For a partner setting a table in a game of “house,” an overturing child might assume the role of the father returning home from work at dinnertime rather than overturing by throwing a ball toward the child and yelling “catch.”

When we reach Jinchang, another forlorn desert town, I change buses for another two-hour ride to the town of Yongchang, a few miles from a village where I’ve heard that locals make some extraordinary claims about their ancestry.

Now outside in Zhengzhou, the city worst hit at the moment, which has had record rains hitting the highest level of rainfall since records were kept six decades ago, the streets have turned into brown rivers which have swallowed up traffic, and in an even more alarming development the military is saying that at a nearby city a major dam could actually burst and that soldiers have been mobilized there to blast around the dam in an attempt to divert flood waters, take the pressure off the dam, in the hope that, what they're talking about is already is a sort of twenty meter fissure in the dam, it can avoid having that dam being burst, which would obviously also be a really terrible development.

Some of the foxes found dead on railway lines, by the way, have been put there after death by vulpicides.