Ordinary Gweilo

Hemlock recently noted that Spike was ideal for anyone who wanted to re-read articles they had already read in The Spectator or on Quamnet.com. This week’s edition of the magazine is true to form, but with a subtle alteration to at least one of the articles. Petronella Wyatt’s piece about Cape Town (as originally published) starts as follows:

Cape Town is as different from Johannesburg as Cheltenham is from London.

In Spike, Cheltenham becomes Sai Kung and London becomes Central, so that readers who have never heard of Cheltenham do not become too confused. In truth, I am not sure where this was meant to imply anything more than the simple comparison of city versus small town that is spelt out in the next paragraph. If it was, then it shouldn’t have been changed. If it wasn’t, it probably didn’t need changing anyway. Maybe one of the Spike sub-editors lives in Sai Kung and wishes us to believe that is an elegant spa town with a racecourse and various cultural events, rather than a bit of a dump with a few Italian restaurants.

Elsewhere in the magazine, their ‘man in Beijing’ seems to agree with my theory that the recent visit of the experts on the Basic Law to Hong Kong was nothing more than the start of a negotiating process during which the central government doesn’t wish to concede too much too quickly.

Unless I’m mistaken (which sadly I often am), Spike seems to be cutting back on the satire in favour of more serious and cultural stuff, though you have to wonder about the wisdom of printing an attack on a book that is a bestseller in the UK but probably not well known in Hong Kong (“Eats, Shoots and Leaves”), again from The Spectator.