Big Lychee, Various Sectors

In the UK, bookmakers are allowed to accept bets on anything, including financial market movements, that come with probabilities the gambling industry can calculate reasonably well. One example is election results. No-one would believe a politicians’ forecast, and even opinion polls can be biased or based on faulty samples. The betting companies’ odds, by contrast, are rooted in cold, hard-headed, unemotional calculation.

The Hong Kong Jockey Club monopoly is allowed to accept bets only on local horse racing and some overseas soccer games. Offering odds on the forthcoming Chief Executive ‘election’ would be fraught with theoretical hazard. Beijing rigs the poll behind the scenes, so China’s leaders could, if they wanted, give the impression that Henry Tang will be the winner while secretly betting huge sums on CY Leung, then install the latter as victor at the last minute and, say, retire to Tahiti on their winnings.

Even if the nation’s senior officials would not stoop as low as the team managers and referees who run mainland soccer games, the HKJC would still have to offer odds on a one-horse race for next Chief Executive. The probabilities must be something like 90% Henry, 7.5% a pro-Beijing figure drafted in at short notice, and 2.5% CY.

CY Leung’s hopes of getting 150 signatures from the 1,200-strong Election Committee, and thus himself on the ballot, do not look too good. The Standard reports that he could have around 120. Given many EC members’ instinctive fear of backing the wrong horse, we can be certain that some who have quietly pledged to nominate him will have flu or an urgent business trip when the time comes. So CY will need nominations from at least some EC members from the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of HK and its labour affiliate, the Federation of Trade Unions. But these are solid, loyalist groups; a few FTU members might at a stretch put their working-class conscience before the interests of Beijing’s pet tycoons, but most will follow United Front orders.

If the DAB-FTU bloc nominated CY (or an as yet unknown), it would imply, as the article says, that Beijing has come down against Henry at the last minute. This would require unimaginably dreadful – as in way-too-juicy-to-be-true – public scandal. It would also pull the rug out from under the array of establishment sycophants already openly supporting Henry.

This is why A.N. Other gets a 7.5% probability. The Friends of Donald and other shoe-shiners could hurriedly scuttle to a new entrant on the field and tut-tut about Henry’s problems while saving their own faces. But if the new ‘winner’ were CY, they would be tainted publicly as losers, even hostile ‘outsiders’, compared with the little elite who had sided with the underdog from the start. In short, CY as CE at this stage would disrupt harmony among Hong Kong’s great and good in unimaginable ways – think the URA’s Barry Cheung lording it over Bank of East Asia’s David Li. And that can’t happen. Even 2.5% is overdoing it.

The attendant at a corpse-ignoring Internet café reports that ‘when he went to wake Chen when his 23 hours were up, he saw that his face was blackened and that he was sitting rigidly in the sofa chair’. Far safer, surely, to drag yourself away from the computer and start planning your Valentine’s Day dinner, perhaps at Brasserie Le Fauchon in Soho where you can choose between the Classic Set for Two at HK$1,688, the Sweetie Set for Two and the Romantic Set for Two (prices not captured in my impulse photo). Among the offerings at this self-proclaimed French restaurant are crabmeat chowder, salmon with mango ‘rose’, garoupa, and something called Australian Wagyu striploin (M7); an online review notes the establishment’s use of ginger as an ingredient.

A stroll around a rural but nonetheless giant Gallic supermarket a few years ago confirmed that La Republique still has the world’s most chauvinistic and xenophobic cooking. Horsemeat no problem, but chilies, coriander, cumin, soy sauce – let alone ginger – were simply nonexistent. They do not appear in French recipes, so nobody can possibly have any use for them.

The Sweetie Set for Two could be an appropriate way to celebrate the beginning on February 14 of the nomination period for candidates for Hong Kong’s Chief Executive election – which will be every bit as authentic as the Brasserie Le Fauchon fare. A surprising number of people claim to believe Beijing officials when they say that the Central People’s Government does not favour one of the two apparent frontrunners, but this is probably politeness; common sense tells us that the Communist Party is congenitally disposed to control everything it can.

Still, compared with previous exercises, they are doing a good job of making the process look superficially undecided – to the extent that Henry Tang seems somewhat taken aback to find that he is expected to at least pretend to be putting effort into getting the job and doing halfway decently in public opinion ratings. Maybe, having had everything in life handed to him on a plate, he has no clue how to act the part of someone exerting himself.

