SUMMER TIME!

Summer's here! And yet again that can only mean one thing - great T-shirts!

And the spies come out too! But more on that later.

What's that, I hear you say? Summer doesn't begin until the equinox on June 21? Or even on June 1 by some crude over-simplified calendars?

Not in Beijing it doesn't. Here, spring lasts for about a week. We go from freezing cold to boiling hot in the blink of an eye. I can't explain exactly why. But I think it's something to do with the weather.

Doesn't matter. The worst thing about winter isn't the cold. It's that you don't get funny fashion.

As I always say ...

A brave man for wearing this to evoke some
good ol' feudal days. That's why I can't show
his face. Kind of.

Remember readers, all photos of attention-grabbing sloganised T-shirts are greatly appreciated here if you can snap them and send them in. The best one might win a prize!

And don't forget, in China in the summer, if you want to roam the streets in your pyjamas, it's OK and you're OK.

And if you want to walk around
with a plastic bag on your head,
that's fine too.

Speaking of hats, here's former Brazil football superstar Ronaldinho.

And here's one of his biggest fans, who I bumped into today on her morning stroll.

Mrs Lao Taitai, of Beijing, says she's
"football loopy", and lists the buck-toothed
ex-Barcelona striker as her number one.
"You can say what you like about Messi,
Rooney, Kaka and the rest of them. For me
it's Ronaldinho all the way," said Mrs Lao,
116. "That goal he scored against England
in the 2002 World Cup? Quality."

This was only the second Ronaldinho hat seen by your faithful fashion policeman in 10 minutes. Perhaps a truck carrying them to the airport crashed near the Silk Market.

Maybe it was this one - an early candidate for 'load of the month'.

Better hope there's a human
under there somewhere.

Ronaldinho was always good at taking corners. Wish we could say the same for this Beijing driver.

It's alright - the kids aren't in danger.
The driver's not rounding the corner.
He's parked there.
For not just parking on a corner but
a mile away from it, on the crosswalk
and all, without a shit given, this person
wins our Park of the Month award.

Then we hopped in our own car and were soon enjoying ourselves along the capital's second ring road, which looked something like this ...

By the side of that road I snapped a photo of this entrepreneurial chap ...

You can imagine driving home from work ...
"Got the milk, got the bread - OH BUGGER! Forgot
one large live turtle!
"The wife's gonna kill ... Oh thank God!"

Or if turtle doesn't whet your amphibian appetite, here's what one of our local restaurants was offering recently ...

Parsley, sage, rosemary and frog.

Or perhaps ...

They've given up on getting it right by the
looks.

But a pushbike is still a great way to get around in summer, though it seems - as documented here previously - that spell-checker is still in the mail.

Happy Holidags! From the good people at Gaont.
(Any resemblance to huge bicycle manufacturing
conglomerate Giant is purely coincidental).

Well that settles that then!

Is it to evoke the song Straighten Up and Fly Harw?
Or a pitch to rugby fans with a local pronunciation
of the man behind the scrum, the fly-half?

My ride was going well until my tender sensibilities were offended by this lewd piece of street art, a sort of tribute, I imagined, to phallic rock bands such as Motley Crue and Poison.

However, upon raising a petition entitled "Ban This Filth", I was told it was not lewd at all, but clever.

I soon encountered more funny business at this stand for exhibitionists by a canal.

And discovered my seven-year-old daughter was enrolled in the "What The F*ck Tae-Kwon-Do" school.

I also found this ...

It's true. After you've lived here for a while, you learn to treat anything that you understand as a bonus.

*  *  *

SPY SCANDAL!!

There were no doubts about what I uncovered when back in my apartment, however. I often like to take a look south from the Tiger Father lair over the Australian Embassy, to make sure my taxpayer-funded public servants are hard at it.

But when I did so this afternoon you could have knocked me down with a feather. There, unfolding before my very eyes, was a good old-fashioned spy scandal!

The photos speak for themselves. Indignantly, I shall be forwarding our Prime Minister Julia Gillard a link to my blog forthwith.

When I first looked out my window, it looked like any
other ordinary day. There's the Australian Embassy,
looking as beautiful, friendly and welcoming as ever,
if also a lot like a Soviet-era prison.

