ten years after

In October 2009, I received an email from an old school friend in which he informed me that he’d just started a blog, and, knowing that I like to write, he suggested that I do the same. I’d been intrigued by the new phenomenon of ‘web logs’ and had checked out the Blogspot site, but I’d lost interest when I found that I would need to pay to participate. However, in the interim, Blogspot had been taken over by Google, and blogs were now free. I was in.

Accordingly, on this date in 2009, I posted the first of what now amounts to more than 500 entries on this blog. It didn’t seem worthwhile to post just one item, so I started with four essays and a puzzle that I’d written previously. Almost every contribution that I’ve made since has been written and posted immediately. The main exception has been occasional extracts from a comic fantasy novel that I wrote between 2000 and 2002.

During the first six months, I posted more articles/comments (68) than I’ve managed in any subsequent calendar year, perhaps the best of which was Who’s Fooling Who?, an extended discussion of the limitations of science. Unfortunately, that summer I didn’t have an internet connection in Penrith, so I was unable to post anything for four months. However, when I returned to Hong Kong in October 2010, I was able to resume where I’d left off, and some of my best work was produced during this period. If you haven’t read these three essays, then I’d like to suggest that you do so:

• Comparative Advantage is an assessment of whether India or China will take over as the world’s hegemonic power as the USA declines.
• Future Imperfect is my analysis of the future prospects for Planet Earth.
• Explanations is an exposition on the four ways in which humans have ‘explained’ natural phenomena.

The most significant change to the future trajectory of my blog occurred at the end of 2011, when as a result of a serious bike accident I spent five nights in hospital. I was unable to sit in front of a computer long enough to write any extended articles, and the focus of my work shifted from opinion to reportage.

Although I’d posted the occasional photograph previously, it was during this period that I started to produce more photo-based posts. These usually reflected something that I’d come across while exploring the New Territories on my bike, and here are three of the best examples:

• Ghost Alley describes a location northeast of Fanling that identifies itself as ‘Ping Che Mural Village’. There is so much artwork here that I’ve written five additional reports (links provided in this account).
• Disappearing World is a report on traditional houses in the village of Muk Wu, close to the Chinese border northeast of Fanling. The village had been part of the frontier closed area until the beginning of 2016, but once I’d started to notice the painted friezes and polychrome mouldings on old houses in other villages in the area, I simply had to write about those too.
• More Door Gods. I’d always wanted to buy a pair of door god posters but didn’t know where I could do so. By the time I’d discovered where, I was no longer interested, because I’d found that individual, hand-painted door gods on old public buildings (ancestral halls, study halls, temples) are far more interesting.

Although the majority of the photographs that I’ve posted here have been to illustrate various posts, I have for the past few years posted a collection of other pictures at the end of the winter months in Hong Kong and the summer months in the UK that for whatever reason I’ve found interesting. These are typical examples:

If you want to see more, Photographic Highlights: 2018–19 and Favourite Photos: Summer 2019 are the most recent.

Other posts from this period that I’m pleased to have written include Black Music of the 1960s, I, Robot (an assessment of how easy/difficult it would be to replicate a human being in machinery) and Choice Quality Stuff, which is a riposte to the idiot who came up with the purported witticism ‘a camel is a horse designed by a committee’.

It took me more than a year to recover from the accident I alluded to above, but once I’d done so, I started to explore more widely on my bike. Journey to the West (named after a Chinese literary classic) describes how I found and gradually extended an exciting bike ride to the western New Territories. Cycling has subsequently become my single most written-about subject.

However, there is another recurring theme: I do like to write about unusual aspects of my native language, and Saying the Same Thing Twice is my analysis of just how many common English expressions repeat themselves, while Super Dooper is a polemic that laments the misuse of certain adjectives merely to express approval, thereby rendering them redundant in other contexts.

I’ve also written frequently about aspects of Chinese culture that interest me. Playing Piano to a Cow is a typical cheng yu, or ‘four-character idiom’, while Fifteen Strings of Cash is my retelling of a melodramatic Chinese folk tale, and Jumping to Conclusions is an account of a more didactic fable.

The last theme that I’d like to mention here is my abstract photographs, which I posted at regular intervals between 2012 and 2018. These are five of my favourites:

blue remembered hills

naff giraffe

speed

symphony in red and gold

visions of the emerald beyond

I discontinued this activity because I didn’t feel able to find any new motifs to exploit. However, if you would like to see more, Photographic Abstraction #27 includes links to earlier posts in the series. Incidentally, the number 27 is significant because it occurs twenty-seven times in the comic fantasy novel that I alluded to earlier.

I don’t expect to be around ten years from now, but I will continue to write for as long as I’m able. I hope that you will continue reading.