He is left in a curious position. While his supposed rival CY Leung has released a reasonably detailed if insipid platform, Henry doesn’t seem to have one (other than a vacuous announcement in December). It’s almost as if he imagined that, as with holding a debate, he could unveil a manifesto after the nominations were over, by which time CY’s 23 hours would be up after failing to get the necessary 150 nominations from the 1,200-strong Election Committee. But at least a few of the EC members, unhappy at this clear (and correct) implication that they are a mere rubber stamp, are mumbling about not nominating someone without a declared set of policy pledges. Henry’s team are no doubt going through CY’s proposals and concocting their candidate’s very own load of drivel about helping the middle class and small-medium enterprises. Which is why the countdown to Valentine’s Day will be so especially extra-exciting this year. Meanwhile, you can (preferably with headphones, as it is not aurally suitable for work) listen to them let you know that We Are Tomorrow!*

*Try trimming url to ‘http://wearetomorrow.hk’ or something if it doesn’t work.

Click to hear ‘Get Yourself Together’ by the Small Faces!

Hong Kong’s Equal Opportunities Commission wades into the Locust-Gate morass with a plea to all of us to be nice and civilized to each other, phrased with all the hand-wringing even-handedness at which the Big Lychee’s bureaucracy excels. The EOC likes to see itself as a watchdog that, by the standards of local officialdom, is trendily ahead of the curve on social issues. Even so, they have a curious ability to make sensational and provocative topics (gay rights, for example) mind-numbingly dry and dull. We can safely declare that the more lurid side of the backlash against Mainland tourists is blowing over.

Nonetheless, the imagery – as befits a leaping insect – has legs. Shanghainese intellectual property thieves hijack the Apple Daily anti-locust/Mainlander ad for their own purposes. Which are to get back at the Cantonese running-dog bastards down south? No: to lash out against their own influx of bloodsucking peasants, the rural migrant workers with no residency rights in the city. The ones who earn a pittance dangling from ropes washing skyscraper windows. The ones we in Hong Kong feel so sorry for when municipal authorities pull their kids’ illegal schools down.

A welcome break from the usual blandness of opinion in the South China Morning Post’s op-ed pages comes from Lau Nai-keung, the perpetually angry, mouth-frothing patriot and scourge of the mass of Hongkongers (‘dissidents’) who fail to kowtow to Beijing. He is interesting because, as one of the devout faithful, he has to find ways to square intellectual circles. He loves the Communist Party because it works for the people; the same Communist Party appoints a Hong Kong government that blatantly sides with feudal-style landlord-tycoons against the people. In his struggles to get his head around such contradictions, he sometimes makes sense.

Lau’s current position, not unreasonably, is to support CY Leung to be the next Chief Executive instead of spoilt rich-kid Henry Tang. So the Great Anti-Locust Uprising of 2012 prompts him to point the finger of blame at the officials and policymakers.

His accusation comes with a pro-Beijing twist. The Hong Kong government, he maintains, brought local maternity services under unbearable strain by accepting the courts’ reading of the Basic Law as granting residency to children of all Chinese citizens born here. This was probably because the Basic Law explicitly states as much (Article 24 (1)). But the pro-Beijing camp maintains that their much-loved, invisible, parallel Basic Law – the drafters’ supposed ‘original intent’ some 20 years ago, which somehow failed to appear in the final text – denies this right to, lo and behold, Mainland mothers.

Still, at least he’s blaming the right people. Speaking of which: has anyone seen our leaders lately, other than reading out lame budgets? They seem to have absented themselves from the Mainland Locust controversy with stunning success. I always knew they had it in them.

Click to hear ‘Things Are Going to Get Better’ by the Small Faces!

Flicking through the 2012-13 Budget with one finger while jabbing the calculator with another, the little sums of ‘relief’ add up. The government will give me back HK$12,000 of last year’s salaries tax, paid a month ago. It will boost the tax-free allowance I can earn before tax kicks in by another HK$12,000, saving me HK$1,500 or so. It will pay HK$1,800 of my electricity bills, and waive property rates yet again, leaving me a further HK$9,800 better off.

