photographic highlights 2023–24: part 1

I shall be going back to the UK for the summer next week, and as usual, I’ve put together a collection of what I consider to be the most interesting photos that I’ve taken during the past seven months in Hong Kong. In fact, I’ve taken just one-third of the number of photos that I’ve taken in previous years, although this has only slightly affected the number of photos that I consider ‘interesting’.

Paula and I have started going to Fairwood in the Queen’s Hill Public Housing Estate for breakfast, and on the way there, I couldn’t help but notice these flowers next to Lung Shan Road, the only way into the estate for motor vehicles:

Although they probably weren’t the same ones, I kept noticing flowers here for several months!

We had also been in the habit of going to Sun Ming Yuen in Green Code Plaza for yam char (‘drink tea’), but this restaurant closed recently, and we still haven’t found a suitable substitute. The next photo is of a wool shop in this mall that I noticed after leaving the restaurant. Although knitting is quite popular in Hong Kong, I can’t explain why this window is full of quirky figures, few if any of which appear to have been knitted:

I attend the Fanling Clinic regularly, and whenever I do so, I always walk through Fan Leng Lau. The next two photos are of the crowd of ceramic figurines next to the village shrine

I took this photo (and several others) of our local goat herd back in October on the track running alongside our local river (Ng Tung River) that we now have to follow because of construction on the opposite bank:

I haven’t seen them since.

I captured this photo of a Chinese military helicopter in flight from our balcony:

One day, I was sitting in our living room when I suddenly realized that we have a great view:

There used to be a large tree covered in epiphytes that blocked the view, but it was destroyed in a typhoon a couple of years ago (while we were in the UK).

We often see large numbers of pigeons perched on the upstream railing of the first footbridge across the Ng Tung River downstream from where we live:

We don’t see them anywhere else.

There has been a running track in San Wai Barracks since British times, but the Tartan Track you can see here is a recent construction. When it was inaugurated, I thought that there would be a full athletics competition, but there were just a few 4×400-metre relay races:

Nevertheless, the entire garrison appears to have turned out to watch.

There is a café in Queen’s Hill called Lime Fish. We haven’t tried it yet, but I do like the neon logo:

Paula’s brother and his wife, who live in Canada, were visiting Hong Kong in November, and on one occasion we had dinner together. I’d never had this dish before, which is why I photographed it. All I remember is that it was delicious:

I don’t often go to Hong Kong island, but I had a medical appointment there, and I spotted this mural in a side street in Central:

I don’t know what it’s intended to represent.

Sunset on the Ng Tung River:

This is a view of Queen’s Hill estate from Po Kak Tsai. In the foreground is ‘the swamp’, and there is a good path running next to the trees, which we follow after breakfast in a roundabout way home:

Another sunset picture. This one was taken from our roof:

There is a line of bauhinia trees in the centre of our village (bauhinia is Hong Kong’s ‘national’ flower):

The flowers persisted for months.

I’ve probably photographed this artificial island several times. It’s located just south of Taipo, and we pass it when cycling south to Shatin:

It’s almost always covered in egrets.

This is this year’s disappearing perspective photo, a view of Taipo Waterfront Park:

The mountain in the distance is Ma On Shan, after which the new town that you can see at its foot was named (I can remember when the land occupied by the town was just wilderness). When cycling down south, we invariably detour to follow a very pleasant cycle track that runs through this park.

I included a photo of this creature in my account of the Tang clan festivities in December, but I felt it was so intriguing that I’ve included another photo here:

I included San Uk Sitting-Out Area in my recent account of such facilities in my neighbourhood, but this is what it looked like in December, when all the trees here shedded their leaves in a very short period:

Morning glory is a very common plant here, and I particularly like this one, which is growing over a temporary fence that demarcates what is currently the only public footpath alongside our local river:

Continued in Part 2…

the corridor of uncertainty

As far as I’m aware, the phrase ‘corridor of uncertainty’ was coined by former England opening batsman Geoffrey Boycott to describe a situation that faces every batsman in cricket when deciding whether to hit or leave a ball that has been bowled at them. A ball bowled close to the legs must be played, or the batsman will almost certainly be out, while a ball whose trajectory is well away from the body should be left alone, because the risk is that the ball will graze the edge of the bat and be caught by a fielder positioned for precisely that circumstance. However, there is a narrow zone between the two where it’s easy to be indecisive: play or leave. A good bowler will try to provoke this indecisiveness with every ball he delivers.

