Ordinary Gweilo

It's not big and it's not clever, it's just a Brit in Hong Kong writing (mainly) about Hong Kong

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  • Up in the Air

    A promotional brochure arrives from a certain credit card company, offering a trip to London for some dollars and some credit card points.

    It’s described as a “5 days / 2 nights London package”.  Er, hang on.  5 days?  I’d call it 3 days (and even that is a touch optimistic). 

    The first “day” is a couple of hours at Chek Lap Kok airport waiting for your plane to depart, and maybe 20 minutes in the air.  The second day you arrive in London early in the morning, rested and relaxed after 13 hours in the economy cabin, and maybe you can check-in to your hotel in the early afternoon.  The third day is genuinely 24 hours in London.  The fourth day you have to be at the airport by around 7 pm.  The fifth “day” is spent in the air, arriving back in Hong Kong in the late afternoon. 

    What an enchanting prospect.

  • Lowering expectations…or maybe not

    This week the BBC announced that Ricky Gervais is making a new series that will be broadcast later this year.  However, there is some concern that expectations are so high after The Office that people are bound to be disappointed.  So what have the BBC done?  From The Guardian:

    The new Ricky Gervais series is to be shielded from excessive expectation by being screened during the summer months and on BBC2.

    [..]

    Alluding to the high expectations for his series, which began filming two weeks ago, Gervais joked that Extras was the show "that some critics are already calling the disappointing follow-up to The Office".

    OK, but if you want to maintain a low profile do you really announce to the world that this new series is "one of the highlights of the spring and summer season on BBC Two"…  Probably not. And I don’t see how you lower expectations by transmitting it in the summer.  Or on BBC Two.  Watching or recording BBC Two on Monday nights in July and August probably won’t be too much of a challenge for fans of The Office, now will it?

    So you hype a show by saying that you really don’t want to hype it.  Now it all makes sense.

  • Fat lady sings

    Unsurprising news from the UK – Atkins Nutritionals UK is closing down.  Cue headlines about "slim pickings" in several newspapers.

    As I have mentioned before, I find the Atkins Diet quite fascinating – because it does work, but not exactly in the way that Mr Atkins claimed. My view is that what makes the diet attractive (to some) is that it is easy to understand (and lets you eat things like meat, cheese, butter and cream that are not allowed on other diets), but the reason that so many people have given up on it is also the reason that it works, namely that it severely restricts what you can eat. It’s quite hard to over-eat on Atkins, so of course people lose weight. Surprisingly, this rather obvious conclusion was reported as shock news only yesterday!

    The idea behind Atkins Nutritionals was that they could sell food that was permitted under the diet, including low-carb versions of otherwise forbidden food. There are a number of obvious problems with this concept – firstly that it makes the diet more complicated, secondly that it means you can eat more (and hence put on weight), and thirdly that it is expensive. Food that is naturally low in carbohydrate is already available in supermarkets, and if you really want to eat bread and candy bars and other such stuff you really ought to find another diet rather than Atkins.

    It also means that rather than associating the Atkins Diet with a maverick doctor who came up with an unconventional eating plan, it is linked with a company that wants to sell you expensive food.

    The decline in popularity of the Atkins Diet hasn’t helped, and the other problem for Atkins Nutritionals is that large food companies have jumped on the bandwagon and started selling low-carb products as well. These would be the same people who proudly advertise high-fat products with large text saying 0g Trans Fat.

  • Punditry

    There’s only one explanation that makes any sense.  The SCMP don’t pay Simon Patkin for his silly little rants, he pays them for the free publicity.

    Monday’s paper had one of his more banal efforts, starting off with Donald Tsang’s strange suggestion that Hong Kong people should have more children in order to solve the problem of an ageing population.  He uses this to claim that "many middle-class couples already support at least three children through their taxes".  However, he offers no statistics to back this up, and moves swiftly on to his real concern: 

    Indeed, despite a forecast budget surplus, it is unrestrained government spending that is causing a cyclical deficit, which pundits claim will drain our reserves and put us into the poorhouse.

    Er, pundits?  You mean people who write opinion pieces in the SCMP.  Oh dear, it must be serious.  I don’t fancy living in a poorhouse – do they have aircon?    

    Simon does have statistics to support his complaint that spending on education, health and social welfare are substantially up since 1989, though I’d wager that these have not been adjusted for inflation, making them virtually useless.

    Mysteriously, he complains (warning – cliche alert) that "there has been a deafening silence from the accounting profession about curbing this increase" as if bean counters were supposed to tell the government what policies to adopt (if they do, I suggest that they adjust their figures for inflation).

    He proposes a clampdown on immigration, because (as we know) many immigrants are welfare scroungers.  We know this because it has "been reported as a serious problem", though Simon hedges his bets by saying that "most immigrants work hard" (perhaps they run their own free-market think-tanks from their spare bedrooms).  In fact, of course, the most obvious solution to the problem of ageing populations all round the world is to allow more immigration, though ironically many of the right-wing commentators who want lower taxes are also paranoid about immigration.