I usually feel extremely proud when
I see this - the unmistakable sight
of the Australian flag! Unless it's
New Zealand. Or Fiji or one of them.
"But wait," I thought, "what's this?
Spies on the roof? The nerve of these
Chinese!"

I stopped to wonder if my keen journalist's mind wasn't over-imagining things.

But then came the final proof.

As blatant as you please, if you don't mind!
Instantly, again with media training, I dubbed it
"Australian Embassy, Beijing-gate".

It was astonishing to see Chinese intelligence officers are still doing it old-school. I mean, who can forget when I was on the other end of the stick - the day The Tiger Father's offices themselves came under equally intense scrutiny.

As I continued to snap these tell-all pictures, the spies went about their business with seemingly not a care in the world while doing what spies do - screwing in wires, and sitting down.

After some time, one of the operatives was seen to walk in a southerly direction, presumably to test out one of the crude listening devices the crack team had just installed ...

... while one of his partners made his getaway.

Operative 1, the so-called "Man In The Hat", then went and ferreted around in a secret white box, where he appeared to have stashed some radio equipment, probably the night before ...

... and radioed in his position to probably someone else in the country's top-secret spy bureau the Communist Interference Association (CIA).

The spy was only seconds away from a dramatic, commando-style helicopter-rooftop escape when our investigative reporting team had to go pick up his kids from school.

So we don't really know what happened then.

But later, when we phoned the Embassy to report our findings, a spokesman told us in no uncertain terms: "Who are you again?" and "I've no idea what you're talking about."

No doubt there'll be more heard of this in the coming days.

*  *  *

More on Monday, readers! Meanwhile for a fun look at why Australians are so hard, copy and paste this link into your browser!

http://www.buzzfeed.com/awesomer/totally-common-occurrences-in-australia

DOCTOR JOKES!

(Here's the extended limited edition director's cut of my column from That's Beijing/Shanghai/Guangzhou magazines this month!)

WHEN you’re married to, and propagate with, a doctor, it can be good and bad.

The joke goes that you at least have access to some pretty good drugs, but that’s a myth. That’s anaesthetists you’re thinking of. I’m usually good for some aspirin and some antibiotics at best. Woohoo.

On one hand, when there’s a doctor in the house, you should know whether or not your child is really sick. Some ailment that would freak the pants off many a mother, and even some fathers, can be quickly diagnosed as nothing to worry about. It’s not meningococcal – it’s where she got some jam on herself at breakfast.

Such diagnoses happen in the living room. Other people have had to bundle a child up in the middle of the night, wait for Ayi to come to mind the other one, and race to the clinic. Mind you, we’re friends with one medical couple who frantically took their baby to hospital fearing the dreaded twisted testicles, as his scrotum was red and tender. After a long wait in the middle of the night they were told by a bemused junior intern that it was nappy rash. The father’s an anaesthetist, so …

Attending pre-natal classes with a doctor wife was slightly humiliating. For one thing, those little dolls we had to put nappies on? They all looked like me – bald and grumpy. Also a doctor wife knows all the answers. The journalist husband sits there wondering if Cervix knew Asterix, and why we’re discussing the subway in Fallopia.

The births were my time to shine – not because of my technique with the scissors but because my wife was a gibbering fool for the most part, thanks again to a helpful anaesthetist.

Apart from these there were some, but only a few, moments where I was able to triumph in the world of medical science. At four months Lani caught a cold. She was miserable, but finally she was sleeping soundly. Stef went to bed but then got up to do some pacing in the middle of the night about whether Lani’s “condition” was “deteriorating”.

I was pretty calm about it, since I wanted to get back to sleep. “She’s sleeping isn’t she? She can’t be too bad.”

“Well yes she’s sleeping,” Dr Wife snapped. “That doesn’t mean her kidneys aren’t going toxic!”

Now, I’d heard of kidneys, but I didn’t know one could go toxic. And I still don’t know what that means. For me ignorance was bliss. I let my doctor wife continue worrying about medicine while I got back to one thing I’m good at - sleeping.

With a doctor, a thrillingly high piece of playground equipment is not just a climbing frame or slippery dip, it's "a potentially fatal fall". Anything small isn't a 'thing' but a choking hazard. And there's always some story or other about a child who was doing that mundane thing your child is doing right now - and suddenly his head came off.