Although this post has nothing further to do with the arcane sport of cricket, Boycott’s phrase always springs to mind whenever I want to visit the toilet in Green Code Plaza, a shopping mall that was opened on the eastern edge of Fanling three years ago. Paula and I are regular visitors because we go to the big Chinese restaurant in the mall several times a week for yam char (Cantonese: ‘drink tea’).

There is nothing to suggest uncertainty when looking from the mall itself, although I’m curious as to why the two double doors are not the same size. This is the only example of asymmetric double doors that I can recall seeing anywhere in Hong Kong:

There are male/female toilet icons only on the right-hand doors, although there is a sign at ceiling height. The sign to the right of the left-hand doors points to the management office for the mall.

As you will see from the following sequence of photos, the corridor leading to the toilets is not straight:

The walls and floor are polished stone, which can be disorienting, especially with the mysterious markings on the floor, but there is a helpful arrow pointing the way to the toilets and the management office.

Why do we need a second sign, given that there is no alternative?

Ah! Now I understand. There is an alternative reality in which you might turn left and pass into another world:

The next turn needs no signage:

…but we are still getting signs pointing the way to the toilets:

Finally, the management office (not a hive of activity):

The door on the right leads to the car park:

Finally, the toilets! Women straight ahead; men around the corner to the right:

Now this is what I find baffling: why is this corridor not straight? I suspect that it has been designed this way for purely æsthetic reasons. However, assuming that you go through the right-hand of the two double doors seen in the first photo above, you will then have to turn left–right–right–left–left–right–left–right–right to reach the men’s toilet. I can see that causing utter chaos in an English pub.

headline news

With the advent of online editions of national newspapers, the art of writing succinct headlines appears to be in decline. Thirty years ago, Britain’s Sun newspaper employed subeditors whose only function was to write the headlines for which the paper became famous, but it may be that a different allocation of labour brought about by the online revolution now makes this a less efficient use of resources.

The rules for writing headlines are simple: never use a long word if a shorter word is available; and if a word can be cut out without affecting the meaning, then it should be cut. Obviously, any ill-judged application of the second rule has the potential to create ambiguity, but it is the first rule, and what it tells us about the lexicon available to the headline writers, that is the more interesting, particularly given that the shorter word that is used may not match the meaning of the longer word precisely.

In the language of headlines, any type of embargo, exclusion, injunction, interdiction, prevention, prohibition or proscription becomes a ban; any constraint, containment, demarcation, limitation or restriction becomes a cap; any abatement, contraction, curtailment, decrement, devaluation, downgrade, diminution, discount or shrinkage becomes a cut; any kind of accommodation, accord, agreement, bargain, compromise, concession, settlement, transaction or understanding becomes a deal; any kind of disparity, distinction, divergence, inconsistency or incongruity becomes a gap; any type of appointment, assignment, calling, career, employment, enterprise, occupation, profession, undertaking or vocation becomes a job; and any altercation, antagonism, argument, controversy, difference of opinion, disagreement, squabble or vendetta becomes a row. It will be seen at once that the short word isn’t always quite the right word, but that doesn’t seem to matter to the headline writers, whose aim is to have their creations set in the largest possible type.

Adjectives are not favoured by headline writers, although something that might be described as colossal, enormous, gargantuan, gigantic, humongous, immense or massive in other circumstances will be described as merely big, or possibly huge, in a newspaper headline. At the same time, anything that is abominable, defective, deleterious, dreadful, horrendous, horrible, imperfect, substandard, terrible, unacceptable or unsatisfactory would simply be bad.

There is another aspect to the writing of headlines, much favoured by Britain’s redtops, and that is the use of word play, including puns, rhymes, alliteration and assonance. Cultural references are also common—even the BBC, on its website, isn’t immune to this kind of headline. Although many such headlines are teeth-grindingly awful, I’ll conclude with two famous headlines from the Sun’s sports pages.

