Good 'eavens!

Monday being St David's Day, the next week is particularly busy for the Hong Kong Welsh Male Voice Choir. Two sets at the St David's Society ball in the cavernous sports hall of the Hong Kong Football Club this evening is followed by a similar event in Bangkok next week for those who are able to obtain the requisite visas and pink tickets.

The choir will have their work cut out to cheer the guests up after Wales completed a miserable start to their Six Nations campaign by going down at home to France last night. This defeat comes hot on the heels of a desperate defeat to a dismal England outfit and a win over Scotland that owed as much to refereeing benevolence as to a stirring comeback which failed to mask the poverty of the preceding 70 minutes' play.

On the menu tonight are two songs that would meet in the final if there were ever an Olympic event for most bizarre national song. In the red corner there's "Anthem" from Chess, a musical about, well, chess. Ostensibly, the music is by Benny and Bjorn of Abba and the words are by Tim Rice, but you would be forgiven for thinking that the Englishman has done no more than polish lyrics penned by the Swedes.

The trick to singing this song is to ignore the words completely. If you do happen to attend to them, as I made the fatal mistake of doing once, then you find yourself slipping into an alternate universe almost as scary as the one depicted in Mamma Mia!

No man, no madness
Though their sad power may prevail [What are you talking about? Whose power – madness's as well as man's?]
Can possess, conquer, my country's heart
They rise to fail [Who's "they"? "Man and madness" or "countries"?]
She is eternal [Who the f*ck is "she" – your country or your heart?]

And so on until we get to the last line:

My land's only borders lie around my heart [So your heart isn't your country? It's your "land", huh? But how can it be your land, country – whatever – if it's contained by your land?]

You get the picture. Look up the full lyrics at your peril. This song is the vocal equivalent of an audience with Smashie and Nicey.

"Men of Harlech" has spawned a thousand versions and the one we sing seems to go back to 1867, that is, 12 years before the version sung by Micheal Caine at Rorke's Drift during the Anglo-Zulu War, the battle that holds the record for largest number of Victoria Crosses at one go. While "Anthem" would win Gold for bizarrest song, "Men of Harlech" would sweep the board in the jingoism category, despatching the likes of "Jerusalem" into the ranks of also-rans with all that stuff about "Saxon spearmen and Saxon bowmen", which serves merely as a prelude to the magnificent final line, "Cambria, God and Right".

That equivalence inferred between the Principality and the Deity (not to mention Justice) is truly a thing of beauty – much like a Shane Williams' try in a losing cause.

I leave you with Smashie and Nicey, AKA Harry Enfield and the brilliant Paul Whitehouse:

New Kid on the Blog

First, I must apologise for a heading devoid of any imagination whatsoever and worthy of remark to the extent that it's worthy of remark at all only by dint of the fact that it demonstrates such egregious laziness on the part of the writer. Yes, I got it from a Hong Kong Government press release.

But seriously, this month we are celebrating the first anniversary of Fletcher, our rabbit. Fletch, as we affectionately call him, is let out of his cage morning and evening, and likes nothing better than to chew cables, wallpaper and book covers. That's not entirely true, as his all-time favourite occupation is to hump. He's a real equal-opportunity humper: he's not bothered about sex or age, so long as you've got an arm or a leg.

Talking of money, he's very cheap to keep, but he's rather too fond of the wrong type of food, preferring carrots and cabbage to dried grass. Who wouldn't, though? As for beverages, his favourite tipple is his own urine, which gives some of us pause when he indulges in his number one show of affection, which starts as a lick to the nose before graduating to a crop to the eyebrows.

He's quite entertaining when he does those funny electrified leaps that rabbits go in for or when he runs around in circles before standing on his hind legs meerkat fashion. Above all, Fletch is incredibly stupid (he makes our dwarf hamsters look like David M. Webb) and desperately insecure - always in need of attention and affirmation.

No doubt about it, he was born to blog.

Donald Tsang Dismisses Bullying Rumours

Whispers have reached me that you're not a bully, Donald.

Lies, Mr. President, all lies!

