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.

an unhappy accident

The frontier road had been in the so-called ‘frontier closed area’ until 2013, meaning that you needed a permit to enter, but once that restriction had been lifted, we were quick to find out what it was like along the border. There is just one road branching off the frontier road—Ma Tso Lung Road—and of course I also wanted to see where this might lead to. After passing through the village of Ma Tso Lung, I arrived eventually on Ho Sheung Heung Road, a road with which I was already familiar.

However, there is little but quasi-industrial premises along the last kilometre before the junction, and when I turned left at this junction, I found that Ho Sheung Heung Road is similarly populated by such premises for the first kilometre or so. This means that there are a lot of heavy trucks on both roads, and truck drivers show scant regard for cyclists, so I wondered whether I could find a way that avoided the anxiety caused by running such a gauntlet. I could!

At the point where the scenery changes from rural to quasi-industrial, I found a quiet road/dirt track that cuts across the angle to reach Ho Sheung Heung Road beyond the last industrial site on that road, and this became our preferred option when cycling this way. However, in January last year, I found the way blocked by a truck that appeared to be unloading its cargo, and, not knowing how long I might have to wait, I wondered whether I could find an alternative. I could!

I found a narrow alleyway that eventually emerges directly opposite the exit from ‘the heart of darkness’, an alleyway that cuts across the angle between Ho Sheung Heung Road and Ho Sheung Heung Pai Fung Road that I’d discovered earlier but hadn’t used because of the aforementioned industrial traffic on Ho Sheung Heung Road. I sensed immediately that the new alleyway would be best traversed in the opposite direction to the way I’d just come, but I would need to find some kind of continuation on the far side of Ma Tso Lung Road. And I could!

I’d already named the first alleyway ‘serendipity’ (‘happy accident’), so it was inevitable that I would name this new alleyway ‘serendipity #2’, retrospectively renaming the first alleyway ‘serendipity #1’. I wasn’t happy to be mixing it with industrial traffic on Ma Tso Lung Road, but there are several alleyways leading off #1, and one of these, which I named ‘serendipity #3’, leads directly to the start of #2.

There was just one small problem. Following #3 means missing out the best part of #1, but near the top of the hill on the latter, there is another narrow alley that branches off to the right. However, it leads back to Ho Sheung Heung Road, which did seem rather pointless, but at one point there is another alleyway on the right that I discovered leads back to #1. Obviously, I named this ‘serendipity #4’. This is the first of two paths that lead off #1 that I’d wondered where they might lead to. The second of these leads back to #1 close to the start of #3, so I now had a contiguous route through the alleyways, which I named simply ‘serendipity’.

The next step would be to shoot a video, which we tried to do back in May. This first attempt was unsuccessful, mainly because Paula fell behind just before the start of #3, but here is a still from that video at a point on #4:

Clearly, this is straightforward from a cycling point of view. However, when we did shoot a decent video of the route last month, things had changed from the scene shown in the previous video:

The leaning tree in the first still had been sawn down, and the clearance between the tree stump and the wall on the right is now very tight, but a slight shuffle as I pass through the gap seems to be all that is necessary. Unfortunately, I was wrong!

At the end of last month, we were cycling this way, and when I tried to pass through the gap, my handlebar snagged on the netting hanging down the wall on the right—a hazard that I’d failed to identify. I was thrown violently to the ground. I wasn’t hurt, but the violence of the crash meant that my left leg was jammed between the handlebar and the frame of my bike, and I might have struggled to extricate myself had Paula not been there to help. Once I’d got back on my feet, I took this photograph:

I have no idea where the log across the path came from—presumably it had merely been hidden in the undergrowth—and the violence of the crash dislodged it. The sad part of this misadventure is that the path is now impassable, and as Paula remarked, this is a back lane that is unlikely to be cleared, so we are now obliged to avoid #4 completely, which means that my carefully worked out solution to what was essentially a problem in topology is no longer viable. Damn!

a view from the edge

Surrealism, as an art movement, had its heyday in the 1920s and 1930s but had largely petered out as a creative force by the start of the Second World War. Although some contemporary artists continue to paint in a quasi-surrealist style, repeating what has gone before isn’t art, so this essay focuses on the work of the artists who were active during the movement’s most prolific and influential period.

