FINDING GOD WITHOUT RELIGION.

 

Using the word 'god' is problematic in a discussion regarding how the universe came into being.  It is difficult, neigh, impossible to mention the term without associating it with religion; not just one, but any religion, past and present.

Atheists say that mankind created God no matter what religion we are talking about.  In a sense that is correct, but it isn't necessarily fair.  The god that I am going to propose in this blog, as potentially existing, is not defined by religion and must be divorced from it entirely.  In fact, let's leave the word 'god' out of it and consider instead a self-aware cosmos.  It is something that humankind has considered a possibility since it became self-aware enough to contemplate the nature of existence itself.

Each one of us possesses self-awareness that popped into existence, seemingly, from nowhere and yet atheists find the idea of another life after this one, ridiculous.  Think about this: if an amino acid, the foundation of all life, was floating around the cosmos and had the ability to imagine becoming the life form that we are, would it not think the possibility as fantastical as we do the idea of an afterlife?  Had we been able, we would never have conceived of this lifeform that we have become in the first place?  This, basically, is what mystifies us.  We've won the lottery once.  What are the chances of it happening again?

It is possible that as our brains evolve, we may come to understand how our life and intellect came to be, but I believe we are so far from that happening that, in comparison to that level of awareness, we are as microbes floating about in a pool of sludge.  Before that happens, we will upload our consciousness into an advanced computer to where there is little hope of it evolving further, once it is set into a computer chip.  We will just be happy to have made our unevolved conscious, eternal; that is, until we begin to fester in our inability to change or move forward.

The thought of this made me contemplate something.  For many years I have considered that the universe, at some level, is self-aware and intelligent.  In fact, I'm certain of it.  I came up with the notion myself without reading books on philosophy, however, I have recently been reading of the idea of a pan consciousness by some philosophers, which is basically along the same lines as my thoughts.  I'm not surprised as it's a consideration many people who ponder the mystery of life would have come up with.  

My other thought is that this cosmic intellect has reached into life forms that have developed adequate brains so that they share its self-awareness and can wonder at the nature of existence.  Then I had a new consideration, and it arose from this: I am prone to terrible boredom; there are days I wish my brain could find an outlet that would satisfy itself enough to give me a break.  In other words, I wish it would find somewhere else to go, just for a little while.

Infinite time is hard for us to even contemplate and yet we hope for eternal life, but how on earth would we cope with it?  If the cosmos is self-aware and has always existed, how do you suppose it has coped?  My simple-minded guess is that it evolves, changes, experiments and expands.  Nothing eternal could remain in stasis.  If I were this entity, I'd get mighty tired of my self-awareness so I might come up with a nifty idea: I'd subcontract it out; I'd give myself a break from myself by putting pieces of my self-awareness into myriad, unsuspecting life forms under my omniscience, without memory, temporarily, of my eternal nature.  As such, I'd fill the cosmos with infinite pieces of my consciousness born into various states of being to learn, grow experience and die, without any idea of why they came to be.

Once dead, their consciousness would be reabsorbed into mine.  Parts of my consciousness would, therefore, have had a holiday from the eternity of my existence; would have looked at everything with a new, blank memory slate and mind, and returned to me refreshed.  In other words, I would reinvent myself over and over; wonder at the universe with my smaller, initially ignorant particularized selves, at the nature of existence, and try to make sense of it because, while my outsourced selves are terrified of death, I am terrified of an endless eternity.

By facing death in many, many short and unknowing lives, I am living on the edge.  I am feeling.  I am living through the beings I created.  As each of these entities is separate and with an infinite number of possible existences and experiences, I can spend my eternity experimenting and experiencing new possibilities.  They may be terrible or wonderful but an infinite, eternal, unchanging existence would be death, and I must be life.

Reaching the age of seventy and, having become a bit bogged down in my life, wondering what to do next when I've tried pretty much everything I've wanted to, is what set me to thinking about an intelligent, eternal cosmos.  If I am bored, what would this entity do?  Simplistic thinking on my behalf you may say but look at life and the universe.  It is in a perpetual state of life and death of stars, planets, galaxies.  On this planet the essence of life in nature is birth, life and death; of constant renewal.  The universe is ceaselessly reinventing itself.  There is no stasis.

We may not remember if we have lived before, thinking that before we were born we've been in a state of nothingness before for unimaginable billions of years, but I doubt that.  In all that time?  Really?  I think we are part of a universal conscious and return there; not in a state of mind we can imagine, but in some state.  The idea of being part of something I felt many decades ago when I had something of an epiphany.  I was simply talking to someone I didn't know very well and, suddenly, felt how very odd it was that we were separate entities.  It was as if I suddenly became aware that our separateness, as individuals, is unnatural.  It was a one-off kind of mental insight that never left me.  I don't get that feeling anymore, but I remember how it struck me at the time, out of the blue.

Some of my most profound thoughts came when I was twelve years of age and through my teen years.  My mind went into overdrive at that stage, contemplating existence and all manner of things.  I was also severely depressed at the time and going through puberty.  Nonetheless, in retrospect, I admire my young self.

I had the benefit of a deep-thinking mother who would discuss with me the nature of existence.  My father, a very intelligent man, had a different type of mind entirely and could never really follow our line of thought, or decided it was unnecessary.  He was a devoutly religious man and really didn't feel the need to question the nature of existence.  All the same I rather wish I had inherited my dad's excellent and much happier type of mind than my mother's more insightful, philosophical but also depressive mind.  Depressive or not, having a mind to think, to wonder and to be overwhelmed by both the beauty and terror of existence, the many life forms we share this planet with, not to mention the others beyond is an extraordinary happenstance.

No wonder we don't want to lose it.  Life is too extraordinary to believe that it appears like magic and then disappears again.  It is a mystery and, like all good mysteries, you've got to wait to the end, of this life at least, to find out.

END

THE EXCRUCIATING JOYS OF GROWING OLD.

 

Me, aged 30, model portfolio shoot.

Growing old sneaks up on you, really, really fast.  One minute you're hanging in there in middle age, with men (in my case, as I'm a woman) still casting furtive glances at you, even though you're on the plus side of sixty and whoosh, overnight it seems, something has dropped and you discover a sudden clutch of grey hair on your temples; you know, the ones that make men look so distinguished.

Admittedly I'm a bit of a freak for greying so late. My mother had only a few grey hairs when she died at the age of eighty-one.  I was, in fact, pleased with mine because, after decades of dyeing my hair blond, when Covid and isolation hit, I let it return to the mouse brown that had been inflicted on me by my genes.  "Ah," I thought, "when I go blond again, no more dark roots."  No such luck.  I retain way too much mouse brown and my income has also dropped due to finishing work so I can no longer afford it, thanks to that uninvited little plague.

My age clock is about to tick over the seventy milestone on Christmas Eve.  I am pleased as punch to have made it thus far and hope for a lot more, but I must resign myself to losing my, almost glamorous and not unattractive former self.  I had worked hard at it.  I had always worn make up, remained slim and worn heels.  My feet now just laugh when I contemplate high heels in a moment of whimsy.  I am so out of practice at wearing them, after giving up work, that I feel I am teetering if the heels are over two centimeters.

When I was a young girl, my mother would tell me that I was plain, but that I would be beautiful one day.  It didn't help that she demanded that I keep my hair short and would nag me incessantly about it once I was old enough to ignore her demands and grow it.  In any case, she told me I would be beautiful and so I made bloody sure I was.  Whether by sheer force of will or good bone structure, I managed to achieve it.  I suppose you would call it striking, rather than beautiful but, with long, blonded hair and artfully applied makeup, I did a good impression of it.

Makeup, now, has become a problem.  Why?  Essential tremor is why.  Seven years ago my hands developed a tremor.  That's all it is but, it's a nuisance.  It makes putting on eye makeup and eating in restaurants a problem.  With the eye makeup, I am liable to paint anything but my lids.  With the restaurants, I am liable to feed someone beside me or fling food in their face rather than get it in my mouth.  Some foods are okay, cutting and knife and fork coordination is not.

I was recently trying to help my six-year-old grand-daughter with some artwork she was creating by mixing some paint with a brush for her.  The next thing I flipped the paint onto her nose.  My darling grandchildren find me amusing, rather happily.  I persist with typing on my laptop but the fourth and little finger of my left hand have other ideas.  My new laptop has just upgraded itself and offers me speech to text writing, but I will persist with typing, or it will be like the high heels; if I stop, my fingers will forget how.

