Mémoire Du Jour

The Race For The Post Editorship

With acknowledgements to Wally Wilde, QQ (Hemlock), Patsy and other former NTSCMP staffers.

The British Empire Today

First Kill The Pets Then Remove The People

If That Doesn't Work, Make It Into A 'Nature Reserve' And Stop People From Fishing There Because Fishing Is Their Livelihood

George Galloway often tells the joke about The Empire On Which The Sun Never Sets, the British Empire, which we think has been dismantled but which in reality is, like the American and French empires, still doing well and taking on new guises and forging new partnerships. Galloway says that the sun never set on the British Empire because God would never trust the British in the dark.

Today, 2nd April 2010, even the BBC, the summit of British state propaganda, highlights the British move to make the Chagos Islands into a 'marine reserve'.

The former residents of the islands, who were evicted from the British overseas territory between 1967 and 1971 to make way for the US Air Force base on the largest island, Diego Garcia, have fought a long-running battle in the UK courts for the right to return.

Of the islands, only Diego Garcia, which has played a key role in the US-led operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, is currently inhabited.

After years of litigation, the courts in the UK ordered the British Government to return the Chagos Islands to the islanders. They had been deported to the slums of Mauritius because the British got a fourteen million pound discount on missiles from the Americans for selling Diego Garcia to them so that it could be made into a base for decades for bombing runs into Iraq (long before there was any official 'war').

This is of course buried low down in the article. The truth is that the British first killed the pets of the islanders, then rounded them up and bundled them off across the ocean. If the Argentinians had done the same to the Falkland islanders, bombs would have been dropped on Buenos Aires. But the Chagos islanders are black. They just don't count, as we all know. And the British Empire sails on and the longest runways in the world get their deliveries of bunker-busting bombs because Obama is for peace and justice and a new age is upon us. Yes we can, they say in Whitehall.

And Whilst We're On The Subject...Cringe Video Of The Month

Former NTSCMP Columnist Patsy Says ' I Am Gay'

We are all shocked and writing to the Daily Mail about it. For Patsy's former columns, which give none of his sexuality away, please go to the archives.

Hong Kong Fights Murdochracy

All those sceptical about the concept of Murdochracy need only look to Australia, which is the Murdoch doctrine in its purest form. Across Australia, he owns the only national paper and 70% of the capital city press. Politicians not only dance to his tune, they invent new melodies for him. The Murdoch assault on the Internet is presently two-pronged: charging for content (to be introduced for the UK Times in the summer for example) and blacklisting sites (beginning with those manifestly of public abhorrence but gradually extending the list). Here in Hong Kong, the Government wifi already bans access to Murdoch's UK Sun newspaper. Wouldn't it be ironic if the world voted to extend the wise move of Hong Kong and ban access to all the Murdoch media empire? Lead the way, Hong Kong.

Have A Nice World War, Folks

War is peace. Invasion is benign exceptionalism. The latest BBC news seems to support the Pilger thesis that Obama is another 'liberal' chapter of bloodthirsty Americanism. The liberal Presidents usually kill more...

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes the increasing American war front across the world: from Afghanistan to Africa and Latin America. This is the Third World War in all but name, waged by the only aggressive "ism" that denies it is an ideology and threatened not by introverted tribesmen in faraway places but by the anti-war instincts of its own citizens.

Here is news of the Third World War. The United States has invaded Africa. US troops have entered Somalia, extending their war front from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen and now the Horn of Africa. In preparation for an attack on Iran, American missiles have been placed in four Persian Gulf states, and “bunker-buster” bombs are said to be arriving at the US base on the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

In Gaza, the sick and abandoned population, mostly children, is being entombed behind underground American-supplied walls in order to reinforce a criminal siege. In Latin America, the Obama administration has secured seven bases in Colombia, from which to wage a war of attrition against the popular democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Paraguay. Meanwhile, the secretary of “defence” Robert Gates complains that “the general [European] public and the political class” are so opposed to war they are an “impediment” to peace. Remember this is the month of the March Hare.

