Big Lychee, Various Sectors

Last week’s teenage heartthrob and hipsters’ hero Edward Snowden turns up in the 7-Eleven opposite Perpetual Opulence Mansions this morning, clutching his trademark Rubik’s Cube in a desperate attempt to be recognized. Even the South China Morning Post, which shot to global prominence for its scoop-but-for-the-Guardian, is reduced to filling its daily page dedicated to his saga to filler from news agencies and a summary of whiny Mainland media.

Fame is cruel, I tell him. Why, it seems only yesterday that HK Magazine reported calls for me to take over both China and the Catholic Church, and a million keen-eyed secretaries, marketing floozies and young housewives mentally undressed me wherever I went; now, it’s as if no-one had ever heard of me.

Still, I try to reassure him, at least our names were upon everyone’s lips for a while. The Standard carries a short story about a certain Ashton Kutcher and his companion, one Mila Kunis. I suppose the news angle – they plan to get married on the moon – warrants a few column inches. But the tone of the piece clearly implies that we should know who these people are. I have never heard of them, and my new friend Ed, despite having enjoyed access to the personal details of around 4.5 billion people, confesses similar ignorance. We decide to make a game of it: I wager that the pair are Euro-trash tennis players (the hat and the silly names are real giveaways); Ed bets they are winners of some TV talent show. Sadly, none of the convenience store staff or customers can give us the answer.

Ed asks if I can recommend any purveyors of fine public relations services to assist him in his quest for the international, or at least local, limelight. He insists that it is not just attention he craves, though he admits that once you get a taste for it, it’s hard to fade back into anonymity. The fact is that even after exchanging the Hotel Mira in Tsimshatsui for the YMCA, he’s finding Hong Kong unexpectedly expensive.

I commiserate. If the United States authorities wanted to seriously punish him for his treachery, they would not issue an arrest warrant – just keep on ignoring him. The poor guy would end up living in a subdivided apartment in Shatin scratching a living sorting out middle-aged fuddy-duddies’ computer problems. But he may be in luck. I remind him that media and dimwitted Congressmen who can neither work out how to use Google nor find Hong Kong on a map are frothing at the mouth demanding his abduction by CIA-backed triads, rendition via Uzbekistan and Guantanamo Bay, waterboarding, 20 successive 300-year prison sentences and the death penalty for endangering thousands of servicemen’s lives and imperiling the very existence and freedom of the nation itself by revealing those riveting secrets that so obsessed us all for a few days in mid-June before we forgot what they were and life went back to its previous grey normality. That, and the price of a carton of Vitasoy, puts a relieved smile on his face.

Hong Kong Chief Executive CY Leung’s maiden policy address, with the focus on housing. Democratic Party leader Emily Lau’s immediate reaction yesterday was to do her apoplectic freak-out act, but by this morning she had calmed down enough to grudgingly concede on the radio that maybe the plans to reduce air pollution and increase the supply of homes were not totally abhorrent. Still, she grumbled, the CE utterly failed to announce any plans to deport Beijing’s local Liaison Office’s entire staff or introduce universal suffrage next week, so on balance it was awful.

It depends on whether you are a glass-half-empty or glass-half-full person. If you want serious Thatcherite radical reform, you can’t help but be dismayed. CY did hint at edginess when he said he might be willing to do things even though – gasp – there wasn’t a complete consensus, which prompted a critical question from a Western reporter who is presumably a big fan of harmony. But threats to crush the Heung Yee Kuk, promises to bury the property cartel and warnings to stamp on Nimby-ist neighbourhoods opposing public housing projects and columbaria there were none. Unfortunately. But that of course is how Beijing wants it, let alone how our dysfunctional political structure requires it.

On the brighter side, the policy address was a departure from the flaccid and vacuous junk we had to endure under CY’s predecessor, Donald Tsang. Sir Bow-Tie refused to believe that air pollution was a problem, or indeed even existed, let alone allow a dollop of the government’s vast hoard of wealth be used to phase out old dirty vehicles. As for housing, the last administration was basically against it in principle, unless it cost over HK$15 million and was sold to Mainlanders at a big profit for Donald’s property cartel buddies.

