I’ve been in Beijing all week. I have been surprised to find that I really liked it (apart from the smog – OMG). It’s certainly an intriguing place – right in the middle of an extraordinary amount of change. Some random observations in no particular order:

–       the  hotel changed the carpet in the lifts every day to tell you what day of the week it was – helpful when friends and family are a whole day away.

–       Riding a motorcycle with Side Car around the Forbidden City at night – mad! More to come on this…

–       why are taxi drivers all such con artists? I might be foreign but I’m not buying the “ there’s lots of traffic and a longer way back”. Just put it on the meter and stop mucking around.

–       Wow the air quality is bad. Various organisations such as Greenpeace and the US embassy publish hourly airquality updates.

–       Chinese Personal space is not very large – I guess it can’t be. In the underground that makes for some close encounters (eek). It also extends to traffic, with pedestrians, bicycles and cars manouevering at speed between people and cars just inches from each other (scary).

–       Beijing has approx 4.5 MILLION cars. Most of them are less than three years old. Most of the drivers have held a licence for less than three years. That’s pretty darn scary if you think about it.

– the weirdest item of clothing I saw was crochet hot pants. Yes. Crochet hot pants.

–       The best meal I had was a hot box – a sort of Chinese fondue that’s integrated into the table. The box is filled with water/ stock and spices and once it is boiling you cook thin strips of meat and veg in it. Once that’s done you bung in the noodles and have noodle soup. Great!

–       The airport just seems to work. Who’d have thought!It’s now one of the top ten airports in the world – I can believe it. One weird thing however is that they have an extra bag check at the gate for international flights where they take any liquids off you. Annoying if like me you like to buy water for the flight as it’s hard to stay hydrated with the frequency of United glass refills…

I often drive through New Jersey (or Noo Joysey as the locals call it) as it is only twenty minutes from home. However if I am in or near there I will make a significant detour to avoid filling up with petrol. Why? Because all the petrol stations are “Full Service”. While that sounds fairly promising, it just means that they won’t let you operate the pumps yourself.

How does it work? You pull up next to the pump as usual. Then you sit there apparently invisible while the pump attendants lie in hiding. The only way you can get them to appear Mr Ben-like, is when you get out of the car and start messing with the pump/ paying for your petrol. At that point a usually bad tempered and dishevelled character appears like Mr Ben, transfers it a total of nine inches to the payment machine on the pump. They then generally need help getting the slightly fiddly petrol cap off before they set the pumps to dispense. One useful thing here in the US is a little prong on the pump handle that allows it to dispense until cut-off without you having to go to the trouble of holding the handle in. That’s presumably because, thanks to  the enormous gas-guzzling blancmange mobiles they drive here, holding that pump might get perilously close to exercise. Anyway, my car has a small tank (about 9 US gallons if you are interested) so it fills up pretty quickly. Which generally means I then have to sit there waiting for the chap to take it out again…

Now I think there’s an extra charge embedded in the price of petrol for all this value adding service. I wouldn’t mind QUITE so much if they actually did something useful, such as checking your oil or cleaning your windscreen like they used to do in some of Continental Europe. But they don’t.  The only small benefit is if it is really cold out, and you can sit in the warmth of the car. Mostly.

I never saw a real live trash chute before coming to America. I’d seen them on TV – particularly on episodes of Friends. I am sure the Friends chute starred in at least one programme thanks to an incident with a pizza box getting stuck.

Maybe it is just because it is un-American to actually walk any further than strictly necessary that they have chutes. I understand that they are useful but I can’t help but find them slightly sinister.

There’s a chute in my weekday apartment in DC. It’s mouth is fairly innocuous – in a small room next to the lift.  I mostly try to avoid it because of what might lurk at the other end. I could be imagining it but I think I can hear a distant rumbling when I feed something to the mouth of the chute  – possibly some strange and scary mechanical beast that wakes when you bring it offerings. Or it could be the rubbish falling on other rubbish …but I’m not sure.