Homosexuality in Animals

Top stuff from the man who can't act but is one of the best in the business at observational humour.

Tiger Goes Buddhist

Anyone say bad thing about you, you kill them

Guest Film Review

If Hemmers can do it, then so can I. The only difference being that today's review of Invictus has really been penned by someone else – my daughter, as her English homework assignment during the long Chinese New Year break. Anything, absolutely anything to keep her away from her new New Kids On The Block album!

When they all came together and said, "We'll be making this film about how Nelson Mandela used the Springbok team as a tool to unite the two-sided country of South Africa," without hesitation, the actor needed easily came to mind - Morgan Freeman.

Freeman had no trouble impersonating Mandela, he had the aura of respectability, the charm, the straight-forwardness, everything he did was right. For a moment, you think you're with the real guy himself.

Invictus not only follows the story of Mandela becoming the first black president for South Africa, but also how he brought together the entire nation to support the Springboks – South Africa's national rugby team – and eventually reclaiming peace for his country between the whites and blacks.

Clint Eastwood (director), dedicates over a half hour of the film's two-and-a-quarter hour running time to said sport - since Invictus is not a story without the cliché of "The Little Team That Could", it needs the emphasis of rugby. And for those who don't particularly enjoy the sport, well, let's just say the performance given by Freeman's underrated co-star, Matt Damon – who plays Francois Pienaar, the captain of the Springboks – shows his undying passion for the team, his dedication, his will to succeed for not only himself and his side, but for his homeland as well.

To some who expected (and thought!) the film to be an "All About Freeman" production, I personally thought Damon was equally important, and deserves much more acclaim than the amount he's been given! Freeman played a man much like himself. So much so that, after Nelson Mandela published his autobiography, he was asked who he would want to portray him if the book was ever made into a film, he picked Freeman. The man was destined to mimic the "most admired statesman of our time". And seeing he's played God twice (Bruce Almighty, Evan Almighty), this wasn't a mighty challenge compared to Damon's role!

The differences between Matt Damon and Francois Pienaar don't only revolve around their extraordinary height difference – 6'3'' Pienaar was played by a comparatively infinitesimal 5'10'' Damon. Besides the fact that said actor didn't even know how to play rugby, his task was definitely more daring than the man who, well, in my opinion, plays the same character every time. The male version of Jennifer Aniston practically.

Despite all that, Invictus engages its audience not only with its heart-warming storyline, but mostly with its two main stars who easily conquer their given roles. 3 out of 4. A definite recommendation.

Now, if anyone says that's better than my stuff, I'll sue.

Keep Your Distance from Government Gibberish

One bus rear-ends another in the Shing Mun Tunnel. Some plonker from the Transport Department passes up the opportunity to talk about the need to keep a safe distance from the vehicle in front by bringing up the non-issue of bus drivers' workloads.

"We're very concerned about the working time and the rest time of bus captains," said Albert Yuen Lap-pun, the Transport Department's acting deputy commissioner. "We're reviewing these with the bus firms."

Albert, the bus drivers had just started work when they attempted to leapfrog each other fifteen minutes into their journey.

Look, mate, give me your car model and reg. no. and I'll arrange for someone to do you from behind – just so I can have the pleasure of hearing you intone some garbage about the stress I'm under and your desire to meet up with me and arrange some counselling.

An Education and Precious

In between eating lashings of loh bat gou with chilli sauce, trying to avoid the duck's tongue Shanghai-style, making sightings of Streptopelia chinensis, annoying my daughter by my parsimony in respect of lai see and winning a few bob on the nags over Chinese New Year, I also managed to watch a couple of films – one on my new Dell Studio 15 laptop courtesy of my aforementioned progeny's facility with Mainland websites of dubious provenance, and one at Yaumatei's purveyor of independent – usually pretentious et, bien sur, French – films, the Broadway Cinemathéque.

Both films are recent releases and both have been given 4-star ratings by Roger Ebert. True to my commitment to giving you the unalloyed Ulaca on all things cultural, I have read neither review. For the record, I would give 2 stars to An Education and the full monty, 4 stars in Ebert terms, to Precious.