Although they never precisely spelt it out, Donald Tsang and his tycoon-bureaucrat establishment adhered to a traditional colonial, not to say Dickensian, philosophy towards slums and their inhabitants. People shouldn’t have come to live here if they couldn’t afford it, and if they live in illegal and dangerous conditions, the obvious solution is eviction.

CY talked about substandard housing, and described seeing it in person. Long Hair Leung Kwok-heung chose this moment in the address, just when CY came closest to showing some sort of emotion, to create a fuss and get thrown out of the Legislative Council chamber. Or at least that’s how it appeared. Those of us with nasty, sordid little minds might wonder whether Long Hair fell into a trap here. It was CY-supporting lawmaker Ma Fung-kwok who chose the moment to snitch on the Trotskyist radical for being noisy, enabling CY to rewind the tape on his speech and repeat the tragic, heart-rending bits about the kid in Shamshuipo sleeping in a box hanging from the ceiling. Either way, Long Hair didn’t come out of it looking especially good.

The last government perversely kept land supply tight, as if delivering higher and higher profit margins to developers was all that mattered. (In fairness, some of them might have realized that they had overdone it but then got spooked by the prospect of triggering a market crash.)

CY listed a lengthy array of sites and possible sites, including something called ‘artificial islands’, on which hundreds and hundreds of hectares of land could be devoted to building a low six-figure number of new homes over a timeframe that people under 40 might even live to see. The word that springs to mind is ‘notional’. Even for a Monaco-type refuge for hot dirty money at a time of negative real interest rates, Hong Kong’s property prices look really stupid. When the crash comes, the private-sector part of the problem will to some extent fix itself, what with 200,000 apartments sitting empty and all that. In practice, much of the new development will probably be various forms of social housing. Interestingly, with a Margaret Thatcher-style gleam in his eye, CY hinted at getting tough on people who sublet or otherwise abuse public housing privileges – an area where previous administrations haven’t dared to tread.

The health care and elderly welfare proposals were in a similar vein: timid if you want big change and a universal pension right now, but serious-if-prudent compared with anything Sir Bow-Tie (or presumably Henry Tang) would have produced. The blather about CEPA and Pearl River Delta cooperation/partnership/blah blah was the usual stuff. CY’s decision to establish committees and councils for various things, including financial services development, looked lame, as if someone said “this is a policy address – you have to set up new councils.” Donald Tsang created new committees every day, purely so he could appoint shoe-shiners to them as some sort of badge of honour (and gratuitously not appoint detractors, so they would go off into a corner to cry and feel miserable). Pan-dems sneered that CY, too, would pack these new bodies with his friends. They forget that he doesn’t have any. The policy address won’t change that, but it wasn’t supposed to. At worst, in five years’ time we should at least be able to breathe the air – and when could we last say that?

On the first day of Christmas, Ms Fang the hunter-killer secretary gave to me a chunky stollen. Not in a pear tree, but a cellophane wrapper with a label indicating that the traditional Austrian festive cake was made in Hong Kong – and they say our manufacturing industry is dead. It arrived at S-Meg Holdings in a hamper addressed to the Big Boss from the slightly less-than-averagely slimy Chiuchow family the Leungs. After our visionary Chairman and Managing Director cast the offering aside with an uninterested wave full of Christmas cheer, its contents were sequestered by his ever-acquisitive personal assistant. After helping herself to the chocolates and ham, she distributed the less desirable contents as she saw fit. Deputy Managing Director Mr Chan received the bottle of wine, while the three Stanleys in the mailroom got a big tube of pecan cookies. The stollen, being at the more inexplicable and exotic end of the culinary scale, went to the Company Gwailo, who would presumably know what to do with it.

