rat race
There must be few sights more innocently strange than to see a mandarin tree – a three foot high wobbly cone full of fruits which look like floating eyes – on a bike ahead of you cycling down the causeway. Black jeans protrude from where the roots might be and white plimsolls push the petals. The little bush looks nervous, cuddly and authentically nightmarish. It turns away down the road in front of Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum and I continue down Pham Dinh Phung which, at this end, is a dark avenue of Khaya trees (Hanoi’s equivalent of the plane) hiding yellow colonial villas filled with government offices. Some of the Khayas have been unlucky enough to form a nest for a strangler fig; a seed dropped, no doubt, by the red-whiskered bulbuls that flock through their shaggy crowns. Curtains of whiskery tendrils trail over the stream of traffic as it heads towards the lighter end of Pham Dinh Phung. On the left are cafes, most of them closed. On the right now the entrance to the ancient citadel and the demolished mausolea of the kings. The great north gate, built like a bolt head, still bears the crater marks of French cannons. A few things take root in it. A guard in a green trenchcoat turns away through a smaller gate flanked by two red banners bearing, in gold, the hammer and sickle and the star of Vietnam. A thin faced man rattles the ice round in his coffee, the music starts on something heavy and classical, then switches to some equally heavy crooning. A little girl, all in red, goes past on her red bike. I remember my green bike leaning on green railings in front of green lake water reflecting palm trees.
well I should get down to work. the music’s a bit loud.
