Where we're going, we don't need roads

Back from Hong Kong, a chance to reflect and indulge in a spot of philosophical musing on the nature of time, progress and so forth.

Watching fave comfort-film Back to the Future last night may have brought this on. Or perhaps it was the fact that Peter was clearing out some old papers today and came across an envelope which he was supposed to post to the Premium Bonds people to tell them he’d moved house. In 1967.

Anyway, ever since we arrived in China, we’ve been saying how it feels like being in a time warp. Obvious examples of modern technology such as the internet and ubiquitous mobile phones aside, it has very much the feel of the UK in say, the mid-1980s. It’s not just the prevalence of poodle perms. It’s the sense of optimism, combined with conspicuous consumerism by the rich while facilities and infrastructure have to advance by leaps and bounds to try to keep up (and don’t always succeed), and while others still struggle in poverty.

Chinese cities are full of people who make a living collecting and selling rubbish for recycling – plastic water bottles, old cardboard, you name it. You sometimes see pictures of them with the rubbish piled high on the backs of their bikes (or occasionally donkey-carts). We call them ‘tub-thumpers’, as they ride the streets thumping loudly and continuously on an empty oil drum attached to the handle-bars to advertise their presence, sometimes shouting out as well, in a way which reminds me of the rag-and-bone man who still used to call round our area in his horse-drawn cart when I was a kid in the 70s. But I suspect that within ten years they’ll be gone, as China continues to rev up to 88mph and propel itself into the future, obliterating everything which could possibly mark it out as a ‘developing’ country.

There’s no doubt about it though - if in China it’s about 1986, in Hong Kong it’s roughly 1974. Admittedly due to our unfortunate medical experience we didn’t see much of it, but we drove through it, I managed a bit of shopping on the last day, and you get a feel for a place. Much of it had a very slightly seedy, run-down feel; the hospital and hotel were decorated in beige and chintz and appeared to be run by Peter’s grandparents, but I kind of liked it. They had proper, old-fashioned trams. Troupes of schoolgirls in white dresses could be seen, shepherded by nuns. I found this brilliant arcade of little shops selling cool clothes at reasonable prices. As China is coming up in the world, Hong Kong is definitely going down and is no longer where it’s at, but I found this preferable to China’s immense, glitzy malls full of over-priced shops, no customers and bored staff who pounce on you and try to push their most expensive items on you all the time.

Maybe it’s my age, as they say, but I do find myself yearning for a simpler time. A time when I wouldn’t have had to phone my credit card company yesterday to ask them to reactivate my card, due to the fact that I had to pay a deposit of $20,000HK (about £1600) on admission to hospital, and even though I had phoned them in August and told them I was moving to China they were only allowed to record that I would be here for 90 days, after which I would have to phone them again and tell them I would be here for another 90 days, and so on, and even though the HK payment was in China and was within the 90 days, and even though the hospital subsequently cancelled the payment anyway because they got clearance from our insurers that my bills would be covered, the credit card people STILL thought it was fraudulent and stopped my card without contacting me to check.

I mean, what kind of a world are we living in here? Call me a cynic, but surely most self-respecting credit card thieves would go on a splurge and buy designer goods or fly to exotic destinations with their ill-gotten gains? Not think, ‘Ooh, I know, I’ll check myself into a crappy hospital in Hong Kong for a spot of freeloading puking’.

On the other hand, simpler times are often over-rated. This we discovered when a light-bulb going in our bedroom at 11.30pm last night tripped a fuse which took out the power to the whole flat. (Just in case we were getting lulled into a false sense of security by not having any disasters befall us for at least three days.) This led to 12 hours without electricity, a freezer full of ruined food, and a few panicky Sunday morning calls to our poor long-suffering interpreter, Kevin, who eventually a) established that we had not – quite – run out of credit on our meter, and b) got a security guard to come up, flip a switch behind a locked panel outside our front door, and hey presto everything beeped and flashed and was working again.

Honestly, will this never end?

I’m now thinking of investing in a DeLorean. The only trouble is, I can’t quite decide whether to set the time coordinates forwards or backwards.