On the second day of Christmas, Ms Fang the hunter-killer secretary gave to me a vast panettone in a tin. But not before making sure it was, as she suspected, a nasty, overly sweet cake-thing not suitable for the delicate Cantonese palate. This came in a large, ribbon-bedecked basket that momentarily excited the Big Boss when one of Stanleys dragged it into the conference room and announced that it was from Mr Li. A Yuletide tribute from Asia’s richest man would require his personal attention. But it was not to be. This is Mr Li of the venerable durian trading dynasty, who always followed their grandfather’s instructions to focus on fruit, which they know best, and not get diverted into areas like real estate, which is why today they are nonentities. Ms Fang helped herself to a pricy-looking selection of French preserves, Mr Chan had the champagne, and the office pantry has been replenished with a variety of herbal teas none of the three Stanleys wanted. My pair of Filipino elves will welcome the Italian sweet bread, but I’ll keep the amazing tin.

On the third day of Christmas, Ms Fang the hunter-killer secretary gave to me a 42-gallon barrel of Almond Roca buttercrunch somethings. It was one of the sicklier contents of a hamper from Ho, Ho and Ho, S-Meg’s long-suffering law firm, whose partners must attend emergency calls at three in the morning when Number-One Son crashes his Porsche. The Big Boss showed little interest after confirming that it had come with a suitably groveling message. After mulling over her options for some time, Ms Fang eventually gave her own personable and highly efficient assistant a box of ginger biscuits. Mr Chan got a fancy jar of marmalade, possibly because the label indicated that it had a hint of whisky in it, while the three Stanleys got a bag of exotic-looking breadsticks. Ms Fang thinks I didn’t see her swiping the big vacuum-packed slab of salmon.

On the fourth day of Christmas, Ms Fang the hunter-killer secretary gave to me a heavy black lump of British Christmas pudding. Or rather she offered it on the off-chance that I might want to rescue it from being thrown away. In Victorian times, a steamed fatty spiced wodge of dried fruit and nuts was an orgasm of rare and highly valued culinary sensations. Now, it is the Western equivalent of mooncakes: a seasonal punishment to be endured. This hamper was from Mr So and his wife, inveterate shoe-shiners who constantly nag the Big Boss for help in having their son made a Justice of the Peace. The Big Boss shrugged it aside with a grunt. Sophisticate Mr Chan inspired awe by asking specifically for the Stilton cheese – terrifying, mould-ridden cow-grease – which he declared would go well with the port. Ms Fang’s assistant received a dainty bottle of olive oil and Googled for advice on its best use, while the three Stanleys dived with relish into a can of gourmet organic honey-coated roast peanuts. The pantry was donated a jar of quince paste that looked too expensive to throw away. Everyone gets a wicker basket to transport their loot in. Ms Fang, gambling that Mr Chan would opt for the port, nabbed the selection of pates and the vanilla fudge before distributing the other items to everyone else. The two Filipino elves, who are apparently acquainted with the stodgy dish, have taken the big black lump with gratitude for serving at a barbecue at Repulse Bay tomorrow.

The other eight days were no less eventful, and at times we have been so inundated with fine Scottish shortbread, luxury sesame crackers and jars of exclusive hand-crafted honey, we have had no option but to pass the excess on to the peasants who toil in the Accounts Department.

I declare the weekend-in-the-middle-of-the-week open.

Park N Shop were out of turkeys…

The mood on the Mid-Levels Escalator this morning is one of unbounded optimism, after Chief Executive CY Leung pledges at a Foreign Correspondents Club talk to deliver cheaper housing, bigger homes and clean air – the latter within a year. In his second term, he will arrange for us all to have eternal life.

There comes a point, however, where promises get too ambitious, and skepticism is called for. Gliding towards Central alongside me, Mr Chan the regional distribution manager has spotted it.

“The environment people are proposing to go ahead and charge Hong Kong families roughly HK$40 a month to dispose of household waste in compulsory, pre-paid, plastic bags,” he reads out from the paper. “It won’t work.”

Mrs Lee the private banker begs to differ. “The bags are a lovely Hello Kitty pink,” she gushes. “They will look beautiful piled up on the streets waiting for the truck to come.”

Mr Chan corrects her. “People here will use them, but what about other neighbourhoods?” He nods in the direction of Kowloon. “Old people there stand in a line for hours for a free sample, and the young will go a mile out of their way to save one dollar on a lunchbox.”

