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Five-year plans, however important, are not a suitable topic for lampposts

May 2, 2026 by timhamlett

One of the changes I have noticed since our last – shall we say popular? – district board was replaced by a more salubrious patriots-only gathering is that we now get decorations on Shatin lampposts.

This adds to public gaiety, no doubt, but has limited effectiveness as a communication medium because the banners have to be quite small and the lampposts are quite tall. So you can’t really get any words in.

Early attempts in this area avoided the legibility problem because they were put up in celebration of anniversaries. All you could really see was a big number, but as you were seeing the same number in all sorts of other places it was quite obvious what we were supposed to be celebrating.

The latest effort did not involve a number. Looking up at it while waiting for the traffic lights to change I could not make out anything at all. My research assistant deployed her mobile phone, took a picture with the telephoto feature working flat out and announced that we were celebrating China’s 15th five-year plan.

Happily I was able to catch up with this important matter when I came across a much bigger offering on the same theme outside an MTR station. It seems we are urged to “Pro-actively align with the 15th five-year plan” and “Follow a holistic approach to development and security”.

I hesitate to criticise the work of other writers but I cannot resist the thought that the author of this offering needs to give some thought to finding the sort of language which means something concrete and sensible to the man in the street, who is rarely told to pro-actively align with anything, or indeed to follow a holistic approach to it.

Most English people of my generation are not bowled over by the idea of five-year plans. This is partly because rigid adherence to erroneous five-year plans caused two of the 20th century’s most catastrophic famines: in Ukraine 1932-3 and in China 1958-62.

It is also no doubt partly because UK governments have rarely attempted economic planning of this kind and the rare experiment (in the early years of the 1964 Wilson government) was not a success. The Treasury (which is what they call the Finance Ministry in the UK) has never developed a wish to run plans itself, but certainly does not want anyone else doing it.

Besides the history there is the philosophical objection, usually attributed to Friedrich Hayek, to government direction of the economy. This maintains that official intervention is an infringement of freedom and also obscures the useful information provided by prices set in the marketplace.

Whatever you think of five-year plans, though, one does have to wonder if they really call for the sort of mass public participation that the campaign on lamp-posts and MTR stations appears to be seeking. Even if we replaced proactive alignment and holistic approaches with something more democratic in tone it is far from clear what the average Hong Kong person can do to further the doubtless laudable aims of the national plan.

Apparently we are going to have our own five-year plan in due course, some time later this year. No doubt this will be a very valuable indication of what Hong Kong should be doing to further national objectives. Perhaps it would make more sense to wait for it.

A separate question is whether the compulsive adornment of lamp-posts with announcements of public interest is a welcome innovation. Perhaps it is a dulce et decorum thing that citizens should be reminded of historic landmarks and invited to join in democratic festivals.

But there is a cost to hanging things on lampposts and district board members need to consider whether the message they are trying to get across really suits this particular mass medium. If the only thing you can get in at a legible size is two digits then the merits of proactive alignment and holistic approaches should be advertised elsewhere. There is no point in hanging a message on a lamppost if people need a pair of binoculars to read it.

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An old joke with topical resonance

April 27, 2026 by timhamlett

Reading the latest news I find myself recalling an old Russian joke. It must be an old joke because it features an attempt to assassinate Leonid Brezhnev, who died in 1982. This joke is entirely fictitious and has no real people in it, living or dead.

It goes like this:

Yesterday a madman attempted to assassinate our leader Leonid Brezhnev. The attempt failed. As soon as he produced his weapon the assailant was overwhelmed by a crowd of bystanders shouting “Give me the gun! Give me the gun! Let me do it!”

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Keeping ‘Five dumplings not one less’ off local menus

April 17, 2026 by timhamlett

The Hong Kong government’s attitude to the rule of law is interestingly ambiguous. It wishes to claim credit for being a law-abiding government, but it does not want to sacrifice for this purpose the achievement of other desires.

This implicit conflict is nicely wrapped up in the matter of restaurant licences. In any sensible jurisdiction there are some requirements for restaurant operators, intended to ensure hygiene and other worthy food-related objectives.

