Photograph Source: Jitze Couperus – CC BY 2.0

When I was a child, the world felt vast enough to resist you. Things didn’t always work because you needed them to, and sometimes they refused. I caught the tail end of this with occasional cars needing coaxed back to life with a metal crank. I’d watch disgruntled men—middle-aged, I suppose, though at that time ancient—puff and swear as they cranked the engine over. A mechanical benediction before the joy. If it didn’t catch, you were stranded. “A moment between heaven and earth,” as Li Bai once wrote.

On the week Keir Starmer visited Beijing, I had the same problem with the TV. Some time ago I bought an inexpensive Chinese one, because it had 4K. It worked well—until it didn’t. We had joked, harmlessly enough, about the secret camera inside, quietly logging our steady diet of news, documentaries, European cinema, the odd comedy, and more news. The joke relied on distance.

Despite my reading a lot of Chinese poetry—not just Li Bai but also Du Fu—the specific problem was that it took an age to start, just like one of those old cars. The backlight must be failing. Meanwhile, the recent news was making it resemble a tropical fish tank about to explode. Every so often a bright orange fish would leap clear of the glass, flapping in front of us with its fake aches........

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