According to an American general, the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan is not so much a real war as a “war of perception”. Thus, the recent “liberation of the city of Marja” from the Taliban’s “command and control structure” was pure Hollywood. Marja is not a city; there was no Taliban command and control. The heroic liberators killed the usual civilians, poorest of the poor. Otherwise, it was fake. A war of perception is meant to provide fake news for the folks back home, to make a failed colonial adventure seem worthwhile and patriotic, as if The Hurt Locker were real and parades of flag-wrapped coffins through the Wiltshire town of Wooten Basset were not a cynical propaganda exercise.

“War is fun”, the helmets in Vietnam used to say with bleakest irony, meaning that if a war is revealed as having no purpose other than to justify voracious power in the cause of lucrative fanaticisms such as the weapons industry, the danger of truth beckons. This danger can be illustrated by the liberal perception of Tony Blair in 1997 as one “who wants to create a world [where] ideology has surrendered entirely to values” (Hugo Young, the Guardian) compared with today’s public reckoning of a liar and war criminal.

Western war-states such as the US and Britain are not threatened by the Taliban or any other introverted tribesmen in faraway places, but by the anti-war instincts of their own citizens. Consider the draconian sentences handed down in London to scores of young people who protested Israel’s assault on Gaza in January last year. Following demonstrations in which paramilitary police “kettled” (corralled) thousands, first-offenders have received two and a half years in prison for minor offences that would not normally carry custodial sentences. On both sides of the Atlantic, serious dissent exposing illegal war has become a serious crime.

Silence in other high places allows this moral travesty. Across the arts, literature, journalism and the law, liberal elites, having hurried away from the debris of Blair and now Obama, continue to fudge their indifference to the barbarism and aims of western state crimes by promoting retrospectively the evils of their convenient demons, like Saddam Hussein. With Harold Pinter gone, try compiling a list of famous writers, artists and advocates whose principles are not consumed by the “market” or neutered by their celebrity. Who among them have spoken out about the holocaust in Iraq during almost 20 years of lethal blockade and assault? And all of it has been deliberate. On 22 January 1991, the US Defence Intelligence Agency predicted in impressive detail how a blockade would systematically destroy Iraq’s clean water system and lead to “increased incidences, if not epidemics of disease”. So the US set about eliminating clean water for the Iraqi population: one of the causes, noted Unicef, of the deaths of half a million Iraqi infants under the age of five. But this extremism apparently has no name.

Norman Mailer once said he believed the United States, in its endless pursuit of war and domination, had entered a “pre-fascist era”. Mailer seemed tentative, as if trying to warn about something even he could not quite define. “Fascism” is not right, for it invokes lazy historical precedents, conjuring yet again the iconography of German and Italian repression. On the other hand, American authoritarianism, as the cultural critic Henry Giroux pointed out recently, is “more nuance, less theatrical, more cunning, less concerned with repressive modes of control than with manipulative modes of consent.”

This is Americanism, the only predatory ideology to deny that it is an ideology. The rise of tentacular corporations that are dictatorships in their own right and of a military that is now a state with the state, set behind the façade of the best democracy 35,000 Washington lobbyists can buy, and a popular culture programmed to divert and stultify, is without precedent. More nuanced perhaps, but the results are both unambiguous and familiar. Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, the senior United Nations officials in Iraq during the American and British-led blockade, are in no doubt they witnessed genocide. They saw no gas chambers. Insidious, undeclared, even presented wittily as enlightenment on the march, the Third World War and its genocide proceeded, human being by human being.

In the coming election campaign in Britain, the candidates will refer to this war only to laud “our boys”. The candidates are almost identical political mummies shrouded in the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes. As Blair demonstrated a mite too eagerly, the British elite loves America because America allows it to barrack and bomb the natives and call itself a “partner”. We should interrupt their fun.

I Wasn't Abused By Catholic Priests, Claims Tsang

The Governor of Hong Kong, Sir Donald Tsang, has claimed that he was never abused by Catholic priests. 'As far as I can remember, they used to leave me in the playground with the school bullies and Democrats. The only reason I didn't want to meet the Pope is that he looks taller than me in press photographs. But then, most people do.'

Donald Tsang is 12.

A DOCTOR WRITES: ' Despite the claims of non-abuse, Mr Tsang exhibits all the signs of a dsyfunctional constituency childhood: the bashfulness in public, the inability to relate to people outside his assumed social class, the vestimentary retreat into infantilism, the life of denial of his Colonial past. Added to this is the guise of 'social' drinker and his exaggerated submission to figures of authority. Will that do?'

