Take a Hike

Three of my passions (walking, the English language and CS Lewis) come together in this letter of the great man to a chap called Evans dated 22 December 1954. This was one of the last letters written from God's Own University before he was lured away to the Other Place by the offer of a Professorship, denied him at Oxford because he had pissed a lot of people off, not least by championing for the post of  Professor of Poetry a friend possessed of what were considered in highbrow (and some other) circles the twin drawbacks of disliking Pound and Eliot and not actually having much of a background in poetry himself.

"About the word 'hiking' my own objection would lie only against its abuse for something so simple as taking an ordinary 'walk': i.e. to the passion for making specialised and self-conscious stunts out of activities which have hitherto been as ordinary as shaving or playing with the kitten. Kipling's Janeites, where he makes a sort of secret-society-ritual out of (of all things!) reading Jane Austen is a specimen. Or professionals on the BBC playing to an audience the same games we used to play for ourselves at children's parties. I expect any day to find a book written on how to swing your stick when you walk or a club (with badges) formed for Singers in the Bath."        

HR Meet Their Waterloo

It’s not often I manage to notch up a victory against the one department in the company that never falls victim to “rationalisation” or “retrenchment” or whatever vogue word may be in season to describe the cessation of employment for some poor sod. But I managed it yesterday.

Some time ago, lacking anything meaningful to do, the boffins who used to call themselves “personnel” before they further morphed towards impersonality by restyling themselves as “resources” decided to put locks on the loos, or more precisely the entrance to the loos.

As a result, we were all issued with flimsy cards fancifully called “smartcards”, whose only similarity to smartcards such as the Octopus card was the fact they were made of plastic. Even the most cursory of inspections by a person with the intellect of Henry Tang would have revealed that their wafer thin constitution meant that they would last about as long as a plate of oysters at a Hong Kong buffet.      

Yesterday morning, my card – carefully protected in its little leather prophylactic – gave up the ghost. I duly returned the dead card to the departmental admin-wallah, who told me that this was the second case of expiry he’d come across and that he’d pass it to HR.

An hour later, I received an Excel form from those lowlifes telling me that the card had a “hairline crack” in it and that, according to “pre-established policy”, I would need to pony up a hundred bucks for a replacement.

My reply was short and to the point:

“Dear Kenwood

Given that other people are finding the cards problematic, perhaps there are issues that need to be addressed for further enhancement.”

In case Kenwood didn’t get the underlying sarcasm (fat chance of that with these humourless drones), I threw a “Thanks and best regards” into the mix (Kenwood … mix … oh, please yourselves!).

Whether it was the Austenesque irony, the cunning deployment of “enhancement” (the perennial winner of the company Oscar for Most Overused Word) or the effulgent benediction, it did the trick. Shortly before “COP” yesterday evening, Kenwood sent me an email, cc-ed to his Head of Department Cassandra, to inform me that “due to the special circumstances concerning about your SmartCard, we have decided to waive the replenishment fee in this case. Please be noted that this is a one-off scenario and a full charge will be made in case of future breakage.”       

    

One doesn’t know where to start when you get a missive like this. Part of you – the nice part that used to exist before HRD ate it up – wants to say “Thank you”. But the part of you that distinguishes you from the monkeys wants to ask them when they are going to issue cards made from a durable material that won’t develop hairline cracks. When, in short, to use an analogy that even they might be able to understand, they are going to use smartcards that are as smart as my Octopus card, which I’ve been using without a problem for seven years.   

Dawkins Evolves to Agnosticism

My remote ancestors may have been involved in slavery - who knows?

Secret Picture of Henry's Love Nest

Would you like a bit of the bubbly or would you prefer some champagne first?

Henry Enjoys a Good Lay

Courtesy of the mass circulation Chinese language Oriental Daily News, the email exchange said to be between aspiring Chief Executive of Hong Kong Henry Tang Ying Yen and his "Baby". 

Really, Henry, I'm disappointed in you, writing "I love you deeply and I want to overcome all the obstacles that lay ahead of us." Lie, Henry, it's L-I-E.

Should be easy enough for you to remember given your record in the terminological inexactitude department.

唐英年→最親愛的寶貝(Henry to ‘Baby’) 18-01-2010 18 4:16pm

I know things are happening very fast.? I gazed at the sofa in my office the very first moment I walked in this morning, and I stare at it every moment I have.

It was a magical moment, slow, tender, yet full of excitement that tingled my every senses.?It was a moment of love expressed in full sensation, both physically and mentally, that bonded our hearts together.

It was fate that brought us together, and I will make every effort to make it our destiny to stay together.