Back to my feet.  My bunions are quite magnificent.  The odd thing is, they don't hurt.  They do if I wear shoes that are too tight but, by and large, they do not.  A general practitioner saw them recently and his jaw dropped open.  "Don't they hurt?", he exclaimed loudly.  I replied that they did not.  I've been offered an operation by public health but refuse.  I think I'll leave well enough alone for now.  I call the bunion on my right foot, Everest, and the one on my left, K2.  My mother warned me I would get bunions with glee, as she had perfect feet.  Apparently, I inherited them from her aunt.

I also, apparently, have arthritis in my bunions and, obviously, in my hands, which do not hurt unless someone squeezes them with vigor.  My hands are gradually becoming deformed because of it but they're not too bad, I just can no longer open my palms out flat.  About three years ago the fat under the skin of my hands also suddenly disappeared leaving them, with the help of sun damage, not the smooth things they had been.

What offends me most, however, are my arms.  My upper arms were always taut and shiny things of beauty.  Suddenly they have developed vertical wrinkles.  Now, I'm not, and never have been, plump, or even close.  I don't recall my mother having vertical arm wrinkles, but she was slightly on the heavy side so perhaps that's why.  When my grandchildren sit either side of me at lunch, one will start to play with the floppy fat bit on the underside of my upper arm, then the other, finding it amusing, will join in on the other side.  My arms are far from fat, I am slim, but when the skin stretches, any fat follows gravity.  At least I can consider myself a toy.

My skin is now crepey and dry in various places but, all in all, my body and physique are doing well.  My breasts have done an admirable job of staying firm and are only now sagging slightly.  I forgive them as I loathe wearing a bra and do so as little as possible.  Thank heavens for moderate sized bosoms.

My only other age-related problem are my eyes.  I cannot consider the floaters I've had since I was twelve age-related since I have had them since then.  They just get worse with time.  What annoys me most is that once I was only short-sighted but now, I am also long-sighted.  This really is galling.  I mean, really, how can a person be both?  I didn't mind being short-sighted so much, as everything up close was clear.  Suddenly, I need glasses to see something small and fiddly up close.  I've had graduated lenses for some time now because, ten years ago, my lenses for short-sightedness began to blur things when I looked at something near.  This had never happened before but has something to do with the muscles ageing.  Hence, I needed graduated lenses to correct this.  Nonetheless, without glasses, I could still see fine up close.  In the last year, however, I've had to pull away from print to see it, then when I get too far away, I have to move closer again.  My eyes are not coordinated in this respect as each one has a different distance at which it likes to read.

Well, that's all I have to report, so far.  My knees and hips are fine, which I'm beginning to think is unusual.  I have met many people, some much younger than me, who have had operations to fix their knees, some even twice.  My blood pressure was once on the low side and my cholesterol was perfect.  Both are creeping upwards, but neither are cause for concern.  I don't wish to have to start my breakfast with five or six different medications daily.  If I can keep things under control as naturally as possible, I will.

There's no use fighting it, the trick is to stay alive as long as possible, feeling as well as possible.

Me, at 70.

See you next year.

END

8 BILLION AND COUNTING.

 

A few years ago, I made a comment beneath a post on Facebook.  I thought it was a fairly moderate, innocuous comment that suggested people should start to think about how many children they should produce if they considered the maths, the size of our planet and how many people it could sustain in the future.  I was certainly not prepared for the online vitriol I would receive.

I had, unbeknownst to me, commented on a post that originated in the USA.  A number of women, who had produced over six offspring, told me to mind my own business and that no one could tell them how many children they could have.  What I came away from this was that, if these were the type of people reproducing with great gusto, would their offspring have the brains to consider the effect of the numbers they would themselves produce when their time came?  The attitude was very much a 'Me first, bugger the planet and the future'.

Let me be clear.  I do not advocate the culling of humans or the horrible one child, or even two, policy.  I just want people to really consider the future for their descendants.  In fact, I believe schools should teach children from a fairly young age about how much arable land is available on the planet and how many people it can feed.   We don't need a terror campaign, we just need children to be taught this, the way they are now about climate change, so that they will think of their options in future.

When I was born in 1952, the world population stood at around 2.5 billion.  In seventy years, it has almost tripled.  That is scary.  The population is growing exponentially and yet every time I hear the media and politicians ranting about greenhouse gas emissions, I boil.  We have greenhouse gas emissions because of all the fuel and production necessities required for a massive population.  Dealing with solely greenhouse gases as being the potential source of the world's demise is like hosing the top floor of a building when the ground floor is on fire.

We are at the point in history where we have to stabilize the population before there needs to be the radical, unwanted and immoral ways to enforce population control, but people will not address it.  It will be almost impossible in third world countries to educate people about population growth, but wealthy and educated countries can use education to gradually make those who won't think, do so; to inform and encourage young people to have families of sustainable size.

Even as I write this, I feel I am treading on eggshells because I am expecting another serve of the vitriol I previously received.  I have never understood why people do not use their brains.  At the age of seven, I began to think about pollution and things that affected the beautiful, green environment in which I grew up.  I have come to understand, however, that a large percentage of people simply do not give any thought to the future or anything that doesn't immediately impact them.  When I hear people say, "Oh, I never thought that could happen to me", I am appalled.  Why not?

I am not a genius, so why can't other people put their brains into gear and use them.  I can't believe mankind has progressed as far as it has technologically and scientifically while common sense has remained the least common thing on the planet.

We have Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos et al, racing each other into space to create new frontiers.  That's because they know Earth will, very soon, be stuffed.  This beautiful, amazing planet (and, no, I have no desire to live on a colony on Mars), is being destroyed by simple lack of thought.  No one will address the elephant in the room; overpopulation.  The politicians don't dare and so they keep rabbiting on about climate change.  Climate change is Santa Claus propped up in front of the unpalatable truth of untethered population growth.

I hope there is still time.  It is absolutely extraordinary that civilization has gone on with blinkers on in this regard for decades.  Politicians only care about votes and won't deal with it.  The great man, David Attenborough, has done amazing work using the media to awaken today's youth to the problem of this Earth's survival.  He has done, however, only one show on population.  I believe that is because he knows that addressing the youth and making them think about the planet is the best way to start without creating controversy.  All power to this man, I love him and thank him from the bottom of my heart.  I only wish he'd been around sooner.

THE END.

EMOJI POWER : symbols worth a thousand words.

Emojis have entered electronic communications throughout the world like a fresh gust of wind.  I'm sure I won't do justice to their symbolism in this, my first attempt, at addressing their impact.  I undertook a degree in Communications Studies, which focused greatly on semiotics in all forms of media.  Before my degree I couldn't have told you the meaning of 'semiotics' or 'semiology'.  In fact, I thought it must have had something to do with pathology, honestly, I did.

Let me bore you with a definition of Semiotics from www.brittanica.com:

"Semiotics, also called semiology, the study of signs and sign-using behaviour. … Saussure treated language as a sign-system, and his work in linguistics supplied the concepts and methods that semioticians applied to sign-systems other than language."

But I wasn't as stupid as I thought for there is also medical semiology.  A definition I found on pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov goes:

"Medical semiology comprises the study of symptoms, somatic signs and laboratory signs, history taking and physical examination."

Signs actually play a very important role in our lives.  Language itself is a sign system and non-language signs, from expressions, to gestures, to the underlying meanings given to colours, all expand our way of communicating with others.

During my degree I studied the role of signs of all kinds used in advertising, from that in print to broadcast on television.  Colours, and the meanings we associate with them, play a big role in how advertisers construct their copy.  Blue has a lot of connotations ranging from sadness to porn.  Red is for excitement, heat and the forbidden.  "He's yellow" - a coward; "she's green with envy"; "he looks really black" - angry, upset.

As students we were given print advertisements and asked to assess how the visual background and elements of a photo or picture supported the text.

