Hong Kong in rain trauma

Wow – and I thought it would be those good-for-nothing low-life cheating Botswanan scum…

The subject of the Great Mouth-Froth Du Jour is the Hong Kong Observatory, who yesterday morning sadistically implemented a period of severe rain, and then abruptly suspended the downpour, and then turned the storm back on again. To gain maximum pleasure from their extreme cruelty, they waited until every little kiddy in town was nearly at school, and then cancelled classes. Just as the soaking-wet children were wading back to their homes, the Observatory announced with an evil laugh that the crisis was over. The bedraggled kids bravely set out back to school, only to find that the Malevolent Meteorologist Maniacs had recommenced the torrent and shut down all educational institutions again. Thousands of innocent children perished after being swept into storm sewers, where they were consumed by crocodiles descended from escaped pets.

Angry parents and politicians are demanding that the HK Observatory get its act together, calculate precise weather, traffic conditions and winning Mark Six numbers three months in advance, and telepathically transmit this information in full, instantly, to all sentient beings.

How things have changed. Some of us remember this…

In those days, kids just got wet. It was a part of growing up. People were alert and self-reliant and didn’t cling to some nanny-state Red and Black Signal nonsense. Now, the little mites are so precious that burly firemen have to rescue them from school buses trapped in two inches of water.

I still recall that morning, opening my he-man-size umbrella and stepping out off to work in normal office attire. It was immediately obvious that this was not normal rain, and I got 10 yards before retreating back to my apartment, sodden from the thighs down. I changed into shorts and sandals and splashed down the hill as detritus floated past. One of the few other people to make it into the office was the kindly old Financial Director, who told me that when he was my age, he had dutifully walked from the Peak into Central in a typhoon, only to be told by the Chairman of the time to go back home a put on a tie. The decline of Hong Kong’s moral fibre – from ‘can-do’ stoicism in the face of bad weather to pathetic whining at the onset of a slight shower – has been going on for generations.

The South China Morning Post continues its insider tealeaf-reading scoop on what Beijing is really going to do about the Glorious Motherland’s possibly-utterly-screwed-but-we-don’t-know economy. By ‘Laid Bare’ we mean ‘vague, gnomic, anonymous gibberish, with flashes of Chauncey Gardner, woefully failing to disguise complete cluelessness and despair’…

(More on this here.)