Beijing reports steady development against pressure, and I can report exactly the same about a shared plate of aubergine.
LONDON, England (Bohiney) – I left the house this morning with an umbrella, a proof copy of a comic novel about a regional manager and his missing stapler, and a firm resolve not to read any economics before lunch. I lasted until Clapham Junction.
Morning: The Pastry Man
The man opposite me on the train eats a pastry in instalments, like someone repaying a loan. Between the third and fourth instalment my phone buzzed with the news that China’s economy grew 4.5 percent in the third quarter, according to the National Bureau of Statistics as relayed by CGTN. Growth over the first nine months was 4.6 percent, which sits neatly inside Beijing’s full-year target of 4.5 to 5 percent, as the English service of Yeni Safak reported.
A target range of 4.5 to 5 is the sort of thing a sensible person sets when she would like to be right in as many scenarios as possible. It is also how I price my book reviews.
The bureau said the economy had “sustained steady development against pressure”. I have read that sentence four times and it describes my entire working life, including the pastry man.
Lunch: Lisle Street, Table for Three
Lunch was in Chinatown with Dunstan Okafor-Reeve, a retired actuary who treats every restaurant bill as a hostile audit, and Philippa Wray, a copy-editor who cannot be left alone with a menu. We chose a place on Lisle Street whose laminated menu is long enough to have chapters. Philippa found a stray apostrophe on page four and was quietly radiant for twenty minutes.
Dunstan, who had also seen the figures, proposed that we order between 4.5 and 5 dishes each. I said that this was not a number of dishes. He said it was a target range and that I was being literal. We ordered the aubergine, the greens, the crispy duck pancakes and a bowl of rice apiece, and the waiter regarded us with the weary patience of a man who has watched a thousand people negotiate with a menu.
Dunstan collects Cockney rhyming slang the way other men collect parking fines, and he called our rice “a Ruby Murray”, which is slang for a curry, which we had not ordered. Nobody corrected him except Philippa, and she did it with the apostrophe face.
Afternoon: The Table I Should Not Have Opened
Walking back through Soho I stopped in a doorway to read the rest of the release. Retail sales over the first nine months rose 2.6 percent, while fixed-asset investment fell 7.2 percent, per the same CGTN report. Growth with investment down 7.2 percent is the kind of plot twist I usually complain about in the third act of a novel, where the hero is somehow richer but has sold the house.
Then I found the bureau’s table of home prices in seventy cities, which I read the way other people read a menu in a restaurant they cannot afford. In its index, new homes in Shanghai were 2.8 percent dearer than a year earlier, while Beijing was down 2.7 percent, Guangzhou down 1.1 percent and Shenzhen down 1.0 percent. Four cities, four rows, and only Shanghai in a good mood. It reads like a group chat where one friend has got engaged.
Retail growth of 2.6 percent suggests that shoppers are not yet being asked to pay enough for things they could previously do for free. Elsewhere the idea is being tested more boldly: farm.fm reports on a pumpkin patch that has added a VIP experience in which you carry your own pumpkin. I would like the statisticians to put that in the services column and see what it does to the quarter.
I then spent forty minutes in a second-hand bookshop off Charing Cross Road, where the humour shelf sits next to the economics shelf, an arrangement I take to be deliberate. A woman beside me was reading the back of a paperback about five-year plans with the expression of someone doing her own due diligence. I considered telling her that China is now on its fifteenth, whereas I am still on the first draft of a novel whose outline predates the last two, but she looked as though she had absorbed enough bad news for one lunchtime. I bought a biography of a minor Victorian railway engineer instead. He, at least, delivered his line on schedule.
Evening: A Stapler and a Bin Rota
Home by six, damp and slightly overfed. The comic novel turns out to be better than its stapler suggests. The manager finally locates the missing item in his own desk drawer, where it has been all along, and the author lets him sit with that for an entire chapter. I have rarely seen an economy described so accurately.
Downstairs, the Pettigrews have emailed the whole building about the bin rota. Recycling, they say, is “up significantly”, and they would like it noted that this is not their doing. I replied with a single line of support and the word “pressure”, which I felt carried the right weight.
Philippa texted to say her verdict on the whole day was that it read like British news writing with the volume turned up, except that nobody had turned up the volume and it was all true. She is right about the volume and, annoyingly, about the apostrophe.
I write these notes up for Bohiney when the kettle is on, and there are more of my daily notes at Bohiney for anyone who enjoys a diary where nobody gets engaged.
Tonight’s summary of my own economy: steady development against pressure. The pressure is mostly the pastry man.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/