I have come to feel that emojis are a really valid form of expression.  They are something to be used in addition to language but can also take its place.  Emojis are just what they are named for: a means of expressing emotion.  They are somehow friendlier than mere words and I think that the reason for this is that we associate pictures, and communication using them, as relating to childhood.  There's something sweet and innocent about them.  To use the words 'I love you' in a missive can bear too much weight.  You can send a platonic friend a 💓 for instance and not have them fearing you have developed a passion for them.

With emoji faces you can express so much with the expression you choose.  Not only that, but they also tend to make us laugh.  For those of us who are older, they also bring out the kid in us.  For someone like me, in her late sixties 😱, it gives my communications a whole new sense of fun. (And, yes, the horror emoji more than adequately expresses what it's like to be a young person who finds themselves in an old body.  When the heck did that happen?)

The internet was born in the 'nineties but really came into its own after the millennium.  The children of today will never know what it was like to be without it.  In a way it really is magic and has given rise to many new careers and possibilities that didn't exist before.  I watch my five- and eight-year-old grandchildren on their iPads and know that they must become adept in the use of computer technology.  The eight-year-old needs his for school, as do his fellow students.  Their homework also includes Mathletics on the iPad.  At their age they take to it like a duck to water, just as they learn language so quickly when they are young.

The five-year-old girl uses an app on hers to put make up on a panda or some fantasy creature, but she can flick through apps like a pro and find what she's after.  At her age having an iPad may seem a bit much, but older brother had one and there would have been a battle if she didn't.  Besides, it is amazing to watch how quickly she became adept at using it.  What really amazed me most was the two-year-old grandchild trying to operate the television remote the other day and refusing all help.  It wasn't just for the television; it was a box that connected to Netflix or something, but he persisted and studied the screen trying to choose a program.  He didn't succeed but he tried.

The older two grandchildren try to do awful, and sometimes beautiful things, to my face using Snapchat.  These days I need improvement but, at worst, I end up looking funny.  I even wonder if I get more of a thrill acting like a kid and using emojis than they do.  When new things come into the world as you're becoming a bit jaded, having been born in an age of television, phones, cars and all the mod cons, and then something new, refreshing and only dreamed of, like mobile phones and the not even imagined internet, comes along, it does make you feel young again.    

🤸🏼‍♀️

END

ROADS I HAVE TRAVELLED.

 

A road in the Australian Outback

If you were born in the age of the motor car, and anyone alive today has been, then you have travelled much further than your ancestors who were born earlier than the nineteen hundreds.  Before the car was invented, ground transport relied on horses and horse drawn carriages or trains.  If you travelled by train you had be going on a pretty specific journey and if by horse, or horse and carriage, you weren't likely to be taking scenic detours but going somewhere for a purpose.

Because of this modern humans have clocked up a lot more distance than our predecessors.  I was brought home from hospital (I wasn't a home birth) in a car and, for me, a car has been something I have loved and appreciated since I can remember.  They have taken me on some wonderful journeys, to events and given me access to places I needed to go.

Let's face it, any good invention comes with it's downside.  That's the case for most things in life but for now let's consider the benefits of the car.

Life was once urban or provincial.  Suburbs began to spring up in the mid nineteenth century around cities that became overcrowded.  In London a catalyst for suburban growth was the opening of the Metropolitan Railway in the 1860's.  At that time London was the largest city in the world.  By the 1950's, when the motor car became affordable to normal families and the US Interstate Highway was built, suburbs fanned out around cities in that country.

Australia, with its massive size and tiny population relative to the US had still, by the 1950's, managed to link its far flung major cities with roads and, by the time I was born in 1952, suburbs had spread out far and wide from city centres .  By the time I was seven my family and I had made a long journey by road from Sydney south to Melbourne then Adelaide on sealed roads.  We then put the car on a train, the famous Ghan, and travelled north to Alice Springs.  I don't think the road between those two cities was sealed until the 1980's.  After that we drove further north to Darwin and from there eastwards to Cairns and then back to Sydney.  It was without doubt the best trip of my life even though I have since travelled many places overseas.

My first memories of being driven are of excursions to the local shops with my mother and to school.  In those days we didn't have seat belts and I remember many a time when, if Mum had to brake suddenly, she would fling her arm across me to hold me back.  Years later when seat belts arrived, she would still do it by habit. There was also the time before indicators became fitted to cars that I remember her making hand signals to stop or turn.  I loved it when, after my parents had visited friends, we would drive home at night and I would fall asleep in the back seat.  Once home, my father would carry me into bed.  I so loved this that when I got older and woke as we arrived home, I would fake being asleep so I could be carried to bed.  Sadly Dad grew tired of this as I grew heavier and I would have to walk.

Once I was seven and left the local school some three kilometers from home, my mother would drive me to a primary convent school at Avalon on Sydney's Northern Beaches.  The journey was about ten kilometers and the last two were around some spectacular but winding roads on headlands around the beaches.  While I just sat and enjoyed the view and the time with my mother she did not enjoy it although she was very sweet about it for the three years I remained at the school,.  She had to drive me as there was no bus and then drive home and repeat the exercise in reverse in the afternoon.  She didn't do paid work so this, as such, was her job among her other housewifely duties.  Mum was an excellent driver even if she didn't like being my chauffeur.

Living so far up the North Shore from Sydney city as we did, a car was a necessity.  The train lines were further inland than the beach suburbs and the bus journey to the city was a long trip.  On Sunday's my father and I would go to church and when we returned home he would stop the car at the base of our long, steep driveway so that I could drive up it.  I was twelve by this stage and it was my introduction to driving.

Also at this age I was sent to a school in the Eastern suburbs of Sydney, some thirty kilometers distant.  Here I endured weekly boarding and Mum would drive me in Monday mornings and pick me up Friday afternoons.  By this stage she moaned considerably about having to drive me.  I had no sympathy as I loathed the school and felt it was just punishment for her making me go there.  She did occasionally manage to wiggle out of this by getting Dad to drop me at the Hydrofoil in Manly that took me over Sydney Harbour to Circular Quay in the city.  From there with my suitcase full of a week's clothes, I took a bus to the school.  As I was prone to panic attacks by this stage, I did not enjoy this exercise but managed it nonetheless.  But I had my revenge because I was mostly driven to school during those six years even though I had to endure my mother complaining about it.  If my parents had had the sense to send me to the local high school a mere three kilometers away, I could have done the bus trip without an issue so they made that rod for their own backs.

I give them their due, however, by the time I went to University they presented me with a brand new car that I loved and enjoyed for ten years and would even carry my baby son in the rear when he arrived.  Driving to University became the way I overcame my panic attacks.  It took an effort but the car became my home away from home.  It was a very snazzy, mustard coloured Datsun 1200 Coupe and I am forever grateful for this gift from my parents.  I have never since been without a car and would feel I had lost a limb if I was.

Driving my new born baby proved a challenge in my little coupe.  He was too young for a baby car seat and there weren't the snazzy contraptions for carrying a baby in the car in those days.  My solution was, with great difficulty, to put his carry basket minus baby on the rear seat.  This involved putting the front seat forward and getting the basket through the opening.  Then I would put the rear seatbelts through the basket's handles and clip them in to their fasteners to hold it in place.  Then baby went in and finally there was a nifty webbing I had bought at a baby shop that I put over the top of the basket that was then secured around its edges so my son was safe and would only hit the soft criss-cross webbing rather than being hurled around the car should I have an accident.  Of course once I arrived at my destination I had to retrieve son from this device and put him in the pram I carried in the boot of the car.  It was quite a business.  When he was big enough he went into a child car seat and when he turned five he just sat on a booster seat and was strapped in with a seat belt.  There was none of this being in a child seat until the age of seven or a specific height.

Whenever my parents drove me I would look out the window and enjoy the scenery.  Even on repetitive trips to the same places I would still enjoy the view.  Not so my son.  Scenery did not enthrall him at all.  His three children have video screens to watch when they are being driven and this makes me roll my eyes to heaven.  I suppose it's anything for peace but he, as a child, was never a problem even without amusement.

When my son was two and a half we moved to Hong Kong where they also drive on the left as we do in Australia.  The public transport was brilliant but we liked taking excursions and I also needed to drive my son to playschool.  Life was just easier with a car.  We bought an old Toyota Cressida whose favourite pastime was breaking down and led me to my first initiation into the local mentality.  I have mentioned in earlier posts that I was young and glamorous during my Hong Kong sojourn and one early morning I was dressed in a long turquoise coloured velour shift with a long side split up one leg when husband decided he needed to be driven to work for some reason.  As we had a maid, I could drive my husband and leave our son with her and, as I wouldn't be seen, it didn't matter what I was wearing.