Watching An Education was the cinematic equivalent of receiving a parcel through the post and knowing neither what it contains nor who it is from. My wife, who'd been put onto it by my 13-year-old, who could step in as host of Entertainment Tonight at the drop of a hat, such is her knowledge of contemporary popular culture – I will convert her to Brahms one day – would only tell me that it was "interesting" when I asked her what it was about.

As I've said before, I'm not sure if one can spoil a film like this, but here goes: "Spoilers Ahoy!"

The film is about the coming of age of the heroine, a 16-year-old schoolgirl at a posh girls' school in the London suburbs in 1961. (You know the school is posh because they play lacrosse and have Emma Thompson as the Headmistress.) The main problem with the film is that the heroine is already of age when we meet her. There is essentially no more developing for her to do. She's self-assured and knowledgeable, she has no insecurities, she knows the difference between French and Russian cigarettes, and she is able to get out of games by standing behind a large tree with her adoring groupies puffing away and suddenly breaking into French like a free spirit with Tourette's.

The rest is predictable. She meets a sleezeball. The sleezeball wheedles his way into her parents' confidence. She goes off to Paris and loses her virginity with (or without) the help of a banana. She drops out of school. She realises the folly of her ways and asks Emma Thompson to take her back. Emma unaccountably gives vent to a latent anti-Semitism but remains unmoved on the main question. She looks up her English teacher – who smoulders throughout the film behind her Dame Edna Everage spectacles – and asks her to give her some private tuition. The teacher crumples on the spot and gives her plenty. The letter arrives from Oxford saying she's won a place.

Worst of all, they cast my beloved C.S. Lewis as a McGuffin – and still manage to get it wrong. You see, film-makers, C.S Lewis never signed himself "Clive" beyond adolescence (it would have been "C.S. Lewis", "Lewis" or "Jack"), and he never actually left Oxford after he accepted the Chair at the other place in 1954. Indeed, it was part of his agreement with Cambridge that he should remain domiciled at his house in Headington Quarry.

Okay, now that we've got that out of the way, let's move on to Precious. This is the story of a big, fat black girl in Harlem, who is abused by both her father and, more unforgivably and more poignantly, by her mother. It really is an outstanding film, which does have a happy ending and yet gets to that ending in a satisfying way. The only qualm I have about the film is the casting of a really smoking café au lait chick as Precious's Main Supporter (Mariah Carey is outstanding as Supporter Number Two: no cleavage in sight – you'd hardly recognise her).

On the one hand, it kept me on the edge of my seat, but on the other I couldn't help thinking that by giving such a beautiful woman such a crappy job as teaching English to adult dropouts in Harlem the producers were selling out rather. And the way they resolved this little dilemma – by making the babe a lesbian who hated her mother because she never accepted her sexual orientation – was out of step with the reality of the rest of the film.

Catch the Pigeon

Not a cartoon starring Dick Dastardly, Muttley and the Wacky Racers ... not even a pigeon, in fact – just something that looks like a dove wearing a Burberry scarf.

I'm no twitcher, but I reckon this particular avian visitor to Ngau Tau Kok must have stopped off at the Landmark before building her nest in the sanctuary of the mother-in-law's foliage.

Lies, Damned Lies and Google Analytics

Lazing around at home on the third day of Chinese New Year (or Lunar New Year, as the politically correct style it) after a strenuous hour on the badminton court at the magnificent Yuen Wo Road Sports Centre, I thought, in between races, that it would be interesting to look up my stats on Google Analytics.

It had been a long time since I had done this, and the last time I did it, I didn't make any records, but the fascinating thing is that some of the same old topics are proving popular with my thousands of visitors, or, to be precise, with the 1,194 "absolute unique visitors" (out of 2,316 visits) that popped by in the last 30 days.

The top ten keywords (excluding "ulaca" and "who is ulaca" - cheeky buggers) in descending order were as follows:

zheng jie nude
lantau peak
robuchon
mary jean reamer
clive james on chesterton
lily chiang
rendition protocol
pseudo model
okapi
bdsm

which just goes to show that porn is indeed the number one use to which the internet is put. But we all knew that already, so what else does this tell us?

