This years Christmas really jumped out at me from nowhere. I mean I've planned for it, got gifts for the few people that exist in my life, got a tree up and such. But even then it feels like it was always months away until it wasn't.

Probably because Shanghai has had unseasonable warmth, even by its usual unseasonable standards, right up to the last few days. I mean, early December we were hitting 26C, then mid-December we were hitting 0, and now we're at -6C, a coldest snap in 40 years!

It's been great. I have this Timberland puffer jacket which makes me look like a 200kg man and basically renders me immune to Cold Damage. I lost the batteries to my electric gloves but I got some more on the way. They were the best thing ever when we went skiing last year.

We also got a new radiator, pulled out the ol' electric blanket and 'christmas flavour' candle. The colder it gets, the cosier I become!

---

Well, it's been a while since I blogged. I've been lingering most days, even if that just means looking at the Hive bookmark on my tab. I've actually written maybe 5-6 blogs over the last few weeks, just decided they were too pointless to bother publishing. To be fair this one isn't exactly revolutionary, either. But I figured a good way to get back into the game is by doing a little summary of my life for anyone depressed enough to sit and read through.

I haven't really been super busy as is tradition with @lemouth for example. I just feel like real life has been a bit more interesting, even if that is just me lying around doing nothing, I just seem to have found more interest in that than doing stuff on my computer, including blogging.

Then I got my hands on Baldurs Gate 3 and so any computer time went onto that, but even then I only got to the second of 3 acts so far after weeks because I'm just not using my computer much.

So what else has been going on...

Family Drama

Yeah, its that time of year but I feel like our family's family drama is somewhat... shittier, than the average fall-out-and-make-up that epitomises the average family. To start off, I don't even have a family. I got a mum and a sister, the rest are either estranged, dead, or functionally dead. The latter of which being part of the recent drama. I won't go into it unless somebody is genuinely curious but suffice to say, some people just never grow up, even in their 60's.

Talent Show

We had our Christmas Talent show at school yesterday! Actually, it was at the other campus in a city called Suzhou. It was pretty wild because our campus here is very... cosy. We're pretty sure it used to be a small hotel. It houses about 200 high school kids and that's very crammed. It has almost no facilities you might expect in a school. No changing rooms, no library (there's a storage room for class books they call a library, but is mostly used for classes and storage of robots because there's nowhere else to put these things). There's one basketball court, a miniature football field, 2 badminton courts. No music or drama facilities, no art facilities (a room full of easels is the best we got).

Point being, the other campus is GIANT. It can easily house well over 2,000 students...

It has full size running tracks, swimming pool, gymnasiums, film studios, art galleries, locker rooms, piano rooms, numerous huge dance rooms with the floor to ceiling mirrors and such, multiple gyms backstage dressing rooms with those light bulbs all the way around the makeup mirrors... so much space they even have rooms they don't know what to do with, like 'national geographic' rooms and pilates room.

It might sound normal to people in real schools but to me and my students we were all so jealous. The funny thing is, the entire school currently has under 50 students. It's a ghost town. I went exploring on the 4th and 5th floors and it looked like everything was frozen in time. Brand new, posh infrastructure, completely devoid of life.

There was one jiu jitsu class going on near the swimming pool, but that was the only activity I saw in the two full days I spent there.

Anyway, we used their performance stage (which was small compared to everything else) and I'd say it was a resounding success! Exhaustingly long. I spent an hour commuting to work, then 2 hours to Suzhou, then a whole day of performances, 2.5 hours back, then 1 hour home again. That's about 7 hours of travel and 4 hours of performances. Eesh.

I feel a bit disappointed in that my choir only did 2 christmas songs, when, in hindsight, I think this years students are much more capable than previously. I should have had them rise to the challenge. After the holiday break I'm going to start hammering them with 4-part harmonies and the like!

Some of my other students did fantastic with their rock bands and solo guitar-voice, pop bands, dances, duets and such too. It was probably the first time there was no real 'disaster' of any kind!

Politics and Pessimism

I've been mourning the loss of my homeland quitea bit lately. I see a lot of passing comments on various things that all say 'England has fallen/UK has fallen'. You see this for Europe, Canada too, but it's just sad. UK is doing worse than any of them as far as I can tell, but none of them are doing well at all... Except the USA, but even their absurd growth doesn't necessarily trickle down as much as it should.

USA median household is now about $80,000/year, and they still complain. Of course it varies state to state, but even the poorest state has a higher household income than the UK, and even London, the supposed financial powerhouse, doesn't even make the top 10 US states by income, and that's a city where it costs thousands of pounds a month to rent a bathroom.

It's a really hard pill to swallow to acknowledge that the UK is, well, a poor country now. On paper, it's 6th richest, but in practice it's far below that. That wealth is almost entirely propped up by London. Outside of that, there isn't much industry going on. Some places, towns once thriving such as fishing villages up north, are now just borded up ghost towns with little but poverty roaming the streets (thanks Iceland).

People like to blame Brexit, but there's not much realistic evidence to say it did much other than make things slightly worse than what it already was, a long trajectory downhill into the mud. The thing is, as much as it's easy to blame the government, I can't help but feel like it's the people's fault too. Productivity in the US is supremely high, and the UK it feels like nobody can really be bothered to do anything. I'm not there so this is only my online, at a distance perception of the place.

But yeah, with such pessimism - 50% of the population think things are going to get much worse in the next 12 months - I feel like an absolute moron making plans to go back, especially now my family is reduced further to basically nothing. There really is little reason to go there. Salaries in the UK are pathetic, earning only a fraction for most jobs what you can earn elsewhere doing the same thing (I will never see close to the salary I get right now back in the UK no matter how optimistic I am). What's the point?

China has an entirely different but possibly worse economic problem over the horizon, but Shanghai will be mostly shielded from its effects until the absolute last moment, being the financial powerhouse, pride and joy.

Jacob Collier!

Every musicians musician. The kind of genius people mostly love, but the less capable love to hate. I won't blabber on about him more but me and the fiance saw him live right here for the first time. It was quite mind blowing, and actually got my fiance to admit he's great, after moaning every time I talk like a fanboy about him and his music.

I'm never that fanboyish. I don't like a fair amount of his work, and I really dislike his unrealistic, preachy optimism about humans and love. But I get what he's doing, and I can see how healthy and positive a force he is for the musical world.

Marriage

Well well well. The time is quickly approaching.

And other stuff

I can't remember everything over such a long time, but needless to say I haven't been bored. Thanksgiving Bingo & Buffet, for example.

I did try to get this under 1,000 words, but under 2,000 is a fair compromise.

Christmas in 2 days!

Really hard to believe. I'll filter out all the negativity for a bit and get fat.

Peace out!