The resulting total of just over HK$25,000 translates into over four months’ salary-plus-housing for my underworked but dutiful amah, or a surprisingly measly-sounding 550 pints of San Miguel outside of happy hour, or a far better-value 3,000 big cans of it from 7-Eleven. Or I could buy a whole clutch of iPads, iPhones, plasma screen doodahs or whatever. And there’s the HK$6,300 handout from last year’s budget, which I have yet to apply for.

In truth, the cash will just go pretty much unnoticed into the pot. Like the Hong Kong government itself, my revenues exceed my expenditure by an embarrassing amount and I always end up with a big surplus (the differences are that I am merely cheap to run, and I can forecast the leftover sum quite accurately). Either Financial Secretary John Tsang shouldn’t have collected the 25 grand from me in the first place, or he should have thought up something useful to do with it. But what can one humble member of the squeezed middle class do?

A variety of robotic accountants and fiscal experts quoted in the press today recite the mantra that Hong Kong’s tax base is ‘too narrow’. It is true that very few people pay more than seven or eight percent of their income in tax; the same goes for companies (also benefitting from yesterday’s ‘relief measures’), most of which mysteriously make too little profit to concern the Inland Revenue Department. John Tsang may have perceived such worrying narrowness when he predicted an HK$8.5 billion deficit for 2011-12. But after he later found he had a HK$67 billion surplus, he could be forgiven for thinking that this is the sort of ‘narrow’ we can live with.

In fact, if we further squeezed the salaries/profits tax base until it were just an atom wide and yielded one penny a year, we could still get by. (OK – it would blow something like a 20% hole in the public finances. But bring civil service pay halfway back into line with the private sector, and voila! We’re back in surplus.) To outsiders, this must look like a deliriously happy state of affairs: this place hardly collects any serious tax from anyone and still has mountains of budget surpluses piling up year after year.

In some ways, it is miraculous; for those of us whose affairs are in order (especially having freed ourselves from the grip of the property scam), the money roles in, and you give the government a little dribble of that, and then the government gives you some of it back again, and there we all are with John Tsang like kids in a bath full of foam, throwing the stuff at each other and in the air.

In other ways, however, we are talking grotesque distortions, not least by which a segment of the population who mistimed property purchase, or simply their era of birth, now carry the weight, via killer mortgages or rentals, for the rest of us. And we are talking gaping vacuums where money should be flowing but isn’t. Billionaires enjoy tax-free investment income, while one Ms Hu and kids talk to the South China Morning Post in an 80-square foot partition and get none of the little public-housing rent waivers and welfare bonuses John Tsang is once again scattering among the poor-but-not-too-poor (her landlord pockets the electricity subsidy).

Naïve, she still has a bit to learn about the Hong Kong way…

In the eyes of the government, they hope we simply don’t exist and all people are tycoons and the middle class…

“…they hope…”?

Click to hear the Aztecs’ ‘World of Woe’!

It’s a life of surprises, watching Hong Kong’s social and political ferment over the years. Each time the rulers suppress or ward off discontent, it pops up again where you least expect it. Our leaders thought the people agitating for reform down at the Star Ferry in Central in the 90s had wandered off out of boredom; instead, they poured out in the early 2000s to demand and get Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa’s head. After Beijing made it clear there would be no democracy, the malcontents turned historic and occupied the Star Ferry site to defend the city’s heritage. Now the local administration has started to get on top of that issue, the masses rise up over something else: ‘Mainlandization’ and, specifically, ‘locusts’.

Noodles being dropped on trains, overcrowded maternity wards, cinema closures, unaffordable housing, guttural slurring chatter on the Mid-Levels Escalator, kiddies doing pee-pee in public, Dolce & Gabbana luxury hegemony, baby milk powder shortages, signs in simplified characters – it’s all coming to a head, not least in the world’s press. And while we’re not quite getting to pogrom/Kristallnacht levels of viciousness, ‘bastard running dog’ Hong Kong emotions are definitely getting borderline nasty where the entomological allusions are concerned.

For all its apparent efforts to convince its citizens to love the motherland – through National Education, Olympic flag-waving, astronaut visits and TV anthems – the Hong Kong government has successfully alienated local people from the nation and arranged the demonization of Mainlanders as the cause of Hong Kong’s biggest problems. It is the Hong Kong government that for years has had ample funding to ensure adequate maternity and other hospital capacity, but has chosen not to spend it. It is the Hong Kong government that throughout much of the 2000s has squeezed land supply to deliberately push up the cost of housing and business rents and cut supply of affordable homes. This is where the burgeoning ethnic/cultural hatred of voracious, swarming, chomping, ‘locusts’ comes from.

