Holly and the Christmas past

 

Christmas in the strangest of years

Pat, Anita and Claire gave the boys sticky-tape rolls of led disco lights which synch to the music they play. I have no idea where they found the lights, but it has certainly been the gift of the year :-).  Of course the temptation to wait until nightfall, ramp up the volume, and get down is not insignificant.

Aiden's room, glowing blue...

while Valentino's love-nest glows red in Ev's; not enough to detract from the game however.

The very late morning loot; Christmas fare of balls, boots, and water bottles silently voice optimism about '21. 

Some inevitable rushing around delivering this, collecting that, Ev down at the water with Bougainvillea - bright green socks.

We went to the Schats' house for desert, games and a few more drinks, it was great fun.  Hugo watching the arrivals.

Late night calls of Merry Christmas, Ange on the phone to Tracy in Kenton

The sky from the patio, wintery high altitude dry.  Santa's tracks for another year.

Picasso's bicycle bull - Sheung Sze Wan version

 

A lovely week so far

 It's been a lovely week of leave.  To have that break, and rediscover oneself is fantastic.  All the things that are so easy and lovely to do, but too time-consuming to tackle outside the weekends, at which point the roads and beautiful places are very quickly peopled.

On Monday

I achieved very little - enjoyed my birthday with the homies, and speaking to you...

...after a decent stint of lazying about and reading in bed with the cat.

On Tuesday, I tackled a circuit of exercises and then went for a longer than anticipated run.  No pictures of that of course.  On Wednesday however...

...we hit the hills with Robyn, Pieter and hound Hugo, and walked the newly opened mountain bike trail.

Really lovely view from the contour part of the trail, water crystal clear at the beach that I swim at, bottom left of the picture.  It's amazing.  You can see the coastal reef and the sand bottom thereafter; you can also see how the waves coming into the bay fold around the point and into the bay.

On Thursday I decided it was time to break away from Clearwater Bay.  I resolved to brave the grey and chilly windy weather (11C, wtf?), got up well before sunrise and cycled through Sai Kung to the country park on the other side.  I arrived there as the dawn was breaking, went through the booms, and onto the road that runs up through the hills...

...and comes out at the High Island Reservoir, which is a massive piece of fresh water.

Staying on the road, eventually you climb all the way up to a saddle, and can look back over the reservoir (the first photo above is taken from in the trees behind and to the left of the pump-station tower, top left, to give you an idea of scale)...

...before you descend the other side which has really lovely views.

At the very end of the road is the start of the UNESCO Global Geopark's walking trail, with the reservoir on one side and the...

... run-over dam with the sea on the other side of that on the other.  As it happens there is a South African connection, because the sea wall itself is constructed of Dolosse, those perpendicularly ended concrete bollards the design of which I understand to have originated in East London of all places. A harbour engineer, Eric Merrifield, invented them in 1963 to rebuild a part of East London harbour which had been trashed by a storm (in case you've ever wondered, they weigh 80 tons each).

I had no idea what a UNESCO Geopark was, so looked it up; quite interesting for those who have budding geological urges to fulfill.  There are apparently 161 UNESCO Geoparks globally.  What they have in common is that each one has a unique geological feature.  The HK Geopark unique feature is that it has hexagonally shaped volcanic rocks that violently pushed up out of the ground.  They look like they came out of some sort of giant grater.  Here is the website for the HK Geopark, and a few pics taken from there and a website called Culture Trip - thanks to them for these.

Massive cliffs made out of the hexagonal columns.

Love how some super-extreme force shaped and bent them.

One of the cliff faces into the Reservoir really shows the column's through their decay.

Just to confirm that you can take Covid precautions whilst staying committed to disgusting-I-watch-too-much-of-the-TDF-neon lycra for cycling.

...and yup, Big Blue outside the Sai Kung post office, just in case you'd forgotten; it's an ironic statement ... to wear neon lycra to and then ride a dik-wiel with mudguards ;-)

From birthday to birthday

 It's been a shocker of a year, blog-wise, sorry.  Not sure what it was. Too much time staring at a screen?  Running out of creative inclination... is that one of the things that happens to a person as you get older?  Maybe one of the things we surrender?  Maybe it was a turned in on oneself pandemic response.  The physical isolation becoming a mental thing?  Its a monochrome time.

It was a highlight of the day, speaking to you.  Love what you are doing with your life and talents - super-engaged and putting out: ideas, work, leadership, physical assets, yourself ... amazing.

Claire and Anita came to say happy birthday; Claire, Aiden and Evan from the parking lot.

From back when the world was open - Ponti, OG,  in Hang Hau - modified phone pic

Evan at fourteen

 

The long summer of home living

Breakfast for a late-night football game crew

Holly imagines leaping, tiger-like

Evan builds his Minecraft world with Ange reading on the patio

The many faces of Fifa one evening - Aiden and Dylan in action together - Daisy mournfully excluded

 

Lockdown lazybones and the departing

In the brief window before Hong Kong's latest spike, Aiden's mates came round for a sleep-over.  Piles of bodies strewn about.  Holly fast asleep on the tiny space where the spiral stairs go up.

If there has been one tiny upside amidst all the viral pandemonium, it has been getting to see Dylan, Courtney and Jordan - though I'm sure the interruption to their lives has been a massive drag for them.  Jordan's T-Shirt is quite funny, she's so cool.  She left last night to fly back to SA (via Doha); Courtney leaves tonight to go back to London, and Dylan next week.

Your great+ grandfathers

Was looking through some old photos and found this, which is a photo of your great grandfathers (all George McGillivrays, so we don't have to bother getting names right - at last I work out why this might be a good idea ;-)

Standing on the left, Grandpa George's father, born in Alice in the Eastern Cape in 1895, standing next to him your great great grandfather, born in 1860, and sitting down your great great great grandfather, born in 1831.  It's pretty cool.