In some respects, surrealism was as much a literary as an artistic movement. Its leader was a poet, André Breton, who had no talent as an artist but managed to attract some of the brightest talent in the art world with his ideas. The movement was centred on Paris, which was a mecca for both artists and poseurs during the 1920s.

The surrealists rejected formalism in art and were influenced instead by the primitive, as revealed in the paintings of children, lunatics and untutored amateurs. In this latter category, the best-known painter is probably Henri Rousseau, a small-time customs official who had had no formal training and who didn’t start painting until he was 40.

Rousseau may have been untutored, but he harboured an ambition to exhibit in the established salons of the day. He never did, but from 1886 he was able to exhibit his work in the Salon des Indépendents, which had been established as an outlet for the work of leading impressionists such as Cézanne, Monet and Renoir, who had been excluded by the ‘official’ salon of the time. Rousseau also had high confidence in his own ability, if a remark he is reported to have made to Picasso is anything to go by, that the two were the greatest living painters: “I in the modern manner and you in the Egyptian.”

The overriding impression that a modern viewer takes from any of Rousseau’s paintings is their extraordinary stylization, although this is not what the artist intended. His aim was to depict his subjects as realistically as possible. Hence the sheer amount of detail with which every component of his ‘jungle’ canvases was painted, which gives them a dreamlike quality that the surrealists admired and sought to replicate in their own work.

One of Rousseau’s best-known works is The Dream, which was painted a few months before his death in 1910 and which provides one of the best examples of his peculiar style. Note the incongruity of a formal nude in a jungle setting, and the apparently friendly disposition of the two lions:

Another naif who was much admired by the surrealists was postman Ferdinand Cheval, who picked up an unusually shaped stone on his delivery round one day, continued this practice every day and subsequently spent a third of a century using these found objects to build what he called his Palais Idéal (‘Ideal Palace’):

Just as Rousseau is often referred to as the Douanier Rousseau as a nod to his daytime job, so Cheval is also known as the Facteur Cheval to acknowledge his employment as a small-town postman. It is not known when the surrealists first became aware of the Palais Idéal, but once discovered, it quickly became a place of pilgrimage for the leading figures in the movement. To these luminaries, the Palais Idéal was a construction of the unconscious mind that had not been glimpsed, let alone designed, by a formally trained architect. This was manifest obsession, another word that features prominently in the surrealist lexicon.

However, the artist who exerted the greatest influence on the surrealist movement was Italian Giorgio de Chirico, whose weird juxtapositions on canvas would be replicated in one form or another by the leading surrealist painters. His Melancholy and Mystery of a Street is typical of his work in the second decade of the twentieth century:

The first thing that one notices in this painting is the perspective, which is not remotely realistic. And the shadows are not in alignment. However, these faults do not detract from the ‘message’ that the artist is trying to convey: a young girl is bowling a hoop along the street—a popular children’s pastime in the pre-television era—while up ahead, hidden around a corner and revealed only by its shadow, a mysterious figure is lurking. We cannot know any more about this menacing figure, the presence of which threatens the innocence represented by the unsuspecting girl.

Many of the fringe artists in the surrealist movement have now been forgotten, at least by me, so I’ve chosen to take a closer look at the work of three leading exponents of the style. René Magritte is the least formally gifted of the three, but he dropped quite a few bombshells. Take a look at The Treason of Images:

In case you’re unfamiliar with French, the legend translates as ‘this is not a pipe’. Of course it’s a pipe, you are probably thinking, but bear in mind the title that Magritte gave to his painting. It really isn’t a pipe; it’s a picture of a pipe!

Magritte painted several versions of The Human Condition, but they all had the same central message:

How do you know that what is depicted on the painting on the easel represents what is behind the easel? You cannot know for certain. This painting reflects the unease that is at the heart of the surrealist ‘message’.

Salvador Dalí is almost certainly the best-known surrealist artist, at least to the general public, and at the peak of his powers he also made some powerful statements. Le Jeu Lugubre is about masturbation—note the enlarged right hand of the statue, and its averted gaze, reflecting the shame that attached to this activity almost a century ago:

However, the most interesting part of this painting is the gibbering man in the bottom corner. He has just shit himself, which Dalí painted in exquisitely minute detail. In fact, this painting caused quite a furore when first exhibited. Breton was mortally offended, but as Dalí pointed out, a censored dream is no longer a dream. And dreams were at the heart of the message that the surrealists were attempting to convey.

