Oh God Not the Parade Again

Frankly I dread this moment of obligation.

When all Hong Kong must fetch up at the Chanel end of Canton Road at exactly the same time BY LAW to attend the New Year's Parade.

Lonely Planet once stupidly suggested this event was great, an unnecessarily hyperbolic word which can only suggest the editor accepted a bung.

It is the most tedious horrible celebration of naked advertising that anyone could dream up. A plastics factory output of branded floats trundle by for what feels like decades. At the end of it your brain is saturated by Cathay Pacific and the Jockey Club.

In between the floats, trek the dance troupes, glamour girls and marching bands. To their credit, they endeavour to whip us into a frenzy of hoo-hah, I suppose to wrestle the whole charade into a carnival-type atmosphere, but it is a doomed attempt.

We know, and they know, that corporate sponsorship is far too important to mess with, so beneath the thin skim we can only see fake joy, organised celebration, oiled progress, and professional marketing.

But I enjoyed the event better this year. Mostly because half way through we escaped the crowd control police to find a rice burger and chips. I also amused the juvenile part of my brain by photographing a promotional chocolate milkshake and a pair of sex shoes.



Now, back to the parade with some dragons and a giant fish (the latter probably advertising a restaurant).

National Day, Hong Kong

Can you imagine what would happen if Great Britain were to actually have a National Day rather than just argue about it?

Everyone would get upset and fight over their vision of what that should mean. London would arrange the party, Scotland wouldn't come. Cornwall would get the hump. Northern Ireland would send hate mail. Wales would speak Welsh to piss everyone off. EDL would hijack the event and someone somewhere would declare independence and lock themselves in the bathroom.

It would all end up in a big mess with everyone slagging each other off. We'd be totally united by discord, then we could all properly enjoy a national moment of irony.

Round here it is National Day.

Not for Hong Kong, obviously. It's National Day for the People's Republic of China. Which means that in Hong Kong, southern colony of Beijing, we get the might of political power uninterrupted by the noise of democracy.

Simply put, we are having fun and celebrating National Day. Shut up.

To make doubly sure, China has several hundred barrels of gunpowder lined up against Victoria Harbour, aimed at the IFC.* Each contains enough incendiary to blow your money sky high. Or they can send up a lot of happy fireworks which you can watch and cheer as the mother country reminds everyone who's boss.

China is in charge, and don't doubt it for one second. Any idea that Hong Kong is semi-autonomous? Well, that's all it is, an idea.

The Pearl River Delta megacity is proceeding nicely with infrastructure projects, financial centres, transport links and a dotted line on a map dividing Hong Kong and Shenzhen which can be removed when they print new maps.

It won't take too long in the Chinese long vision for matters legal, financial, and administrative to merge. If Hong Kong does put up resistance, China can simply switch in the parallel financial centre that operates out of Guangzhou.

Education is power, propaganda, and control, so no surprise that all schools in Hong Kong, primary upwards, are to include National Education as a taught subject. Some whiny churchman has had a little grizzle that it's 'brainwashing' (a bit rich coming from him, really) but somehow I don't think a few minor complaints will stand in the way of the national educational syllabus.

Then we have elections coming up for Hong Kong's Chief Executive. But don't assume that word 'election' means the same here as it does in London, or that Hong Kong's Chief Executive is anything like Boris. Here it means a group of Chinese officials decide which puppet to put in place in that happy alliance of interests between Hong Kong, Beijing, and the property developers.

So, given the choice, to cheer or not, the Grit family stays home. I declare my loyalties by catching up on old episodes of Coronation Street, Dig hides in his office to plot his retirement route, and Shark, Squirrel and Tiger take photographs of Arseface in a variety of hand-made ballgowns.

And you, people of Great Britain, should fall about your ongoing debates of nationhood, to be or not to be, as loudly, energetically and good naturedly as possible, because that is a very great freedom you have. Indeed, I hope you get nowhere with the plans, that you never have a National Day, but that you can just continue to enjoy a bloody great argument.


*IFC? The shopping mall is merely front of house.

And if you want to see how China reports the Hong Kong experience, with all the joyous brimming with cheer and jubilance, go here.

Must see Hong Kong: Ridiculous shoes

Walk down any street in Hong Kong, and you can spot them. Women so thin they can turn themselves sideways to slip through the crack in a pair of closed doors. They measure their boob size in microns, dress in size zero clothing hanging lose about their bodies, and they teeter on the most ridiculous shoes you can possibly imagine.

No, I take that back. Imagination alone is not powerful enough to conjure up the footwear I see. I swear, some of these creations have been invented in a machine. You drop into this machine your chosen items - chain mail, concrete block, cat, formica desk top - then you press a button and out rolls a pair of shoes that combines all the properties of your unique materials assortment.

Seriously, I tried to photograph such fantastic objects. They resembled a pair of metal sandals on wooden stilts fastened together by the tails of small furry animals twisted like ropes.

Unfortunately they were lashing some woman's calves at the time, so I failed. You try tip toeing behind a woman while you are bent double with a camera pointed up her legs and your daughter is dragging you urgently by the hair to come away because the decency police are heading in your direction.

So I have succeeded only in capturing this rather mundane pair of ordinary sandals. They merely look so wretchedly uncomfortable her feet are trying to escape from them. Or perhaps they are meant to be worn like this, and this is currently in fashion. In this city, who knows?


The strange thing is, ridiculous shoes that you cannot possibly walk in are ubiquitous out here. They are no indicator of job, social status, ability to think. You just have to be female, aged between teen and thirty-teen, and have a wish to enter an infantilising sexualised cartoon culture. In fact, in this age group, any girl in possession of a sensible pair of footwear in which she can actually walk is probably in violation of her right to look like a two dimensional stick thin version of Betty Boop.

I might not have been out here long, but I've seen business women in smart suits who quite frankly should get a grip. Literally. They try to stride along the walkways in red heels that shout, One false move and you fall off a cliff. It's just me, obviously, but to my way of thinking, trying to look serious while lurching around like a ship is never convincing. And I could not imagine being listened to for my review on profit and loss while below ankle height I modelled myself on a streetwalker. But hey! This is Hong Kong and maybe women like to enter a culture where the higher your shoes, the better you can wobble.

But for real entertainment, go to the malls. I have seen ladies who live their entire existence shopping in Prada and Valentino stand in one place pretending to examine the shop windows of Gucci in great detail. Actually, thanks to the eight-inch heels, they are unable to put one foot in front of the other. They may have stood in that position for days, figuring out what to do next. Once, I saw one of them attempt to board an escalator. It outdid freakshow cabaret. She made several false starts before taking the plunge and tilting her heel on those piercing metal teeth of the moving tread. One misjudgment and the entire audience watches death about his work.

But sometimes you see these foot sculptures truly where they belong. Not floating about the heads of shoe designers who probably regret the decline of foot binding, but on the feet of the tiny ladies in the company of enormous, red-faced, beer-bellied European men. Yes, you guessed it. The lady of the pair is Asian and can hide behind a wine glass stem, while the gentleman of the pair needs to open both double doors and, with a bit of rear shoving from the general public, might just pop through to the other side. I kindly assume that in this partnership that there is a real meeting of minds and some hard core intellectual discussion involving Nietzsche and Jean Paul Sartre. What else could it be? Surely, not the shoes?