In 2000, Inverness Caledonian Thistle (affectionately known as ‘Cally’ by the team’s supporters) defeated Celtic, one of the powerhouses of Scottish football, 3–1 in a Scottish FA Cup match. Celtic were playing on their home ground, and Inverness were two leagues below Celtic in the Scottish football hierarchy. The Sun’s report on the match carried the following headline:

SUPER CALLY
GO BALLISTIC
CELTIC ARE
ATROCIOUS

I’d always remembered this headline as ‘…CELTIC WERE ATROCIOUS’, but it seems to have been plagiarized from a Liverpool Echo headline from the 1970s, when Liverpool forward Ian Callaghan produced a man-of-the-match performance to defeat Queen’s Park Rangers. The headline in that case read ‘SUPER CALLY GOES BALLISTIC QPR ATROCIOUS’. Although I’ve suggested plagiarism, the use of ‘are’ instead of ‘were’ to report on something that happened in the past points to another possible explanation: that it was a kind of homage to the earlier headline.

While I would expect most Sun readers to pick up on the Mary Poppins reference, I’m not sure that those same readers would be sufficiently familiar with pre-imperial Roman history to understand the following headline, which appeared above the report on an FA Cup match between Leicester City and Wycombe Wanderers in 2001. Leicester were the home team, but Wycombe, a team that played its league football three divisions below Leicester, won 2–1.

WYCOMBE
WE SAW
WE CONQUERED

Whether the historical reference was understood or not, it seems that Wycombe’s fans have since appropriated the phrase to describe every victory away from home.

too much monkey business

I don’t pay a lot of attention to football, but I couldn’t fail to notice the furore that erupted over England manager Roy Hodgson’s (no relation) half-time team talk in a must-win World Cup qualifier against Poland, during which he is alleged to have told a ‘racist’ joke as a way of making a particular point, that the rest of the team needed to get the ball to winger Andros Townsend more often. Townsend happens to be black.

That this was essentially a non-story can be gauged by the reaction of the Guardian, a newspaper that is usually quick to pounce on the politically incorrect. It printed the joke in full:

NASA decides that it will finally send a man up in a capsule after sending only monkeys on earlier missions. It fires the man and the monkey into space.
The intercom crackles: ‘Monkey, fire the retros.’ A little later: ‘Monkey, check the solid fuel supply.’ Later still: ‘Monkey, check the life support systems for the man.’
The astronaut takes umbrage and radios NASA: ‘When do I get to do something?’ NASA replies: ‘In 15 minutes, feed the monkey.’

Yes, I know, it isn’t a particularly funny joke, but apparently Townsend wasn’t offended. In fact, he saw it as a compliment that the manager thought it important that he got the ball as often as possible.

The problem is that for some people, mentioning black people and monkeys in the same sentence is ipso facto a racial slur. However, after talking to all members of the England team, the Football Association (FA), Hodgson’s employer, decided that no action need be taken. The matter was, effectively, closed.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t good enough for Peter Herbert, head of the Society of Black Lawyers, who sent a four-page letter of complaint to the FA demanding that Hodgson be made to attend a ‘race appreciation’ training course and stating that the FA was wrong to declare the matter closed.

It should not escape notice that in order to be a member of Mr Herbert’s organization, it is necessary not only to be a lawyer but also to be black. Imagine the outcry if a similar organization were to be set up with membership restricted to white people. Mr Herbert needs to shut up. He should remember that you don’t have to be white to be a racist.

all must have prizes

…the Dodo suddenly called out ‘The race is over!’ and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking, ‘But who has won?’
This question the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of thought, and it sat for a long time with one finger pressed upon its forehead…, while the rest waited in silence. At last the Dodo said, ‘everybody has won, and all must have prizes.’

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

In the triumphalist aftermath of the recently concluded Olympic Games in London (the British team had had its best result at an Olympiad since 1908), Prime Minister David Cameron called for an end to the ‘all must have prizes’ culture that had poisoned the provision of physical education (PE) in British schools for forty years, and a renewed emphasis on competitive sport. The culture to which Cameron was referring took root in the British schools system in the 1960s, in parallel with the move towards ‘comprehensive’ education.

This latter policy, which was introduced by the Labour government of the time, involved the closure of grammar schools, many of which were hundreds of years old but seen by left-wing critics as elitist, and secondary modern schools, introduced by a Conservative government in the early 1950s. They were replaced by one-size-fits-all comprehensive schools.

