This article appeared on The South China Morning Post's Rewind page

In committing to print any tribute to Henry Chinaski - the dissipated, rather-more-than-semi-autobiographical anti-hero of Post Office and several other novels by Charles Bukowski - one is faced with two options. The first is to leave the page blank and let the editor explain that the writer was indisposed due to a hangover. The second is to follow Chinaski's example when he does turn up for work and slog it out, toiling and cursing, cheap liquor oozing from every pore.

So let's not pay tribute to Chinaski. He has his hagiographers but Bukowski isn't among them. His characterisation is marinaded in self-loathing; there's too much hurt and cynicism in him for Chinaski to be in any way laudable. Deadbeats are romanticised in American life from Big Sur to The Big Lebowski, but with Bukowski it's all too raw.

A child of German immigrants to Los Angeles between the wars he was a misfit from a young age. He had chronic acne. His father was abusive. In his early teens he discovered drinking: "This [alcohol] is going to help me for a very long time," he later recalled. Failing to make it as a writer as a young man, he grew disillusioned and became "a ten-year drunk", which "lost years" later provided the inspiration for most of his books.

The irony, then, is that unlike Chinaski Bukowski made rather a success of things in the end, but you would have to say it was probably because of rather than despite his love of booze. Alcohol is his muse. It fuels his puckishly dyspeptic view of the world.

Much of Post Office is about the drudgery of work. It covers the period of Bukowski's own life when he worked as a mail carrier and later a mail clerk, with an interregnum when he gambled on horses. In the novel the US Postal Service is populated entirely by jobsworths, petty bureaucrats and sadistic supervisors; the part of the American dream about bettering oneself through honest sweat gets a literary pulverising. And yet, tempting as it may be to see Bukowski as some kind of champion of the lumpen proletariat, that's not quite it. Work truly is the curse of the drinking classes in his world. Chinaski drinks when he has a job and when he doesn't. There is a new hangover roughly every four pages.

Along the way we meet the tragic Betty, a widowed alcoholic 11 years Chinaski's senior who is based on the love of Bukowski's life, Jane Cooney Baker, and Joyce, who stands in for Barbara Frye, his first wife, and who is portrayed as a nymphomaniac. Frye divorced him on grounds of "mental cruelty", which is an apt description of what Chinaski subjects himself to on a daily basis. The problem is that despite being a bum and having next to no redeeming features, he is a uniquely captivating bum. It can rarely be said of man nor woman, but Bukowski's drinking did the world a service.

Here's my contribution to the Alzheimer's Scotland/ Back Page Press Football Memories project:

http://www.footballmemories.org.uk/memories/clubs/8-aberdeen/237-kenny-hodgart/

This article was published on The South China Morning Post's Rewind page

Can peace ever be other than relative? Its scourge, war, enjoins us to believe so: that there exists an opposing absolute to those things which take place on battlefields. All Quiet on the Western Front, written in 1929 by Erich Maria Remarque, a German veteran of the First World War, leaves us in some doubt, however - for to his cast of young recruits, peace is as likely to be attained via the grave as it is by armistice.
 
To them, we discover, peace is unimaginable, unknowable. As the author states in his short introduction, the book tells of "a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war." Spurred to enlist at 18 by a blustering, jingoistic schoolmaster, Paul Bäumer (our narrator) and his friends are "suddenly old at 20". Their life experience amounts to having heeded the patriotism of their elders; now, brutalised by life at the front, their numbers winnowed down by Allied bombardments, Bäumer observes "we are a wasteland", and when his own death arrives he is "almost glad the end had come."
 
To read Remarque's novel almost a century after the events it describes, one is struck not only by a devouring sense of pathos - these soldiers are but boys - but also by how, well, unknowable, the entire conflict seems at this remove. How is it even possible that we can reconcile its apparent meaninglessness or grasp its insanity? The so-called "Great War" was one in which men were sent to their deaths in their millions by commanders-in-chief whose own personal safety was never in doubt, in which those who spoke for peace were silenced and which so knocked the stuffing out of the nations embroiled in it that survivors often chose never to speak of it at all.
 
That being the case, All Quiet on the Western Front is likely to have been anything but an easy read for many of those who made it an instant international best-seller. Its core message is that war and soldiering are not merely wrong but unnecessary, that the sacrifices demanded of combatants are always in vain. The nihilism is clawing, potent, powerful - but then that is how good writing works. Remarque's book has been held up to generations of us almost as an article of unimpeachable documentary veracity, which is rather a lot to ask of a novel. Does it explain the war to us any better than history books can? No. Does it make it any more knowable? Almost certainly not.