I tell them I’m with Mr Chan. Compulsive penny-pinchers will spare no effort in hiding their garbage in dark corners of Wellcome – or maybe using counterfeit pink bags – to save their HK$40 a month.

“It’s almost pathological,” I add, which reminds me of exciting news.

“I’m very proud – and I think all of Hong Kong should be proud – that I’ve managed to convince the American Psychiatric Association to put a famous local disease into the next edition of its famous diagnostic manual, DSM-5.” My two fellow commuters listen with interest. “Yes – they’re finally going to include Irritable Gwailo Syndrome. For some reason, the bores have seen fit to rename it Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder. But it’s the same thing: severe recurrent temper tantrums.”

I go on to explain that ideally the Association would recognize another mental health problem that afflicts certain Westerners in Hong Kong, namely Taxi Rip-off Panic Paranoia. Closely linked to formication, the feeling that ants are crawling beneath the skin, it happens when said innocent abroad becomes overwhelmed with the illusion that a commercial service provider – such as a cab driver – is somehow cheating him, usually over trifling sums of money. When an attack happens, it often triggers IGS/DMDD.

“Sadly,” I inform my companions, “the American psychiatrists say they won’t include it in their manual because it’s not treatable.”

As with the Kowloon poor stuffing illicit bags of trash after dark behind trees and beneath parked vehicles, irate and confused expats will be freaking out over perceived fraud long after 2,000-square-foot ‘CY Homes’ are available for HK$1,000 a month, and the nitrous oxide and suspended particulates are history.

The mood on the Mid-Levels Escalator this morning is part- puzzlement, part-fear.

Puzzlement because of the fuss over a tiny stretch of shoreline in lonely, faraway Tai Po. Don’t environmentalists and sudden admirers of the plucky little seahorse realize how much pleasure this forlorn New Territories community will get from having an artificial beach? We are blessed with a huge one here in Central, so we should know. When Mainland tourists have stripped their local stores bare and barred them from their own MTR station, Tai Po residents can always cool off with a swim.

The fear arises from a sinister malevolence some believe is coming to devour their innocent young children. The main victim is Mr Chan the deputy vice president (foreign-exchange), who often shares his troubles with a few of his fellow commuters gliding their way down the hill to the central business district of Asia’s throbbing financial hub.

In the past, he has mentioned taking his family to church on Sundays – the Praise the Lord for Our Wealth Assembly on the south side of the island. He has also complained about the problem of finding a sufficiently devout, Darwin-free school for his two daughters. Most intriguingly, he has recently hinted that since getting married, his religious zeal has waned, while his wife’s has very much strengthened.

A few weeks ago he told me and his neighbour, Ms Wong the marketing manager, that he had been ordered to find ‘Christian’ books for the kids. I of course suggested CS Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (despite having tossed it aside as a child for its tediousness). But his wife had objected because it was not clearly labeled ‘Christian’ and was published by a ‘secular’ company. Ms Wong innocently mentioned Harry Potter, but of course to paranoid fundamentalists the boy wizard is dangerous and occult. “It’s Satan’s attempt to induce us to disobey the command against sorcery in the Book of Deuteronomy,” Mr Chan said, helpfully quoting chapter and verse (18:10).

So now the parents are seeking out dreadfully written novels in which our forebears lived happily alongside dinosaurs, and modern teens are saved from sex and drugs and rock n roll by allowing Christ into their hearts. For the elder daughter, aged 12, there is limitless Christian teen fiction on the way, such as quasi-romances in which boy meets girl, boy and girl pray together for guidance and resolve to remain pure until marriage. “I managed to stop my wife from giving Louisa a copy of I Kissed Dating Goodbye,” Mr Chan says. “I mean, she’s only 12. The book says you mustn’t hold hands with a boy because you would be putting him above Jesus and God’s plan for you. She doesn’t need to think about these things yet.”

His concern, he confides, is that Louisa has embraced her mother’s extreme faith completely. The girl rises at six every day to read what she believes to be the inerrant Bible. She criticizes her father (correctly, I can’t help thinking) for preferring such godless material as Asian Golfer. At a relative’s home recently, when a kids’ cartoon on the TV turned slapstick-violent, she insisted that her 10-year-old sibling Amanda join her in leaving the room.