However these days all government departments are expected to show their enthusiasm for national security. So last year the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department, which licenses restaurants, treated licence-holders to a letter warning that licences would be revoked if holders or their “related persons” engaged in conduct against national security or the public interest.

Now the FEHD has form in the matter of using existing regulations to pester or persecute restaurants which the government, for some basically political reason, does not like. So there were complaints that what was effectively a new licence condition was too vague, and consequently open to abuse.

Not so, the Chief Executive told a news conference. “Offending conduct means any offence that endangers national security, or acts and events that are contrary to national security and public interest in Hong Kong. It is very clear,”

But it is not very clear, because two very different things are being mixed together. An offence that endangers national security is a criminal matter. Conviction takes place in a public court and is a matter of record. A restaurant owner convicted of such an offence may feel that losing his licence is the least of his problems, but he can read the law and look at the way it has been applied.

He will avoid traditional menu items like Five Dumplings, Not One Less, or Three Hamburgers; Revelation of our Thyme. “Related persons” will be urged to behave themselves. But what does the public interest require?

This mystery persists in the latest version of the licence, which has a clause we can consider in full:

“I shall ensure that no act or activity engaged or involved in by me or any of my related persons (include the directors, officers, employees, agents and sub-contractors) may constitute or cause the occurrence of an offence endangering national security under the National Security Law or other laws of the HKSAR, or conduct is otherwise contrary to the interests of national security or the interest of the public (including public morals, public order and/or public safety) of Hong Kong.”

As tends to happen in very long sentences the grammar wilts a bit in the closing stages and seems to require either the insertion of “that” after conduct or the deletion of “is” in the same place. But this does not affect the meaning, which still leaves the question over what might be in the public interest.

There are some legal glosses on the phrase, though unfortunately they are not particularly helpful. Some restrictions on media stories can be waived if publication is “in the public interest”. Judges tend to be quite conservative about this but the general rule seems to be that the public interest is served by stories which expose iniquity (in a broad sense) or stories which alert the public to hazards which they need to know about.

In contract law it is well established that contracts will not be enforced if their effect is not in the public interest. Once again this does not come up very often – judges are even more hostile to unenforced contracts than they are to muckraking journalists – but traditionally contracts have not been enforced if they concern gambling or commercial sex.

The morals/order/safety part seems to have been inspired by the part of the Bill of Rights Ordinance which specifies the purposes for which the government may restrict freedom of expression. This suggests – a worrying thought – that the government intends to use threats to restaurant licences to restrict freedom of expression, and proposes if anyone complains to rely on the permitted restrictions.

This may not fly in court because the Bill of Rights Ordinance also requires that restrictions should be specified by law and necessary in a democratic society. Clearly legal language is being used here, but perhaps as an adornment rather than a substantial signal.

Where does all this leave us? Well one theory is that the government wishes to increase its options in efforts to suppress businesses which supported the wrong people in 2019. Asked if this was the case Mr Ronnie Tong, a government adviser, replied last year that it was “hard to say”.

Another theory is that the unstated purpose is to reinforce the existing routine practice under which food outlets which have accepted bookings from organisations the government does not like tend to cancel them at the last minute.

Maybe it is just that the “public interest” is one of those elusive philosophical concepts like “soft resistance” which puzzle the public but are perfectly clear to recycled policemen and the people who write the front page of Ta Kung Pao.

The other remaining puzzle is why restaurant licences have been singled out. All government departments, we are told, have an obligation to support national security. But the numerous other licences issued for various purposes by different departments have not been amended in the same way.

Yet.

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OK, Donald, your boat is not a toy, but do the toilets work?

March 31, 2026 by timhamlett

Excuse an excursion into territory I do not usually cover here. In my youth I had some qualifications as a naval historian. I even once applied for a job teaching naval history.

Such posts are of course extremely rare and involve teaching future naval officers. The interview was quite pleasant and was conducted inside the actual Admiralty Arch, in case you were not sure what you were getting into.