The line about doctor parents is that the cobbler’s son has no shoes. Doctors see very sick kids, so sometimes ailments that are less serious, but still worth complaint, go under-treated. But sometimes things can get overdone, over-worried. Lani’s had stitches for cuts I would have treated with a kiss and a scruff of the hair.

There are also two truisms about your medicine chest: When you live with a doctor you’re A) going to have a lot of things in there, and B) going to get very confused about them.

As a single man my medicine chest contained, roughly, a tube of ointment and a toothbrush. I’m not sure, with the handicap of hindsight, what kind of ointment it was, but it went on everything.

Now we’ve got tons of stuff to wade through if a child gets sick. Worse, doctors are peculiar in that they call something by it’s active ingredient. Say Evie’s got a fever, my wife will bark: “Give her five mils of ibuprofen, STAT!”

OK, she might not say stat. They only do that on TV. Same as sticking tubes up people’s nostrils if they so much as walk near a hospital.

So I’ll skulk off for the thankless task of looking for ibuprofen. Of course I can’t find it anywhere. It’s listed in small print in the ingredients section of several bottles, but nowhere I’m looking. I just wish one day Dr Wife would give her lay husband something more to go on – I dunno, a brand name, perhaps, like Nurofen, Advil, Zyczyxx or Cyzyczz.

(For the last two, I was making it up, but you wouldn’t know it. Golden Rule of Medicine No.2 is: If you’re trying to sell medicine, make sure it has lots of Zs and Xs in it. A genuine study a few years ago showed we non-doctors were dazzled and reassured by seeing those two letters in medical products’ names.)

Doctors are also armed to the teeth with “facts” and “statistics” they can throw at their husbands. When you’re on a night out “a few beers” can easily become 5.5 standard drinks, which is of course bad for your health. A doctor spouse might remind you of this a few times as part of her duty under Golden Rule of Medicine No.1, the Hypercritical Oath.

But at least she’s just a normal doctor – a general practitioner. I don’t have to explain to people what a urologist or an endocrinologist does, for example. Furthermore, we have a doctor friend whose job it is to look up people’s bottoms all day, every day. Imagine being married to that? All those "How was your day?" bits - indeed any details whatsoever at all about their vocation and their passion - could be kept to themselves for the duration of our marriage, thanks. Just don't forget to buy more hand sanitiser on your way home.

Of course I'm not allowed to show you photos
of my wife being a doctor, so today's picture
special is of the kinds of lifelike baby dolls you
can buy these days and which, some people say,
bear a resemblance to me.
This one fits the bill pretty well. He
calls to mind David Serdaris' description of
newborns - that they all look like bitter
old men.

This one's a little creepy, and not just
because of the decapitation factor.

The artist as a bitter old man.
The all made fun of me.

Another lifelike little grump.

This one does a fair 'me' as well.

This one you might want to get if your
baby is a little bit stupid.

Keep these two in your house and it's a fair bet you'll be
murdered in your sleep.

This one's a bit creepy too.

So is this one.

And this one.

One of the fun parts of being a doctor's spouse is that nowadays, living in an expat compound with lots of friends around, people even ask me for medical advice. I used to patiently explain that I was the husband of a doctor. But now I dish it out in spades. It’s great fun.

Stef recoils in horror at this. She bangs on about “six years at medical school” this and “evidence-based medicine” that and blahdiblah. I take offence at this. True, I don’t have her piece of paper. It’s true I’ve never dissected a frog. Besides, despite not being a doctor I do know frogs don’t look anything like people anyway.

No, I’m proud to say my learning was done the toughest school there is – the School of Hard Knocks. My tertiary education was achieved at the University of Life. There, I mastered in science – the Science of Common Sense!

Noone told Dr Wife, for example, that you get warts from toads, and hemorrhoids from sitting on something cold. I once cracked my sternum, I’m pretty sure, at the gym. I figured, by myself, that I needed calcium. So I drank lots of milk and healed myself. And all in just six months.

So when people come to me for medical advice, I’m happy to help. For one thing, people still feel reassured, and isn’t that nice? Furthermore, Stef usually isn’t around, so I can’t get in trouble – at least not until they go and see her if their ailment should worsen.

Sometimes I nail it, if I get the right patients. One friend, an over-worried New York mum, once showed me her two-year-old’s forehead.

“You see that lump?!?! That red lump?!?!” she fretted.

“Mmm,” I said.

“What do you think? What do you think it is? I’m worried and I might take her to the clinic.”