© 2010 A. Doctor, Princes Building, Central. Credit cards welcome. No personal cheques.

How To Arrest Anthony Blair In Hong Kong

It was only when I saw the glow from Tony Blair's tan that I knew I couldn't chicken out. I'd hatched a vague plan the previous day to place the former prime minister under citizen's arrest, during his scheduled visit to the European Parliament – but wasn't certain I would have the guts to go through with it. But with Blair just a few metres away from me, I walked up to him and placed a hand on his right arm. "Mr Blair, this is a citizen's arrest," I said. For a millisecond, he looked at me with an expression that seemed to blend puzzlement and contempt. I had intended to invite him to accompany me to the nearest police station, but was abruptly shoved out of the way by at least one of his bodyguards. "You are guilty of war crimes," I shouted at his back, as he made his way towards a meeting room. My attempt was inspired by the Arrest Blair campaign that George Monbiot, the environmental activist and Guardian columnist, has set up. As mine was the second attempt since he launched the initiative, many well-wishers have expressed a hope it will be third time lucky.I'm no expert on the legal issues surrounding citizen's arrests, but I did know a precedent had been set by Peter Tatchell when he tried to apprehend Robert Mugabe, also in Brussels, in 2001. Britain and Belgium have both ratified the Rome statute, which entered into force in 2002. This accord, which covers the activities of the International Criminal Court, refers to the crime of aggression. In my view, the war that Blair and George Bush declared against Iraq just over seven years ago was demonstrably not an act of self-defence. Yet, so far, the ICC has only issued indictments against Africans – why should international justice not apply to white men such as Blair and Bush? I also wished to highlight the obscenity of Blair's role as a "peace envoy" in the Middle East. Last year, I visited the house of Maher Hanoun and his family in East Jerusalem – who were later evicted by an Israeli settler company, Nahalat Shimon. Blair has an office in the nearby American Colony hotel, yet said nothing. How can he be trusted to bring peace? (David Cronin/Guardian)

NOTE: Sadly Hong Kong, like the PRC China, is not a signatory to the Rome Statute. However, should Blair find himself on diplomatic territory such as at the British Consulate of any of the signatories to the Statute (of which there are many in Hong Kong) he could be arrested under the provisions of this statute. He could also be arrested in a diplomatic vehicle when in Hong Kong or aboard a plane of a signatory nation.

China and thus Hong Kong is however a signatory to the Genocide Convention. There is sufficient prima facie evidence to arrest Blair under this treaty anywhere in Hong Kong.

New Government Censorship Rubbish

In Italy, citizens' FM radio stations are around every corner. They make the place lively and democratic. The nature of FM broadcasting is such that the signals can't travel very far and the stations In Italy contend for listeners and interest. The story put around by the Hong Kong government that FM broadcasting interferes with civil aviation is a lie because no self-respecting regulatory authority would put aircraft communications in the 76-108 FM airband. If they did, they would open themselves up to international sanction. The real problem of course is that the order has come down from Peking to sit upon open broadcasting and the keck-handed Government is passing the buck from department to department. A much greater problem is the misuse of the radio spectrum by taxi drivers who use the airwaves for free casual chat. Taxi drivers are always immune to prosecution in Hong Kong. A column of taxis in the street fills the Hong Kong civil service and the police with blind horror. Much safer to bash a few Democrats and get a pat on the head from the Central Government Liaison Office.

Inside Britain's Israel Lobby

UK's Channel 4 Dispatches programme investigates one of the most powerful and influential political lobbies in Britain, which is working in support of the interests of the State of Israel. Despite wielding great influence among the highest realms of British politics and media, little is known about the individuals and groups which collectively are known as the pro-Israel lobby. Political commentator Peter Oborne sets out to establish who they are, how they are funded, how they work and what influence they have, from the key groups to the wealthy individuals who help bankroll the lobbying. He investigates how accountable, transparent and open to scrutiny the lobby is, particularly in regard to its funding and financial support of MPs. The pro-Israel lobby aims to shape the debate about Britain's relationship with Israel and future foreign policies relating to it.

