turf wars update

When I posted Turf Wars in 2011, I did so in the expectation that the story still had some distance to run. At the time, the only hints that something may have been about to happen were the large number of signs proclaiming that the area in question was private property, and the counter-signs protesting that the land should continue to be used for ‘farming’.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before most of the previously cultivated areas had been fenced off to prevent their continuing use to grow vegetables, while almost every stone and brick building in the area was razed to the ground to prevent their reuse (wooden and tin shacks were simply left to fall down of their own accord). I recorded the state of play in A Blot on the Landscape in February 2015.

Nothing changed between that update and April this year, when a protest camp was set up to challenge the property developer, Henderson Land, and the way it had evicted the people who had been cultivating some of the land. The general area where all this argy-bargy has been taking place over the past five years is indicated by the red ellipse on the following map, while the location of the protest camp is shown by the large blue dot.

The following photograph was taken on 5th May from the south side of Ma Sik Road and shows the protest camp. The banner on the left reads ‘NO LAND, NO FARMING. PROTECT OUR FARMLAND’, while the green banner alleges collusion between the developer and the Hong Kong government. Because some characters on the banner on the right are obscured, it is impossible to provide a complete translation, but there are references to a systematic land carve-up and an insistence that land in the northeast New Territories be protected from development. The banners in the middle appear to be in Arabic, although it is more likely that they are in a South Asian script.

A better view of the protest camp is shown in the next two photos, which were taken on 1st and 3rd May, respectively. The roughly painted Chinese slogan reads ‘against New Territories northeast development’, while the two white Chinese characters translate as ‘guarding fields’.

At this time, a large contingent of security personnel was drafted into the area, although they were obviously told simply to monitor the situation. This was the state of play when I left for the UK at the end of May. However, at some point during the summer, Paula informed me that ‘things were happening’, although she didn’t have the time to keep too close an eye on the events that were unfolding.

Naturally, one of the first things I did upon returning to Hong Kong a week ago was to see what had changed during my absence. The protest camp had gone, and the site was now surrounded by industrial steel panelling. Most of the banners had also gone, but the next photo shows one that has apparently escaped the developer’s clearance team. As you can see, the English reads ‘Henderson kills HK’, but the Chinese is a rather more pointed comment: ‘Uncle Four, put down your butcher’s knife’. Uncle Four is of course the geriatric chairman of Henderson Land, Lee Shau-kee, and as I pointed out originally in Turf Wars, such an avuncular sobriquet is often used by greedy local box wallahs to imply benevolence.

Incidentally, it is gratifying to note that the door of the cat man’s hut has been preserved, even if the hut itself was demolished a couple of years ago.

So what else changed while I was away? The next two photographs were taken from a footpath about 100 metres east of the site of the protest camp, the first looking west and the second looking east. The third photo is of the footpath, which happens to be a public right of way and therefore cannot be blocked (in theory).

I have no idea what this is all about. There are scores of the concrete blocks seen in the first two photos, and it must have been a considerable logistical exercise to get them to where they are now—I estimate that each weighs significantly in excess of 2 tons. But to what end? Yet another oddity is seen in the next photo, which is of a large mechanical digger. This machine has probably been here since the blocks were brought to the site, but why is it now standing idle? A machine like this needs to be in constant use to justify its existence from a financial perspective, so I must assume that Henderson Land doesn’t mind the financial loss that the digger’s continuing idleness represents.

It would be reasonable to assume that that is it, but there is a mystery to clear up. Although I referred to cultivated areas being fenced off above, there are cultivated areas that have not been fenced off and are still being cultivated. These are shown by the red dots on the map (above). The next photo shows the most easterly of these cultivated areas, looking east. The fenced-off area to the left of the path was being cultivated five years ago but is now choked with head-high weeds. The blue sign reads ‘24-Hour Security Patrolling In Service’, and many such signs appeared during the summer, but I have yet to see anyone who looks even remotely like a security guard in this area since I returned.