I fear I blighted my hopes by being rather critical of Admiral Nelson, still a cherished icon in Royal Navy circles. I had encountered him in a detailed study of the years 1798-1801. This brings you the Battle of the Nile, but also an adulterous passion for Lady Hamilton, and a disreputable incident much neglected by biographers, involving the massacre of prisoners who had surrendered “on terms”, on the grounds that an agreement with rebels was void.

So I never became a part of the naval infrastructure, and remained a critical observer of a national institution. It has a wonderful history, but standards wilted a bit when ships were no longer built of wood, and the battle cruiser was a bad idea. The RN’s main claim to fame in the 20th century was the pioneering of naval aviation.

So I bristled when the Orange Tornado, the Liar-in-Chief, the draft dodger whose take on military life is that it’s for “suckers”, ventured the opinion that the Royal Navy’s two aircraft carriers were just “toys”.

This is an illiterate assessment. If there was one thing that all serious navies discovered in the 20th century it was that aircraft carriers are the new capital ships, and all navies need to deploy one or two if they hope to operate away from their home waters and the land-based aircraft which can support them there.

It could be argued that Britain is now a medium-sized nation ill-equipped financially for the burdens of a blue-water navy. But if there is to be one then it has to have some sort of aircraft carrier.

No doubt the British carriers are smaller than their American counterparts. But the American models have other problems. The USS Gerald R Ford, it was reported, was being withdrawn from combat in the Eastern Med after a fire in the laundry. Reports added that this would also allow work on a long-standing problem with the plumbing.

As the BBC politely put it, “In January, the vessel suffered a malfunction in its toilet system, with US media reporting clogged toilets and long lines for restrooms on the ship. The Navy acknowledged that there had been some issues, but ‘clog incidents are addressed promptly by trained damage control and engineering personnel.’”

Well, patriotic Americans may if they wish dismiss British carriers as toys. But at least they are not full of shit.

Can you say the same of your President?

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Legal logic: there was no baby, but if there was it was only a small one

March 26, 2026 by timhamlett

It sometimes seems, when listening to lawyers in action, that they live on a different planet from the rest of us. Consider the performance this week at the on-going Wang Fuk fire inquiry from Senior Counsel Jenkin Suen.

For those who have just come in, the Wang Fuk fire was a blaze at a housing estate in Hong Kong last November which left 168 people dead. The inquiry is into causes and the other usual topics.

Inquiries of this kind are often a little gold mine for the legal profession and this one will be no exception. Mr Suen is an eminent practitioner not usually on the government payroll, though he is a part-time High Court judge and chairman of the Copyright Tribunal. However Mr Suen is appearing on behalf of the Hong Kong government, the official permanent legion of lawyers being presumably too busy.

Last week the counsel for the inquiry, another Senior Counsel, Victor Dawes, revealed that the inquiry would be told that the Housing Bureau’s Independent Checking Unit – which was supposed to conduct safety checks on building sites, had habitually warned the consultant firm overseeing the Wang Fuk renovation project when an inspection was imminent. The consultants, Will Power Architects, had passed this intelligence to the contractor, Prestige Construction.

Mr Dawes said the contractor had as a result been able to “tamper with” the work site before inspectors arrived.

All this was reported, as you might expect. Mr Suen, addressing the tribunal on the government’s behalf, was not happy with this. In some reports the checking unit was “was portrayed as tipping off or colluding with the firms,” said Mr Suen. “Such characterisations were completely groundless.”

Now we must note in fairness to Mr Suen that this was in Cantonese, so there may be some scope for misunderstandings here. But I think most of us would take that to mean that there was no tip-off, and consequently could not have been any collusion.

Bafflingly, though, Mr Suen went on to explain and defend … the tip-off. There was a practical need for government departments to arrange inspections in advance, he said, so that the inspected party would be available to provide samples and explanations. And, he added, the advance notice was given only a day ahead of the actual inspection.

I am reminded of the woman who was accused of giving birth to an illegitimate baby and said it was “just a small one”.