“Well,” I said, sucking the air, “I’m not a doctor, but … that’s a mosquito bite.”

“Do you think? I thought it might be but then I thought it was something else and I … “

“Yeah no,” I said, using that piece of common, nonsensical Australian. “That’s a mosquito bite. It should go down in an hour.” Oh, the other-wordly wisdom.

Someone else asked: “I’ve got the flu. What should I do?”

“Have a big night on the drink,” I said. “Alcohol kills germs.” (Another basic fact they keep to themselves at med school).

But once a very blunt Australian woman said: “Hey – what do you do if you’re sick in the guts? I’ve been on the crapper with the runs all day!”

My advice was swift and clear: “You tell someone else.”

THAT SPECIAL DAY IN MAY

IT’s a special and sentimental weekend coming up readers - one of the favourites for this house husband, and a cherished fixture of the calendar for families in many corners of the globe, if globes had corners.

It’s a day that’s been marked for 140 years now, one with many memories and, yes, more than a hint of romance. 

For yes, in only a couple of days kettles will be put on, flowers will come out, and millions of people  around the world will come together to watch the FA Cup final.

That this wondrous knock-out football tournament is a hotbed of romance is well known. Sometimes you could cut the romance with a knife. A massive 758 teams from across England – including amateur pub outfits filled with brickies, plumbers and librarians pitted against some of the giants of sport – have been whittled down to just two.

And even now on this spring weekend the romance factor is high, as plucky north-west England council estate battlers Wigan take on spoilt little Abu Dhabi-backed rich boys Manchester City.

Florists always do a roaring trade at this time of year. The managers of both finalists traditionally wear a rose in their lapel for the big day, as do many fans in the stands and at home. It all adds to the lustrous appeal of this one day in May.

Who knows what will happen?

Well, probably Manchester City will win by about six goals. But still. It should be memorable.

And here, to help you enjoy it, is this special edition of …

TIGER FATHER’S TOP TIPS!

Want to look posh this FA Cup final day by wearing a rose in your lapel?

But you can’t afford it?

Thankfully the Tiger Father is here to help. And so is the world’s oldest civilisation. And its vegetables.

Take one or two of these …

They're you cai, better known in the west by the Cantonese
bok choy. Thankfully I live in China, so they're readily
available. I bought six for one yuan. So they're about
two US cents each.

Take a knife and start cutting off the bottom. For best
results, do not cut your fingers, or they will bleed.

Keep on cutting until you're all the way through. The whole
process should take between a half and one second. As a
journalist I was always taught to write as if my reader
was an imbecile.

Et voila! ("And voila").
A rose by any other name! 

Perhaps you're from Yorkshire, and would prefer your rose white?

Simply coat with icing sugar, and Bob's your uncle!

Want to look pretty in pink for the big match?

Just soak in the beetroot jar for a few minutes ....

And kebang! One white and one pink rose.

If you're from Lancashire and need your rose red, soak in food colouring.

This one's redder than the beetroot one. No it is.

Or maybe you're a goth? Or an emo?

Then piss off.

And cheer up. Miserable sod.

Or else throw all your food dye in with some water to make
black, and soak the thing in there.

Black.
 Like your heart.
 (And green a bit).

Now mush up some blue tac, and put it on your chest, and stick your bok choy rose on!

You're good to go for the football, looking well posh.

People will think you're related to the
Queen or something.

If they don't, show them your food colouring and tell them your aunty lent it to you.

By Royal Appointment.

So there you go - a quick way to celebrate and save! Also good for weddings, funerals and proms, without breaking the household budget!

Next week: How to make an inexpensive scouring pad using old stockings and nail clippings!

*  *  *

Ed's Note: Good luck to all those with an interest in the big game. In case you're wondering, as I'm sure you are, your correspondent doesn't support a team in the final. Instead I'm wearing blue in the photos above because I support Leicester City, who are now in the play-offs to decide who gets promoted to Premier League next season. If you enjoy reading my website, I shall ask you to return the favour by getting up at 2.30am tonight, Beijing time, to follow Leicester's crucial match against Watford with your fingers crossed. Thanks a lot.

Now I'll leave you with a shot I found on the web of the Leicester playing uniform, as modelled by the city's most famous (skeletal) resident, King Richard III.

(PS: There's more below, on Two Bit Thursday).