In the Anglophone world Rudyard Kipling's homily "lest we forget" is given breath every November. It is the dead we remember, of course, but also the horror and the mystery of wars, in the hope that remembering will forestall more of them. And this, above all, is why All Quiet on the Western Front continues to be read: Paul Baumer may not believe much in peace but Remarque makes us desire it nonetheless.

If Rory McIlroy is feeling the pressure of being golf's hottest young property since Tiger Woods first emerged on the scene, he is not showing it. The 22-year-old has come a very long way in rather a short space of time - quite literally in the case of his participation in last month's Shui On Land China Golf Challenge, a seven-day whistle-stop tour of seven Chinese golf courses, including Caesars in Macau, but also in terms of his own bigger picture.

Little over four years ago McIlroy was still an amateur. Nowadays he's the youngest winner of the US Open in almost a century - in June he wiped the floor with the field at Congressional Country Club in Maryland - and is currently being afforded all the fuss befitting that accomplishment, by sponsors, fans, media and tournament organisers alike.
It has been a good year for him, but it's not one that's about to fizzle out quietly. The McIlroy brand has been undergoing some serious exposure and there's plenty more of it to come before 2011 is through, with commitments in Asia - including the Hong Kong Open at the beginning of December - dominating a heavy schedule.

And so one cannot but be struck by the diminutive Northern Irishman's chirpiness as he bounds into a room overlooking a neon Macau evening to meet Tatler. He's spent the last hour or so shaking hands with various people in suits in the lobby of the Venetian and charming inquisitors at a packed media conference. How's that part of life among golf's elite working out, then?

"Things have calmed down a little bit," he insists. "The first tournament I played after winning the US Open was the British Open and I probably just wasn't quite ready for the welcome I received, the attention, the hype and everything. Winning one of the majors at 22 - not a lot of golfers have done that. I think Seve [Ballesteros] won one at 22, as did Jack [Nicklaus], so that's a nice bit of company. It does bring its own pressures and attention, but I feel as if I've adjusted to that now. For me, it's actually nice to get on a golf course because you sort of get away from everything else. It's where I feel most at home."

Not that he is afforded too many opportunities to play the links courses of his native land this weather. After the week in China, he was due to fly to Bermuda for the Grand Slam of Golf, a showcase involving only the year's four major winners - of which group this year, astonishingly, two others (Graeme McDowell and Darren Clarke), also hail from Northern Ireland. This month he will play at the World Golf Championship in Shanghai, then at the strokeplay World Cup of Golf at Mission Hills Haikou in Hainan - where he will partner McDowell - and after Hong Kong he has further engagements in Dubai and Thailand.

"It's important for the development of the game in Asia that there are now so many big tournaments," he says. "In China, golf is going to become so big, partly because of its inclusion at the Olympics in 2016. The point of doing the China Golf Challenge was to help promote the game here, and for the outside world as well, to showcase what China has to offer in golf. There are some really fantastic courses."

The notion of establishing a fifth golf major, to be played in Asia, has been mooted recently. McIlory is sceptical about it happening any time soon, but says: "I think it's good that there are now so many events co-sanctioned by the European and Asian Tours. You even see the PGA Tour now moving into Asia - they have a tournament in Malaysia and are trying to branch out in this market. Personally I love playing golf in this part of the world."

In fact, he claims to reserve special affection for Hong Kong, where he was beaten in a play-off in 2008 by Lin Wen-tang. "I played a couple of events as an amateur in Hong Kong and now the Hong Kong Open is probably one of my favourite events of the year," he says. "And because I keep coming back, I get to know it better every time - restaurants that I like, places to go."

Life on tour, he acknowledges, is not always conducive to letting down his considerable head of hair or sampling local cultures, but there is a sense that for all his determination to succeed on the golf course - he talks of becoming the best player in the world in the next three years - McIlroy is out to enjoy life along the way. Currently that involves making time for his new girlfriend, the world No.1-ranked tennis player Caroline Wozniacki, with whom he plans to spend a fortnight in the Maldives this month between tournaments. You might be forgiven for suspecting the sponsors of hijacking Cupid's bow, but it's clear the pair have no wish to parade themselves as some kind of sporting power couple.

"We have very similar lifestyles, so I think we understand one another more than anything else," McIlroy says. "If I shoot a bad score, I feel as if she knows what to say. And you know what she would like to hear if she has a bad result. We're both working hard to be the best in our sport, but you have to some sort of life outside that."