Our policymakers and planners were, in all fairness to them, perhaps too dense to foresee what size footprint a tiny, middle-class slice of the Mainland’s 1.3 billion people could stamp on the city. Or perhaps they are in fact more cunning, and this is all part of a plot by unpatriotic CE Sir Donald Tsang, the British running dog still in power, to split Hong Kong from the People’s Republic, use it as a base from which to subvert Party rule and treacherously deliver the country to evil foreign imperialist forces. Who knows?

Meanwhile, Beijing’s struggle to counter local reactionary devils continues. The accepted wisdom among the chattering classes is that tycoon Robert Kuok bought the South China Morning Post from Rupert Murdoch back in 1999 as a gesture of loyalty to Beijing, to keep the organ out of hostile hands, and that the paper has been a headache for the family ever since. How many of the Magnificent Seven post-Murdoch editors can you name? (Answer in the second-from-last paragraph here.)

Staffers at Asia’s greatest English-language newspaper are now joining the company’s Party Cell for struggle sessions and trying to get their tongues and throats around the irrrrr-ggghhhh cadences of Mandarin, as editor Number (lucky) Eight assumes office and wonders how long it will be before he wishes he were back at China Daily… 

Click to hear ‘Life of Surprises’ by Prefab Sprout!

One of the more distasteful sights in Hong Kong is the cringing, nodding grin of automatic agreement when Mainland officialdom spouts crap. Thus the South China Morning Post today dutifully plays along with a report that China’s National Development and Reform Commission will conjure into existence a global hub on a par with New York and London in Shanghai, focused on Yuan trading. By 2015 (or maybe 2012).

The NDRC is a hangover from Stalin-style central planning days. Real economic hubs grow organically over decades as market players gravitate together into self-generating clusters. Shanghai is a Potemkin financial centre in a jurisdiction with capital controls, corruption, censorship and a weird legal system. The Yuan is a chimera of a currency, not freely convertible but regarded by many overseas officials and media folk with some sort of inexplicable awe. Nowhere more so than in Hong Kong, where silliness like RMB-denominated gold ETFs is greeted seriously, and the prospect of being a (or the) ‘Yuan hub’ is seen as a lifeline free-lunch rent-seeking opportunity.

Meanwhile, Shanghai battles Beijing, Tianjin, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and elsewhere for symbolic and PR victories in its determination to be declared the one officially favoured financial centre. And all the time, the Communist Party, obsessed with maintaining its grip over an increasingly complex economy, has no intention of letting international markets (evil foreigners determined to prevent China’s rise) interfere with its currency. In all fairness to the SCMP, it is a slow news day. Without an unquestioning headline about the emperor surpassing ragged Hong Kong with his fine new clothes, the front page would be empty.

Some relief is in sight. Japan is going to announce names for islets, which is illegal and could lead to all sorts of interesting excitements. Failing that, we have this…

…the [Hong Kong] government needs to show in issues like property, transport and the environment that it is governing in the interest of Hong Kong residents, and not just an alliance of mainland and developer/commercial interests. Otherwise more protests like the [Dolce & Gabbana] uprising look inevitable. (Marketwatch)

Since governing in the interests of Hong Kong residents obviously isn’t going to happen…

The 2012-13 Budget will be unveiled on Wednesday. Our visionary leaders are managing expectations with all their usual subtlety via leaks, off-the-record blather and even Financial Secretary John Tsang’s blog, which also warns that Hong Kong is next in line after Greece, Portugal and Italy if the government doesn’t keep expenditure under tight control.

By Tsang’s standards, it looks set to be an only-averagely dimwitted fiscal plan. There will be no repeat of the HK$6,000 giveaway to every resident; that wasn’t part of the script last year – just a panicky reaction to fend off irate teeming masses. Instead, the tiny number of us who pay a vaguely serious amount of tax (say 10-15% of salary) will get our perennial, and bigger, rebate from the administration that frets about the narrowness of its revenue base. We’re the last people who need it, but we complain more loudly, and, I like to think, persuasively than everyone else, so tough. Public spending, the Standard says, will rise to improve quality of life. This means that health and welfare budgets will more or less keep up with inflation, so the deterioration of (for example) maternity services inundated with pregnant Mainlanders will remain nice and steady.