We got down to Wanchai easily enough where I dropped husband and then proceeded towards Central, then up Cotton Tree Drive to the Mid Levels.  There, on a hill on a single lane road in traffic, the car conked out.  I tried to restart it.  No luck.  I tried again a few times and then, dressed as I was, I got out of the car and spread my arms in a helpless gesture to the cars behind me.  In Australia a couple of able bodied fellows would have jumped from their cars and helped push mine out of the way.  No one honked and no one helped.  The Chinese man in the Mercedes behind me just sat impassively waiting.  This had a profound effect on me.  I decided if no one wanted to help they would thus be stuck sitting on the hill and that was their choice.  I got back in the car and relaxed.  I've never felt so calm in such a situation.  Why panic and feel bad when no one was willing to help me and, thus, themselves?  I sat waiting a few more minutes and eventually decided to try the ignition again and, lo and behold, the car started and I drove home but I had learned a very important lesson.  I don't know why no one tried to help but I thought it might have come down to Chinese 'loss of face' but the episode taught me to go with the flow.

We would lend the car to a Swiss chef who lived in our building because he let us use his parking spot.  He would use the car some weekends to take his family out but would take it as a personal affront when it broke down even though he knew it wasn't reliable.  There's one thing about the Swiss, they expect things to run like clockwork.

When my husband sentenced us to life back in Australia after three years we bought a new car and he also had a company car.  I am not fond of Perth and we would take drives south to Margaret River and Dunsborough, where my parents would end up living some years later.  There are places north and east of Perth where there is something akin to greenery for a short stretch but it isn't lush and eventually runs out.  Even so we went east and explored Toodyay, York and even Kalgoorlie.  One forgettable holiday we went north to Kalbarri, which was meant to be tropical.  It was not but has some spectacular gorges.  We also went north on the coast to Yanchep and even the awful Lancelin.  The beach there is as barren and glary as you would wish and my son, then six years old, and I ran into a snake coming out of the men's toilet block.  We turned and ran and then one of our friends, who had come in convoy in another car, decided to chase it with a spade against everyone's advice.  Fortunately it out slithered him.

We dared to visit Lancelin another time but not the beach.  We drove past it to visit the remarkable Pinnacles, a petrified forest an hours drive north of the town reached first by sealed road and then a very rocky dirt track that we somehow managed in our sedan.

Our son climbing a Pinnacle

While we lived in Perth, Australia had an airline pilot strike.  This was in 1989 and when their bona fide demands were not met, 1,640 domestic pilots resigned throwing the airlines into chaos for well over a year.  By that time my parents lived in Dunsborough but my husband's family lived in Sydney and we toyed with the idea of taking a train or driving all the way there to visit them.  Driving only as far Adelaide, two thirds of the way to Sydney, would take up to four days across the treeless Nullabour or, by train, two days and then on to Sydney and we decided not to attempt it.  At this stage my panic attacks had begun to recur due to the strain on our marriage and by the time the effects of the strike ended, I couldn't get on a plane.  It took a couple of years to beat the attacks that I'd never thought would come back and, once I did, they never returned.  I continued to drive while I was prone to the attacks because my cars have always helped me to contain them and the only trouble I had was gritting my teeth and sweating as I drove over the very long Mount Henry Bridge on my way to Murdoch University to lectures.  I have loved driving too much to let the attacks get the better of me.

There was a time on a vacation in Hawaii that I tried to drive on the right and immediately handed the car back to my husband.  That was way too dyslexic a feeling.  When I went to France years later with my partner, who is Polish, I didn't even try the right side driving and pulled my weight by way of being navigator from Paris to Versailles then through the Loire Valley.  We loved the villages in the countryside and the Chateaux with their magnificent gardens.  We then drove through the Alps down to beautiful Nice and stunning Monaco.

Another earlier vacation that I took with my husband and son was to Sri Lanka and the Maldives on our way back from Hong Kong.  We stopped in Sri Lanka one night on our way to the Maldives to which we would fly in the morning.  I have no idea where the hotel was that we stayed in as we were driven there in the dark.  I think the reception had some light but, after being led to our room in the one story building, when we entered there was no electric light, or any light for that matter.  It was pitch black and we groped our way to the beds, found them, felt for bugs and put our son to sleep.  I just lay on the covers of the bed and hoped nothing would bite me.  In the morning, on going out the door, there was a beach in view but everything in the night was so dark we had no idea of our surroundings.

We spent over a week in the Maldives and it's a place you couldn't pay me to return to no matter what the brochures look like.  We had arrived during Ramadan and the food we were subjected to made my then fifty kilo frame drop another two kilos.  I'm sure the water looked pretty but you needed shoes to swim as the sand was made of broken up coral and hurt your feet.  We were the closest island to the capital Male because we wanted to be close to civilization if our son was sick.  Happily he wasn't but I'm really not too sure there was any civilization if we needed it.  The view from our bungalow consisted of rotting ship hulks as the Maldives is the one of the cheapest places in the world to moor them.

After that we had a driver take us on a five day driving tour of Sri Lanka.  He was a local and had no personality and little English.  If I managed to get him to stop to take a photo, he did so two hundred meters after the photo opportunity.  People had their hands out wherever we went and it was a thoroughly miserable place.  The travel brochures and television advertisements in Hong Kong quoted Mark Twain as saying it was the most beautiful place on earth.  It wasn't.  I had no idea the people there were so poor and felt for them but the whole place had a bad atmosphere.  No doubt our driver's pay was a pittance so we tipped him well.

I haven't travelled overseas for twenty four years now.  Hard to believe I know but divorce, lack of employment opportunities and a failed business all added up.  At least I found employment driving a cab and it only paid the bills, but I'm extremely grateful I managed to do it for twelve years before Covid hit.  I thoroughly enjoyed those years and part of the reason for that is I love driving.  You are your own boss in a cab and, being outdoors in a pretty place like Brisbane, is a bonus.

I'm overdue for a long driving holiday and am even considering going as far as Dunsborough where my father's ashes rest.  We've all been cooped up because of the pandemic and now domestic travel appeals to me as much as foreign.  Another consideration in regard to foreign travel is that there are places I would no longer consider going because, if I catch the virus, I want to be very certain the hospitals in a place are excellent.

There are many places I am sorry not to have seen but I'm also fortunate to have seen many.  I've travelled around New Zealand by car.  I've ridden pillion behind my father one day on a motorcycle on Norfolk Island.  I've also had a driving lesson in a Fiat Bambino bouncing across a golf course on that island with Dad beside me and Mum in the back seat as I kangarooed across the fairways learning to change gears.  The course was as much paddock as it was fairway.  The year I finished school my parents took my cousin and I to beautiful Fiji for Christmas.  We were there for three weeks and were driven between Suva and Lautoka  We stayed on both Viti Levu and Vanua Levu and also did the three day Blue Lagoon cruise around some outlying islands.

I spent only four days in London and experienced its traffic on a bus from the airport to my hotel.  I've also visited Penang in Malaysia, Bangkok and Phuket in Thailand, the Phillipines, Bali and passed many times through Singapore where I've also stayed.  In all these places I have been driven in some form of transport and I find it to be the best way to see a place.  My only regret is the frequency with which I've travelled.  Travelling blows fresh air through the mind and also makes home more appealing when you return.

I hope I have journeys yet to make.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

END

THE BOWEL: the body's in house tyrant.

 

Image courtesy of jasonlove.com

Have you ever noticed, if you have looked at internal imagery of our innards, how much our intestines and colon resemble the brain?  Just like the brain they appear to be meandering tubes packed tightly together and, like the brain, they appear to have a mind of their own.

I watched a recent documentary on the digestive system by Doctor Michael Mosley.  In it he said that the gut has as many neurons in it as a cat has in its entire brain.  That interesting titbit packed a wallop for me as a piece of information and, I would say, explains a lot about Irritable Bowel Syndrome.  The brain and the gut communicate.  If we are stressed, even subconsciously, the gut conspires to give us a bowel spasm to force the brain to relax.  It's revenge by the gut on the overthinking, over worrying brain.  It doesn't work of course, but just gives us one more thing to worry about.