I love you baby…..

你的寶貝→唐英年 (‘Baby’ to Henry) 19-1-2010 11:33am

My love,

This is going to be a long journey for us …and there will be lots of obstacles ahead.... We have to be strong to get through this together…. I truly hope that we can resolve all the difficulties with the least casualties..

I will make our every moment together joyous with no regrets…Until u find “your way” in 2012…

Looking forward to our next gathering makes me happy :-)        

Your baby..

(Henry to ‘Baby’) 19-1-2010

Re: Love

My baby,

I love you deeply and I want to overcome all the obstacles that lay ahead of us.? Its not going to be easy, as you are all aware of the challenges, but I will make every effort to resolve them together with you.? I want to tell you that having made love with you last week strengthened my love for you, and made me more determined to make this work.?

I understand that not everything is under my control in my unique circumstances.? But I will share my thinking with you…….I want to walk this path together with you……

Love forever, 


Sofa, so good, it would seem.

Your Chance to Vote

You have six days until nominations close to pick the winner of next month's Chief Executive non-election. The Webbmeister is running something on similar lines, but it involves percentages and is a sight too complicated for me.   

In line with the fundamentally non-democratic nature of the event, I am not asking you who you'd like to be the next CE, i.e. who you would vote for if it was a proper election, but who you think will win.

I am not offering an Others category because I’m like that and because it's so boring when people vote for Others. I mean, a name at least works at some level to stir the imagination – well, most names, maybe not Albert Ho’s – while voting for Others is like receiving an E-card for Valentine’s Day.

So, exercise your rights and all that, but remember that the poll closes at the end of the month. Depending on the success of this exercise, I will do something similar once we know who’s failed to get over the first hurdle by failing to garner the necessary 150 nominations from the 1,200 loons who make up the Election Committee.     

Participatory politics doesn't get much better than this. Well, not in Hong Kong anyway.

Golden Shower Greets C-Suited Son in Scotland

The other day I had lunch with the CFO. I knew something was wrong when he forwent his customary order of oysters and opted for the lobster soup. After making small talk for a while – including a dig at Chris Patten of all people for the current mess surrounding the run-up to the non-election of the Chief Executive (“He wanted to embarrass China and this incident would make him very happy” – no, I didn’t follow either) – he turned to the matter that was occupying his mind: his son Rodney

Now, Rodney and I go back quite a long way, even if we’ve never actually met. When Rodney was in his final year at school, it was me to whom the CFO turned with questions about his education. Rodney, so I was told, was dead set on going to university in the UK while his father was keen that he should emulate him by crossing the pond and taking his degree from Brown University.

Rodney, had, it seems, in contradistinction to Don Henley, no desire to be able to say that he “came from Providence, the one in Rhode Island, where the old world shadows hang heavy in the air”. In fact, he wanted to sample the old world at first hand.

So it was that Rodney embarked on a 4-year course in Economics at St Andrews University in Scotland. What neither Rodney nor his father had reckoned with was what Frankie Boyle affectionately calls the “alcoholic racism” of his own people. When Boyle says that the most Scottish thing he’s ever seen is a man pissing against a front door and then taking his keys out and opening the door to let himself in, a foreigner should get an inkling of what lies in store of an early Saturday morning.

National traits of this kind tend to be exacerbated when your varsity of choice is a very traditional institute of education in a very conservative part of Scotland; one that looks down its nose at the type of rampant development that has scarred once pristine sites at the likes of Lancaster, York and even Norwich.  

              

The resulting shortage of accommodation has forced Scotland’s oldest university to make first-year undergraduates share rooms, and I think one can say that Rodney was a trifle unfortunate with regard to the person who was allocated to occupy the other bed in his room, who we shall call Jimmy.

   

Rodney first became aware that something was amiss when he was woken up in the middle of the night at the end of the first week of term by the sounds of Jimmy having it away with a second-year English Literature major he’d met at a Greenpeace protest against the makers of Barbie.

I jest not. Apparently the demo’s got something to do with, um, virgin, Indonesian rainforests and carries the slogan “I don't date girls that are into deforestation” – which comes a bit too close to the bone for my liking but is an honourable kind of position to take, not to mention perfectly hygienic so long as the girl (and the boy – I’m no sexist) takes a shower first.           

The CFO proceeded to tell tales of Jimmy’s drunken nights in with the lads and poor old Rodney returning from the library to be greeted by a bottle-strewn floor and a bedroom that smelt like a lift in a Govan public housing estate.

