would be wrong of me to ignore one story that links in with this blog quite well. I remember travelling with a group of senior Chinese colleagues between Nanjing and Beijing, accompanied by my trusty assistant, translator and friend (Hu Jin), we boarded the plane, took our seats and were being served noodles for breakfast before you could say “why is everyone wearing 15 layers of clothes, and asking for the cabin temperature to be increased”. Soon after breakfast the rest of my colleagues (about 8 people in all) kept their tray tables down and proceeded to lean forward and rest their heads on the trays falling to sleep soon after. I had seen this many times before in China, on planes, trains and automobile journeys. It seemed that in every possible circumstance the Chinese would take the opportunity to rest their eyes and recharge their battery’s. I put this down to a harsh life and poor diet, rather than just being lazy. What I was surprised at was my assistant’s insistence that I do likewise and sleep for the next 30 to 40 minutes despite not being tired, when asking why? I was told that taking ‘dead’ time out to sleep shows that you are being efficient with the company’s time, and that you must be working very hard at other times to need the rest. I just continued to pick the weevils out of the bread roll served with the noodles.

I can t really finish my journey of sleep through life by talking about how sleep affects you in old’er age, as I haven’t quite reached it yet. However If I read the most recent research into sleep from the University’s of Warwick and Naples I will get all the sleep I need soon. The research conducted across Europe, Asia and the US suggests that people sleeping less than 6 hours per day are 12% more likely to suffer from premature death. Looks like I had better get my head down!