In his modesty, the Financial Secretary declares that he will ‘stabilize the economy, safeguard livelihoods and invest in the future’. ‘Safeguarding livelihoods’ means the boost to social spending, while ‘investing in the future’ of course means chucking hundreds of billions down the toilet on pointless infrastructure projects. We can only wonder how exactly he proposes to ‘stabilize the economy’ when it seems pretty stable, global circumstances considered, and he only has five months left before Chief Executive Tang takes office and, presumably, finds an equally adventurous and dazzling figure to run our finances.

As usual, the government will find itself sitting on a massive budget surplus, privately estimated this time round at HK$50 billion. Tsang says it is essential to keep revenue and spending at sustainable levels in order to avoid imposing a ‘long-term burden on society’. Yet how can the continued confiscation and accumulation of our wealth – now totaling one-point-something trillion bucks stuffed under the government’s mattress – be anything other than a burden? And the guy has the nerve to criticize the Europeans for not being able to balance books.

Meek and mild ‘think tank’ SynergyNet has produced a (Chinese-only) report suggesting, in essence, that the government establish a fiscal stabilization fund to convert some of the reserves into a source of recurrent income, which can then be matched to long overdue increases in spending on health care, environmental clean-ups, or your other favourite features of a decent, civilized community. In fact, something like this already happens, with interest and investment income from the reserves from time to time being moved into the government pot. They thus form part of the inevitable annual surplus, and thence end up being stuffed back under the mattress to generate yet more returns so the whole pointless process can carry on.

SynergyNet is what we might call the extreme pro-government wing of the opposition (its top advisor Anthony Cheung sits on the Executive Council), and its proposals tend to buy into official assumptions, however questionable. In this case, they are embracing the idea that officials would love to increase social spending if only it were prudently possible.

This is baloney: as well as stuffing wads of our cash away for a Noah-scale ‘rainy day’, the Hong Kong government directly and indirectly oversees the diversion of large amounts of the wealth the population creates into the wallets of a small group of tycoons. (Partly through the aforementioned infrastructure spending, and even more by enabling what are essentially hidden taxes we all pay to the property and other cartels. I believe this is due to be discussed in nauseating detail in a forthcoming feature in Time Out.) The money is there, flowing out of our pockets, already – it’s just being used to amass huge family- (and state-) owned investment portfolios instead of cutting hospital waiting lists, cleaning the air, etc, etc. This not some sort of accident, as SynergyNet seems to think. It’s government policy. It’s deliberate.

On a slightly hopeful note: one of my first colleagues in Hong Kong used to express anger at how the freest and most democratic Chinese society on earth was run by the British. Maybe she feels better these days, especially after watching a new tear-jerking video rejoicing at the noble wondrousness of the Taiwanese political system. It also poses a question: How many more Henry Tangs will there be? Ewwww… what a horrible thought.

Meanwhile, a new word of anxiety from the people who assure us that Hong Kong is going to ‘lose out’ for want of a Formula 1 car-racing circuit or more golf courses…

Click to hear ‘One Hundred Years From Now’ by the Byrds!

So what’s been going on in my absence? On the financial front, I notice that Swire Pacific, the biggest single holding in my equities portfolio, fell some 18% suddenly last week. At the same time, the conglomerate spun off part of its Swire Properties real-estate business in a separate listing (with the rather retro-sounding trading code of 1972 – the date the unit was founded, I think).

To hear all the waffling among analysts beforehand, Swire Pacific was to be reduced to a hollowed-out shell retaining a mishmash of undesirable aviation, distribution and shipping assets, while the subsidiary landlord would be where all the action is. As it turns out, the valuation of the Swire Properties shares that have recently materialized in my portfolio accounts for the 18% drop almost perfectly. This is what you would expect, but it also raises the question: why bother? The holding company is somewhat diluted as a property play, but on balance I don’t see an iota of extra (or reduced) value for shareholders. I guess we’re supposed to wait years for exciting results.

In fairness, the big Swire bosses look very pleased with themselves having added a fourth counter to their existing line-up of Swire Pac, Cathay Pacific and HAECO to the Hong Kong stock market. Maybe that was the point, in which case how can we not share in their joy, and indeed thank them for brightening up our lives during these gloomy times?