The ostensible rationale behind such schools was to improve the quality of education being offered to those pupils who were less academically inclined, and this goal was probably achieved in some cases, but the practical effect, most of the time, was to drag clever students down to the level of the rest. In fact, being clever was usually viewed as undesirable, because, it was alleged, it dented the self-esteem of those who were not as clever.

This mindset was reinforced by a generation of lecturers with extreme left-wing views, who dominated colleges of education—where future teachers were being trained—at the time. It was a philosophy that also invaded the provision of physical education, leading to types of activity being promoted that bore an uncanny resemblance to the silly Caucus Race in Lewis Carroll’s famous story. Losing in sport was regarded as inimical to the emotional development of children, so competition was not only frowned upon; it was frequently dropped from the curriculum entirely. It is worth noting that the teaching of English grammar was abandoned around the same time for broadly similar reasons (it stifled children’s creativity).

Nevertheless, Cameron’s crass remark betrays an ignorance of how the promotion of competitive sport in schools would actually work. I’m old enough to have had first-hand experience. When I attended my local grammar school in the late 1950s, a games lesson during the winter months consisted of a full-blown game of rugby whatever the weather, although the weather, harsh as it often was, is not what I criticize about my experience. The really galling aspect of my introduction to the world of Kipling’s ‘muddied oafs’ was that the entire game was played out between half the boys on the pitch. I was lucky if I touched the ball twice a term, even though I tried hard to get involved and was often in the right place to receive a pass. The ball carrier always went down in the tackle rather than pass to someone whom they perceived to be one of the ‘wallies’. A similar scenario plays out every time a group of children pick sides for an informal game of football. The weakest are always the last to be chosen.

In fact, Cameron’s comments beg a very important question: what is the purpose of PE in schools? I left school with a fierce dislike of any kind of organized physical activity, and it was entirely fortuitous that, during my first year at university, I discovered a physical activity that I thought was worth doing. I’ve been active ever since. I conclude, therefore, based on my own experience, that the purpose of PE in schools is not to raise a generation of footballers who are good enough to play for Manchester United or rugby players who can beat the All Blacks in their own backyard. The real job of a PE teacher is not to build sports teams that can beat every other school’s teams but to help the weaker children to find a physical activity that they enjoy doing, and perhaps excel at. It doesn’t have to be a competitive sport; running, swimming and cycling are worthwhile in their own right, and it doesn’t matter if someone is never going to become the next Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps or Bradley Wiggins. These activities can be enjoyed without the competition, although a kind of self-competition is probably necessary if the maximum benefit is to be gained.

And there is a major payoff: we are constantly being reminded that obesity has reached epidemic proportions in the developed world, and although it is probably too late to help the current generation of couch potatoes, it is possible to encourage today’s children to adopt more active lifestyles. However, finding the right activity for each individual child is crucially important and will not be an easy task.

the curse of the midland railway

The Midland Railway was in 1923 the only railway company running into London that didn’t have its head office in the capital, and before Britain’s railways were consolidated into just four companies in that year, it was the third largest in the country. It connected London with the cities of the East Midlands and Yorkshire, finally terminating in the small border city of Carlisle.

Although it offered a route to Scotland, it couldn’t compete with the London and North Western Railway’s alternative, which merely skirted Birmingham and split the difference between Manchester and Liverpool on its way to Carlisle. Nor could it match the Great Northern Railway, with its partner the North Eastern Railway, whose combined line reached the south bank of the River Tyne before encountering the largest population centre en route to its eventual destination, Newcastle, on the north bank of the same river.

The Midland, by contrast, served six major cities—Leicester, Nottingham, Derby, Sheffield, Leeds and Bradford—in addition to several important industrial towns. Because of the delays that serving so many large population centres entails, the Midland’s main line carried a negligible share of the Scotland traffic. However, the company did have a huge market in short-range intercity transport. It also had a monopoly on traffic from the Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire coalfields, which was bound to cause problems as business expanded, because mineral trains are heavy and therefore very slow, and the Midland developed an abysmal reputation for punctuality. It was rumoured that engine crews sometimes spent an entire shift waiting at a stop signal, and a journey from London’s St Pancras station to Carlisle might take two or three days instead of the scheduled eight hours.