From the time I was born my gut has been my enemy.  Before I was six months old I had a bout of gastroenteritis that put me in hospital.  At another time a doctor prescribed an antibiotic for me that literally stripped my bowel lining.  It wasn't meant to, it just did.  It was called Chloromycetin and was given to me orally.  It is now only used topically for eye infections and can cause aplastic anemia taken internally.  Later in my life a doctor told me that I was lucky not to have developed leukemia because of it.  I sometimes wonder if a lot of my digestive ailments arose from this but I doubt it.

When I complain about my bowel I will stress that I have not had anything life threatening from that area, or any other part, of my anatomy but mainly debilitating ailments.  All that is except for an appendix that had started leaking by the time it was removed and left me ill for three months afterwards.

I think that every single one of us, with the exception of a few lucky ones, have an ailment that is the result of stress, whether conscious or subliminal.  These manifest as migraines, a bad back and/or neck, irritable bowel syndrome and such.

From the age of five I suffered from stomach upsets.  These would involve me waking from sleep every few months very nauseous and then heaving my guts out before making it to the toilet.  In fact, I didn't even make it out of bed and learned to sleep with a bowl beside my bed.  My parents couldn't work out what was causing me to be sick.  A number of theories came up but none proved to be the answer until, after many doctors, I visited a naturopath at the age of twenty one.  The naturopath advised me to steer clear of milk, cream and ice cream.  All through the years I had drunk milk but it seems my body tolerated it only so long before I had one of my nauseous episodes.  Now that I'm older, even one glass of milk would make me ill immediately.

For years my mother thought I was allergic to pork as, when we had dinner with friends of her and father's, we were often served pork with gravy and vegetables, but I'd eaten pork without trouble before.  Eventually we realized that the lady of the house would stir cream into her gravy, not something ever done in our house.  Her delicious meals would bring on violent nausea attacks.  Now if cream is brought to the boil I can actually tolerate small quantities of it.  I am also fine with cheeses thank heavens.  It must be the enzyme process that matures cheese and the breaking down of molecules in cream by boiling it that make them digestible.

There was one thing that I loved as a child that should have given us the first inkling that I was lactose intolerant and that was an ice cream soda.  When I was young ice cream didn't make me throw up but one ice cream soda, now called a spider, did and I knew that I'd be sick in the middle of the night but would have one anyway.  Eventually I decided it wasn't worth the after effect and stopped having them.

By the time I was twenty one and went to my boyfriend's twenty first birthday party, I knew what to avoid.  Unfortunately people slip ingredients into recipes you think you are familiar with and so think will do no harm.  Have you ever noticed what happens to orange juice and cream together?  It curdles.  At the party I was given a glass of champagne and orange juice.  I don't care for orange juice but drank it.  We then sat down to a formal dinner that started with prawns in a cocktail sauce sitting in half an avocado.  My mother didn't put cream in a cocktail sauce but this family did and I didn't know it.

I didn't make it to the main course but spent the next six hours on their lower level bathroom floor heaving even when there was nothing left to heave.  Happily there was an upstairs bathroom for non afflicted guests.  Boyfriend's father spent the entire time sitting beside my prostrate self, who was leaning on the toilet, trying to sooth me convinced I had drunk too much.  I'd had one glass of the champagne orange mixture.  Nothing I said between heaves would convince him otherwise.  At midnight they hauled me upstairs to a bedroom where I dry heaved once more before falling asleep.

It was a night to remember and made boyfriend feel so much better as he had spent the night of our first date throwing up garlic snails and feeling mortified.  I was very understanding, which he couldn't believe as he thought he had ruined his chances with me.  He said that any other girls he knew wouldn't have had a bar of him afterwards if they'd been with him.  Oddly enough he was the brother of a girl that I'd been to school with but I didn't meet him through her but four years later when he and I did a computer course.  His sister was one of the nice girls in my class but most of them were prize bitches.  He lived in the Eastern suburbs of Sydney where most of them came from and so I'm not surprised he had this opinion of them.  I didn't make a single friend at that school.  To this day, however, I miss my old boyfriend and wonder what has become of him as, while I went on to marry someone else, I remain very fond of his memory.  Our stomachs would certainly have been in sync.

Many years later, in my thirties, I began to suffer from bad lower abdomen aches that could render me useless for days.  It was considered to be IBS but persisted until I was forty one and became nauseous for three months and then the pain grew too much to ignore.  One doctor felt my side and said the swelling was a muscle and sent me home. I hadn't been able to get into my usual doctor but, by afternoon, my partner rushed me there and she took one look at me and put me in hospital.  The next morning my appendix was removed.  The oddest thing about this was that my father had appendicitis at the age of forty one as well.  I told my surgeon that other doctors had told me that appendicitis could not be chronic and rumble for years.  He laughed and said that of course it could.  He had tried to remove it by laparoscopy but it had swollen to two and a half times its usual size and he had to cut me open.

He released me from hospital a week after the operation even while I felt terrible and couldn't keep food down.  A locum I called to the house the next day diagnosed an abscess and put me on antibiotics.  A week later I went back to the surgeon and, with puss still oozing from my side, he apologized.  It's very hard to stand up for yourself and your rights when you are very ill.  All hospitals should have patient liaison staff.  It took me three months to recover from the poison in my system.

When I reached my fifties I began driving a cab and this is when the fun began.  Having a case of IBS with associated diarrhea  and sometimes needing four to five serious toilet stops made for some nail biting trips.  After these I would feel punched in the belly.  I give myself credit, I managed to keep on working in spite of this.  I put off taking a probiotic for years thinking it wouldn't help but was proved wrong.  After they began to do their magic I could occasionally have what I called purges, that is four to five toilet stops in a day but I didn't always have to run to the bathroom.  In fact, when I finished working eighteen months ago I felt that part of my anatomy had calmed down.  Foolishly two months ago I stopped taking the probiotics and the IBS has suddenly started again.  Not so much the rush to the bathroom but bowel spasms and pain after going.  I had a colonoscopy eighteen months ago and again six months ago and, typical of IBS, nothing shows as wrong.

I honestly think that the human body is the most remarkable thing.  It is an incredible symphony of functions that mostly run smoothly without any interference from us.  That we have to put up with pain and discomfort when things are out of whack is the price we pay for being biological entities.  I have essential tremor in my hands, nothing serious but a nuisance.  I have reasonably bad eye floaters but my eyes are in good shape so the floaters are only a nuisance.  I have spectacular bunions that I refuse to have fixed as they don't hurt and they're so misshapen that each big toe will have to be fused to the foot and I'm not crazy about the idea.  The one thing that has bugged me all my life, however, is my gut.  It can take the joy out of a day and I know how many people out there have the same problem.  I'm not whinging on my own account, I'm just saying that I'm one more person out there with IBS and some other irritating conditions.

Thank God that in my sixty eight years these things are the worst that has happened to me.  Oh, I've had some psychological problems but most of us do.  I'm lucky to have all my limbs, my senses and my faculties but when people say that something is a pain in the butt, I know exactly why that expression came about.

END

REMEMBERING HONG KONG: my time as an expatriate.

 

Leaving Hong Kong

 

It is hard to believe that it has been thirty seven years since I left Hong Kong.  I had the good fortune to live there for three years and it was one of the defining periods of my life, a concentrate of time that counted as a life in itself.  There was only one other episode in my life like that and it lasted only ten days and revolved around the death of my father.  Both times are each worthy of an entire book.

Hong Kong made me.  I was like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon and drying my wings before moving on.  Unfortunately the years that followed were far less interesting, panned out at greater length and in less concentration than the heady times I experienced there.

When I lived there Hong Kong was also marking time to its 1997 handover back to China, which weighed heavily on the mind of its people.  We were both in a state of flux and came together in a magnificent explosion, at least on my part.  It was a privilege to witness the waning days of the independence of this colony as it thrived under the supervision of a democratic nation before it slid into the grip of its communist patriarch while, at the same time, I emerged from the pall of my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and panic attacks.  It was a time lived with such colour and clarity that nothing has ever eclipsed it.