I remember my grandfather pretty well, he was big and gruff and pretty intimidating - but at that stage I was the last in a very long line of grandchildren, my dad being the youngest in his family - so he'd probably run out of the little patience that he had with wild children. 

I can remember his house in Alice a bit.  We called him Grandpa Train (if everyone is George then alternatives have to be found) because there was a railway line passing the bottom of the garden and seeing the steam train come puffing past was a considerable delight.  I went with Grandpa George to visit Alice a month before we moved to Hong Kong, a sort of farewell tour.  I remember going to find the house, which was called Tozama - and being delighted to find it still standing, and remarkably with the sign still on the gate.  The next time I went back, maybe a couple of years back, on the way to Kenton, the house was gone. 

Lockdown building - a bed for Ev and the economics of tools

Ev had outgrown his bunk bed - both in length, and in head knocks (the desk and wardrobe were underneath).  It was all a bit of a problem, his room, as you know, is utterly tiny, 1.97m wide, and probably 3.5m long.  Full size beds, unless they are mattress stands with no edges, hotel style (but without any headboard) are typically around 1,95 long, and man, you have to get that sucker in and in the right position.  The room is really not big enough for a double bed, width-wise, again assuming you could get that in - so how to create some joy in a tiny space?  Ideally, I thought, a 3/4 - which is not quite a double.  These however are surprisingly expensive in Hong Kong - like 6K expensive.  So we collectively scratched our heads, and after much thinking and inspecting, we decided to build a bed, quite high off the ground, so that he has some storage space, and can see out of the cell-sized window.  Wood is a bit of challenge in Hong Kong.  Having scoured around the internet - and finding some maybe places all the way out near the Chinese border in places like Yeun Long - I decided that we were going to buy some rough, unfinished builder's pine beams, two rough hardwood beams (one for the wall struts, one for the front edge which would take extra weight with Pickle jumping on and off it, and a power planer to turn the rough stuff into neat.  Total cost, 2.2K.  And it worked (and we still have the power planer as change :-).  That machine is an absolute beast, gobbles wood, and pretty much effortlessly turned out some perfectly finished beams; Ev measured where the holes had to go, drilled and countersunk them, and we turned it out in no time. 

The rough stuff removed in a flash.  Filled a big bin bag with shavings. 
Should come with a free hamster.

Evan getting loooonger by the day, massive feet, measuring for drilling.
How cool are those beams?  Spotless stuff.

Ev smiling at the thought of getting a new bed.

 

Far from the finished article, but you get the idea - the mattress is Covid slow, so will only arrive next week (if then) so he has his old mattress in the interim (with an old fold-out below it to catch falling phones and I-pads in the interim.  The cosmetics will follow and we will send you an update.  

A big fall

On Sunday there was a band in the bay, using Simon's Black Shrimp as the stage.  It looked fabulous from the patio...

Where I was recovering from a larger-than-before bicycle crash...

the main injury of which was this little beauty on my thigh, with an obligatory thread of gauze still sticking to its oozy surface.  As the hours tick by, it morphs from graze to bruise.

Big Blue was not as lucky, having both scrapes and breakages.  One of my bike's little customizations are these old school Goats of Gevenalle friction shifters, which they integrate into a cheap (but well designed and made) pair of Tektro RL520 brake levers.  Having the RL520 pair which came on the bike and which I replaced with the Gevenalle shifters, I could take them apart and replace the broken mount and road eaten shifter lever with a new mount and shifter lever scavanged from other parts.  

Ground off the worst of the sharp road surface created edges here and there...

And Big Blue is back, just needing bar tape and the straightened out front mudguard. 

A family moment - Hong Kong hand-back holiday

In many respects we (the HK family) have been pretty woeful during the time of Covid-19.  In so many ways it represents an opportunity for closeness, rediscovering common interests and ties.  Somehow it seemed to have the opposite effect.  With the exception of eating together daily (itself a wonderful thing, and of course such an opportunity to fight and shout at each other ;-) we've been living separate lives together - people off in their own little worlds ... obsessions, anesthetics of one sort or another (Fifa, Netflix, reading) ...vices and devices.

This started to bug me - and given we are far from through this pandemic (has it even really started yet?) - I thought there would be time to remedy this mental and emotional diaspora.  But what to do?  How can a collective event adequately fulfill individual interests?  Somehow, Big Wave Bay (generally a misnomer, specifically so today judging from the surf report) or Shek O seemed to be the best option: the boys could skim, Ange could read in the sun, and I could go for a long swim - and in between we would be hanging out together.  The challenge however was wounding heat from about 9.30 on, and a public holiday which promised beach numbers greater even than those in supposedly social distancing places like Florida (which got so zoo despite the Covid-19 spike, that they have now been closed for the 4th of July holidays) and the, frankly lunatic, South coast of England.  The solution for us was convincing the insanely-late-sleeping-teenagers to get up at 5.30am.  Blow me down they did!

It was overcast to begin with - but still brutally hot and humid - Ev heading downrange - the Western side of the beach has a slope and step that the boys like - witness the thundering surf.  I love the old beach dai-pai-dong at the end of the beach - looking a bit ghostly and disheveled at this time of day. 

The sun soon arrived and they were hard at it.

The thing that I do like about skimming is the massive workout it is, the sudden desire to spend a chunk of the morning doing short sprints.

A happy Pickle as the sun and the heat starting winding up.  We headed home at 8, which makes me laugh.

Stop for a stock-up at the P&S on the way home.  Ev back on his device.  Aiden headed in to help Ange. 
Happy holiday car.