As a landlord, Swire benefits from the ongoing influx of Mainland tourists in Hong Kong. This same influx, of course, imposes a variety of unpleasant and damaging costs on the rest of the city’s population and economy. From my point of view, this may seem Panglossian, serendipitous kismet – but it is all part of a carefully designed plan: if the invasion of Mainland ‘locusts’ continues, I earn higher dividends; if an outbreak of SARS or something drives them away, I have a nicer town to live in. The Big Lychee’s government constantly blathers about ‘win-win’ situations, but this is the real thing.

While I was away, the Hong Kong-Mainland cultural clash – at least partly rooted in pressure on housing, hospitals, rents and babies’ milk powder – grew in intensity. The Great Dolce & Gabbana Siege of 2012 was followed by the now-infamous YouTube video of Mainland scum dribbling noodles all over the floor of our pristine MTR trains, leaving noble Hongkongers with no choice but to push the emergency button to bring the full wrath of mass-transit justice upon the messy peasant invaders. Peking University’s embarrassing Professor Kong Qingdong accused Hong Kong people of being running dogs of British colonialism, and the next thing we know, the culture war is world news. The Cantonese ‘bastards, dogs and cheats’ are now launching ‘anti-locust’ websites.

Yesterday’s South China Morning Post pleaded for moderation, and its business columnist wrote a defence of Mainland shoppers’ importance to our economy that curiously played down the negative impacts of the large-scale influx of tourists on those of us who are not landlords or owners thereof. It is not beyond the realms of possibility that Hong Kong officials – wisely keeping their heads down publicly in all of this – are calling editors and begging for some badly needed harmony to help calm things down.

Meanwhile chatterers are wondering how much Professor Kong’s views reflect those of Beijing. His outburst was on an obscure Internet broadcast, but it gained sufficient attention to get it pulled by censors had it been referring to, say, Tibetans or Uighurs. You can get away with insulting Japanese or Westerners this way online, however, which would imply that Beijing deep down sees Hongkongers on a par with foreigners. Then again, you can also smear other fellow Chinese or Taiwanese in this manner, provided they do not enjoy government favour.

It would be nice to think that the latest Ngong Ping 360 Death Ride disaster would keep tourist numbers down, but I fear it will take far more than that. I can’t see anti-tourist Facebook pages helping, either. I bought my Swire shares back during the SARS crisis, when airlines were grounded and malls deserted, and they were going for a fraction of today’s price. Taking subsequent dividends into consideration, I pretty got them for free, which is why I can be even more philosophical about their and Swire Properties’ current fate as Hong Kong ponders the Mainland Mass-Tourism Menace. It would take another earth-shattering outbreak of deadly pestilence or an equally cataclysmic crash of the Chinese economy to bring the share price/visitor numbers down. More’s the pity. When do we start seeing Swire Properties dividends?

I am spending the week in a small, distant town so obscure that, when you Google its name, you get the name of moderately successful band named after it. I am here to say a final farewell to a loved one, but the mood is not one of moroseness or grief so much as resigned annoyance at the impertinence and unpredictability of nature.

By coincidence, this is the town of my birth. Just a few hundred yards away, past the frozen fields overlooking what passes for sea, I find the long-abandoned tennis court of my first school. The establishment was run by nuns for ‘girls and infants’ until, just as I arrived, it became hard up and the Belgian order had to let repulsive boys join their straw boater-wearing angels.

Around the corner and up the hill, I find the school has vanished. The convent, far smaller than the mighty and mysterious edifice I remember, is boarded up and covered with graffiti. Not before time. I will never forget the incredibly disgusting food: cabbage that smelled of something more like carrion and could have been sucked up through a straw after being cooked by arc-plasma device. One dish – allegedly a cheese tart – is so indelibly etched upon my consciousness that I can induce myself to vomit within seconds just by imagining its rancid smell and its shimmering, orange surface covered in tiny beads of sweat.

This windy part of town lies on the crest of a ridge and includes aging suburban development, with identical homes with numbers. The house I was born in is in a world apart, downhill and thus inland, with no hint of the coast. It was a gently sloping, winding road where every house and cottage was different and identified by a name. Its feel was that of a village, right down to elderly women looking like Margaret Rutherford wearing hats and carrying shopping baskets.