The devil doesn’t give up. “Yesterday, my wife and I had to cover the kids’ eyes in the supermarket,” Mr Chan tells me. “The cashiers and staff were wearing little red horns. For Halloween – it’s a demonic and pagan festival, you know. My wife gets very anxious at this time of the year. Satan is trying to reach our little ones. That’s what she thinks.”

I try to put a positive spin on it. “Well, Satan goes away again on November 1. He’s very consistent, at least.” He is not reassured.

But there is a glimmer of hope. Little Amanda, he admits with a proud smile, is something of a rebel. “She said ‘Don’t be silly Daddy it’s just a decoration’ in the supermarket yesterday, and when she says grace before dinner… well, she doesn’t mean it,” he chuckles. Ten-year-old girls can be one of the most loathsome of life-forms on this planet – among vertebrates, anyway. But this little pre-teen sounds like a force for good, stiffening her father’s resolve to choose rational thinking over his wife’s torments about Hell and the unsaved. Indeed, I sense a nasty intra-family religious war in the making. Way to go Amanda!

Morning in the resplendent entrance lobby of Perpetual Opulence Mansions, and a Nepalese security guard drags the lifeless body of a Jehovah’s Witness across the shiny Italian marble floor, out of the door and in the direction of the Municipal Solid Waste Transfer Station down on the next street. I reach into my mailbox and retrieve a pristine white envelope. It has that faint but exquisite, indeed erotic, sweet aroma of crisp, newly issued banknotes straight out of an ATM or laisee packet.

As I glide down the Mid-Levels Escalator towards Central, I open it up to find a glossy leaflet featuring an aphorism – and not just any saying, but a pithy teaching of almost Confucian wisdom from HSBC. It says: “Realise your aspirations with befitted product offerings.”

Of course, some less advantaged people out there can only ever dream of befitted product offerings. But those of us who qualify for an HSBC Premier® account are accustomed to them. To get an idea of what sort of privileged class of individuals we are talking about here, look no further than the HSBC brochure. A handsome man in shorts sits outside an understated but luxury villa overlooking a steaming jungle. His feet rest in expensively cooled water in which (look closely with a magnifying glass) little magic fish happily nibble away the dead skin on his heels and toes. He is pausing to look down into the dense tropical woodland, musing on its putrid rotting vegetation and unspeakably disgusting millipedes and other revolting creatures, before checking his laptop for the latest news on befitted product offerings…

It is, of course, all an allegory. The hillside represents the mountain of wealth HSBC’s elite customers are sitting on; the icky creepy-crawlies represent the horror that is Hong Kong’s national shame; the mist drifting from the trees represents the hazy thinking of our government; and the maid you can’t see doing the ironing in the luxury villa is a maid doing the ironing – and who will subsequently go to buy groceries to be paid for with Park N Shop coupons.

Which brings us rather elegantly to…

…the befitted product offerings in question. If you increase your Total Relationship Balance (that is, the amount of cash, investments or – intriguingly – loans in your HSBC account) by HK$3 million before 30 November and keep it there at least until 31 December, they will give you HK$1,800 in supermarket coupons. The idea is that I pull three million bucks from whatever other investments I may have – gold ETFs, a Discovery Bay golf cart or whatever – and park it in HSBC. Because that’s how badly I want some Park N Shop coupons.

I shall now head into S-Meg Tower and dangle this befitted product offering in front of Ms Fang the hunter-killer secretary. She will drool with longing and lust for the HK$1,800 worth of Park N Shop coupons, and suffer extreme mental anguish at the thought that the company gwailo is turning his nose up at them. And this will bring the working week to just the amusing end that I hoped for.  Thus I realise my aspirations with befitted product offerings.

The riveting news this morning consists of a very long list of people you’ve never heard of winning sports you’ve never heard of. Where did these multitudinous variants of contrived physical activities come from? Are they being produced in the same genetic engineering laboratories in China that are manufacturing the mutants who win them all? You know it’s time to head for the office when you find yourself waiting to hear who won the men’s 100 metres synchronized walking backwards.