I knew he must be keeping the best until last and so it turned out. Just last week, in Rodney’s weekly Skype broadcast, he reported that he had been roused from his slumbers by what appeared to be a leak, with water plashing around the foot of his bed. Bleary-eyed, Rodney reached for his bedside lamp, his first thought being that Jimmy had added a fountain to the gnome and traffic cones that already adorned the room on top of the official decorations.       

But no, his first thought had been spot on: Jimmy was taking a leak on his bed. I was, for once, lost for words. Part of me wanted to point out that at least Jimmy hadn’t mistaken his pillow for the toilet bowl, while the other part of me wanted to say that at least Jimmy only needed to evacuate his bladder.  

Then, there was this other, slightly mischievous, side of me that wanted to tell the C-Suited one that I didn’t much appreciate being dumped on, but I wasn’t sure he’d get the joke. And, anyway, what sort of friend would I be if I couldn’t be relied on to provide a listening ear when urine trouble?  

Relax, it's Only a Station Promo

Tuning in to an FA Cup match at the weekend on ESPN, I was subjected to the normal Star-network range of cringingly unfunny station promos and trailers. How I have come to curse those guys on the American version of Sportcenter who have a bit of chemistry and the wherewithal to deliver their lines in a way that is actually sometimes funny for persuading countries where it is considered the height of wit to scream inanities loudly and then laugh at them even more loudly to attempt to ape their repartee.

This time, 'though, I was rewarded by one of the broader grins I've managed since the excellent John Dykes was lured back to Blighty by promises of the kind of money he had only dreamed of when a sports hack for the South China Morning Post. (By the way, what is the point of Andrew Leci?)

This smile came totally unwittingly, as far as the station was concerned, and had to do with a generic celebration of football which it had cobbled together using footballers – well, in the main, footballers, as we shall see – from different countries.

The general idea was that players from different lands would laud the wonders of the world game in their own language, with Star providing the translation below. All went well for a while, as athletes from Africa, Europe and South America provided a number of variations on the basic fut-bol theme ("I love it", "It's my life/passion, etc."), with a calcio thrown in for good measure from Italy.                 

 

Suddenly a chubby Asian type popped up and proceeded to say something in Mandarin in a stentorian manner out of synch with what had come before. The subtitles revealed all: the beautiful game had of course been invented in the Motherland.

Enough of the lies-to-take already!, as the badinage on Sportscenter would quickly remind us.

Beijing Thankful that 2012 is a Leap Year

With one time Chief Executive elect Henry Tang Ying Yen making his political suicide a slow and painful one by failing to sharpen his sword before falling on it, the pretenders to the throne are taking advantage of the confusion by re-entering the frame.

To use a racing metaphor that Tang, a steward of the Hong Kong Jockey Club and keen follower of the turf, would appreciate, the scratching of the race favourite at such a late juncture opens the way not only to a cohort of standby runners taking their place in the stalls but also to the sort of unpredictability and last-minute betting plunges that are a feature of all the region's major gambling bourses, from the Lisboa and Galaxy casinos in Macau through the race tracks at Shatin and Happy Valley to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in Central.

While for Rita Fan Hsu Lai Tai this may represent the last chance to have a tilt at the political world's greatest sinecure, for Regina Ip Lau Suk Yee, the woman who makes Macbeth look as if he wasn't even trying ambition-wise, this has something of the air of a trial run about it, as she tests the water for her big putsch in 2017. Meanwhile, dear old Jasper Tsang Yok Sing has deciced to play the humility card by saying that he's not sure that he's qualified for the job, but he may well enter anyway. Perhaps he feels he can take a crash course in becoming a global leader in just 11 days, the time remaining before nominations close for all this nonsense.

In the meantime, the men in Beijing will need to take a break from their own manoeuvrings for power as the succession to President Hu Jintao hots up, and decide which dickhead in their renegade territory in their renegade southern province to back. For this they may be grateful that they will this year get 10% more time in which to finalise their anointing. On the other hand, they may be on their way to thinking the unthinkable and deciding to let the lunatics appoint their own asylum chief.

Tang Says Chief Executive Must Work with People Who are Smarter than Him

               You see, he's by far the best qualified candidate

Henry Tang Shares Structuregate Joke with Press

What's the difference between someone running for Chief Executive and the basement at No. 7 York Road?

One's got nothing to hide and the other's a complete waste of space.

Henry Tang Explains Illegal Structure

             I needed a place where I could dig myself a bigger hole

BookCrossing

You know that something is a naff idea when the people who come up with it stick together two words that exist perfectly happily on their own. In this neck of the woods, AsiaWorld-Expo provides the perfect example, although it’s actually gone one further by attaching another word via a hyphen. Just what was wrong with AsiaWorldExpo, or even Asia World Expo, and just how long and hard did they argue over the styling, one has to wonder?

