Like Company For Chamomile

Chengdu is famous for drinking tea. This is all we know and it’s enough to make you think songbirds, leafy streets and laze. Everything all colloquial and ginseng cool, like breezy lattice gazeboes and parasol strolls.

For the eight hangovers on hard sleepers it sounds well placed. Romantic even, this then imagined big town of quiet card games and fine cigarette smoke. Next stop chamomile clarity and a sweet poppy seed bun. A spot of sketching. Light rain, delicate figures, sleeping caramel cats. Another cup please.

It’s all minty in our minds. The toothpaste we desperately need after a long train trip – after a big poker night on warm Cola and Rum.

And it starts off so arriving at The Loft hostel, which is all that its fashionable title suggests. Poster art, pool table, a little bit of I’ve-been-to-Amsterdam. We settle in and sit around and knock back a few futile caffeine hits in this self-confessed tea town.

The afternoon is spent Pupil Free, which means whatever you like. But no time now for that detox tonic – it’s the museum, Mao’s monument or a rubbish tip trip. People go and see the Pandas. Pete paints under an overpass.

It’s an E.T.C he says with some cheek, when I take a perve at his large roll of paper. An Elevated Transport Corridor. Small teeth, like children, grin out from a bristled chin. The drawing’s more abstract than usual.

The news of his sudden departure, from masculine mountains, to pagodas that burn, to the ever-curious E.T.C. passes around our table at night, with the later proven satanic Sichuan.

To stop being furtive and to embarrass him greatly, Peter is all you can hope for. Clever in the most un-compromised way, not a sparrow’s dick of pretension. Always furiously into the notebook he is, while he listens to something that sounds heavy.

How are your C.C.S.C’s we ask, teasing when he’s at it again. Concrete Systems of Car Conductivity. The O.P.A.F’s? Overland Parabolic Access Facilitators. Bridges arcing the city.

We confess he’s anything but The Great White Asparagrass, which his devoted work ethic could suggest that he is. It was Phil who first came clean about this communal presumption of ours. Thin in high pants with small rectangle specs, perhaps a stutter, or possible shoulder twitch we thought.

How wrong you can be about things sometimes, and how refreshing it is when you are.