If he needs a pep talk from a fellow golfer, on the other hand, McIlroy need only turn to the greatest of them all. Jack Nicklaus, who went on to win 17 more majors after his first fresh-faced triumph in 1962, has invited him to spend the beginning of next year practicing at his club in Florida. McIlroy has already proven his lack of physical stature to be no hindrance to his game, but perhaps there is still something to be said for standing on the shoulders of giants.

This article appeared in Hong Kong Tatler

For someone so indivisible from the altogether serious business of virtuoso violin-playing - with its exacting levels of self-discipline and its station at the altar of high culture - Itzhak Perlman should, one might reflect, seem rather more daunting than he does. We are, after all, talking about a violinist of real genius: a man in whose hands the instrument has a kind of molten ferocity that distracts from but does not diminish his technical mastery. He is, without doubt, the repertoire's greatest living interpreter.

But alas, there is nothing daunting, nothing stern, about Perlman - no loftiness or hauteur, no hint of a tortured soul. He may revel in Beethoven and Mahler but he does not share their manic severity. On the contrary, millions around the world love him as much for the enveloping warmth of his personality as for the emotional range of his playing (though the two may be inseparable). Like the late Luciano Pavarotti, he has for decades performed an almost ambassadorial role for classical music, critical adulation combining with the force of his own irrepressible joy in music-making to catapult him into the global popular consciousness.

And so, when he tells me with boyish glee that the last thing to survive when the world ends is certain to be Mozart's violin sonatas, it is difficult to be persuaded from the notion that Perlman is the effervescent pedagogue we all wish we'd had in school. He is, whisper it, almost as much fun to listen to talking as he is to hear play.

The 66-year-old Israeli-born American, who will perform his first concerts in Macau and Hong Kong for nine years this week, has spoken at length before of how he often asks his students - or when he conducts, entire orchestras - to think about colours or types of food in order to get them to play a piece of music in a certain way. "What do you say to an orchestra that has played, let's say, Beethoven's 1st Symphony 200 times? The way I do it is to just try to think of what I would like to hear from a piece, how I hear it in my head." he tells me. "I would call it suggesting what you want the orchestra to sound like."

Having taken up the baton relatively late in his career, Perlman has, over the last decade or so, conducted many of the most prestigious orchestras in the US, Europe and beyond. He was, until recently, also Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of the Westchester Philharmonic in New York, where he lives with his wife, Toby. Together, they run the Perlman Music Program, a summer camp for exceptionally talented young string players, and since 1999 he has taught all year round at New York's Juillard School of Music - the institution at which he himself studied the violin, under the great Ivan Galamian and Dorothy DeLay, after relocating from Tel Aviv in the late 1950s.

"For me these things are all very much connected," he says. "Teaching and conducting have an effect on you as a performer. Instead of saying to someone they must play a certain way, I talk to myself. I learn to listen in a particular way, so that I can do what I am hearing in the music. Listening is the most important word - the difference between a good performance and an okay performance is in how well the performer listens to what he or she does when they play."

Perlman's own students are mostly between 14 and 16. "I can have a better effect on the way they play because they have not developed the habits that older students have picked up," he says. He is uncomfortable with the phrase "child prodigy", believing it to create unnecessary pressure on parents and children, but it's worth remembering he gave his own first recital aged 10 and was soon thereafter performing with the Israeli Broadcast Orchestra.

In reality, he says, he hated practicing and in his reflections on his own youth there is a surprising degree of mixed feeling. He loved the instrument and went through periods of "completely idolising" first Fritz Kreisler and later David Oistrakh. "But I wasn't sure I could do it [be like them]. You just keep hoping and practicing. If you have talent then people give you support, which I had, but you need an awful lot of negative vibes as well to do this."

Making things harder, quite probably, was the fact that, having contracted polio at the age of four, he was unable to walk without crutches - to this day he relies on them, and an electric scooter, for mobility, and plays the violin while seated. "People ask me what would I have done if I had not had polio as a young child," he says. "I really don't know. I would probably have done the same. When I wanted to play the violin I did not have polio. It was not something that came after."

In the event, two appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show on CBS in 1958 made him a household name in the US at the tender age of 13, and in 1964 he won the prestigious Leventritt Competition, paving the way for a career touring the world's concert halls.