For those of you (99.9% of the world’s population) whom this damp squib of a non-craze has passed by, BookCrossing is a silly idea masquerading as a scheme to get more people reading books, whereby the first person on the scene of a book drop nabs the volume and then presumably goes and sells it on Amazon or at their local second-book bookshop.          

The inanity of the project is clear for everyone to see from the fact that, of all the 200-odd countries in the world, according to that fountain of all knowledge Wikipedia (it’s indicative of something that they went for the classic portmanteau styling, unlike their online confreres YouTube), only three have been daft enough to endorse this dippy practice: Singapore, Abu Dhabi* and Serbia, in other words, the home of eugenicist egomaniacs, dodgy bankers and mass-murderers.    

So far, so bad. Now a reader has sent me details of his HR department’s latest initiative, said BookCrossing. The first few emails gave no cause for anything more than the initially raised eyebrow to remain raised: “input” was “invited” from “colleagues” in tried and tested Hong Kong fashion; colleagues could bring any type of book for sharing; those who found a book interesting could take it without the need to return it.

It was only yesterday after more than a month of to-ing and fro-ing that things got really interesting. A memo was sent round to all colleagues thusly worded:

“Re: BookCrossing

Colleagues are reminded that no obscene or counterfeit materials are allowed in the exercise.”

My reader was devastated: he’d been looking for an environment-friendly way to get shot of his 1970s collection of Knave and Fiesta for years. He says he might have to revert to his first idea and bequeath the collection to his old school, where they lay hidden beneath the floorboards for all those years.       

* Okay, Abu Dhabi may not be a country, but it must be worth more than 80% of the world’s countries put together, which is good enough for me. 

Feel the Love, Feel the Praisage

Love is in the air. Or should that be lovage? It's St. Valentine's Day, it's my rabbit's third birthday, and it's also the day when a company which was obviously starved for love as a child attempts to force itself upon the serenity that was my working day until they intruded on it like the Chinese fellow sitting in the front row at City Hall who had to be hauled away by police at the interval after conducting through the entire first half.

My company has received a package from a dickhead called Danny Chan of Praisage, a particularly unconvincing front for a company I have no intention of naming that lets out space for exhibitions and seminars somewhere on Hong Kong Island. Among the package there is a standard letter addressed to someone who left us nearly a year ago informing him that this ridiculous organisation has "received a praise story" about us and wishes to share the joy.              

The "praise story" itself is of such an incredible nature that I was moved to track down any other specimens I could find. Sure enough, a brief search of their abominable website revealed this gem of praisage under the heading "A Very gentle, courteous and professional phlebotomist":

"Mr. Ngo was responsible for taking my blood sample that day. When he saw me putting a big bag behind my back on the chair, he gently instructed me to put the bag on my lap instead so that I could lean back comfortably on the chair. His further instructions for me, such as slightly holding the fist and … (more here if you don't believe me)."

That standard letter I was mentioning has the feel of something that in any other country I have worked in would instantly be dismissed as a hoax or April Fool's prank. Try this:

"Praisage is the world’s first platform for praise, providing a consolidated and independent channel to the public in expressing their praise, boosting praise quotient and promoting the culture of … (sorry, no prizes for guessing)."   

The racket needs an "Advisory Board with 10 members" to lead it and is supported by various non-entity consulting outfits, one of which promises "through training, coaching and consulting with applied psychologies and an infusion of Chinese wisdom" to help companies "achieve internal congruence".

Well, Danny, I have just two words for you, and the second is "offage".

Streep Nails Iron Lady

I've had a love-hate relationship with Meryl Streep for nearly 35 years now. I liked her in The Deer Hunter, where she played a part that turned out to be remarkably true to real life, and also in Kramer vs Kramer, but the love began to cool when she went into her "accents" phase, first with Sophie's Choice and then Out of Africa, which I have to confess I've never been able to bring myself to watch, just in case I got myself into a right old Baltic State. (Poland … Denmark … Baltic Sea? Oh, please yourselves!)   

Recently, she's teamed up twice with British director Phyllida Lloyd, first in MammaMia! – enough said – and then in Iron Lady, the somewhat controversial biopic of the fading, but still living, Margaret Thatcher.

I must say I was pleasantly surprised by the grand old lady of film's performance and by the film itself, which is remarkably even-handed, especially when set against two films that have eviscerated the reptilian Tony Blair, The Queen and The Special Relationship.