Ocean Park Kidnapping Latest

Hemlock Blog Makeover Shock

Manufacturing Consent

The truth is of course that the CIA doesn't need any more electronics. The pliant and compliant Hong Kong media (and most of the bloggers) give the leading terrorist state of the world an easy ride. Also, quite a brainwave by someone in Government to give all the prominent placard protest areas outside the armed-to-the-teeth USA Consulate to a schizophrenic. I am sure that if the placards were saying anything credible, they would be quickly objected against and removed. I once simply picked up an abandoned placard outside the Consulate and instantly put the hidden army of policemen and plain clothes spooks watching on red alert. How much all this patrolling and armed response costs the taxpayer is not known. It must be a substantial sum.

Oh, dear Hong Kong bloggers - if you don't get the reference in the headline, here it is. You can also watch a documentary about it here. The phrase is actually one of Walter Lippman's, another author you all know nothing about. That's my bit for enlightening you all done this week.

Just When You Thought It Safe To Go To A Bookshop

My fan (see below) has announced that he intends to republish all the Adams oeuvre by the summer, all six volumes of it. In the old days I would willingly join in promoting my books (meeting journalists and even taking them to lunch) but this is to announce that I will definitely not take any part in this venture apart from perhaps writing a new foreword to books like Games Hong Kong People Play (saying largely that nothing much has changed). The reason is that reading what one wrote almost twenty years ago is embarrassing (in the case of Games or the Novel) or devastating (in reading the short stories). I read one of the short stories called A Night In Chung King aloud once, and broke down during the second paragraph, not because it is particularly well written but because the original inspiration and characters came back to me. Next time you ask a writer to read some of his work or get him to do an audiobook version, think about that. So there the volumes sit on the bookshelf, unread and untouched in fifteen or twenty years. I hope you can find more in them than I can. And thank you Anthony.

First Aid For Those Subjected To RTHK 'Hospital' Radio

'

Professor' Richard Tsang Yip-fat, the former Head of RTHK Radio Four, sacked from the headship of English Programming at RTHK following a conviction for Misconduct in Public Office instigated by the ICAC and now reportedly going straight at HKIEd. Yet the legacy lives on...

The Internet has saved us. Working for RTHK Radio 4 under the subsequently convicted Richard Tsang Yip-fat was the most depressing experience of my life. Tsang returned to Hong Kong from a stint as minor producer at Classic FM in the UK and turned the only classical station in Hong Kong into a horrible copy of the British ritual murder of musical culture. Ratings rose for a while - the shock factor - then sank abysmally. The legacy of Tsang's 'New Radio 4' lives on though in bitty pieces of junk discs, selected at random by a computer programme designed for pop music stations: Powergold. Why change a losing formula? Tsang meanwhiile lost his appeal(s) and has found a safe bolt hole at HKIEd at public expense, teaching students solidly and repeatedly rejected by every degree-conferring institution in Hong Kong. Good on yer, Richard. Curiously, the short bio of 'Professor' (although HKIEd is not a university) Richard Tsang Yip-fat omits his conviction for Misconduct In Public Office.

Fortunately however, we no longer have to put up with lobotomy hospital radio like RTHK. Click on the illustrations below. I often listen on my iPhone through Peoples Phone's incredible HK$ 78.00 a month unlimited EDGE data offer. And blow PCCW too, whilst we're on.

181.FM's Comedy Club deliberately chooses all the offensive, politically incorrect but hilarious comedians the United States can produce, plus Jasper Carrott.

1.FM's Otto's Opera House offers whole operas back-to-back 24/7. No interruptions, no tortoise-paced, linguistically-challenged Lo King-man telling you the plot. They also take requests. Marvellous. And no dumb RTHK 4 jingles giving the 'composers' even more public money. When DID those royalty demands run out, by the way? Or was it all cash one off and up front?

Meanwhile, In Australia...

Welcome to the world's first Murdochracy

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger goes back to Australia, where Rupert Murdoch launched his worldwide media empire, and describes how his and Murdoch's homeland has become a murdochracy - a country where important media, issues and perception are influenced if not dominated by Murdochism: "an inspiration to his choir on seven continents".

