Thursday 17 September 2009: Onwards to Paris

The myriad of lights on an airport’s runaway at night is beguiling. One’s thoughts are one’s own rainbow. My thoughts are always the same. I remember the last moments of being in England on the 3rd of May 2005. I remember trying to evoke stirring national themes but thinking of none. The plane taking off. The last sight of the land where I was born being a motorway – I fancy the M25 – with a million people busying themselves with their ordinary lives. The flight attendant disturbing me and my looking way. On looking back a moment later my homeland had gone and a new one beckoned.

Leaving Hong Kong Pat’s thoughts were her own. It never gets easier, the only thing that stays the same is the predictability of it occurring. There aren’t any words for it, and the only thing I can do is be there for her if she needs me. One moment of quiet before another year of silence.

The flight was a night one. The odd thing about night flights is that unless you are very hard headed the whole of the preceding day seems somehow written off in your mind. Compounding this we had both discussed how this first leg of our holiday was the longest single continual stretch in any one place. We both felt we were only just settling down, and now how we were on the move already.

After yum cha in Aberdeen with Ho Dzi, Yi-Dje, MIL, Wen and Wing Hei, Pat went with her mother to sell some of her gold jewellery to a dealer. The price was good, and although we weren’t really in need of the money Pat had been wanting to do this for some time to get it out of the way. It was important that a gwai-lo wasn’t there, as the merchants would notoriously negotiate a worse deal. Pat and I went to Causeway Bay to pick up the new glasses. We bought an additional two pairs on the spot, and got a very good price. The Mandarin speaking gwai-lo next to us in the opticians paid similar glasses for twice the price we paid.

As we had to get back to Wah Kwai fairly soon we gave ourselves 30 minutes in Sogo. Essentially it was like a supermarket challenge where you could keep anything you could pick up in 5 minutes. We had 30, had a stack of cash from a gold sale, credit cards nowhere near the max, and absolutely no scruples about going nuts in this shop. We decided to split up. “Have fun” I said, perfectly sincerely, to Pat.

My 30 minutes started in the mens clothes department. It was a great time to buy, as the summer stock was being cleared, just as Australia was entering the hotter half of the year. And the prices were keen, and the exchange rate good. Hugo Boss spotted. Nah! A duck and a weave – Calvin Klein – my favourite. Unspeakable-Italian-name. A shimmy and an chicane to the AUD 600 jacket I liked. Nah! Actually, all I really wanted was a waistcoat, but I couldn’t find one. Abjectly, I left the menswear floor. I found the ceramics. My father is from The Potteries in England, Pat is Chinese with a master’s degree in Chinese antiquities. I used to proof read her cermanics essays. I really like ceramics, and the stuff on offer here was good. But the wonderful mugs were a bit too much. In the shoes department I heard the slurred Shrrrrrs, chrrrs of mandarin Chinese being spoken. I’ll digress for a moment.

I remember an article in the Economist in about 2002 when I lived in England about how the newly wealthy in mainland China were beginning to start a trend in global tourism, and tourist boards around the world were getting their first indication of what the mainland Chinese were interested in. With respect to England it was not the usual weighting of St Paul’s cathedral, and the standard diet of historic monuments, but included instead a small town about 70km outside London where the Clarks shoes factory outlet store was.

In Sogo the slurred sounds of mandarin were concentrated in the Clarks shoes concession.

The food hall offered no greater inspiration and so my attempt at flagrant materialist consumerism failed witheringly. Pat – who blew the 30 minute time bar we set by 15 additional minutes – wasn’t much better, having bought a few modest clothes for work.

We returned to Wah Gwai and packed. Said goodbye to family and got the taxi to the airport. The taxi driver had four mobile phones all arranged on top of the dashboard, the cab firm radio, two dangly things handing off the rear view mirror. What little windscreen real estate was left had undergone massive incursions by three enormous square window stickers, two identical ones boldly reading ‘JAPAN’ for no particularly good reason that I could make out. The continual procession of calls meant the driver bellowed at the top of voice all the way to the airport and frequently took his hands off the steering wheel while driving at 120 while he wrote down his bookings. If you can impagine the face of Daffy Duck as he says ‘Sufferin’ Suckertash’ after Bugs has done him over yet again, then that was my look at the end of this journey. I didn’t bother with an m’goi sai as we arrived at the airport.

Off all the shops that encapsulate how glib airports really are it is the newsagent-cum-bookstore. We are greeted by a wall of ‘business’ books. Some sad (male?), 39, greying executive: clever no doubt; the novelty of actually getting work to pay for business class having worn off and the tedious gap in time ever present, wondering how the next step up wasn’t simply gifted to him two years ago when senior management should obviously have seen his worth. Time is ebbing away and he’s paying this price for his family, of course.

The management books are nothing to do with success. They like diet advertisements are about transformation. Most diets don’t work and neither do most management books. It’s you that works.

Against expectations I did buy a book in the shop. Much as I admire Paul Theroux’s travel writing – let’s face it, it is the benchmark, I cannot but help admiring the sensitivity of Peter Hessler’s. River Town was amazing, so when I saw another by him I had no doubt it would be a treat.

As the duty free area faded and Gate 47 at Hong Kong airport approached it was not just Pat’s thoughts that were her own. For many –and for a long time that included me – airports were a beginning, be it to Bali, Las Vegas or Ibiza. Since 3 May 2005, regardless of the airport, they are a goodbye. I live in my own moment of quiet, for the things I left, for the heartache I created, for the opportunities gained, for the price we paid, always looking forward and always looking back.