On the Mid-Levels Escalator near Lyndhurst Terrace, a crowd gathers silently near the top of the steps leading up from the street. It is a grievous sight. A man has hanged himself in such a way as to have a perfect view of the expat housewives being pampered in the Twinkle Nail Emporium and Spa – were he alive and it open. He is himself white and middle aged. A placard around his neck reads ‘Call this a world city???!!!’ A policeman tells me this is the fourth such incident on Hong Kong Island alone in the last three days. Then there have been the mass-slayings in subscription TV centres, where Westerners have gone berserk with meat cleavers.

The dreadful scenario is much the same on every occasion. The guy sits down at home at 3.40am to watch the women’s synchronized formation Greco-Roman wrestling on his 120-inch flat screen TV, only to find that the commentary is in Hong Kong’s vernacular language only. There are several possible courses of action. He could drag his locally born wife out of bed to do a spot of simultaneous interpretation. He could turn the sound down and enjoy the graceful and lithe athletes’ performance in calming silence. Or he could just tough it out and learn the hard way what Huang, Zheng and Qiang sound like in Cantonese. But no. After frenzied jabbing at the remote control, the awful truth dawns on him that there is no English audio channel; maybe the cable company forgot, or couldn’t be bothered, or maybe someone there was bitten by a gwailo as a child and is now wreaking his revenge – yes, that’s the most likely explanation. Something snaps, and we have another grim statistic.

On the subject of tragic wastes, the Standard features a series of photographs showing the Olympic Games’ token Hongkonger, Angel Wong (which is what ‘Huang’ sounds like) apparently springing from a thing called a balance beam onto the ground. (What’s Cantonese for ‘Very nice front tuck half mount, tiny wobble out. Switch side’?)

Except she’s not leaping off it, but on to it, complete with somersault-type interlude in mid-air. Can’t she find a way to use this impressive skill to benefit the community? Maybe the Fire Services Department could employ her to jump onto narrow tree branches to rescue cats. There must be something productive like that for her to do.

Ah hah! Reading between the lines, it seems she is more-or-less Australian and has failed to reach the finals (which makes you wonder what freakish acrobatics her rivals pulled off). Late-night English-language sports commentator to calm suicidal expat TV viewers?

Click to hear Gram Parsons’ ‘Grievous Angel’!

The mood on the Mid-Levels Escalator this morning is one of unmitigated grief, with children, women and even grown men with gravelly voices and hairy chests sobbing quietly to themselves, if not wailing out loud and beating their breasts in despair. What could cause such woe?

Could it be the determination of our evil government to ram through its dastardly plan to brainwash our helpless and innocent children and force them to think independently and love the motherland, and learn from school student Chui Ting-wan who ‘spends a lot of time with the national flag’? Amazingly, no it is not.

Could it be the imminence of the 2012 Grand Global International World Tiddlywinks Championship Extravaganza Celebrations Opening Ceremony in London, and its subsequent two weeks of purposeless and monotonous running round in circles and jumping into water? Oddly, it’s not that either.

Could it be the probably-involuntary decision by Legislative Council members Chim Pui-chung and Timothy Fok not to run for re-election in their respective functional constituencies, stock brokers and sports/media/culture, after many, many, many years of selfless service to the community, thus freeing the rigged seats for pro-Beijing figures who actually turn up to vote? No, not even that.

No – our tears are flowing at the tragic news that Hong Kong’s number-one position as a shopping paradise for Mainlanders is under threat as more are buying luxury goods at home. For years, we have been told that, were it not for the millions of cross-border – sorry, cross-boundary – visitors streaming through our streets and malls, the Big Lychee would be reduced to penury. How will we survive without rents at the old Lane Crawford premises on Queens Road going up from HK$5.5 million a month (H&M tatty clothes) to HK$11 million a month (Zara tatty clothes)? How will we eat without hundreds of tour buses clogging up our streets as they wait in line to pour yet more Mainland money into local real estate and gold? What will we do in the evenings with no advertisements in simplified characters to spray-paint ‘大69’ on?

We are doomed. The weekend is hereby cancelled.