There is an old joke about a lawyer’s son who got into trouble at school because he hit a cricket ball through the headmaster’s window. Asked to explain himself he said that “the window is not broken; if it is broken it was not by a cricket ball, if it was broken by a cricket ball it was not hit by me, and if it was hit by me it was an accident.”

Lawyers are allowed to do this. Mr Suen’s line appears to be that there was no tip-off, but if there was a tip-off it was a legitimate bid to improve the inspection.

Of course there is a place for inspections with advanced warning. They are often used in military circles. The inspected unit has an incentive and an opportunity to spruce itself up, tick off all the little maintenance items which have been awaiting attention, and put its best foot forward.

Many years ago I found myself unexpectedly the head of the then Department of Communication in what was then the HK Baptist College. I discovered that as well as the teachers I was also responsible for a warren of studios, workshops and darkrooms in which the students could practice the communicative arts with the help of suitably qualified technicians.

I did not know – indeed I still do not know – what the standard academic management solution to this situation is. But I borrowed from the Royal Navy the idea of doing a ground floor-to-roof inspection about once a month, accompanied by the Chief Technician. There was no warning; I did not particularly want to surprise people but I did not want them wasting time preparing for my arrival either.

I suppose we should leave to the inquiry the question whether monitoring renovation projects was an appropriate task for an inspection with prior warning. But I fear the general public’s view will be that an Independent Checking Unit should be a bit more carnivorous.

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Our government is worried about our weight … or do they mean fatness?

March 6, 2026 by timhamlett

Many years ago I read a short story about a man who successfully summoned a genie, and on being offered the traditional wish said he wished to lose weight. “Certainly,” said the genie, and in a matter of seconds the lucky fellow was glued to the ceiling, having become lighter than air.

The point of this story is, of course, that what the man really wanted was not to lose weight, but to lose fat. Euphemism can be dangerous when making wishes.

But here we have our friendly local government, taking up the urgent task of persuading us that most of us are too fat. Or as they prefer to put it, launching a three-year action plan on Weight Management.

This involves an Inter-departmental Weight Management Working Group (I am not making this up) which will open proceedings with a year-long campaign to raise awareness. The group will monitor, encourage, “foster a social environment to support weight management” and “enhance collaboration between Chinese and Western medicine”. I feel thinner already.

This is a serious matter for some people. Being very fat – or as the medical types prefer to put it obese – is bad for your health. On the other hand there is nothing so amusing as a solemn government preparing to tread on a banana skin.

Having conspicuously failed to persuade most of the population to vote, our leaders are now going to persuade many of us to stop eating? We missed out on the Matterhorn; let’s try Everest.

Behind all this is a survey, part of a series regularly conducted by the local Department of Health. The ensuing report announced that some 32 per cent of the population were obese and another 20 per cent were overweight.

I have two quarrels with this survey. One is that it defies common sense. If half the population was seriously overweight you would see this on a daily basis. Wandering through shopping malls or MTR stations half the people you see would be fat. Clearly “overweight” is being used in a rather special sense. After all half of us are of above-average weight. That is what the average means.

The other quarrel is with the timing. The survey was conducted in the years 2020-2022. Does that ring a bell? The COVID epidemic was in full swing. Beaches and exercise halls were closed. Gatherings were banned. Hiking in groups was legally hazardous. Entertainment wilted. Eating was the only pleasure left and a lot of us put on weight. I know I did.

To extrapolate this result to a general assessment of the population and base a policy on it is perhaps a bit hazardous?

And is it really necessary to have a government effort to raise awareness? Awareness of weight management is one area where the private sector is extremely active, sometimes dangerously so. We are constantly bombarded with helpful slimming suggestions which involve spending money. Progress in the hunt for slimming aids of all kinds is eagerly reported in the media.

Indeed this constant harping on weight loss is sometimes blamed for serious mental health problems, particularly among young women. Social media sites like Tik Tok and Pinterest are lambasted for their willingness to host images of skeletal victims of the resulting eating disorders.

