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In Times Square leech-like silver pods slide in grooves to the summit of the mall and down again. I de-pod at ground level and find myself in a piazza of distraught faces tilted towards a forty foot screen relaying the live news of a kidnapping. The words of the anguished father issue crystal-clear from loudspeakers concealed in beds of white lilies.

In the underground, on the up escalator a woman in a super-short skirt and attitude to spare, clicks out into the street ahead of me but six steps down Cameron Street to scissor adroitly into the cream leather upholstery of a jade Porsche. Into this aerodynamic sarcophagus an unseen hand seals her with a click.

I am loitering on a street corner. I hear a growing roar, look up at the space that was the sky, above the tangle of neon, the street signs, the washing. For three seconds the sky falls dark with the massive bulk of a 747. Then it is light again. This is one of the most moving things I have ever experienced, the most deeply visceral. The beauty, the massive aerodynamism of the plane above the mottled decrepitude of a tenement building; the shocking closeness of one to the other, a juxtaposition we are so unused to with our judiciously sited out-of-town airports. During the next two days, like the adherent of a cargo cult, I move in a steady line through the streets beneath the flight path, ever closer to the airport, to sit on a bench at the crossing of Shep Rip Mei street and Berwick Street eating noodles and watching the airliners flounder in preposterously over the rooftops, landing gear fatly bunched, descending improbably, to greet the tarmac with a smoky little kiss.

The music of Hong Kong; the bass of the pile driver, the rattle of pneumatic drills, the curiously suggestive tak-tak-tak of the traffic lights as I stand in the street, eyes closed and press my hot cheek against the cool marble flank of an office building.

I am moved by the beauty of neon, the veil of acid greens and electric blues and candy pinks pulsing over the dark surface of the city. Clubnames in neon: Club Crystal, the Silver Club, Lipstick Club, Hotlips Club.

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