Hong Kong had always intrigued me from the time I was a child.  A friend of my mother visited there regularly as she had become firm friends with the female cousin of her ex husband.  The woman was very wealthy and had, indirectly, become that way because she had hidden the documents of a well known Hong Kong bank from the Japanese in WWII.  She spent time in a prisoner of war camp but the bank rewarded her with a sum of money with which she started printing the colony's first telephone directory and made her fortune.  The story fascinated me and, when she visited Australia one time, she came to our house when I was very young.  I was allowed to meet her fleetingly before I was hidden away as she wasn't fond of children.

My mother recounted a story about her on one of these visits in which she went to Newport Beach on Sydney's north shore wearing an extremely valuable and long string of black pearls into the water when she went for a swim.  Happily she didn't lose the necklace but such is the stuff I was told.  She was an Australian by birth and Caucasian but Hong Kong was her home where she lived on the Peak.

As well as this connection I was also exposed to shows such as Hong Kong, starring Rod Taylor, and the movies 'Love is a Many Splendored Thing' and 'The World of Nancy Kwan'.  These were set in the Hong Kong of the fifties and early sixties but the exotic nature of the place just called out to me.  It was my dream place to visit and, while I had made it as far and Fiji and New Zealand, hadn't gone further.

I am very affected by the atmosphere of a place.  When my husband and I moved to Melbourne shortly after we married for his work, we drove there from Sydney.  As we approached the city by car and the view of skyscrapers came into view rising above the flat landscape my heart sank.  The vibe was wrong.  Once a vibe sets in with me it stays and, hard as I tried I hated the place.  I can see its good points today but nothing would drag me back to live there.

Sadly the same thing happened with Perth, Western Australia, when we moved there, again for my husband's work.  It is sunny, it has beaches, a big, wide blue river and is flat as a pancake.  The trouble is that it is too sunny, sometimes so much so that my eyes would water.  There were trees and foliage but they struggled in the sandy soil.  The greenery didn't have the verdant yellow green lushness of Queensland nor were there the hills of Sydney that provided contrasts and shade.  When my mother arrived in the place she actually said, "There's so much sky here".  I couldn't have put it better.  It is a pretty place but I hated it and I know this fault lies with me.  I am a 'place' person and, as I have already said in another blog post, I was spoiled by my early environment.  One reason, however, that I loved my childhood environment is that I do pick up an affinity, or otherwise for a place.  It is simply my nature and I feel for anyone who is subject to my whims.

Due to my absolute loathing of Perth, doubtless aided by post natal depression as I was pregnant when we arrived there, after three years my husband took a Civil Engineering job in Hong Kong.  We flew in at night on May 24, 1981.  Kai Tak on the island was the airport at that time before it was moved to its recent position on the island of Lantau, which is now connected to the city by a bridge.  Landing at Kai Tak was a treat that rivaled all the best theme park rides in the world as you flew in amongst high rise buildings and could actually see people watching their televisions in their flats.  We flew in so that Hong Kong island was on our right and lit up in all its densely populated glory.  My throat felt like it was closing up seeing this.  It really was crowded but by gosh it was spectacular.

The next morning I woke at the Hilton on the island feeling a little nervous until I opened the curtains of our room and, lo and behold, outside down below was a large group of people performing Tai Chi in a square opposite .  I calmed down immediately.  I was home.  The Hilton also became a bit like a home for the next three years.  We only stayed there a week until the company flat became vacant but we gravitated back to it regularly even when we'd found numerous other brilliant restaurants to go to.  We particularly liked it's cafe as well as a restaurant outside on the ground floor.  In fact it was one night in its Ball Room at a function given by the Australian Association that we won a trip to Hawaii.  There is a new Hilton now that I don't know and many more things no doubt since we were there.

The flat the company provided for us was in a block only four stories high and four flats wide.  It dangled from the side of a hill overlooking the Lamma Channel and was situated between Central, the central business district of Hong Kong on Victoria Island, and Aberdeen, the former fishing village further around to the east.  We were fortunate as a lot of expatriates lived in high rises in the mid levels above Central and below the Peak.  These towers could be over twenty five stories high and situated among great clusters of other towers, not to mention among the pall of smog that often settled over the city.

The Company Flat.

Our view was of an expanse of deep blue water past which, on the left, could be seen Lamma Island, which looked like the front half of a platypus lying in the water atop whose head was a pipe.  I never found out what the pipe or chimney was.  In winter when fog sometimes settled over the water we would hear the fog horns of the great ships that made their way into Hong Kong harbour and, once a year, the three level Jumbo floating restaurant in all its red and green Chinese decorated glory, would be towed from Aberdeen to the harbour for maintenance.  Such was the magic of living in this brilliant and exciting place that had mushroomed from an island for fishermen before the Opium War between the British and Chinese into one of the world's great cities within the space of one hundred years.

When we first entered the flat with our two and a half year old son to inspect it there was already some furniture in it including a cane sofa and two armchairs, all with white upholstered cushions.  Our son ran straight across the parquetry floor and climbed onto the sofa.  To our horror his feet were blackened and left marks all over the white fabric as some over zealous cleaner had thought to polish the varnished floor.  That wasn't the first of our woes.  The next was trying to find a store at which to buy groceries.  We'd managed to have a car lent to us in the interim but finding a grocery store just wasn't as simple as it had been in Australia and so our first week proved quite harrowing.  We also discovered that the infant food that came in jars or tins came from the USA and was absolutely tasteless.  My notoriously picky eater son would have none of it until I managed to add some flavour to it.  These were, however, all but small road bumps and part of adjusting to a new culture.  Until we managed to be self sufficient food wise, we just ate out a lot.

Food.

That, of course, brings me to food.  The sheer, unutterable joy of Hong Kong is its food.  It doesn't matter what type or from what national cuisine it originates, the best of every kind is to be found there.  I have never eaten as well again and, in thirty seven years, that's saying something.  I spent three weeks traveling in France and came back unimpressed by the food I ate there.  I've been to many other countries too and Hong Kong remains my peak dining experience whether the cuisine be Chinese of any variety, Italian, French, Indian, Vietnamese, Thai or whatever.

Markets and Shopping.

Where to begin with shopping?  One of our first experiences was at a night market in the city where there were also fortune tellers.  The city never sleeps and, after Perth, Western Australia, that closed at nights pretty early and on weekends, the atmosphere was electric.  There is shopping in Wanchai and Causeway Bay, both in shops and street markets.  In Central there were fewer street markets but plenty of shops and laneways that were for specific products.  Wing On Lane had masses of fabric shops, Little Stanley Street had shoe shops and I forget which lane had handbags and bags exclusively.  All merchandise was priced at a fraction of what you would pay in your home country and the variety would be from cheap but well made to high end goods.

Central and Causeway Bay also had department stores.  At that time there was Wing On, the exclusive Lane Crawford and Japanese department stores such as Daimaru.  I practically lived in Wing On, which was just a little way out of Central heading to Kennedy Town on the south east of the island.  There were also factory outlets on Kowloon side and in Mong Kok that you could visit.  A lot of these produced silk clothing but I didn't find these as interesting as just shopping at various stores.  Some factories specialized in jeans and some in manchester.

I would frequent Wing On Lane for fabrics and found a tailor through a Scottish friend who was married to an Australian engineer.  While I can sew, I need a pattern and the tailors there can produce an item from a picture in a magazine.  I would buy the French version  of L'Officiel magazine, the couture magazine of France, and have my tailor copy things for a fraction of the price I would have had to pay a seamstress at home.

Work.

The company for which my husband worked as a civil engineer did a lot of entertaining and would take the staff out regularly for dinners and wives and husbands of staff were always included.  That is, unless the fellows were taking a business client out to the bars in Wanchai.  There were quite a few girlie bars and they could have that on their own.  Some of these were Japanese, very expensive and many a naive young man has left some of these with their drinks costing them the price of their holiday.

We ate out with the company at least once every fortnight and would take ourselves out on weekends to explore cuisine.  Everybody in the expat community also entertained and there was an endless round of dinners and lunches.  What I always loved about the meals in Chinese restaurants was that the dishes were in the centre of the table to share.  At the start of each meal the tablecloth would be clean and white but by the end a complete mess.  As soon as tables emptied, a pristine new cloth replaced the old one.  Nobody used a fork at a Chinese restaurant and it amused my husband and I when we returned home and ate at a Chinese restaurant and had to ask for chopsticks.