The central conceit cum organising device is that Maggie has hallucinations (or are they just mental images recovered from the hard drive of her Alzheimer’s ravaged memory bank?) of her hubby of fifty-odd years, Denis. This stratagem enables us both to see a lot of Jim Broadbent goofing it up as what Denis would have looked like if he had been six inches taller and quite a lot fatter in the face and to take a family's eye view on her life.

She doesn't come out of this fly-on-the wall examination particularly well (but then I doubt many of us would, especially if we were premier of a top ten nation) being accused of selfishness and ambition by husband and daughter (Carol – played as frumpy hackette with a lisp) alike. A bit like the Norwegian Blue, Maggie is pining, but not for the Northern fjords. Instead, as one possessed of a self-confessed preference for men, she is pining for South Africa, where her rascally son Mark is attempting to hide from his creditors and other enemies.

Meanwhile, back at Number Ten, Maggie is failing to heed the warning of Sir Geoffrey Howe, the man who spent the best part of his real political life trying to get over Dennis Healey's damming assessment that being attacked by the former QC was like being "savaged by a dead sheep".

When she first comes into office, the script has Geoffrey warning Maggie that she can't push her cabinet members' loyalty too far. Nearly twelve years on, and the film's climactic scene has Maggie adjourning a cabinet meeting after humiliating her benighted number two because he has spelt committee with only one "t".

Geoffrey has had the sand kicked in his face for the last time and decides to bring the iron lady down with a cracking cricketing metaphor and betake himself to the House of Lords where he can moulder away behind those Joe 90 glasses. 

Judges and Police Sweat on Mental Health Ruling

According to the South China Morning Post (to read the article search for "mental illness" + fetishes + hong kong), "shy or rebellious children, grieving relatives and people with fetishes … risk being diagnosed as mentally ill under 'worrying and dangerous' definitions due to be introduced in Hong Kong" next year.

One of the new-fangled disorders, "apathy syndrome", has potentially disastrous consequences for the educational endeavour in Hong Kong, as the entire student population faces being carted off to Castle Peak Hospital by the men in white coats, in a move that would solve at a stroke the problems of class size and student-teacher ratio.

Every cloud has a silver lining and even among all the tosh one diagnosis stands out as beacon of hope and common sense. A child can be diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder if he or she "actively refuses to comply" with requests and "performs deliberate actions to annoy others".

Too bloody right! Next time my daughter tells me to go and watch the horse-racing in the other room because Darren Kriss is on, or gives me that look when I ask her to remind me what the name of her form teacher is again, I’ll invoke this diagnosis quicker than you can say "The lunatics have taken over the asylum".      

But spare a thought in all this for two groups who stand to suffer more than most from what one person, from Preston, Lancs., no less, has called "a form of collective madness" perpetrated by "those complicit in the continuing pseudo-scientific exercise" (not excluding the multinational drug companies, of course).

I’m referring to members of the judicial and law enforcement industries, who enjoy a bit of how's your father as much as the next transvestic fetishist. Just how will these groups cope if they are prohibited from doing what they do best, dressing up in costumes and cracking the whip?    

Clarkson Faces Storm of Protest after Elephant Man Jibe

                        Do I care if people get the hump?

The G Word

That’s G as in gay. A friend of my daughter's, who she met through an acting workshop, has fallen foul of her school by the most unusual route.

Apparently, the teenager needed to prepare an exhibition on her chosen topic as part of an IB personal project. The topic she chose was boy bands, and to publicise the lunchtime event, she placed posters round the school aimed at grabbing folks' attention.

So far, so good. The problems started when a nosey-parker teacher type from the Antipodes saw a group of pupils looking at the poster and decided to investigate. Horrified, she read the following:

If you think boy bands are talentless, "gay" and rubbish …

Come along at lunchtime on Thursday and Friday and be proved wrong.                

From there, the affair snowballed with the pupil hauled before the Headmaster on various counts of insensitivity and homophobia, and her email of explanation and apology for any offence caused being sent to every member of the teaching staff.

C.S. Lewis used to complain about critics who made such a habit of reading between the lines that they had lost the ability to read the lines themselves - including the punctuation. Seemed like a few of them ended up teaching the IB in Hong Kong. oen of the school stars is jumping ship.
> Resentment is never a good place from which to speak. 

Post-script: I've just been told by my daughter that her friend recently informed her school that she would be leaving Hong Kong to study in the States in the autumn. To paraphrase Congreve:

"Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned,

Nor Hong Kong
a fury like a teacher scorned." 

Lagerfeld Trashes English Royalty

                 Adele is to svelte what I am to beauty   

Susan Li: a Brief Snatch

If you can't beat them, join them, I suppose.