Almost five decades later he is the most recorded violinist in history, possesses 15 Grammy Awards and has played with every major orchestra in the world - including the Israel Philharmonic, with whom he made history by going behind the Iron Curtain to perform in Warsaw and Budapest in 1987, and in the Soviet Union in 1990. He has received honorary degrees from Ivy League universities and had successive US presidents clamouring to weigh him down with medals. And in addition he has recorded jazz and klezmer albums, performed as a soloist on the soundtracks to three movies - Schindler's List, Zhang Yimou's Hero and Memoirs of a Geisha (along with the cellist Yo-Yo Ma) - and made countless television appearances in the US, including on The Tonight Show and Sesame Street.

A 1980 clip of him performing a Beethoven duet with a tuba-playing Telly Monster can, inevitably, be found on YouTube; not so the 2004 PBS special Perlman in Shanghai, but it chronicles something a little more historic - a visit of the Perlman Music Program to the mainland that culminated in a concert at the Shanghai Grand Theatre featuring one thousand young American and Chinese violinists.

"We linked up with kids from the Shanghai Conservatory," he says. "Chamber music, certainly a few years ago, did not have the importance there that we feel it should have, so it was one of the things we wanted to promote. But generally in Asia right now, there are a lot of very fine musicians coming through. The ratio of kids coming in from the Far East on our programme is rising - from Korea, China, Japan. It's really a lot. In the late 1950s, early 1960s, string players tended to come from Europe, Russia maybe, the United States and Israel. Right now the cycle has really shifted to Asia for young string players."

When I put it to him that he has form in terms of breaking down cultural barriers via music, the response comes back with almost evangelistic certainty: "Music is, simply put, an international language."

"No matter where I go to play or the culture of that country, when it comes to classical music everybody has a common reaction to it," he adds. "As an Israeli, there were occasions where I have gone to countries where Israel did not have diplomatic relations yet and you knew that relationships would improve because of those visits with the Israel Philharmonic. The music was a step to improving relations. Because everybody speaks that language.

"There is something about music that is so important to the development of humans. I am asked what I would do without music. I think society would be much worse; it's the soul of society. What would we do without it?" It doesn't bear thinking about, of course; but at least the Mozart sonatas are safe.

This article appeared in The South China Morning Post

This article appeared on The South China Morning Post's Rewind page

In a sense all books are about silence, which is perhaps one reason why it has long been considered expedient that children take at least a passing interest in them. In the 1960s and 70s, decades after its first publication in 1922, Herman Hesse's Siddhartha influenced the Beatles and fed into a hippy counterculture that gave off a lot of noise - but there is little point in blaming the water for what grows in the ground: the novel itself, though redolent enough with the German-Swiss author's own spiritual angst, has a meditative, hushful quality about it in-keeping with its eponymous hero's search for inner peace, enlightenment and all that sort of thing.

When he wrote Siddhartha, Hesse was living as a semi-recluse and had immersed himself in Hindu and Buddhist scripture in the hope of finding a cure for what he called his "sickness with life". The result is a version of the bildungsroman - a phrase coined by another German about a century before to refer to novels about difficult young men, more or less - that takes the reader on a walkabout around India in the time of the Buddha and delves rather haphazardly into eastern theology but which must also be read as echoing Hesse's own quest for self-realisation.

The Siddhartha we meet at the beginning of the novel is a Brahmin's son who can hold his own in discussion with the wise men of his village and knows "how to say Om silently". The author does not say as much but he is certainly an unusual boy. Soon he decides to leave his parents and head off in pursuit of nirvana, moshka and various other states of spiritual release the book touches on: first of all by embracing asceticism, which among other bizarre exercises involves occupying the soul of a dead jackal, then later by tasting of a more worldly existence as a trader and lover.

Ultimately, however, it is in quieter rhythms that he discovers "atman", his true self: by the river, a recurrent symbol of life's "song", he meets the ferryman Vaseduva and gains the knowledge he has been seeking from the old man's "silent love and cheerfulness".

In the years that followed the First World War - during which Hesse made life difficult for himself by daring to denounce the patriotism he saw as responsible for unleashing hell on earth across Europe - Germany fell into intellectual forment. Hesse was influenced by German romanticism and neo-romanticism, he was intrigued by expressionism, fascinated by the psychoanalytic movement and by orientalism.

And yet, in light of the hell to which -isms would soon return the country it is, in passing, moving to note that Siddhartha effectively renounces the idea of doctrine as a route to harmony. When his old boyhood friend and spiritual accomplice, Govinda, finds him by the river, he wishes to hear what wisdom Siddhartha has finally attained. But the answer is incommunicable - and Siddhartha cannot respond other than with silence.