The problem, surely, is not lack of awareness. People who are seriously overweight are well aware of the medical implications of their condition, and are occasionally reminded of them by doctors and friends. Just as most smokers know the price of their addiction, so do most over-eaters.

We all know that we should avoid the double cheeseburger with fries, eat more veggies and get out for regular walks, if we can manage nothing more strenuous. The problem is in the implementation. And the solution, I suspect, is not for the government to take on the role found in many families of the nagging aunt whose major contribution to conversations is unwanted advice.

May I at least humbly suggest that the Health Department desist from what appeared in one recent publication to be an attempt to get us all to give up booze. True there are a lot of calories in alcoholic drinks. But people have been drinking alcohol for thousands of years and they are unlikely to stop now.

More constructively, in a crime film I watched recently the prime suspect was asked to account for his whereabouts on the night of the murder and produced a porch camera video of him taking the dog out for a walk. “You walk your dog in the rain?” says the detective incredulously. “Sure.” says the suspect. “When you’ve got to go you’ve got to go. He’s a 200 lb dog. You want to clean up after him?”

Keeping a dog gets you out, rain or shine, pounding the pavement or walking the park. It’s good for you. Yet half the population lives in housing owned or managed by the government, where dogs are not allowed. An easy win for the Working Group?

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Are our universities too willing to sacrifice students to the gods of political correctness?

February 24, 2026 by timhamlett

What does a university owe its students? This question attracts a surprising range of answers. Idealists regard the institution as in loco parentis, and infer that it should treat students as it would wish its own children to be treated. The ultra-realists say that the sole obligation of a university to its undergraduates is to teach what is on the syllabus, test the results and certify them for potential employers.

There is much variation in this matter, between teachers and between institutions. Hong Kong universities generally now seem to be abandoning any notion of care for their students.

When I joined the then Baptist College in 1988 it was a post-secondary college. In the ensuing years it turned into a university. In many ways this was an improvement: more money, better pay, housing allowances, nicer titles, less pressure on potential students to go to a “real university”.

But there are no benefits without costs, and one cost in this case was a change in the sort of people who wanted to work at BU. When it was a college doing nothing much besides teaching, the staff were people who enjoyed working with youngsters. As time went by and the institution moved up the academic food chain they were gradually replaced by people who were willing to seek wealth and fame by conforming to the management’s desire to see us all devote most of our attention to research.

I recall a staff training session in which the youngest member present asked the oldest one how much time should be devoted to teaching and how much to research. The answer was that you should spend the least amount of time you could get away with on teaching and the most you could spare on research.

Where this was leading became clear much later, when a discussion of a student with a personal problem led one colleague to opine that such things were none of our business and should be referred to the Student Advice Service when first noticed.

These were extreme positions and in my time BU remained generally a humane and thoughtful environment where young people were not just taught but also cared for. This may have owed something to its religious origins.

Anyway this gradual change of focus pales into insignificance compared with the state of near-open warfare which local universities now wage against some of their students. No university now tolerates a student union. Many student publications have closed. And now we have the case of Chinese U student Miles Kwan.

After the Wang Fuk Court fire Mr Kwan organised an on-line petition calling for an investigation of the fire, accountability for those responsible, resettlement for the residents and a review of construction supervision.

You would think this was harmless enough. All the things Mr Kwan had suggested were promised by the Chief Executive a day or two later. Can it be an offence to agree with the CE too early?

Well apparently yes. Mr Kwan was arrested by the national security police on, we were told, “suspicion of subversive intent.” This does not make a lot of legal sense. “Intent” itself is not an offence; there must be an action with it. So it may be that the matter will not be continued. It may also be that the police proceed to a formal prosecution and Mr Kwan is acquitted.

This does not look much like the majestic machinery of the law rolling on its impervious and impersonal way; it looks more like a deliberate act of intimidation by a regime which cannot tolerate any spontaneous expression of opinion not controlled by itself.

You might also think that all this had nothing to so with the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where Mr Kwan was a student. What students get up to in their off-duty hours is generally nothing to do with their university authorities. While we can all think of scenarios when we might not wish to follow this rule, launching an on-line petition is hardly one of them.