Adelaide is Australia’s festival city. Its arts festival is currently in swing. Polite debate, aesthetics and high-octane wine are putting the world to rights. With one exception. Adelaide is where Rupert Murdoch began his empire. The voracious trail starts here. No statue stands; his is a spectral presence, controlling the only daily newspaper, even the printing presses. Across Australia, he owns almost 70 per cent of the capital city press and the only national newspaper, and Sky Television, and much else. Welcome to the world’s first murdochracy.

What is a murdochracy? It is where the fealty and augmentation of Murdoch’s editors and managers are undisguised, an inspiration to his choir on seven continents, where even his competitors sing along and wise politicians heed the Murdochism: “What’ll it be? A headline a day or a bucket of shit a day?" More....

Even In Hong Kong You Can Get Real

This week: George Galloway - Why People Hate America

Cliché Watch

This week: SCMP and Edo de Waart

When I used to write and edit the artist profiles for the Naxos web site, I always eschewed or deleted the term 'maestro' as it was hardly ever applicable to the people involved. Anyone who has heard de Faart's murder of Rachmaninov on Phillips will know that it is certainly not applicable to him.

NTSCMP Introduces Hong Kong Inbound Traveller Alert System

As a further service to readers, we are pleased to announce our Hong Kong Inbound Traveller Alert System with immediate effect.

GREEN - The usual chaotic mix of clueless Mainlanders squatting at street corners gawping, scratching their groins and smoking foul cigarettes. Groups of them being led around Lan Kwai Fong to see the white trash human zoo. Isolated pockets of Australian and British tourists in socks and sandals and huge American women in spandex shorts sucking Haagen Dazs, all carrying lots of cheap shopping. Nothing much to worry about.

AMBER - US Fleet's in, Rugby Sevens week and Mainland holidays excluding Lunar New Year. Avoid Wanchai, Stanley Market and basically anywhere else remotely touristy and get out a big hardback book to hide behind until trouble subsides. Stick to beer.

RED - Lunar New Year and German Buyers' Weeks in September/October. Now is the time to call the helplines and develop that harder alcohol habit you were always curious about. Booze has never been so cheap. Who can blame you? Avoid taxis and talking to civil servants/Fortress or PCCW staff as they will only tip you over the edge.

BLACK - That only happened at the Handover in 1997 when foreign journalists decended upon the Territory looking for people to interview and will never happen again. Honest.

The Greatest Music You Will Ever Hear

An excerpt from Tippett's Corelli Fantasia (1953).

It's 25 years almost exactly since I first met Michael Tippett or Sir Michael Tippett, OM (1905-1998), the only composer of note, besides Britten, England produced in the 20th Century. I interviewed him at some length one morning and some of it was broadcast on Swiss National Radio. It was in Gosforth in the North of England and a dull day. He was tired after a party and a performance he conducted of the Corelli Fantasia in Stockton of all places the evening before but soon livened up after a coffee or two. Tippett's mind was the quickest I have ever encountered. When I next spoke to him it was in Vienna a few years later and he was sat waiting for his luggage in the airport arrival hall. I would spend the whole week watching him rehearse his extraordinary Symphony No 4 (an overwhelmingly moving but defiant 'birth-to-death piece' which includes the sound of human breathing to begin and end the work, usually synthesised by a wind machine) with the Vienna Symphony. He put his arm around me, and my wife and we went for kir royal at his hotel. He loved life. The question remains: is it great English music or great music? I think it is great music. The forecast was that Tippett's music would die with him but surely it never can.

The Nausea That Is Parkview

Vague suicidal thoughts cross my mind as I wander around Parkview this morning. Alienation falls on me like Meursault at the beach. The horror, the horror. A mass of humanity willingly living in a bricked-in, dehumanized, air-conditioned luxury slum. Odd and hilarious works of 'art' and reproduction furniture lurk in the entrance lobbies to further taunt the sensibilities. A maid walks a paunchy pooch, anomalous in legless Metroland. She cannot smile. The mists swirl, the limousines and minivans trundle by and the taxis fester. Who could blame Mrs Kissel? Is this the key evidence they missed? The effect of Parkview on the psyche. The ultimate mitigation. Murder is only an extroverted suicide after all.

Top Gear

This week: Sheung Wan

National People's Congress Double Act Shock

Dog Pram Of The Month

Because of the popularity of this NTSCMP feature, we have brought forward our update, originally intended for the end of this new month.