Well, first, that people have an insatiable desire for gossip. Second, that many people in the region come to Ulaca for the restaurant reviews (Sai Kung's one-thirtyone and Macau's A Petisquiera and La Bonne Heure are also in the top 20). Last but not least, that there are a lot of people out there who, eight years after The Bourne Conspiracy was released, are still desperate to know what a rendition protocol is.

HRH Drops his Energy Ball

One needs to be slitty-eyed for it to work properly, you see.

Kissel's Defence in Brief

I laced the milkshake with sedative because I had thought things through rationally and believed my husband was likely to assault me that evening; I attacked him with a statue in anticipatory self-defence, having reached the conclusion that the likelihood of him attacking me first was so high as there to be no reasonable doubt that this would happen; I wrapped his body in a carpet in a moment of temporary insanity; I called security three days later and asked them to take the carpet to a storeroom while recovering from a state of depressive amnesia brought on by the temporary insanity. And I didn't even know about the 18 million bucks I stood to gain from insurance payouts to share with the cable guy.

Cruise Eyes Explosive MI5 Role

I prepared for the part by marrying Nicole Kidman

Le Jardin de Joel Robuchon

A couple of weeks ago, I took my family off to the outrageously priced Jardin de Joel Robuchon in the Landmark building in Central on Hong Kong Island. It was a decision made with eyes wide open in celebration of a landmark anniversary on the part of my long-suffering better half and a windfall bonus on my own behalf – just reward for catapulting the company's annual report to a podium finish in the Hong Kong Management Association's annual report awards. Honours don't come much higher than that ...

Having perused their online menu, I devised my strategy for the evening: we would eat à la carte, no one was allowed to talk about how much anything cost (fat chance of that, of course) and I would choose the wine in advance, since, from the 20-page pdf file devoted to booze, I could only see two bottles of white that came in at under 1,000 dollars.

Not only did I write down the name of two whites (two in case one was out of stock – I'm a cunning bastard), I memorised them on the trip over on the Star Ferry from Tsim Sha Tsui, where I was performing as Peasant With Rake and Soldier With Wobbly Hat in Donizetti's Fille du Régiment. Having done a couple of circuits of the Landmark, I finally found the escalator up to the "jardin" – actually a terrace dominated by a poster of a slimline Kate Winslet flogging "parfum" that was previously sold to gullible women with too much money by Ingrid Bergman's daughter.

Rather than being led to a table in the restaurant proper, I was shown to a private room, complete with armchairs and sideboard. It was a bit like a B&B in Bognor Regis, except that the landlady would have put up net curtains to keep vulgar actresses from staring down at you and putting you off your full English.

It was while I was waiting for my wife and daughter that I made my first mistake. I ordered a beer. As with so many of the great tragedies – Oedipus, The Wrath of Achilles, Kane and Abel – all went well at first. The Amstel duly arrived and was poured expertly behind my back by the waiter into what looked like a champagne flute. He must have poured it pretty damn slowly because the head was perfection itself. What wasn't so perfect was the fact – unbeknown to me at the time – that the contents of the bottle were unable to fit into the glass.

Act II began with the arrival of my family. This seemed to throw the other member of the waiting team – a charmless, if attractive, Mainlander – for when I ordered a bottle of the 2003 Mer Soleil (I had wanted to order an Australian chardonnay just to annoy the Froggies, but they had outmanoeuvred me by refusing to put any Australian wines whatsoever on the wine list), she seemed not to understand. I still had the Catena Zapata up my sleeve, but years of experience in Hong Kong had taught me that the best course of action at this stage was to give up the battle and ask for her colleague, the male Hongkie.

He duly arrived – very solicitously – but met my order for a bottle of the Californian chardonnay with the news that only the house wines were available by the glass. Realising that I had thrown him by having a beer by way of aperitif, I told him that I would be joining my wife in a libation and we would indeed like a bottle of the Mer Soleil.

"Oh, you are fortunate!" he replied, doing his best Basil Fawlty impression. "You may have The Last Bottle."

