And then the Monsoon...

The crazy green and bruises monsoon has arrived.  Water everywhere, and the depths and range of greens and purples turn Hong Kong into eye paradise for those who are out there looking.

Astonishing beauty if you look into this photo, with some cool lines too

In a bright moment between the downpours

And a junk trip on Friday, a private hire, but only work people invited; in the end 14 of us, everyone a bit burned out and keen to kick back in the beauty.

The long, hot, spring

This is not necessarily a chronologically accurate account of moments of weekends, in between a relentless tide of work, and a disconcerting time professionally.

For the longest time, a parade of days like this, hot, clear, manageable humidity

With a long patch of morning riding, day after day (stitches, no swimming for nearly a month)

Dinner together every night which has been divine, but for the rest, one day weekends for a while.  Here out for lunch one Saturday in TKO.

And an evening or two over the other weekend days, Ange in her Hepburn dress.

And it's a time of leaving it seems, Covid circumstance and other weirdness driving people home... in this case Roy and Debbie's farewell, more retirement and change for them.  

JBC, restaurant by boat only, the pic above this the Pak A Pier.

Wild heat, clear water.

By evening, fluid colours and sweat.

One of those party photos - but cool - Yau Lei in the background, red and white clothes.

And in the midst of it all, a proper cricket match on the Kowloon Cricket Club field.
It was meant to be a father and son thing, but both the boys had school commitments (it being a Friday)

And it was a proper match in preparation, included three 7am net sessions.  That was an excellent idea by Pieter who was the primary organiser; if you are me, and it is nearly 20 years since, it all happens a bit faster than you remember.  Our speed machine Steve walking back.

Michael and Steve, our opening batsmen.

In the end it was actually pretty exciting, 25 over game, won by the Southern Hemisphere by one run!

Wazza had a rough day in the field; catch opportunity that aced his finger.

 

For the record (batsmen had to retire when they reached 35, with any extras for a boundary getting there).  The Big Dog was on fire :-)

A kak year, medically speaking

 I remember one of Simon's hyper-well heeled connections saying, at the age of 80, in the end, the only thing that matters is your health.  It's one of those sentences that you might feel, yes, well, likely a truth... and then you have some very mild taste of tiny inconvenience, and whew.  So the first six months of the year have dished up an emergency appedix op, some stitches in the shin (which took an age to heal, almost a month of not swimming, which meant 30 days in a row on the bike, in this hot, dry spring, loads of shit and grit in the eyes, and then, a double delightful thing called a chalazion, cut and mauled out.  The eye thing was by far the most uncomfortable.  Any way - I'm hoping for a change of fortune...

 

Twenty years today

It's as if twenty years passed since I last posted something - so sorry - a covid slump of sameness.  I feel terrible even saying it, but the reality is that I am so used to riding the same roads on my bike at the moment that I now have patterns: round the corner, stand in the big ring to the fourth street light pole, swap to small ring... etc.

We came to Hong Kong twenty years ago.  As it is today, it was raining then. How has it been?  Wonderful. Disruptive. Life changing. Alienating.  Gained so much.  Lost so much.  I think best put as you can only live one life, or everything that moving away from a sense of home to somewhere excitingly foreign might mean.  

Memory is so imperfect.  So here is what was happening at a headline level in South Africa in June and beyond, in 2001.  Wikipedia has the following listed as the big events:  Conservation.  A reasonable government visiting abroad.  A world conference against racism.  More conservation.  A census, an interest in who we are as a people.  More conservation.  Some murder - no-one is exempt, and thankfully Kortbroek signs himself off into irrelevance.

The deaths list was stunning.  Guy Butler.  A reference to Pandemic, and an ongoing one, HIV/AIDS.  Nkosi Johnson was the longest surviving child born with HIV at that point, tragically dying at 12, silently highlighting how many had died so much sooner.  Donald Woods, serious newspaper man and friend of Steve Biko - murdered by the security police in 1977; Govan Mbeki, ANC royalty, back when it meant something: Rivonia triallist, friend of Madiba, father of Thabo; 24 years on Robben Island.  Chris Barnard - first ever heart transplant at Groote Schuur - medical marvel.  Joe Modise, Minister of Defense during the Arms Scandal, that really was the start of the rot, and which Jacob Zuma is only now on trial for.  And then the murdered Marika again, grim.

I thought to try contrast this to the front pages - in so far as a digital newspaper has them - today:

So what do we have here?  Clearly another pandemic, but fascinatingly, also reference to the previous or is is ongoing one, if you clicked on the cartoon with the running guy, you would find the HIV pandemic compared to Covid - and as Nkosi Johnson 20 years earlier so tellingly pointed out - they are orders of magnitude different in terms of lives and impact.  And that is not to take the current pandemic lightly.  Infrastructure is a problem - water, power, the environmental crisis takes the place of conservation triumph, Denel is about to fall apart (a silent homage to Joe Modise?) and the police are the biggest gangsters in the country (not in itself a new thing).  On the very positive side, LGBTQ rights have taken huge strides (with many more needed and hopefully to come).  How short is a life?  How much changes yet stays the same.  Spending so much time apart from you has been an incalculable loss and horror - that is a heavy marker over 20 years of absence.