After a week in China I am still trying to convince myself that this residency is work-related, but realistically, it would only be true at the moment if I became a food writer. This is a career trajectory I could live with. Writing from Chengdu, Sechuan province, which despite the intense humidity is a charming city full of culinary delights. The street snacks are five star.

China is a land of wonders. Last night after a delicious meal of mock at the wenshu zen monastery, my lady and I went for an evening stroll in the People’s Park. The people really like karaoke. They taught us a lot about the therapeutic values of strolling. Then we had a five-star snack stall dinner of barbequed tofu and vegetables from the lane of a block of flats, which led me to declare aloud my gratitude to sechuan province for damn well knowing how to grill an eggplant.

For all its enthusiasm for construction (they are building a metro system and I guess still recovering from the 2006 earthquake), Chengdu is quite relaxing. We spent a couple of days on the way here in Xi’an to see the terracotta warriors. There is a whole city outside Xi’an built around the ancient tourist attractions, to cater to visitors international and Chinese. It is something of an eyesore, but the warriors are pretty cool. The old walled city of Xi’an itself has been swamped by industrial development, grotesque pollution and nuclear power stations, still fulfilling its role as an economic base which it has held since silk road days. Ugly though. And then you go and climb up a mountain* to a Taoist monastery from 763ad and look out over the new housing, smog and ancient hot spring playground, and think: this is china. Infinitely industrious and . . . why are they playing a whistling muzak version of ‘scarborough fair’ over the PA on this mountain? Infinitely industrious and infinitely surreal.

Plenty to think about, if I get the chance to write. Flickr doesn’t seem to work here (whoda thought communists would ban sharing?) so this blog will be my main channel. So I promise to be a more regular correspondent, once I recover from my Difficult Second Novel burnout.

The nameless book is sitting on my desktop, a single last-chance pdf. Looking at the page proofs gives me a shiver of excitement. To think I actually wrote this and it’s going to be a real book that you can hold in your hands! After about six months of being so over it it’s good to feel happy with it again. It has been a tough book and it has just about wrung me dry. But I can’t complain. I get to do what I love, and in interesting places. Even if I can’t share the pictures with you, I’ll try to regain the habit of composing sentences – in whatever English I have left.

*actually we caught the cable car and climbed the last third of the mountain – it was nuclear-fission hot.