    This whole article can really be summarised very simply.  Simon is against government spending:

    there should be a cap on government spending on education, social welfare and health each year. This should be reduced to zero over the medium term.

    Does he mean the cap should be zero or expenditure should be zero?  As with much of this article it’s hard to tell, but based on his past opinions I assume he means the latter.  Never fear, because the middle-class are very benevolent.  So, although Simon is nervous that we will all end up in the poorhouse if government spending is not curbed, he is really quite keen on a return to the Victorian era when the poor had to rely on charity and really did live in poorhouses.  Ah, happy days.    

  • The foggy day

    This week/month/year, I am mainly…reading children’s books.  In practice that means reading books from either the UK or the States.  Mainly the UK, actually. 

    Naturally enough, they depict life in the UK.  So you have a family living in a semi-detached house, playing in their garden, going on holiday to the seaside, driving to the supermarket and doing all manner of other ordinary things – if you live in the UK, that is.  However, for a child living in Hong Kong, these books don’t reflect their lives at all.  Living in a small apartment, probably with a domestic helper to look after them, seeing their parents for a few hours at the weekend, walking or taking a shuttle bus to the supermarket, and flying to Thailand for a short break.  Not quite the same.

    Or there’s the weather.  One book I’ve read a few times is specifically about a foggy day (and the problems of driving when visibility is only a few yards). 

    Fog is one of the less attractive features of a British winter, but it is relatively uncommon in Hong Kong (unless you live at the top of a mountain, which most of us don’t).  Or at least that was what I thought. 

    However, the hovercraft crash last month was blamed on fog, and the following week when I was across the border it was horribly damp and foggy (though at least it wasn’t cold), and some ferries were unable to reach their destinations (Pingzhou Port in Nanhai and Lian Hua Shan port near Panyu).  The following day in Hong Kong, several planes were delayed or diverted for the same reason. 

    Checking up on this, it seems that the Observatory believes that there are usually a few foggy days around this time of year, so it isn’t as unusual as I had thought.  So maybe two or three days each year it really is good old-fashioned fog rather than pollution.    

    The other thing that strikes me about children’s books is how "politically correct" they have become.  If a story has an airline pilot or a doctor in it, the chances are that it’ll be a woman.  Which is probably better than it was when I was a child (and books showed daddies going off to drive trains or save the world and mummies stayed at home and worried about nothing more taxing than whether it was beans on toast or sausages for tea), but frankly it’s just as unrealistic. Did I say unrealistic?  Hang on, these are books about trains that talk to each other, park keepers who talk to animals, vintage cars that have adventures and all manner of things even more unlikely than women flying 747s. 

    Of course, these days they are also careful to present a positive image of multi-cultural Britain.  So, in the books, the schools have a racially diverse mix of pupils (and teachers), and the children have a racially diverse mix of friends, and they all get on famously.  Again, quite different from what I remember from the books I read in my school days but perhaps they have gone a bit too far in the opposite direction.

    I suppose in Hong Kong there’s no need to indoctrinate children with the notion that women can go out to work, and this isn’t really a multi-cultural society either, so perhaps there’s no need for heavy-handed propaganda on that subject.  So I wonder what else they present in a relentlessly positive light? 

  • Letter of the week

    The letters to the editor published by the SCMP continue to be a source of some amusement to me.  Rather too many of the letters are just tedious complaints about matters of little importance.  For example, Friday’s special souvenir "Yes, he really has resigned" issue had one correspondent complaining about the moneychangers at the airport.

    Travelex have a scheme whereby if you pay an extra HK$30 fee when you purchase foreign currency you can convert it all back to Hong Kong Dollars at the same rate when you return to Hong Kong.   They presumably make money out of this scheme in two ways. Firstly by collecting HK$30 from people who forget (or can’t be bothered) to convert their foreign currency back to HKD, and secondly because people buy more foreign currency than would otherwise be the case.

    On the weasel index, this only scores a 5 or 6. The main problem here is simply that their exchange rates are uncompetitive, and you’d probably be better off changing money in a Hong Kong bank before you go to the airport or in a local bank when you arrive at your destination, or using your ATM card when you arrive.  The common sense advice is to convert the minimum amount at the airport, but obviously Travelex want you to change as much as possible. Hence this scheme, and in my opinion paying the HK$30 fee is probably the least of your problems!

    Anyway, the letter writer was not complaining about the way the scheme works, but rather that she had been unable to take advantage of it:

    I went to the Travelex counter with my original invoice to change my money back to Hong Kong dollars for a fee of $30. I was advised that this could not be done, as I had not purchased the buyback receipt at the time of purchase. Staff then produced a brochure which said: "Offer conditional on presentation of the original `Buy Back Plus’ purchase receipt and passport/identity card when returning Hong Kong dollar or foreign currency."