We ate at high end, medium and low end restaurants and it was all delicious.  My only disappointment occurred at one of the two top restaurants in Hong Kong, Gaddi's in the Peninsula Hotel on Kowloon side.  I have devoted a whole other post to that experience titled, 'The Worst Restaurant Experience I've Ever Had', if you are interested in reading about it.

One of the best restaurants there at the time was not high end but had the best Chinese food I had ever eaten and was hugely popular with both locals and expats.  It was situated in Wanchai and called The American.  It had pale green walls on which Botticelli type prints hung, laminex tables and harsh fluorescent lighting.  The Chinese waiters all looked like they had been there for decades.  We went there regularly, often with friends or the company.  In our last year there it closed after being there, I believe, for many decades.  The New American across the road remained open, but it just wasn't the same.

Lamma Island.

A lot of companies had their own junks but ours wasn't one of them.  These boats were great for entertaining and we were invited on them sometimes by people who had access to one through their companies.  Bankers were generally the best looked after expats in Hong Kong and I envied them their junks.  These boats are large, wooden and beautiful to look at.  At the time we lived there Aberdeen still had a large population of people living on junks in its harbour, moored side by side.  If you took a Sampan ride to get to a restaurant in Aberdeen you went right past them.  There were families living on board with televisions and all the mod cons.  By the time we left three years later the boat people were gradually being moved to high rise housing estates.  I couldn't think of anything worse after living such a life, but I suppose the harbour pollution lessened.  Mind you, given the state of the water in Hong Kong Harbour, Repulse Bay and Clearwater Bay, sewage treatment was obviously not a big issue at the time.

Hong Kong as it was originally spelled meant 'fragrant harbour'.  It was fragrant for a whole other reason when we arrived there.  Swimming at Clearwater Bay in the New Territories one day, a piece of toilet paper wrapped itself around my calf and there were no boats nearby.  At Repulse Bay on another day the Manager's wife of the company and I took and American tourist to the beach.  He went swimming and came out covered in red algae bloom.  He was horrified thinking that it was faeces and ran to the showers.  It was no doubt the putrid water that gave rise to the algae so he wasn't far wrong.  Mostly we swam in the pools of the large high rise housing flats of the other expats.

While it may have been fetid, the waterways of Hong Kong and the New Territories were pretty and the views spectacular.  One of our favourite weekend outings, and sometimes they were company outings, was to the restaurants perched above the water on piers along the water's edge on Lamma Island.

The restaurants there were basic and to get to a toilet you usually had to walk through the kitchen and find yourself at the back faced with two cubicles.  One cubicle offered a hole in the centre of the floor, the other a shallow trench along its back wall.  As I waited for the one with the hole in the floor to be vacant I watched, just outside and squatting on his haunches, a man washing an eel under a running tap.

The food, however, in all the restaurants there, was delicious.  It was all fresh seafood and, on weekends, every table was packed with both Chinese locals and expats.  We usually took a ferry there from Aberdeen where we parked our car and returned the same way.  It was a very large ferry and it only went a few times a day.  Our son would often play with other children in the restaurant in which we were eating and one day, within a split second of having him in my vision, he disappeared.  All the men at our table went off to look for him and sent me to look for police.  I went off into the backstreets of the very small village and could find no police or anyone for that matter.  After a while I returned to our table where the women remained and they couldn't believe how calm I was.  I wasn't.  I just couldn't do anything but wait.  There was water all around us but he didn't fall as there were barriers and I knew he wouldn't go down onto the sand to the water's edge because he simply hated it.  Nothing would make his little feet touch the stuff.  After thirty minutes the men found him.  He had walked off to follow a Chinese child.  He was only four and I feel guilty to this day but somehow my mother's instinct told me he was fine and I was happily right.  What I couldn't understand, as my husband was watching him too, was just how fast he disappeared.  The trouble with having a sensible child is that one can trust them too much.

Another thing about our son is that, at almost five, he would only say the occasional word.  A sentence was just too much trouble and we awaited his first string of words with anticipation.  It came on Lamma Island when he had obviously become bored.  Suddenly he said, "Ferry come now.  We go home."  I was so impressed with his eloquence that I wrote it in his baby book of events when we arrived home.  He has remained a man of few words all his life and only speaks when he has something to say.  A few years ago I was at his Veterinary clinic one day waiting to see him for some reason, when he came out of a consultation room with a dog and its owner.  He proceeded to talk to the owner at some length about the prescription he was supplying for the dog and how to use it.  I listened entranced as I had rarely ever heard my son speak at length about anything.  It's the little things that warm a mother's heart.

Walks.

Hong Kong island and the New Territories have some wonderful walks where there is plenty of foliage and no buildings.  There was a place not far from our apartment where we could park our car and walk all the way up to the Peak.  Lots of locals would take advantage of these walks on the weekend.  We also found great picnic spots in the New Territories to go with friends.  This gave the children some time with nature as our son's only play area around our apartment was the downstairs car park beneath the building, which was at least open, although under cover.  The only other options were playgrounds where there were gardens but no actual grass.

 What I didn't like were the high-rise housing estates in the New Territories.  Once you drive out of Kowloon, you head through the Lion Rock Tunnel to arrive in the New Territories.  One of the first places we came to then was Shatin, which was on flat ground and stood alone as a residential township consisting of numerous high-rise buildings surrounded by concrete with little greenery amongst it.  It lacked the magic of the districts that, no matter how crowded, were set among hills and shops and vibrant precincts.  Further on was Tai Po.  Gradually the people living in the shanty towns on the hills on the island and in Kowloon were being moved into these modern high rises.  No doubt this was better and safer for the residents and perhaps, with time, these estates would develop a vibrancy of their own.  Frankly though, they made me shudder.

We were there during a powerful typhoon in 1983 and, at the bottom of our street, was a small shanty town hanging off the side of a hill.  An elderly woman died there during this storm as did a young policeman who was trying to help her, so one has to be grateful the shanty towns were being cleared.  It is terrible to admit that they added to the mystique of Hong Kong, but they did and most of them disappeared during our time there.

Public Transport.

The public transport in Hong Kong was a dream and there was so much choice.  One of the great modes of transport were the mini buses that you could hail anywhere either in the city or residential areas.  There were also regular bus services with allocated stops.  There were ferry services that ran between Hong Kong Island and Kowloon as well as other areas.  In the city there were trams and there was also the fabulous MTR, or Mass Transit Railway, that would get you anywhere in the blink of an eye.  A tunnel ran between the island and Kowloon and this took cars, buses and the MTR.

One of my first journeys on a bus was from my street to the city via Kennedy Town.  This meant I caught the bus as it went down my street then passed through Kennedy Town, which sat at the water's edge and then on into the city.  Kennedy Town was very much a Chinese enclave and not cosmopolitan.  The people who got onto the bus there looked at me as if I was an alien while I had the pleasure of sitting across from and facing a Chinese gentleman who was holding a live chicken on his lap while he blatantly stared at me.

There was something my husband and I noticed after a couple of months of residing there and that was that the locals began to treat us differently after that time.  It is as if they could spot a newcomer on sight.  As we settled in and looked more at home they took much less notice of us.  They also didn't try to scam us as much in business.  Quite often cab drivers would try the long routes on susceptible foreigners so we got around this pretty quickly by giving directions in Chinese or noticing quickly if they took the wrong route.  The Chinese are honest people but business is business and bartering was commonplace.

One of my favourite trips was taking a ferry across the harbour.  It is one of the world's great trips although only lasts a few minutes.  On the island side the Peak rises up with the cluster of high rises beneath it and, on Kowloon side, Tsim Sha Tsui with the Harbour Centre and fabulous five-star hotels.  Kowloon is basically flat and it isn't until reaching Lion Rock Tunnel that the hills begin.  The ferries that cross between Central, Hong Kong Island, and Tsim Sha Tsui are large, double story and the fare incredibly cheap.  There were two classes, one for the upper deck and one for the lower.  I never minded which class I paid for as there wasn't really any difference in the seating.  I relished the crossing each time I took it sometimes alone, sometimes with my son, or son and husband.

