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Guidebooks to most destinations generally 'do the right thing'. when it comes to the subject of hospitality: "the people from X are noted for their hospitality" we invariably learn. No writer about HK would even waste time pretending this was true. Indeed the anxious to please Lonely Planet guide specifically says: "HK is best known for the rudeness of its people." Yes, it goes on gallantly to demur but doesn't bother too much. And how does it feel? After one day you get into it, this "Fuck you" attitude. It is liberating.

The armoured security vans have the faceted profile of a Stealth bomber; teams of men, one to carry the box, one to carry the gun. How strange that in this world of almost chimerical financial dealings, transport of money must still be done by a man with a box and a man with a gun.

In the markets great flocks of cheap alarm clocks twitter together like starlings. I add to my watch collection: an Omega here, a Cartier there; oh the jackdaw glitter of the South East Asian watch stall; how I love the very worst, the most perfunctory of forgeries; how I treasured my now lost Cartier imitaion…so far removed from its original that it had shed an I and become more prosaic: CARTER

There is a transparency about Hong Kong; the rudeness is part of it; you know where you are. But there is a tolerance also ( a sort of don't give a toss, can't be bothered to do anything about it sort of tolerance; the best sort of tolerance, that is.) Beneath the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank on Sundays about 4000 Filipina maids on their afternoon off picnic (indeed, practically cook meals), do each other's hair, listen to music. Nobody seems to find this an inappropriate use of the ground level atrium of the most famous building in HK, the one actually on the banknotes. Whether they will be there on the Sundays after July 1998 I don't know enough to say. Somehow you can't imagine the new landlords operating with the same laissez faire. The HK and Shanghai Bank has an imposing hi-tech sobriety but (whatever it may say about my architectural tastes) I like as much the twin towers of the adjacent Lippo building, rather sexy in name; sexy anyhow in the ceaseless procession of office girls clicking through the fountain-lulled atria on their way from one part of Central to another. For it is possible here to walk great distances alternating
between a subway here, an overpass there; into the welcome air-conditioned embrace of one block, through and past the fountains of the next, while the buses and trams snarl outside in the heat.

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