Phew. It’s gone 15th October and my tax returns are finally submitted right on the extended deadline. US tax returns are a COMPLETE mystery to me. In my time in the UK I always paid tax via PAYE – very occasionally I even got the odd small refund. There isn’t a PAYE system here (at least I don’t think so) – you have to file your own. But you don’t file just ONE return – that would be way too easy. There are multiple different ones – a Federal one, a state one and a local one. Confusing or what?

I was lucky enough to have had my former employer pay for my tax returns to be done for 2008. This year  (2009 return) I was pretty much on my own. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. For a start I ignored the letters from the local tax collection group – I assumed that any dodgy looking organisation asking for 1-2% of my hard earned cash had to be a scam. It turns out it wasn’t a scam… Then there’s the state tax, which varies from state to state (eg 0% in Nevada, about 6% in Pennsylvania and a whopping 10% of global income in near bunkrupt California).

I know what you are thinking – how hard can it be to calculate a percentage of whatever you earn? Not hard. The challenge is that this whole system is designed for you to be able to submit deductions for various obscure things. Which is why people employ highly creative accountants to ensure that they pay the least possible amount of tax. And the forms are so complicated that it is nearly impossible to work out where the numbers go. Nightmare.

Anyway after a healthy amount of procrastination, I extended the April deadline (the very simple online form to do this makes me think this is rather common) and got some help from accountants. My aim for this year is to start collecting a whole pile of things to deduct for next year’s forms. Thank goodness I finally managed to convince the UK tax folk that I didn’t need to do one of of their returns too.

It’s election season here again and don’t we know it – every front garden seems to be infested with red or blue flags promoting a selection of sinisterly smiling heads. The TV and radio also have a surprisingly enormous number of ads. That’s not unusual – bu what is particularly notable about this election is the sheer number of negative ads, that really attack candidates in a highly persona way.

This is to a large extent because of a remarkable law change. The bottom line is that there is no longer a ban on corporations spending unlimited amounts of money on broadcast political ads in the run up to elections. That’s limitless money to spend on ads supporting or opposing candidates. Bizarrely individual contributors continue to have limits on their donations direct to candidates or parties.

According to The New York Times: For the first time, though, as a result of the [Citizens United] ruling, corporations will be able to spend unlimited amounts of money on “electioneering communications” (i.e., broadcast advertisements) expressly advocating for a candidate’s election or defeat. While the court upheld the ban on direct contributions from corporations or unions to candidates, it also clears the way, for the first time, for corporations to donate money to nonprofit groups that place advocacy advertisements.

Nothing is sacred – military history, personal finances, voting history, family life. I’ve always believed that when you are promoting your product or service it is far more dignified and professional to focus on its benefits rather than the shortcomings of competitors’ products. Clearly this is not a belief shared by many of the groups sponsoring ads. Bring on the elections is all I can say so this nonsense can finally end. Until next time.

Seriously – it must be horrendous to have children today. Not because the little darlings are more demanding or influenced by that heady cocktail of E numbers and advertising but because other parents are so judgemental. No matter what parents seem to choose, from type of buggy, feed, clothing, whether to work etc they get judged by others THE WHOLE TIME.

What’s made me think of this? Well I was in a shoe shop the other day (I know, I know, hold the front page…). Anyway I was browsing, minding my own business when I turned the corner and started to browse down an aisle towards a mother and her daughter. The daughter seemed to be just pre – that dressing-like-a-prostitute phase, so maybe about 9 years old. She was wearing 4 inch leopard print stilettos. I did not bat an eyelid (this was DWS after all and I’ve seen men in more alarming footwear). Still, the mother (wearing identical shoes  btw) felt obliged to tell me ” she’s not buying them, it’s just for fun”.

What has the world come to when young girls can’t play dress up in a shop without parents feeling like the have to justify it? And actually I don’t care if your 9 year old does wear stilettoes. Ok not good for growing feet but there are worse things.*  Seriously who’d be a parent nowadays?

*Such as those Clarkes brown (yes brown – urgh) ‘sensible’ shoes I had to wear at school until I was 16. The shame.

