Tanks

It was dark now, the driver dropped us off at Tiananmen Square. You cannot be ready for how big that place is. People were still flying kites. There is a large building in the centre of the square which is Mao’s Mausoleum, a day or two later we would join the queue to file past what is supposed to be the remains of the man himself. His face could have been made of marzipan.

It was a balmy evening and we strolled about a bit. It certainly feels like stuff has gone on there. It is adjacent to the Forbidden City and the government offices. From time to time you will see a posh black car with people in suits going about the business of transforming their county into a super power. There are no rubbish cars around as they haven't had cars there that long.



Anyway we had been wandering about for about 20 minutes and we were approached by a very smiley Chinese bloke. A few people had wanted to sell us something. He was more persistent than the others, more charming too. For the next two or three hours he was our unofficial guide, it didn’t matter that he was being paid by the shops and tea houses we visited; it was worth it. During the day he teaches English at the University but cannot afford to accommodate his family in the City, they lived out of town; he stayed during the week in a Huton, a one room apartment (without a toilet) off a little communal square. Everywhere in Beijing the Hutons are being flattened and replaced with tall buildings.


"no rubbish cars"

Whilst we were still in the square I asked him whereabouts the student was standing when he confronted the tanks. He looked at me like I had just taken all my clothes off. Through a fixed smile, glancing over his shoulder he said, “you cannot talk about that here”.

Pelican

October 1994; we were going to Florida. The flight followed a path down the east coast of the states, I tried to identify cities from 30 000 ft. By the time we were on board the hire car, heading for Miami Beach, it was getting dark and starting to rain. We had no bookings anywhere and it was several hotels before I had found one that showed the ESPN channel on the TV in the rooms; I wanted to know if Michael Schumacher was going to win his first world title.

The following morning we awoke to the remnants of Tropical Storm Gordon. There was a lot of rain and we were told to expect it to last a while. We moved to a cool hotel on the beach called the Pelican. But the weather was still interfering a little. We drove around through the floods in our convertible.

The pair of us considered flying inland to New Orleans or somewhere but in the end decided to drive south. We had to drive all the way to Key West before the sun came out. A bit knackered, we checked into the first nice and very expensive hotel we found. This was on the basis that we felt due some “r and r” and we could move somewhere cheaper later. We never moved.

Every evening there is a bit of a party to watch the sunset. One evening we found ourselves sitting side by side in a Tiger Moth. As it flew over the little crowd by the port we were joined by another old plane and we did some modest aerobatics; we even saw a shark in the clear sea. Another evening we were on a sailing boat and became witnesses at the wedding of a drunk bloke and his much older slightly less inebriated partner.

I went on a dive. My diving buddy seemed surprised that I didn’t know Ridley Scott (as I lived in London) and on the way, talked a lot about how much he enjoyed diving. I had never dived before but I wasn’t the one who freaked out. On my second dive I let too much air out of my regulator too quickly and when the bubbles had dissipated I found myself standing on the bottom with a small group of divers around me. I learnt that before I stood on it, they had been studying a baby shark on the sea bed.

When you dive you can move by the way you breathe.