The mood on the Mid-Levels Escalator this morning is one of bitter disappointment, as Hong Kong’s hard-working taxpayers flick through their free newspapers and learn that yet another government minister, Health Secretary Ko Wing-man, has been discovered with an illegal structure at his home. The anti-social criminal-bastard-fiend has a Hello Kitty toilet paper holder attached to the wall of a bathroom. No such fixture appears in the original architect’s plan authorized by the Buildings Department.

Ms Chan the marketing manager holds up the felon’s photo. “You can tell he’s a psychopath – just look at those eyes. Why on earth did CY Leung even think of hiring him?”

Mr Wong the banker shares her alarm. “I bet you he’s got a trellis hidden somewhere. God, I really hate people with those.” He looks at me and Ms Chan. “Do you have any idea what they do with them?”

We admit that we don’t know – not sure that we want to, either.

“They grow plants on them.”

Ewww. I screw up my face in disgust, and Ms Chan gasps. “No! That’s revolting. These people are absolutely sick. What’s happening to this city?”

As we glide down the world’s most ingenious public transport system closer towards the heart of Asia’s throbbing international financial hub, we notice a scuffle on the street below. Amid streaks of pepper spray, a group of police are dragging a driver from a small white van. Mr Wong nods approvingly. “Ah! He’s been caught with a suction cup holder stuck on the dashboard. There’s a big clampdown on them – quite right too. I mean you can’t have people adding things to their property just like that.”

From top government officials to lowly deliverymen, civilized society is breaking down all around us. Meanwhile, in a distant jungle, the Big Lychee’s most famous son dangles from a helicopter aiming expert and deadly kung-fu kicks at other abominable evildoers. Our only hope. Who else can save us from the erectors of car-port roofs, the installers of glass frames and the unspeakable trellis beasts, but Jackie ‘Chinese people need to be controlled’ Chan?

Click to hear ‘Lions in My Own Garden (Exit Someone)’ by Prefab Sprout!

The filial piety tour of the United States has to come to an abrupt end as I realize that the whole nation is about to be flooded with mawkish, groveling coverage and celebration of Queen Elizabeth II’s 99th birthday. With just moments to spare, I reach the airport, fling money on an airline ticketing desk and beg to get on the first flight to anywhere more than 2,000 miles away from this country. Seven hours later, I realize I have made a mistake… 

Click to hear ‘One of Those Days in England’ by Roy Harper!

I have ended up in the very heartland of the monarchical festivities. It is impossible to step a yard without encountering another representation of royalty, whether it is the stately figurehead herself, or her feeble-minded progeny and their embarrassingly untoothsome spouses. This small corner of England is not a pretty sight: a miserable people who under usual circumstances silently detest one another come together as a community to rejoice on the village green.

In a jet-lagged haze, I wander among children eating cake at long benches, mingle with adults guzzling the local alcohol and barbecued burgers, and watch the jousting, bear-baiting and other traditional entertainments. At one point, I stumble into a dark, humid church hall in which elderly women in faded hats sit around tables sipping tea from chunky white cups dispensed by a uniformed lady with a huge urn. It is like walking into a black-and-white movie where people whose homes have been bombed by the Germans are resolutely refusing to grumble.

On the wall in a corner, however, it is the 21st Century. A notice advertising the UK government’s public consultation on gay marriage looks like it was pinned up with a slight shudder. There is the inevitable school PTA meeting schedule. And I spy a pair of maps illustrating the Parish of Stonegallows as it is today and as it will be when a sprawling, underused medical facility hidden by woodland is replaced by a grid of residential development. The number of households will rise from 700 to 1,300 and the population will go from 1,900 to nearly 3,000. Looking around at all the Margaret Rutherfords gossiping over their jam sponges, I decide to keep the news to myself.

Back outside, men and boys in shorts are playing cricket. Out of deference to their ancient British ancestors, it seems, they have pained themselves in woad. Then I look at the rusty thermometer outside the hall’s door and discover why they are blue: it is 50F, or 11C. The rain drizzling down is colder still, as if it had been stored in a refrigerator overnight. I know for a fact that in Hong Kong it is in the low 90s. And Heathrow is a mere three hours away.