Seeing my beer glass was in need of replenishment, he made the fatal mistake of attempting to fill it without angling it, with the predictable result that the contents ended up all over the table. Zut alors! Madge in Bognor would take better care of her formica.

"Um, would you care for another bottle?" he asked, obviously hoping I'd say, "No, don't bother – when you're paying through the nose for a special evening out, it makes it a bit more memorable if you lose half your beer and drink from a sticky glass".

But I wasn't complaining. I'd managed to get my very own 2-for-1 happy hour beer promo out of Hong Kong's priciest eatery. A couple of minutes later, my friend returned brandishing the desired white.

"It is The Last Bottle, sir," he emphasised, in case I'd missed it the first time, and promptly poured some for my wife to taste.

Now, this is where things get a little complicated and where a flame war would be an inevitability if this were a message board rather than a humble blog. So, I beg your indulgence while I explain that – not counting the champagne flute that was used for beer – there were two glasses at each place setting. One looked like a brandy glass, the other like a white wine glass.

Except ... the staff at Joel Robuchon's had been trained that the one that looked like a ballon was for wine and the one that looked like a white wine glass was for water. How we found this out may be told in Act III.

Not comfortable putting her delicately shaped nose into the cavernous ballon, my wife had transferred her white wine to the white wine glass. A minute or two later, the Mainlander entered the room, stationed herself at my wife's left shoulder and proceeded to pour the wine from one receptacle to the other right in front of her like Madame Mao dealing with a recalcitrant Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution. When I asked her to desist, she gave me a look that said "I was trained which glasses to use, you silly man" and left the room quite indignantly, no doubt to reflect on the faux pas we had committed.

After that, the rest of the evening was, I have to admit, a bit of an anti-climax. For the record, the starters and the main courses weren't terribly memorable (I've forgotten them, in other words, although I did spot a sliver of truffle at one point), but the desserts were terrific.

Not perhaps, though, sufficient cause to persuade me to go back – at least, not until the food matches the cabaret.

Caveat Emptor

Subscribing recently to the online Times Crossword Club served to remind me of the poverty of the South China Morning Post's customer service, not to mention its business ethics.

A couple of years ago, I helped an elderly friend set up a 12-month subscription to scmp.com. Before the year was up, my friend was undecided about whether she wanted to renew her subscription. As it happened, she had no say in the matter, as she received an email on the anniversary of joining "thanking" her for renewing.

Rather than informing her when she joined, as the Times did when I joined their Crossword Club the other day, that the subscription would automatically be renewed after 12 months unless she cancelled before the subscription expired, the SCMP chose to remain silent about this rather important piece of information. Since she was okay about renewing for one more year, as she still had many archived articles she wanted to retrieve, I suggested she wrote back immediately to the SCMP telling them to arrange for her subscription to be cancelled when the current period expired.

That did the trick, of course, notwithstanding some bleating by one of their "customer relationship" team, but not before it had served to show in microcosm why the Post is such a shitty paper.

Cant Still Stronger than Cunt – in Australia

In a letter of 1819 to his friend Douglas Kinnaird, Byron wrote this of his poem Don Juan:

"I had such projects for the Don, but Cant is so much stronger than Cunt now-a-days, that the benefit of experience in a man who had well weighed the worth of both monosyllables, must be lost to despairing posterity."

Nearly 200 years on, and Australia's Macquarie Bank carries the torch for the humbugs. Watch the fellow behind the interviewee on the left – especially his computer monitor:



Totally Safe for Work – unless you're an Australian who gets his or her rocks off over a thumbnail image of a non-nude person called Miranda Kerr.

Is it not Life, is it not the Thing?

Reading Leslie Marchand's biography of Byron, I marvel in turn at the sexual antics of the latter and the prudishness of the former, his devoted, if at times rather naughty, American biographer; naughty, that is, in terms of using innuendo to suggest certain, typically unseemly, things took place in the absence of any firm evidence. Such prurience and such creativeness – the quickness to make assumptions and then to build a case on them – seem to be very much American traits, as can be seen by picking up just about any book or essay written by an American about C S Lewis, most of which are pretty woeful.