By way of an analogy it does not follow that because some children are abused by their parents the family unit is a discredited entity. The abuse of press freedoms is a less serious crime, though serious nonetheless. Yet the current outpouring of opprobrium towards News International over the criminal misdeeds carried out or sanctioned by an as yet undetermined number of its journalists, executives and associates - and let us agree that the revelations that brought the New of the World down last week speak of a loathsome newsroom culture - has a canting momentum about it that may yet have some form of pernicious satisfaction.

Sporadic outbreaks of inchoate public rage are now expected events in Britain. The bankers, the MPs, the Lib Dems and Ryan Giggs have all copped it. Now it's the turn of the journalists, and, er, the coppers. There's little doubting the hatred is real, and yet one wonders whether there is not a little too much anti-establishment schadenfreude about it. To bow to that sentiment and neuter the press only to find that in the blink of an eye the public pulse has been quickened by some new casus belli would be a mistake. No doubt the Guardian and to a lesser extent the BBC are to be applauded for helping to expose the scandal; but it is perhaps no coincidence that the latter, in particular, stands to gain much from News Corp's ruination, or that the former has long demonised Rupert Murdoch, both on an ideological basis and personally. After the phone-hacking business erupted a couple of weeks ago, one Guardian blogger exclaimed: "Let's hope this is our Arab Spring." In-keeping with the wider narrative if he meant the Guardian's; entirely asinine if he meant the country's.

At any rate the story is unlikely to disappear from that newspaper's front end any time soon; which will surely give its editorial staff the opportunity to flesh out a vision of Britain's post-Arab Spring media world. It is encouraging, then, to note that they do not give credence to the notion espoused by Neil Kinnock - allying himself in this instance with pronouncements on the matter from the Chinese - that newspapers should be made to toe the same line the BBC is meant to on political impartiality. After all, it is for the left an unpalatable truth that in most places where there exists a free market for news and opinion, titles either marginally or blatantly to the right sell rather better than the alternatives.

All of a sudden the taxi driver has been overcome by a fit of the giggles. Is it the fare? We've barely moved in about 20 minutes and the meter has nudged its way up from ridiculously cheap to merely cheap. It is not the fare.

"London, Hong Kong, it's the same," he says finally, pointing over at the massed divisions of demonstrators snaking along Hennessey Road in the opposite direction to us. "People don't like government, make protest. It's same."

Okay. Yeah, I nod. Protest. Government. London. But wait - London? Nobody's smashing windows or setting about police vans. In fact, it's all rather peaceable. I mean, whoever heard of an angry mob carrying parasols? Maybe the anarchists are late. No trouble, I say. No violence. Unfortunately for our conversation, no understand. Well it was fun while it lasted.

But still, I'm right. This march - they've been held every year on July 1 since the British split for home in 1997 - appears to stir up all the animus of a Hare Krishna rally. The government has been trying to do away with by-elections and so this is the biggest turnout since 2004. But still, not even the chanting's aggressive. And what do they want? Well, universal suffrage would be a start. "One person, one vote" is the shibboleth. In May, incidentally, the Brits were asked whether in future they wanted two votes in general elections, or something to that effect, and declined. Instead they've been out marching against cuts in government spending that so far don't appear to be cuts at all, the erosion of middle class entitlements and suchlike.

I'd seen groups of protestors gathering earlier on. Hawkers sold t-shirts emblazoned with pro-democracy slogans and - the very latest in radical chic - Guy Fawkes masks; volunteers handed out pamphlets and placards and John Lennon's Working Class Hero blared from a loudspeaker. And it struck me that if the self-pitying jeremiads of a dead hippy were to be the democratic movement's rallying call, then the Chinese Communist Party needn't worry all that much.

It is often claimed, indeed, that there will be no great clamour for democracy on mainland China whilst the government is delivering nine per cent growth year on year. Growth, however, may not necessarily preclude anti-government sentiment if it is accompanied by a widening of the gap between the rich and the rest. And this, probably more than the desire for greater democracy, is what explains the 218,000 turnout in Hong Kong last week. As much as they have compounded the miseries of the poor, rising rents and living costs are squeezing the middle classes. The rentier class rules. The picture is not, in fact, so very different from that of London after all.

Later on, there were also a few arrests: 228 to be exact. But one shouldn't jump to conclusions. The offending parties were, for the most part, demonstrators who refused to go home. There is so little in the way of crime in Hong Kong that its bobbies occasionally feel the need of something to do.