As you can see from the picture – I’ve just been to Paris. I thought an image of a pigeon and the Eiffel tower were about as Paris-y as it gets. But did I just rock up, take the picture and go? I did not. I stood there for a good 15 minutes waiting for the feathered rat to stop cleaning its own backside.

It’s that sort of courtesy that I was  bracing myself for – previous trips to Paris (last time approx 12 years ago) left me expecting condescending service, that whole pretense of not understanding my poor but not totally useless French…

I couldn’t have been more wrong. Everyone was charming – the hotel staff couldn’t do enough for us, waiters and waitresses brought what I had asked for (and let’s face it, over a decade of not using a language rarely improves it) and people in shops were friendly and helpful.* So now there’s absolutely nothing to dislike about Paris. Apart from the pigeons of course.

*In the spirit of full disclosure – the Charles De Gaulle United check-in and ground staff were as surly as ever but I wouldn’t hold that against Paris specifically.

Today was a special day. I just won in court. The nice judge ruled me not guilty when the nasty policeman told porkies about me. I am very happy.

It’s been an irritating matter that has been hanging over my head for just over a year when I was stopped for speeding. The thing is, I actually really wasn’t speeding. Absolutely not. Really. If I had been, I would have paid up and been done with it, but I was pretty annoyed so I took it to court.

All the correspondence is a bit intimidating – “Chambers v the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania”. I kept wondering – what the WHOLE Commonwealth?

My only real knowledge of US courtrooms (or UK ones for that matter) has been gleaned entirely from books and TV. Of course it isn’t at all like that. In books/ TV the D.A. (District Attorney – look how I’ve picked up the lingo) is the attractive one in the sharp suit. In real life he’s about twelve and wearing a slightly shiny polyester outfit. And rather than being thrusting and dynamic he mostly just hung around chatting to people. The Prosecutor was slightly less impressive still.

There’s also a LOT more random sitting around than strictly necessary. There was a good hour of random horsetrading before the show started – everybody else’s policemen made deals but my nasty one wouldn’t. Then there was a bit more waiting. It starts when the judge shows up. And he shows up whenever the fancy takes him. I even popped out to feed the meter in the middle of the sitting around bit. In this small provincial courtroom I counted 15 yes FIFTEEN people all paid by our taxes in some way. All of those 15 people were doing very unproductive things for hald the morning – that can’t be right.

Anyway, I’m ridiculously pleased. That really was the right result. I know I was lucky too. I should have bought a lottery ticket while I was about it.

We’ve recently had rather a lot of weather. Snow to be precise.

The Car

Snow isn’t usually a big deal here not least of all because they’ve got the hang of it so usually fairy diggers come to scrape the roads off before you need to go anywhere. Of course people do drive EVEN worse than usual in the snow (clue: when your wheels are spinning, ease OFF the accelerator) but you just give them a really wide berth. So the other day when woke up to all the snow, I didn’t think it would cause much of a problem. Wrong.

What I’d always thought of as a mostly flat driveway might as well have been Everest with snow on it. Particularly when that snow has been compacted by several tons of German engineering (Vorsprung durch Gewicht). The thing is, you don’t get any traction when the car’s size zero weight is distributed over massive tyres. And the rear wheel drive doesn’t make it any easier. Ok it isn’t a secret that this isn’t a winter car but I only needed to move it 10 metres onto a cleared road where it would have been fine. After much digging and even resorting to chemical heat I gave up and spent the next 2 days as a pedestrian.

During those two days I realised that what I really needed was snow chains  – but that’s crazy if you only need them for your own drive …..which is when I realised the true genius of US school busses.

When you look at the back of a school bus  – for instance when you are trapped behind them for ages as they crawl along, not allowing overtaking, as they drop each chubby child off at his or her own letterbox – you see all these dangling chains underneath. I always thought they were for strapping useful things to the bottom of the bus; such as tools, spare wheels, unruly children etc. It turns out that these are brilliant automatic snow chains. When they are needed they are sort of dangled in front of the wheels to provide traction and then they just hang out of the way when it isn’t needed. I think we need those on the Lotus. Metal chains would be too heavy – so maybe cute little carbon fibre ones. Am I on to something?