The English have a word for it

“How would you describe the way you speak, Joseph?” Mingzhu asked me the other day over dinner. “Are you posh? You sound very posh.”  “I’m not so much posh as educated,” I said.  “When I first came to England,” said my wife, Lanying, “I was very surprised that not everyone spoke clearly like Joseph. I [...]

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The stones in my path

Lately I’ve been writing in the staff canteen. It’s the only place I can go at lunchtime that’s warm.  Spring has been slow to arrive in London. But our building has become so crowded that it’s hard to find somewhere to sit every day. It’s playing havoc with my routine. Today I wasn’t writing my [...]

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I really want to find more like this!

During Christmas in Bamberg I read a really exciting book and as soon as I got back to London I rushed out to various bookshops and tracked down other titles by the same publisher. There were not many so I bought them all. It seems they are now out of print. It’s a shame because [...]

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Character building

My boss wants to send me to China. But he doesn’t want me to tell anyone yet. That probably means nothing will come of it. But, just in case, maybe I should spend more time practising Chinese. “He speaks Mandarin,” my boss keeps telling everyone. But I don’t. Not really. Last week I was ill [...]

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