The Midland’s great competitor was the Great Central Railway, which was based in Manchester. It had previously been known as the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway (MS&LR), or Money Sunk and Lost Railway by the locals, a name later taken up by the popular press. Its original Manchester–Sheffield main line through the Woodhead Tunnel was the most arduous of the trans-Pennine routes, with nominal gradients of 1 in 40, although some sections were actually steeper, the result of subsidence caused by mining.

In the 1890s, the MS&LR, which had built docks at Grimsby and Immingham to facilitate the export of coal from south Yorkshire, started to extend its operations into Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire to tap into the lucrative coal traffic from this region. Then, in 1895, it began to build its own line into London, motivated perhaps by the delusions of grandeur of its directors, who had decided to rename the company to better reflect its image. The vainglory of these people is amply demonstrated by noting that in 1913 they commissioned a new class of express passenger locomotives, the so-called ‘Director’ class, each of which was named after a member of this clique.

Unfortunately, by this time all the ‘easy’ routes had been taken, and although it served Nottingham and Leicester, the bulk of the route passed through sparsely populated rural areas and small market towns on its way to Marylebone station in London. It was not, in other words, a sound business decision. Shareholders saw little return on their investment, which was reflected in a new sobriquet: the Gone Completely Railway.

Needless to say, the citizens of Sheffield, Nottingham and Leicester preferred the more direct and thus cheaper Midland Railway route to London, so the GCR’s so-called ‘London extension’ operated at a loss almost from the start. The company’s directors, who had by this time voted to move their head office from Manchester to London, could come up with no ideas to stem this severe drain on its coffers (more money sunk and lost). In desperation, they decided to call for suggestions from the railway’s workforce, and many were forthcoming, but not one was both practical and easy to implement.

The most bizarre of these suggestions came from Duncan Drummond, nephew of the Caledonian Railway’s former chief mechanical engineer Dugald Drummond and a foreman in the GCR’s Gorton locomotive works in east Manchester. The younger Drummond was well known in the company as ‘Drunken Duncan’, for obvious reasons, so his contribution was dismissed by the board without a formal debate. It consisted of a single quatrain, which Duncan said had been composed by his grandmother, who lived in Ballachulish in the Scottish Highlands and was believed by her neighbours to be a witch. According to Duncan, it had once, many years ago, taken her more than three days to get from London to Carlisle, most of the time not moving at all. Some things never change.

The original paper on which the quatrain was scrawled has not survived, but the quatrain itself remained part of the folklore at Gorton until the locomotive works closed in 1963. I heard about it during a tour of the works in 1961, and although there is no guarantee that the version I heard was a verbatim rendition of the original, I believe it to be substantially accurate. I made a note of it at the time because it seemed so strange, and also because nobody knew what it meant:

The six citadels have raised regiments of foot,
and all will count amongst the most renowned,
but in final judgement shall they be cast down
and the bounty of the sky will be lost for ever.

I have shown this to adherents of the mountebank Nostradamus, but none of the interpretations I received were even remotely convincing (much like the so-called prophecies of their hero). However, in the past few years, I have finally succeeded in deciphering this apparent gibberish.

The ‘six citadels’ are the six cities connected to London by the Midland Railway—Leicester, Nottingham, Derby, Sheffield, Leeds and Bradford—and the ‘regiments of foot’ are those cities’ football clubs. In the modern era, ‘the most renowned’ must refer to membership of the English Premier League, and it is the case that Leicester City, Nottingham Forest, Derby County, Sheffield Wednesday, Sheffield United, Leeds United and Bradford City have all spent more than one season in this exalted company. The Nottingham, Derby and Leeds clubs all topped the old First Division in my lifetime, while Forest were actually champions of Europe in 1979 and 1980, so there is some illustrious history there. Unfortunately, all have since been relegated, and several have even dropped into the third tier of English professional football (‘shall they be cast down’).

If you’ve been following so far, you will probably have deduced that ‘the bounty of the sky’ is a reference to the satellite broadcaster BSkyB, known colloquially as ‘Sky’, given its responsibility for the obscene amounts of cash sloshing around the Premier League nowadays.

An intriguing tale. I’m not sure if I believe it myself. Do you? Do you believe in prophecy? Was the precipitous decline of these once famous clubs foretold more than a century ago by an old crone with a grudge? Or are they in the wilderness because their football teams are crap?