    On the billboard advertisements there is no mention about paying the $30 at time of purchase, nor did the counter staff offer the option when I changed my money. A simple "Would you like our Buy Back option?" would suffice. As exchange rates at the airport are quite competitive, I had changed extra money on the assumption that I could change my money back at the same rate for $30. We all know that exchange dealers make their money on the difference in spread, so it is in the company’s best interest not to push this product.

    Well, I’m not sure about that – I think they would want to offer the Buy Back option to all their customers (especially people who believe that their rates are "quite competitive"), so I doubt that there is any trickery involved.

  • No more nouns

    Via Fumier, another Hong Kong blog, The Solbourne Identity, from a Malaysian living here.  The author cheerfully admits that his is a boring, personal blog, so that’s fair enough.

    More entertainingly, David Webb has some fun at the expense of property developers worrying that they have exhausted the supply of nouns and are now reduced to using adjectives, such as The Grandiose for a development in Tseung Kwan O.  If they’ve run out of English nouns, French names seem to be quite popular as well (isn’t there something called Les Saisons in Sai Wan Ho?), but very often the Cantonese name, which is what most people use, is totally different.

    There’s blanket TV advertising right now for the new one with a hole in it atop Kowloon Station.  The brochure rather imaginatively pretends that it will be surrounded by greenery, which seems unlikely, but at least they do appear to be advertising the property they are selling, rather than an attractive chateau in France. It’s not cheap.

  • Get lost

    I have to admit that I am fascinated by maps – well, some maps.  So from Metafilter via Shaky, some interesting London public transport maps.  Firstly, a geographically accurate London Underground map (rather than the classic Harry Beck diagram with straight lines), and secondly, (Mayor of London) Ken Livingstone’s ambitious plans for a much bigger network of underground, overground, light rail and trams by 2016, though unfortunately most of the new lines probably won’t get built. 

    Then there’s a rather more elaborate version of the maps they have in all the tube trains showing the stations and interchanges.  This one attempts to show the position of the platforms, which is useful if you want to know where you are going. 

    Or if you really don’t know where you’re going, you could try Transport Direct, a new UK government service that will advice you on the best route to take to get from A-B.  Unfortunately, it may take you via X, Y and Z: 

    For instance, a person leaving south London in the evening for Sale in Manchester would arrive at 6:31am the following day, but only after spending the better part of six hours waiting for a train at the remote Navigation Road station. No mention is made of the night bus that would deliver the travellers to Sale in little over 40 minutes.

    The short trip between the Lancashire resorts of Fleetwood and Blackpool should be a straightforward 45-minute bus ride. Those following the website’s advice would embark on a near two-and-a-half journey consisting of two train trips, a bus ride and three bouts of walking.

    Sometimes vital transport data can just disappear. A motorist from the Cornish village of Polruan wanting to visit nearby Falmouth would unquestionably choose the ferry across the River Fowey. Yet, on occasion, the system simply forgets the ferry exists, with drivers guided on a picturesque two-hour journey skirting around the estuary.

    So just another highly successful UK government IT project.

  • Busy, busy, busy

    Sorry, I’m a bit busy right now.  Normal service will be resumed shortly.

  • Who the hell is Pierce Lam?

    Letter of the week from today’s SCMP, echoing my own thoughts:

    I fail to understand why you continue to publish letters from Pierce Lam on the English Schools Foundation. In the past six weeks, since I first noticed his letters about the ESF, you have published at least five from him. The content of each is the same. Basically, he seems to have made it his personal mission to "bash the ESF". Some of his letters contain inaccuracies and falsehoods. His latest one, "ESF values at school" (March 4), is ludicrous. In it, he comments derisively on the ESF community, even if the topic was charity work which some students and teachers were doing in Sri Lanka. (Mr Lam had previously told us that ESF schools "hardly participate" in "community services".) In my community, Mr Lam’s letters are becoming an object of ridicule. If only he would adopt a worthier cause to vent his anger on, such as improving the quality of the air.

    If you don’t read the letters page of the SCMP (which would be a wise decision) you may not have read Pierce Lam’s many and very boring letters on the subject of the ESF. What he doesn’t seem to have appreciated is that the ESF has taken on board much of the criticism and it now has a new chairman, new chief executive and a slimmed-down governing body.  The new people have to be given a chance to sort things out.

    Pierce Lam’s letter two weeks ago was particularly stupid, as it made fun of ESF students for doing charity work in Sri Lanka.  It prompted a dignified response from some of the students, but (Mr?) Lam continues to bang way with his argument, apparently holding ESF students responsible for the governance of the schools where they study. 

    He’s entitled to his point of view, but he really has nothing interesting or useful to say on the subject, and I don’t understand why the SCMP bother to print his letters.