Water Ink

I love BBC TWO’s Springwatch. Today will be the last of the programme, or this ‘season’. Small birds have to grow up and fly away – if they could survive the attack from mink and so on, so perhaps it’s better to let it go.

I have my mini-Springwatch though, just down to the local park.

The parent:

The child:

In the introduction of his new book Getting Rich First: Life in a Changing China (Chatto and Windus), Duncan Hewitt wrote that when he sat at the cafe of Shanghai IKEA, he can see cars and trucks were rushing around outside the window in the three level elevated roads which also tangled with a light weight train rail. When I was reading this, I was sitting beside a window in a quiet corner of one of the large Waterstone’s in Edinburgh. Outside the window is the cobbled back street, where a pigeon was fighting hopelessly against a seagull for some leftover chips. Incidently, Edinburgh is where Hewitt’s journey started, as one of the students learning Chinese in Edinburgh University who were about setting foot in China in late 80s.

An often heard complaint among the youngests who came to the UK from China is that this place is just a bit dull. People can cite me many things they used to do in China, eating out at a newly opened restaurant, karaoke at a new KTV, or exchanging some latest American tv series are just the common ones. There seems to be endless supplies of new ways of consuming and entertaining. Things are moving rather fast there.

This fits well what Hewitt said, that it almost like the 60 years of post war development in the West has been compressed into 20 years in China. BBC’s Andrew Marr, in his History of Modern Britain, describes the make over of Birmingham in the 60s – the old Birmingham almost completely disappeared while people can’t wait to see a New Britain. Imagine that in a much bigger scale, repeated every five years. That’s what’s happening in China.

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BBC Four’s The World has an imaginative new name, World News Today, and a new slot at 7pm, which is a shame, because I’m a fan of its presenter Zeinab Badawi. I watched The World. Unlike other news programmes, The World doesn’t have to cover every news, thus allowing more time for each story, sometimes with discussion and debate, which is informative. But I have to say it hasn’t reached the status of untouchable, so when BBC Four decides to change it to the suicidal slot of 7pm, the unmissable Channel 4 News is the certain winner for me. So I’m afraid there will be one less viewer of World News Today.