The Chinese Spring Festival (or Chinese New Year to westerners) is the biggest public holiday in the Chinese calendar (incidentally, it’s now the Year of the Tiger). Every year Chinese people go back to their parents to celebrate with their families, leaving huge metropolises like Beijing bizarrely ghost town-esque and devoid of life. It’s also an excellent chance for us expats to take a break from city life and go on a tour of China, or at least part of China anyway. This year, Hannah and I decided to go to Yunnan Province in the south west of China; it borders Laos, Vietnam and Burma (or should that be Myanmar? – I can never remember) and has lovely tropical weather, so we’d be feeling an early burst of summer sun, as well as escape from the freezing temperatures of Beijing (honestly, it’s still brass monkeys here, although it’s getting less cold every day) ...   more »

I now know a little of what it feels like to be Stephen Hawking. No, not in that way (I can feel the scoffing already); I mean by having to distill an immense amount of information into something digestible by the general public (or in my case by a handful of friends and family and those arseholes that spam the trackbacks). Hawking undertook this onerous task when writing his masterpiece, “A Brief History of Time”. This was a seminal piece of work that furthered his genius (to even more seemingly improbable heights) simply because he was able to take the most complex human imaginings and theories (a lot of which were his own) and make them understandable to the layperson. Make no mistake, this was a hugely important piece of work, and he understandably received plaudits from every quarter of the universe for it. The work I present here is far more important than that, and it’ll only be read by a tiny fraction of the people that read Hawking’s gem and receive no acclaim whatsoever. I suppose my genius will always be underappreciated ...   more »