Bracing for the season's blood, sweat and tears

When I arrived in Beijing last winter, my nose bled and throat hurt every day for two weeks.

"The air is probably too dry for a southerner like yourself," many colleagues would tell me. "It's your body adjusting and you'll get used to it soon enough," one of them cooed.

Sure enough, a year on, I no longer blow or cough up blood-streaked phlegm into tissues. As the cold settles firmly onto the capital this year, I have even found the heavy air in the evenings - tinged with the smoke from the coal-fired boilers that help warm the city - strangely alluring.