Friends like these

Our good friend Rachel arrives in town! This is great news! And we find so many ways to welcome her!

Like, ignore her completely. When we have done that, then hastily arranged to meet up, Ace Tour Guide Grit welcomes her with great ceremony! Mostly by wearing dark glasses and jumping out from behind a pillar where she has been lurking incognito.

But from then on, it is a whirlwind day!

First, frog marching the innocent and obliging visitor round the old pot museum while the Ace Tour Guide delivers a lecture on glazing.

The Grit itinerary next causes our happy, long-suffering friend to be assaulted with a near-dead turtle, then led on a hopeless and misconceived tour of the back streets of Hong Kong markets.

Here, with increasing alarm, the Ace Tour Guide realises she is unable to navigate her way out of the stalls selling sex aids, assortments of plastic penises, strange unknowable things, thongs and vibrators. (Not that I took more than fleeting note of all of those.)

To complete this fantastic tour, the rapidly wilting, possibly silently despairing, but always agreeable and kind Rachel is dragged off to a backstreet Indian restaurant, from where she is thrown to scowling triplets, fleeced by a Mong Kok stallholder, then bundled into a taxi with a touching memento of her day (a $3 rabbit, dead).

Really, it is not the way it should go!

If we were to properly measure our delight in seeing Rachel drop from the sky, and honour her amiable and agreeable nature, she should be welcomed with singing flutes and dancing lions, transported on a night-time harbour trip, banqueted as guest of honour at the Shangri La, then given a gift bag from Shanghai Tang.

This would reflect our enjoyment when receiving visitors from other worlds! But no. There are firmer connections, for the gentle Rachel is now part of the wider Grit network of far-flung friends and thus can be treated with casual hellos and comfortable see you laters. Which, in a way, is even more delightful than the lions.

Of course, if you, like the lovely Rachel, are passing through Hong Kong, you are welcome to enjoy one of Grit's Fantastic Ace Tour Guides too. (I think we have been there before.)

Now available to known and friendly bloggers!

(However, please do not inform me of your travel plans through Hong Kong if you are an insane, knife-wielding murderer whose prime ambition is to scatter my limbs in Victoria Harbour.)