NTSCMP - always there for you.

Park 'N' Shop Supersavers

A few weeks ago, the world's most expensive supermarket was offering very good coffee under the French Planteur brand for HK$22.50 a 250g pack. Of course it was too good to last and the cheaper Planteur line is now replaced by its most expensive. Consumers fall victim to the coffee cartel in Hong Kong at Wellcome too. In the UK, PoundLand and other budget supermarkets sell similar packs of ground coffee for, yes, a pound (HK$ 12.00). In Hong Kong the mark-up for coffee is at least 100% and more often 300-400%. Why in such a large and 'open' market is the consumer exploited so viciously and so universally?

Humour In Uniform

Gourmet Choice

How are the sheep medicated? Do the Australians breathe on them? I will try it. If I am not seen again, it has been nice knowing you all and there is no bill for the free entertainment I have provided you with all these years.

Better a packet from the supermarket than a meal at a Hong Kong restaurant, in most cases. Anyone who eats out regularly in Hong Kong must be a fool. The biggest problem is hygiene. Food is nearly always undercooked and handled horribly. When I ate out regularly in Hong Kong, I got gastroenteritis three times a year.

The second concern is the outrageous price demanded for rubbish, which is an insult to one’s human dignity. Here in Stanley we see the frozen chips delivered to all the 'Italian' restaurants. The European food is cooked by Indians and the Indian food is cooked by Nepalis. The Swiss owner lights up another cigar and has a good laugh at your expense.

The last time I ate ‘European’ food out at the seafront here I got pizza on shortcrust pastry. The patron of that restaurant, an Englishman on two or three packs of box wine a day, passed away recently. Who could blame him for drinking himself to death, serving up bilge day in and day out for thirty years? It must have been so depressing.

As far as restaurants go in Hong Kong, I fart in their general direction. The delights of the home kitchen await – clean, fresh, tasty, cheap and wine not from a cardboard box. The problem is that most local girls can’t cook. But they love you when you serve up the simplest spaghetti and the knickers fall like rose petals...

Incidentally, I once called up Hemlock and he said he was cooking. After further enquiry, it turned out he was warming up what one of his Filipina elves had prepared for him.

Hong Kong Expat Cooking (definition): ‘Using the microwave.’

TIP: Never stay in a restaurant if you hear that familiar ‘ping’.

P.S.: I heated it up, took one whiff and threw it all down the toilet. Sorry. You will just have to put up with me a while longer.

Corruption Now

This week: Stanley Plaza and Waterfront Mart

Not content with transforming the Stanley waterfront into a sweep of desolate concrete to encourage marching hordes of Mainland shoppers, the Stanley powers-that-be are soon to set about the relatively pleasant and well-disguised Plaza shopping centre. Let's hope it is not the new look in the picture - parched grass, useless boulders, litter and empty shops.

For some reason, the Plaza owners, the Link Reit, publicly-owned but you wouldn't know it, recently brought Starbucks and Mannings to the Plaza, as if urban dwellers would miss those amenities on Sunday afternoons. The only remaining bank in Stanley (we used to have three) is set to close. This is a branch of the Bank of China and is no doubt reeling under the Reit's greedy increases in rent which have banished many small, socially-useful traders (one of them sold cheap stationery to local schoolchildren) to backstreets in the Market. The Reit seems intent on encouraging luxury goods outlets as tenants, as if there aren't enough of those in Central and elsewhere.

It is unclear what role the Lis have in driving up the rents. They already have almost a whole floor in Stanley Plaza - and are the biggest tenants. Their new-concept delicatessen-cum-supermarket TASTE deliberately excludes from it shelves the cheaper goods available at its other supermarkets in favour of fifty-dollar-apiece apples. There is also a branch of Watsons Wines (similar wines to Park N Shop in many cases but double the price).

To see the 6 am soup kitchen in Stanley Market is to know there are several non-millionaires in Stanley.

The centre-piece attraction of the waterfront meanwhile is now a Pizza Express. The so-called Waterfront Mart is a row of empty shops and plastic-seat eateries which encroach on the peace of the park area with hot dogs and overpriced beer. Many local notables seem to have grabbed publicly-subsidised storage space there and offer service neither to the community nor to visitors.