If Marchand and Byron isn't a match made in heaven, nonetheless, as is the case with many odd couples, there's a lot to enjoy when watching them interact. It's fun to read pages devoted to Byron's allegedly incestuous relationship with his half-sister Augusta, in which the biographer isn't afraid to pull his punches, only to read on another page of Byron falling prey to the affliction of Venus, as if Marchand has scruples about troubling his reader with the word "syphilis".

With Byron, as with many other outstanding thinkers, writers and artists, the inconsistencies and the paradoxes are not only exciting to read about; they offer a glimpse into his true nature. Thus, he was inordinately proud of his barony and yet a man of the people (he supported the Nottingham weavers – the original Luddites), he was a free spirit (bedding 200 women in a two-year stint in Venice - he was partial to the fellahs too) and yet ended up as the virtual slave of the married Teresa Guiccioli (Italian culture formalised this type of cuckolding relationship to the extent that they had a special expression for it, cavalier servente), he hated tyrants and yet never quite lost his sympathy for Napoleon Bonaparte (although this may have had as much to do with his contempt for reactionary politics, as represented by his bête noir – one of them, at any rate – the Duke of Wellington, and by the carving up of Europe by the "great" powers at the Congress of Vienna shortly before Napoleon met his Waterloo).

That same year, Byron summed up some of the complexities of his make-up when he wrote to his sister, "I am determined to fling Misery around me & upon all those with whom I am concerned."

He was rightly proud of his magnum opus, Don Juan – the only poem to date to make me laugh out loud. Which person who has ploughed through Wordsworth's Prelude or Excursion can resist lines like this?

"And Wordsworth, in a rather long Excursion
(I think the quarto holds five hundred pages),
Has given a sample from the vasty version
Of his new system to perplex the sages;
'T is poetry -- at least by his assertion,
And may appear so when the dog-star rages --
And he who understands it would be able
To add a story to the Tower of Babel."

As might be expected, with stuff like this, John Murray, Byron's publisher, was a little chary of printing any more of the poem after Canto I and II came out, and Byron reckoned he lost some of his "Spirit" as a result of the outcry about the atheism, the licentiousness and – above all to English readers – the radical politics.

But his self doubt didn't last long. Don Juan might be bawdy, but it was good – not to mention, based on experience:

"As to Don Juan - confess - confess you dog - and be candid - that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing - it may be bawdy - but is it not good English - it may be profligate - but is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man have written it - who has not lived in the world? and tooled in a postchaise? in a hackney coach? in a Gondola? against a Wall? in a court carriage? in a vis-à-vis? on a table? and under it?"

That assessment was from a letter to a friend. A more sober evaluation of the poem's worth was given in a letter to his publisher written in 1822, two years before his death at the age of 36:

"Don Juan will be known by and bye, for what it is intended – a Satire on abuses of the present states of Society, and not an eulogy of vice: it may be now and then voluptuous: I can't help that."

As the man who was "born for opposition" once wrote, quoting his beloved Alexander Pope, the life of a writer is "a warfare upon earth".

George Gordon, Sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale – truly, a fighter among giants.

Plato's People's Republic?

Zhao Lianhai, a father of two who used to work for the optimistically named Food Quality and Safety Authority in China and who set up a website to help fellow victims of the melamine-laced powdered milk debacle, which poisoned 300,000 children, killing six, has been charged with disturbing social order by the tyrants up north.

Not for nothing did Plato put tyranny at the bottom of his list of the five forms of government (behind monarchy, timocracy, oligarchy and democracy – he loved to blind us with Greek, did Plato).

One of the privileges Plato wished to see accorded to people such as himself – naturally – who would function as rulers under the benevolent philosopher-king was the power to lie. Thus, in Book III of The Republic, Plato has Socrates say, "The rulers of the city may, if anybody, fitly lie in respect of enemies or citizens for the benefit of the state".