So why has this and other cultivated areas not been closed down? There must be a link to the following sign, which is headed ‘LAND EXCHANGE APPLICATION’. For obscure legal reasons, Henderson Land has been unable to evict some of the ‘farmers’ here, which appears to make it impossible to develop the land in the way it would want, so it is trying to offload this troubling asset from its property portfolio. Or something like that. If you can explain this strange legal conundrum, please leave a comment. I’m baffled.

tunnel of love

Now that I’m back in Hong Kong, I don’t expect to be writing anything about the UK for the next seven months, but I do have one loose end to tie up first. On the weekend prior to my departure, I travelled down to Manchester for the christening of my grandson. It wasn’t possible to travel early enough on the day—that’s the modern British rail network for you—so I was obliged to travel down the day before and check into a hotel in the south Manchester suburb of East Didsbury.

Once I’d done so, I had the rest of the afternoon and the evening to myself, and I spent much of that time walking around the area. Among the city’s public transport options is a modern tram network, some of which follows old railway lines that may have been disused for decades prior to their incorporation into the network, and I was walking along a path (shared with cyclists—there appears to be an extensive off-road network of cycle routes around these parts) that runs alongside one such line when I came across a brick-lined tunnel, the walls of which were covered in graffiti.

Regular readers will know that I don’t automatically regard graffiti as vandalism—they can have aesthetic merit—although in this case a degree of vandalism must be conceded. However, the vandalism here appears to be against older graffiti, which have often been overwritten. There are also a lot of meaningless scrawls, often on top of more elaborate pieces of work, so that often the result is, unfortunately, a mess. As you can see from the following sequence of photographs, the tunnel cannot be compared with Ghost Alley or Penrith’s Answer to Ghost Alley. Nevertheless, I felt that it was worth recording.

Having checked out these images, you’re probably wondering why I gave this post the title I did, given that I often use common phrases that don’t appear to be directly relevant as titles. In this case, I was listening to music on my MP3 player, and Tunnel of Love by Dire Straits came on just as I reached the tunnel. But for this serendipitous juxtaposition, I might never have bothered to write this post.

linguistic legerdemain

I will be setting off early tomorrow morning on the long haul back to Hong Kong, and as usual I have a little puzzle for readers to ponder while I’m en route. Of the following six words, which is the odd one out, and why?

citizen ● partner ● recruit ● scholar ● sponsor ● steward

Obviously, a person can be a citizen, or a partner, or a recruit, or a scholar, or a sponsor, or a steward, but one of these six differs from the others in a fundamental way. Which one?

All correct answers will be acknowledged at the time of posting, but the comment(s) that include such correct answers will not be posted for a month from this date. If no correct answers are received during this period, this puzzle will remain unsolved indefinitely. I will not be providing the solution.

If you have found this one easy, then you should try An English Question, for which no correct solution has been submitted despite its having been posted almost three years ago.

spoiler alert
Correct solutions have been submitted below by an anonymous reader and by Siegfried, and by Claire via email. Only Siegfried has explained the reason for his answer.

penrith’s answer to ‘ghost alley’

If you’ve read Ghost Alley, you will know that I’m fascinated by what might loosely be called ‘street art’. However, I never expected to see anything of this kind in my home town.

Earlier in the summer, I noticed that the walls of the passageway connecting the bottom end of Bluebell Lane to Little Dockray had been painted in vibrant shades of yellow and orange but thought no more of it at the time. However, I was walking through this alley a couple of weeks ago when I noticed that a range of decorative motifs had been added to the walls. A friend told me that they had been painted by children under the tutelage of an established street artist, who showed his students how to achieve smooth edges to their designs and other skills. The first photograph is a general view of the passage from the Bluebell Lane end. This is followed by a view from the Little Dockray end.

The remaining pictures are of individual designs on the walls. The symmetry evident in these designs suggests to me that stencils and other templates have been used in their creation, although this is not to imply any kind of criticism. After all, Banksy uses stencils, and nobody criticizes him for doing so. I believe this to be a welcome modern addition to the town’s historic landscape. The next time you’re in Penrith, check it out.

Anyone who is familiar with Penrith will recognize motifs in the fourth and fifth photos that are based on the tower on top of the Beacon, which was erected in the mid-eighteenth century to commemorate hundreds of years of pillaging by Scots marauders, by then coming to an end, and in the second and fifth pictures, a stylized version of the Musgrave Monument, which was built by a prominent local family to mark the loss of their son in the Crimean War (1853–56) and which is usually considered to be the centre of town. I’m not sure what the cupola that appears in several images is supposed to represent, although there are no examples of this architectural feature in the town that are as prominent as the Beacon Tower or the Monument.