Dalí’s best known work is probably The Persistence of Memory, posters of which have adorned the walls of the bedrooms of thousands of students over the years. This is also a kind of dreamscape, and it’s the only painting I’m discussing here that I’ve actually seen. What is particularly striking for me is the size—24´33cm—which gives the impression that one is looking at the landscape through the wrong end of a telescope!

However, the ostensible theme/meaning of this painting—that time is mutable—is not my take on this composition. Notice the ants crawling over the red watch on the left of the painting. This is a reference to an event that occurred when Dalí was an adolescent, which he related in his autobiography and is a reflection of yet another perversion to go with his coprophilia and masturbation fantasies: necrophilia.

Surrealism was always intended to shock its audience, and Dalí may have been a master shocker, but he wasn’t the ultimate. He may have created dreams, but there was another artist who went one step further by creating nightmares. That is the only interpretation that I can provide for Joan Miró’s The Harlequin’s Carnival:

Try imagining yourself in this room. There is so much happening that you would probably go insane. But that’s it: insanity is the central message of surrealism, which is why, as an art movement, it was moribund by the time the Second World War—the ultimate insanity—had engulfed Europe.

pond life

If you’ve read Super Dooper, you will know that I decry the modern usage of words like ‘awesome’ and ‘amazing’ merely to express a liking for something, but having said that, I had an amazing experience last week. In fact, I had two amazing experiences, the second of which was even more magical than the first!

I’d originally spent some time exploring the fish ponds between San Tin and the frontier earlier this year, at which time I didn’t think there was much scope for development, but Paula hadn’t been this way before, and now that she has retired, she has far more time on her hands, so it had to be worth another look.

Last Tuesday, we started from the point on San Tin Tsuen Road that I identified in New Fields, and I was struck immediately by the sheer number and variety of birds that we saw. Most were migratory species that I hadn’t seen during that earlier exploration, and I was surprised in particular by the sheer number of Japanese cormorants, which in previous years I’d often seen on the Kam Tin River and in the fish ponds near Fairview Park. But not as early as October!

After several hundred metres, I suddenly became aware that I was being buzzed by huge numbers of what I assumed must be a species of swift. They were zooming around like kamikaze pilots, so I stopped to take a photograph:

The strange thing is that we encountered these birds for only about 200 metres. There were none anywhere else on this first foray. Actually, there was an even stranger thing: I had a video camera mounted on my handlebar, yet it didn’t occur to me to switch it on, probably because the camera was there to record cycling! We simply had to come back, which we did two days later.

I started the video the moment we entered the fish pond area, and if anything the whole experience was even more intense than it had been two days earlier. Here are two stills from that video:

The first shows a pond with hundreds of egrets, while the second captures a few swifts. Overall, the video was rather disappointing, because it doesn’t convey the sheer intensity of the experience, but see for yourself:

The ‘swift experience’ begins at about 3:20 and continues to the end of the video. On our first venture, we had turned right at the junction seen in the second still above, but the video shows us turning left, because I wanted to show Paula some of the things that I’d discovered on my earlier exploration, in particular the unmanned crossing point into Shenzhen, which isn’t accessible by motor vehicles, and as you will see below, is literally ‘off the beaten track’ towards the end.

I haven’t uploaded any of the videos to YouTube that I recorded along this section, but here is a sequence of stills that illustrates what it’s like hereabouts:

Just before we reached the crossing point, Paula glanced to her right and immediately stopped:

She had spotted a dozen cormorants perched on a dead tree, but by the time I’d got my camera out, all but two had buggered off:

We eventually retraced our steps, and I recorded a second video that is now available to view on YouTube. Here are two stills from that video:

And here is the full video:

It follows the route of the first video in reverse. Incidentally, I’m not an ornithologist, but I’ve tentatively identified the zooming projectiles as Pacific swifts. Please correct me if you think I’m mistaken.

You can be sure that we’ll be back to see what else we might discover. Paula is currently in Kuala Lumpur, where she has been invited to run a two-day workshop on assessment at the local university, and I had been due to go out for a bike ride with my friend Vlad today. However, I received an email yesterday to say that he couldn’t make it. I hadn’t told him where I planned to take him, other than the vague phrase ‘out west’. I think that he’s going to be gobsmacked when he finally experiences the San Tin fish ponds.