I have a long-recurring dream in which I am at the top of this tranquil lane where it turns and the last houses give way to hedges and trees. Within a few paces the greenery on either side is so tall that it joins at the top, turning the road into a dark tunnel. I think you can get to the top of the hill where the convent and more urban neighbourhood are, but the farther I press on, the more difficult it gets. The lane narrows, twists and looks impenetrable. Sometimes it gets too steep or too overgrown to carry on; other times it leads to a tiny ledge perilously high on a cliff top. There is no getting through.

Today, awake, I am coming in the other direction. After the last of the 1930s semi-detacheds, I pass a few small rough fields of sheep and horses, and there, off to one side, descending into shrubbery-shrouded gloom, I see what I am looking for. The exit. I always knew I wasn’t imagining it. Making the journey backwards is surprisingly quick; everything has shrunk when you have grown up. After a few minutes strolling down the dark, narrow lane – you are actually going into a valley – a long-forgotten row of cream cottages appears, and I turn down past the Joyces, past the Wilcoxes and past my own old home (now valued at around 150 times what my parents paid for it, not counting inflation). Even a Margaret Rutherford-type makes an appearance.

Later, I stop off for lunch in a pub. Retirees line up to take advantage of a two-for-one offer, and the barmaid is patiently tailoring their orders to suit their requirements. “Would you like peas with that?” “No, no peas, dear.” “Would you like the salad on the side?” “Oh, no thank you.” God forbid any non-starch plant matter should blight their platters. These people are a generation ahead of me and for all I know were even more badly traumatized by inedible school lunches than I was.

Comments will be cleared… eventually

…to ward off the Monstrous Mainland Mother Menace

Problem: Mainland mothers are making ever more determined efforts to give birth in Hong Kong to qualify their kids for an eventual ID card and residence rights. Hospitals now have quotas to limit Mainlanders’ deliveries, and pregnant women from over the border without a booking may be intercepted by immigration officials and turned back. To get round this, some mothers-to-be enter Hong Kong before the bump gets too obvious, hang out in an illegal apartment-hostel for a while, then turn up at the public hospital emergency room after contractions begin. This endangers them and their kids, and – more to the point for angry Hongkongers – increases pressure on medical services and taxpayers’ costs, especially when the rascals run off without paying the bill.

Non-solutions: Hong Kong’s Basic Law guarantees residency to all born in the city. Changing this would be difficult politically and practically. (Amending the BL – a Chinese law – would legitimize Western-style rule of law and lose the Communist Party face. Chinese-style ‘interpreting’, under which we would be invited to believe drafters really meant to exclude Mainland babies all along, invites ridicule. Besides, the accumulation of Mainland residents in Hong Kong seems to be a policy of Beijing’s.  There would also be problems with discriminating against fellow Chinese vis-à-vis overseas nationals living here.)

Refusal to hand over the birth certificate without payment of fees – and perhaps of some sort of deterrent fine – is, I am reliably informed by a lawmaker who suggested it, not possible for some constitutional or legal reason that escapes me. Lame politicians like Chief Executive hopeful Henry Tang offer silly ideas like barring the mothers from Hong Kong for two years, as if that would make any difference.

Click to hear ‘Death of an Elf’ by the Reverend Glen Armstrong!

A real solution: I hereby solve the problem neatly and vividly in three simple steps.

1  All un-booked, potentially bill-skipping Mainland babies shall henceforth be impounded (what’s the phrase – taken into care?) by the child welfare and social services people straight after the nurse severs the umbilical cord. The grounds for this are that any woman willing to risk her and her child’s well-being by staggering in after her waters break is unfit to be a parent.

2  The newborn children will be offered up for adoption (maybe we could charge the new parents a fee to cover the costs of the delivery and the repatriation of the unfit mother). Local families would get priority, but most of the kids would no doubt go to those slightly creepy but no-doubt well-intentioned Americans who hanker after a Chinese baby to dress in cheongsams and teach Mandarin.

3  As word of the new policy spreads extremely quickly, watch the illicit mothers vanish overnight, and the pressure on our hospitals noticeably lessen.

Tomorrow I will solve the problem of illegal parking in Central through selective – and in practice relatively rare – public garroting.

Comments will be cleared eventually…