I seem to remember the tunnel link between the island and Kowloon for the MTR was completed while we were there and we decided to try it.  The MTR was just so modern, efficient and fast and went almost to the New Territories.  Driving through Kowloon and surrounds could be a long and tedious business but on the MTR you could get through it in no time.  I did take trams a few times but wasn't very fond of them.  If you drove beside them you had to stop when they stopped to let off passengers.  Their ceiling were always a little low for the taller foreign expats as well.

Toilets.

I've mentioned the toilets on Lamma Island but the ones in the city in buildings were the usual western kind.  If you happened to be in one of the many five star hotels for lunch or just passing through, you could easily access the toilets in them.  These were as five star as the hotels and there was often a woman in attendance who handed out hot flannels for you to wash you face and hands after you had used the basins.  It was customary to tip these ladies and I always did.  The up market department stores often had attendants as well.

The truly appalling toilet experience I had was at Stanley Markets.  The markets themselves were fabulous and ran along the streets surrounding Stanley Beach.  Some stalls operated under canopies but there were many shops in buildings, all low level and one supermarket.  There was a great restaurant some way done one street on the waterfront where we went a few times with friends but I wouldn't have used their toilet unless I was eating there.  This left the public toilet block that was an experience I will never forget.  There were cubicles through the floor of which ran a trench about twenty to thirty centimeters wide and the urine and excrement ran right under you as you straddled the trench to do your business.  There was, of course, no seat.  The first time I used the facility I foolishly put my feet both on one side of the trench and tried to balance my bottom over the top of it.  I don't know what I was thinking but the smell must have made me unable to think.  Somehow I managed not to fall in.  The next and only other time I used it I realized what a dummy I had been on the previous occasion and put my feet one each side of the trench.  After the first visit I developed a gastric upset and I really hadn't touched anything while I was there.  I swear the smell was so rank it caused the upset.

Sights and Sounds.

Such is the variety of life in Hong Kong where you can experience the basic to the luxurious and high tech.  I bought some beautiful things over the years at Stanley Markets in the way of lamps, a silk screen and ornaments.  We also bought amazingly cheap and well made clothing as well as food.  It was the first time I saw meat hanging outdoors, dead chickens and dried fish.  I first thought I'd never get used to the sights and smells but very quickly found it quite normal.  There was, however, one place in Central that I was never brave enough to enter and that was the fish markets.  I had to hold my nose just to get past it.  Supermarkets near to our unit were housed on the ground floor of a block in some of the housing estates.  At Chi Fu, an estate a couple of kilometres drive from us, was a western style supermarket and, on some days, there was a wet market just outside with butchers and fish sellers.  On one occasion I went past a vendor who sold live frogs that were tied in pairs by their feet and just had to grit my teeth and deal with it.  This was normal to the locals and I was in their country.

In our first year there I was driving to a supermarket housed in a small high rise residential building, Scenic Villas, situated below and to the left of us on the waterfront.  It was a narrow and winding road and I found myself behind a tray truck with a canopy.  A bare chested man with a huge goiter on his neck was sitting in the back atop what must have been a dead pig or sheep whose entrails had fallen down between the end of the truck and the back flap that closed up so that I had a view of its stomach or whatever dangling out as I drove.  It was these strange sights that I loved about the place.  Things like an old Chinese gentleman doing Tai Chi on a tiny traffic island that held a traffic light in Kennedy Town oblivious to the traffic, noise and smell around him; peace in the middle of such chaos.

That sight alone helped me learn to be calm within myself.  I had arrived in Hong Kong still subject to the panic attacks I had suffered for many years but I loved the place so much I forced myself to go out and explore everywhere.  I had a massive attack one day at Stanley Markets when my husband and son left me for a while.  I sensed all morning that it was coming and it did.  The world began to turn and I leaned against a shop wall trying not to pass out.  It was the worst I ever had but it finally passed without me pitching forward onto the pavement.  Having survived that one, I never had another until my marriage started to break down ten years later.  I'm completely over them now but Hong Kong was so overwhelming that I told my mother that it scared me more than I scared myself and helped me control my own inner fears.

Work.

So what did I do with myself while my husband was at work?  We had hired a Phillipina maid so that I could get out and about without our son and so that we could attend the numerous functions that the company put on.  She was a lovely girl named Clare and only eighteen.  She couldn't say our son's name, Asher, properly and the way she said his name it came out sounding like Asia.  We offered her a normal size bedroom in our flat and she wouldn't hear of it.  The flats all came with tiny rooms for maids or amahs with their own tiny bathrooms and she insisted she would stay in it.  She was so adamant we had to concede.  We also had to have a tiny bed made to fit the room as everything in the shops was too long.  Clare was tiny too and seemed quite happy in her room.  The maids in the unit blocks relied on one another for company and there were only twelve apartments in our block and the Chinese residents had Chinese amahs.  There were only two other Phillipinas in our building and Clare left us after her contract was up two years later because of this I believe.  We met up a few months later and I think she regretted it.  I wonder to this day where she is as, even with the internet, I can find no trace of her.

At any rate, having Clare meant I could try to find work but it proved very hard.  I didn't speak Cantonese and had too little experience as a programmer to find work in that capacity.  I did some office work for an engineer in a company allied to the one my husband worked for and also took a disastrous job managing a high end dress boutique in Central.  What I didn't know was that the staff were ripping off the designs of the well known designer whose shop it was and put me through an honesty test wherein I found a wad of paper money on the counter that wasn't entered in the books and rang around our clients trying to ascertain who had left it there.  My mistake was apparently not offering it to the staff and keeping it a secret.  It took my husband, I and a savvy friend back in Australia a couple of years later to twig to what had happened.  I was fired a couple of days later on the most spurious pretext having only been there two weeks.  Apparently I'd messed up the books as we were doing a stock take and the girls kept giving me wrong counts that I had to correct.  The whole thing was a set up no doubt to test if they could keep stealing dresses right under my nose.  The owner had told me they had a problem with shoplifting and to keep my eyes open.  I wondered then how anyone could shoplift as it was a small boutique and we could keep our eyes on anyone in there and there were never many.  Hong Kong has a huge knock off trade and the designer was one of its best known.

I was paid a full month's wages and took it.  I was furious.  A week later the accountant phoned and my husband took the call.  He was asked some very odd questions and we realized later that the accountant was trying to ascertain if we'd caught on to them but this was too late to do anything about it.

Modelling.

I lost a fair amount of weight in Hong Kong, not that I was ever big, and decided to try film extra work and modelling.  I had a portfolio done by a professional photographer who specialized in such things.  I'm so glad I had it done as it's a record of me in my prime looking very glamorous.  I did a few hotel brochures, an advertisement in the South China Morning Post and a housing estate brochure.  One day I had a particularly riotous television extra job with a few other expat models for a Chinese crime show.  One was a crowd scene where we were dancing in a club in Wanchai.  In another we were by a hotel pool out in the New Territories in bikinis and also, in another scene, in hula skirts.  I kept trying to hide and not be photographed in this outfit but ended up in some shots and also a Chinese language television guide.  When the manager of the supermarket at Scenic Villas recognized me from the show I was mortified with embarrassment.  I turned down another job where I would have been an extra in a scene on the Jumbo floating restaurant and starring Ali Macgraw and George C. Scott.  I don't like being stranded for hours and had learned what a long day it could be from my previous, experience especially after we discovered no one had arranged for us to get a lift home.

Leaving.

It was a sad day when my husband decided that he'd had enough of working in Hong Kong.  He refused to look for any other work beyond Australia before we left and arranged to work back in Perth, Western Australia with his old company even knowing I didn't like Perth one bit.  We made friends in Hong Kong but gradually people would leave.  We kept in touch with some for quite a while but our lives eventually diverged.  I was stuck in Perth for another eight years before we moved to Queensland where I, my ex husband and son all still live although separately.  My son is grown with his own family now and my husband and I divorced two years after coming to Queensland.  The years in Perth, after the vibrancy of Hong Kong was like living in a morgue.  I love Queensland and am grateful the openness, cleanliness of the air and lack of crowding in Australia but I will be forever grateful for my time in Hong Kong.  It was a life changing and affirming experience.  I would very much like to have experienced life in one more country as well but something tells me that I experienced the pick of the crop and it would have taken a lot to outdo it.

END