I meant to revitalize my blog at New Year, but I’m afraid that came and passed in a flurry of activity, and now I find myself suddenly arrived at Chinese New Year. The year of the rat will arrive, noisily, at midnight on Wednesday. This should be the one time in the year when China as a whole kicks off its shoes for a well-deserved rest. Even migrant workers, the hard-working low-paid engine of China’s economic growth, try to go home at Chinese New Year, to see their families. Often they have left wives or husbands and children behind, and they are desperate to see them. Ideally, they go back as conquering heroes, with wads of cash from their work in the big city. The compound where we live is ablaze with celebratory fairy lights, but it’s an illusion – Beijing is a bubble of normality at the moment while much of the country is in real crisis. Unexpected snow blizzards have stranded hundreds of thousands of people at railway stations and thousands on the roads, and have cut off power to thousands of homes. The freezing weather comes as a particularly disastrous shock to the south of the country, which is used to balmy weather, and installs little in the way of heating in homes. Such awful weather conditions mean that the authorities are having trouble moving coal around the country, and with more bad weather forecast there are serious concerns that power outages may spread. The government is embarrassed – could they have predicted this? Probably not. But they have kept saying that all will be well, and it patently is not. Of course, with China’s propagandistic approach to news, it’s hard to know just how bad things are in distant parts of the country, and what the death toll actually is. This all feels rather surreal in Beijing, where today the sky was an unusual blue. But, the fairy lights not withstanding, we did today take the precaution of buying lighters, in case we need to light candles….