The unelected – indeed, unelectable – slimebuckets up north are obviously quite big on their Plato. The Telegraph's man in Shanghai somehow manages to keep a straight face as he dutifully records this glorious archetype of the Chinese ability to point at a deer and call it a horse:

"In his indictment, the Chinese police accused Mr Zhao of 'viciously spinning' the news of the crisis on the internet and 'inciting and assembling people to go to the courtroom in Shijiazhuang [for the trial]'."

"Disturbing social order?" That's what sentient beings have always called politics.

Me? I Blame Wu Fung

My friend has a theory that the theatricality of a race is in inverse proportion to the degree to which members of said race are repressed in childhood. Looking at events in Hong Kong recently, I'd have to say she has a point.

Just yesterday, a judge with the terrific name of Johnson Lam decided that Tony Chan, Nina Wang's Fung Shui "master" (there can be no doubt that he is masterful at some things – persuading his wife to support him even though he was caught on camera (nay! demanded to be photographed) holding a pair of Nina's blood-stained panties comes to mind), had forged a will leaving him all those of Nina's assets which he hadn't already tasted.

But enough of that. We all know this is merely Act One, and that Tony will step triumphantly out of the Court of Final Appeal in a couple of year's time arm in arm with the dough and an adoring wife.

I still can't get enough of the case involving the niece of local judge Kemal Bokhary, who Chan may yet come up against, as he is one of the permanent judges of the Court of Final Appeal – a woman with a history of assaulting police officers and somehow getting away with it (she should try her hand at Fung Shui – she's obviously got some hidden powers) Amina Bokhary.

I don't imagine Amina's got too much to worry about, given not only her friends in high places (her auntie Verina is also a judge in Hong Kong) but also the fact that she's managed to assault police officers and taxi drivers and be caught in possession of cocaine and she still hasn't seen the inside of Tai Lam's Cell Block H.

My imagination is still caught by the policeman who slumped to the tarmac in the manner of a Portuguese footballer who suddenly finds himself in the penalty area upon being given a cuff by the serial slapper. Sources say he was keen to get himself admitted to hospital to buttress the charge of assault to be laid against Amina – a classic case of the "A&E Phenomenon" so widespread in Hong Kong. For those not in the know, the A&E Phenomenon is a well-established ruse whereby anyone involved in, say, a traffic accident will immediately feign unconsciousness, moan, bang their head on the pavement before the ambulance arrives, etc. so that they might be rushed to the local hospital under the cover of screaming sirens. Having writhed around there for a while, they emerge from the hospital to lay immediate claim to the not insignificant sum that transport companies set aside for such contingencies (my contact at the MTRC mentions HK$30,000 – no questions asked – for anyone admitted to hospital after an accident) before awaiting the result of the police investigation into the accident before deciding what other avenues to pursue.

Anyway, all that is by way of introduction. My main concern today is to raise a glass to the man to whom any self-respecting police officer owes an enormous debt, the man whose School of Overacting threatens to make the Police Training School obsolescent. He may have just turned 78, but Wu Fung can still teach the boys in blue a thing or two.

Here he is in the 1992 classic The Inspector Wears Skirts 4, putting Paul Fonoroff, making a cameo appearance as the world's campest police superintendent, through his paces (go to 1'20" if the suspense is killing you):



And here, for anyone who might have missed it, is the slapper herself:

Cop down after a ferocious slap on the cheek
Uploaded by thedarksidehk. - Sitcom, sketch, and standup comedy videos.

Scientific Breakthrough Finds Fat Parents to Blame for Children's Obesity

Sheesh! Them scientists never 'eard of 'ormones?

Anthony's Ranch

We went to this purveyor of ribs, steaks and meatballs for lunch yesterday and I'd put it at number four in my Sai Kung eateries Top Ten behind Hebe One O One, Okapi and one-thirtyone. Solid fare, healthy portions, unobtrusive service, nice venue - which will be better when the roadworks are finished.

Talking of French food, if any of you are thinking of trying Le Jardin de Joel Robuchon, think again. We went recently and the service was something out of Fawlty Towers and the food nothing to write home about, 'though the desserts were first class. A fuller review later. In the meantime, one-thirtyone represents much better value for money pour les gourmands.