So the SNP's Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications Bill has been kicked into the long grass, or at least the rough. Quite right, too. Seemingly it is to be looked at again later in the year, but the longer the verdure into which it is shanked the better.

Not being in the country I haven't seen them with my own eyes, but I can well imagine the shrill headlines on the front pages of the Scottish editions of the Mail and Express after the minister sponsoring the thing, Roseanna Cunningham, acknowledged in parliament that under its provisions singing God Save the Queen or crossing oneself might "in certain circumstances" (we're sort of, um, not sure) constitute an offence. As those organs of truth will have taken delight in pointing out, you couldn't make it up, and they'd be right: you couldn't. But you didn't have to. It may be a small few who take an interest in what goes on inside the Scottish Parliament, but the transcripts are there for all to read. And Cunningham was attempting to make the case for the bill.

Equally certain is that ponderous commentarists in the lefty, Alex Salmond-hugging broadsheets will have been at great pains to point out that only a relatively small number of prosecutions would ever be likely to arise from this Bill and that nobody would actually be arrested for banging on about the queen because that would be absurd. And furthermore give the Scottish government some credit for trying to Do Something, etcetera etcetera. And in their ponderous way they would probably be right about some of this too.

But if it is agreed that a piece of legislation is so vague that it is only ever likely to be patchily enforced, or indeed so vague that you won't know you're breaking the law until you end up in jail ("behaviour that a reasonable person would be likely to consider offensive" is the key line here), then why bother with it in the first place? The chief constable of Strathclyde police was quoted as saying that "if the legislation stops one person" from doing anything vaguely sectarian, then it will be worthwhile. Really? A wiser man once said that "a corrupt society has many laws", and it is a matter of fact that we already have numerous laws capable of banging those guilty of sectarian crimes to rights, including some fairly robust anti-terrorism laws whose passage I seem to think the SNP, rightly or wrongly, opposed. Yet quite apart from the issue of its superfluity, in extending strictures on sectarian behaviour and language within football grounds to pubs, cyberspace and anywhere else Celtic and Rangers supporters might convey themselves, this Bill strikes rather a sinister, Draconian note. It is, in fact, illiberal in the extreme to presume that the state should have any business peering into men's souls on the feeble-minded presumption that people crossing themselves in an "aggressive" manner may be to blame for the violence of others.

One final point. It is often in the make-up of nationalists to be irritated and exasperated by the nation they would wish to remould in their own image. Neither Rangers or Celtic supporters have tended to promulgate a feverishly Scottish identity. But if we're in the business of proscribing songs about bygone bloodshed, what makes Flower of Scotland exempt?

When I was at Glasgow University, academics took every opportunity to shove it down biddable undergraduate throats that Edward Said was right about everything. One, I remember, offered up Alfred Hitchcock's 1931 film Rich and Strange as final proof that the sole purpose of western civilisation since about the time of the Crusades has been to peddle racialist and imperialist untruths about the Orient. This is the dogma outlined in Orientalism, Said's most famous book, the influence of which over the last 30 years outweighs its merit by far.

The title of that early "talkie" derives from Ariel's song in The Tempest: she makes it known to the shipwrecked Ferdinand that his father has perished and lies at the bottom of the sea, which misfortune has turned him "into something rich and strange," bean curd perhaps. Fred and Emily, Hitchcock's prim young English couple, off spending a wodge of inherited wealth on a cruise to Singapore, find everything they encounter east of, well, Dover, strange and exotic. Ultimately they are fleeced for their money and go back to London, where Fred gets his missus to put on a nice steak and kidney pie. Unfortunately it escaped my humourless tutor - a Canadian, I seem to think - that the joke was never other than on the Brits themselves. It is as Noel Coward had it in the song: "Why do the wrong people travel when the right people stay back home?"

I come to recount all of this as, in the last couple of weeks, I have moved to Hong Kong. As its gleaming towers serve to declare, it is certainly rich; and insofar as everything at street level looks to my racialist and imperialist eye like a restaurant, it also feels strange. But strange, too, is a feeling of widespread confidence in its institutions. China, Francis Fukuyama has said, has the best modern bureaucratic state in the world, but having failed to sanction a commercial middle class until recently, has a weak society. Hong Kong, notwithstanding its own democratic deficit, appears to have it all: a market economy, a strong society and efficient government. Regarding this last, Hong Kong's impressive Immigration Tower has an entire level devoted to welcoming "quality immigrants". Suffice to say I collected my papers on another floor.