Wishing you all a twist of chaos for 2022!

New year 2022! Everyone’s feeling it… A fresh start. A time to move forward – hugs still hampered, kisses only for knuckleheads in knickerbockers, while coughing is still definitely de rigueur, but then seriously, it always was a no-no.

My To-Do list is the same as last year’s – finish my African memoir – The Lion behind the Anthill.  I so enjoyed the writing journey that I dilly-dallied on the way, plunging into innumerable rabbit holes while wrestling to fathom the naïve and clumsy younger me. I also needed to revisit the way it was then – before big tech put us constantly in touch all the time – back when headlines were just that – a teaser for the news article – rather than the whole story in a word grab.  

My African memoir is an entirely different book when compared to The Hong Kong Letters, because it is written AM - After Marriage. I marvel at how carelessly both Mike and I threw away our autonomous freedoms to become a harnessed team. Yet talking to Mike about the extraordinary adventures we had, has been a highlight of 2021 and would never have happened had I not embarked on the manuscript… or got married in the first place.

Mike and I a few days before we got married practising being in harness. Barnstaple, Devon June 1972

I’m still having a lot of fun with The Hong Kong Letters. I had a lovely email mid-year from Russell, a Hong Kong reader, who sent me a picture of the bookshop in Sheung Wan, a district on HK island, where he’d found my book: “… two tiny rooms overflowing with books in shelves, on the floor, on chairs and in boxes.”

I looked and thought, ‘How on earth would anyone find anything in such chaos?! How random that The Hong Kong Letters landed on the top of the pile!’

And then I thought, we need more chaos. We’re channelled by the web that suggests books by an author, or in a genre, we have read before. It seems cute and caring to help us save time making choices. Yet, is it? I think back to literary discoveries at book sales or, as a backpacker, ferreting around hostel bookshelves for anything in English. Most searches left me feeling Germans were the largest cohort of reader-backpackers.  Now of course, I take my kindle. How convenient. It is, but oh, how tame, a little less of an adventure, not forced to read anything oddball... or consider learning German!

In 1973, Mike and I lived in Egypt. Newspapers were censored, as was our mail, and we quickly ran out of anything to read. We lived in a Mess with pilots and engineers, and exchanged what we had. So it was that I, a little priggish, discovered Playboy Magazine actually had good articles! Don’t ask me how the pilots got those well-thumbed editions through Customs, when my Penguin modern Russian classics were confiscated.

Thinking back on 2021, the lockdowns, restrictions and controls, pushed me out into the chaos of alternative news channels, threw my assumed allegiances into turmoil and forced me to devise my own fact-checking for fake news. Invigorating and surprisingly scary, I settled into a newfound emancipation, which is one of many positive aspects of the past year.

I wish you all a healthy, calm and peaceful New Year – with just a twist of comfortable chaos.

Memories of The Sea Palace

The Sea Palace lights up Aberdeen Harbour in the 1960s. Hong Kong.

I’ve had two visits to Hong Kong this year, 2019, promoting the local edition of my memoir, The Hong Kong Letters, published by Hong Kong’s own Blacksmith Books.

I sank back into Hong Kong with a familiarity and an affection that really took me by surprise. Hong Kong has changed enormously as we all know and the pace of that change has accelerated with the current volatility. While its spectacular harbour and the march of high-rise up Victoria Peak is so iconic, Hong Kong’s real essence rests with the people. Polite and solicitous, Hongkongers have defined themselves as a brand. Over the course of its history, Chinese from the mainland arrived to join those already in the territory, and have adopted an unusual lineage as part of their own.

Aberdeen - the original ‘Fragrant Harbour’

There were many places that I wanted to get back to and one of those was Aberdeen. It was such an extraordinary place in the 1960s, I might have hesitated fearing the change. But on my visits this year I realised that I could not complain that the Hong Kong that I rememered was not the same for neither am I. And I found I could treasure my memories without sacrificing my curiosity for the present. I didn’t visit Aberdeen in the end because I simply ran out of time.

Aberdeen harbour, fishing port and home to the Tanka boat people, was one of the most colourful places to visit in the 1960s. The Tanka had perfected a long established and elaborate tradition of living well afloat.

Aberdeen Harbour scene from Love is a Many-Splendored Thing

The famous floating restaurants

Like many foreigners, my initial visit to Aberdeen was to dine on one of two famous floating restaurants. Film directors too could rarely resist that scene, where prosperity and paucity coincided with such picturesque charm. And that’s wonderful because unusually for the time, they shot the Aberdeen scenes on location and we can be transported back to visit the extraordinary lifestyle of the people who lived among the sprawling maze of planks and ropes that joined small junks and sampans moored in the shadow of the magnificent fishing fleet which swung at anchor in the deeper water.

It was October 1968 when I had my first dinner at The Sea Palace. The floating hulk had been built in the 1950s and was a restaurant for fifty years. It had been designed with the famous Marble Boat, at the Summer Palace in Peking*, in mind. My boss, Patrick O’Neil-Dunne, (known as P-O-D) insisted that The Sea Palace had better food as demonstrated by the greater number of Chinese patrons and fewer tourists than frequented its competitor, the Tai Pak Floating Restaurant.

The journey to The Sea Palace was part of the experience

It was early evening when a woman in black wearing her traditional straw Hakka hat, propelled us across Aberdeen harbour using a bamboo steering pole. The tiny sampan was home to her whole family. A small girl ignored us, concentrating on her homework, while washing hung on lines strung round the craft. When we reached The Sea Palace, completely covered in lights, its bulk dwarfed our sampan and its tiny lantern.  I watched while the sampan turned and soon was swallowed up in the busy harbour.

POD took my arm, “Come on, we’ll get another sampan ride home,” and ushered me toward the waiters, impatient for us to start make the selection for our meal. There was no menu, they simply hauled battered rattan baskets up over the side from the sea below. We had to select from fish, crabs, rainbow lobster, octopus, eels and crayfish. I was overwhelmed by that idea, so POD took charge and ordered our party an enormous quantity of seafood. His choices were tossed into a basket with our table number.

The whole meal was accompanied by warm rice wine. And afterwards POD, keen to make my first visit memorable, insisted that the restaurant’s time-honoured photos were taken, escorting me to the ‘throne’.

I put these up recently on a Hong Kong in the 60s Facebook page and received some wonderful comments including one where it was recommended never to wear the beard which never got washed!

I will go back to Hong Kong and next time I will visit Aberdeen. I’m not sure I will go to the new JUMBO Kingdom Floating Restaurant with it's seating for 700 diners. I might find somewhere a little less flamboyant without POD to call the shots.

* At the time The Sea Palace was designed, Beijing was still more commonly referred to by the old name Peking.