What is it about Stanley's urban planners which makes them so tacky and unimaginative? Why do they spend public money for the benefit of the rich and local grandees? Why do they appear to be so corrupt?

Red Packets

Adams 65, Hemlock 37

When you are mentioned in a book sixty-five times, you have to sit up and take notice. Anthony Solloway is my fan. He has without prompting and with only the odd can of Carlsberg as a reward, rescued my books from the litter bins and remaindered tables of second-hand outlets all over Hong Kong. Unlike my former wife, who never read a bit of it, he has even read all of the Adams oeuvre. I love him.

In 1991, I fell sick with Lyme Disease, if you believe the medical doctors, and with the vapours if you believe your own instincts. I also compiled my first book called Transactional Analysis in Education. It was a big hit in Poland. The book was the result of a paroxysm of frustration and bewilderment caused by the Hong Kong education system.

Sadly, twenty years on, the conditions which inspired my first book have not changed and a new generation of perplexed and more than slightly angry foreign English teachers has been produced. I dip into Anthony's book occasionally and have to give up after a while as waves of melancholy descend upon me. Nothing has changed. The schools are under-funded, the classrooms are noisy and full. The teachers are lazy and depressed, the administrators are cynical and in the end the poor pupils are walking dictionaries and rote-taught morons, incapable of original thought. Only recently did Hong Kong spend more of its GDP on education than most African countries.

Like most self-published authors - not me of course - Anthony could do with an editor. The cover also makes the book's author and subject hard to discern. Yet one is swept along by the sheer awfulness of the system he describes and the enormous waste of human potential it represents. It is first-rate reading for people in education or for those, like Hemlock, who have only a tenuous relationship with it. He gets thirty-seven mentions.

You can read sample pages of Does It Have to Be Like This?: Education and Socialisation in Hong Kong on Amazon. It should also be in bookshops in Hong Kong.

Well worth the outlay.

Top Gear

This week : Wanchai and Stanley Market

Advertising Today

Oh damn. I feel an NTSCMP coming on.

Kökssaker

Behöver du hjälp i köket? Vi har grejerna! Vi har samlat ett gäng smarta saker som gör att du slipper citronkärnor i salladen. Matlagningsverktyg som har flera funktioner, som gör att du slipper diska onödigt mycket samt några smarta och smarriga köks- och matböcker. Kolla speciellt in boken Hjälp jag är med kök, zestjärnet, citruspressen Catcher och pastasleven med parmesanrivare. Måste även slå ett slag för matlagningsverktyget Combination som är matlagningspincett och serveringssked, du kan servera med en hand!

(Spotter: Andrew Boddington, Oxford Tutors, Putney Branch, London, UK.)

Dog Pram Of The Month

Still Angry After All These Years

Oh hell. Here we go again. This site has had more restarts than the Hong Kong Democrats.

The real news is not from Hong Kong. It's from Libya. Our good friend Mr Gaddafi has promised Jihad on the Swiss for arresting some of his family and getting him all in a bother. This raises the interesting prospect of bullets and mayhem in the home of apathy and smugness. The Swiss condescended to join the United Nations in 2002. Maybe they will soon have to join NATO and the EU. Good on yer Muammar.

So why the absence? Well, I have been writing some books. And starting up a business. Blogs these days are like butt holes. Everyone has one and mostly they stink. In 1995, when NTSCMP started up, we were called-an e-zine and were vaguely anarchic. I managed to sack a Post editor. Life was sweet. Nowadays, the only anarchy on the Internet is when MI6 decides not to cache you. Or when Twitter crashes.

And the best story in recent weeks, apart from Mr Gaddafi? That was The Times which actually managed to name eight young victims of our horrible aggressive war in Afghanistan on its front page. Taliban means student. Anyone carrying a book in Afghanistan is fair game for our glorious bringers of democracy.

Times have changed. When we start to contemplate the John Pilger doctrine, that the only gauge of good governance is how few innocent people any regime wipes out, all the Obama hysteria recedes and we are left blinking at yet another PR move in Washington.

Hong Kong isn't particularly important in that, unless we manage to uncover a few arms dealers and spooks. There are lots of them in Hong Kong, one presumes.

Watch this space.