In any case, if a student is arrested, prudent universities stand back to await the result of the proper prosecution. The police case should go first. This sensible policy is in fact enshrined in the CUHK’s published procedures for handling student discipline cases.

Nevertheless Mr Kwan was invited to meet a disciplinary panel on January 7. The panel meeting seems to have been a stormy occasion. Mr Kwan’s inquiry about the offences with which he was charged was rejected with “we ask the questions here”. He did not conceal his misgivings about the procedural fairness of the whole affair.

The panel’s conclusion was odd. It decided to take no action over the arrest, but to expel Mr Kwan from the university for his “impolite and disrespectful attitude” during the hearing and the conclusion that it was “more likely than not” that he had breached confidentiality rules, presumably by telling people about the up-coming hearing.

This is legally dubious and also cruel. Mr Kwan will now not be able to graduate, after six years of study at CUHK. Preventing people from graduating as a disciplinary move is the capital punishment of university discipline. It is and should be the last resort.

When I was a member of a university disciplinary committee we spent a lot of time explaining to people who had incurred fines – usually from the library – that in the last resort they would not be allowed to graduate without clearing up their debts. We were very anxious not to carry out this threat. In cases involving small sums and genuine poverty we sometimes had a quick whip-round and paid the debt ourselves.

We would not have conjured up two new offences during the hearing of another matter and I can see no satisfactory explanation for what happened to Mr Kwan. Another petition has now been raised (daring stuff) asking the university to over-rule the committee’s decision as being unjust and procedurally improper.

But in a sense the damage has already been done. I do not know if the committee went off-piste because it felt pressured to display a becoming level of zeal for national security. But who would willingly attend an institution where students are so eagerly sacrificed to the gods of political correctness?

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Are our leaders too keen on locking people up?

February 11, 2026 by timhamlett

So the new regulation requiring us all to wear seat belts on buses was cancelled after five days, apparently because of public opposition to the measure. It is nice to know that the government cares what people think, at least about some things.

At one level this is an everyday story of careless constitutional design. The reformed system is set up to stuff the legislative and consultative machinery with people who will tell the government what it wishes to hear. You can’t expect it to provide an accurate report of public opinion on anything and it doesn’t.

At another level this is a typical performance from a department which seems to have strong opinions of its own. Observant residents in Sui Wo Road are baffled by the apparently random placement of a variety of street furniture, culminating in the curious insistence on providing bus shelters in places where nobody will use them, while adamantly refusing to put them where they are needed.

In the days when I occasionally visited government departments to interview their occupants the Transport people came across as intelligent and thoughtful. No doubt they still do. But the results of their collective efforts are, alas, sometimes difficult to understand.

I am personally an enthusiastic user of seat belts. They have saved many lives, including mine. Tour buses, on my last trip to Europe, all featured seatbelts and we were regularly reminded that using them was a legal requirement.

But in a Hong Kong public bus? Regardless of the numbers painted on the side they are, at busy times, packed. The driver has no control over the number of passengers admitted, and quite understandably imposes a limit only when the number of standing passengers threatens to block his view of the nearside wing mirror. Insisting that the seated passengers should wear a belt seems a bit of a token gesture.

Anyway many writers have chewed over the transport aspects of this matter. What I thought should have been given a bit more thought was the matter of penalties for not belting up. Of course there must be some penalty or the rule will not be taken seriously, but what on earth was going through the head of the person who thought it appropriate to threaten offenders with three months in prison?

Failing to fasten your seat belt is, as the late lamented Judge Caprio used to put it, “not an offence of gross moral terpitude”. It is a victimless crime, in the sense that the only person likely to be hurt as a result of failure to fasten is the perpetrator. Most offenders will have been guilty of nothing worse than absent-mindedness.

Willingness to jail people for this minor offence sits uneasily with the government’s total helplessness when faced with equally minor offences committed by people who can afford cars of their own, and the general immunity enjoyed by the perpetrators of potentially dangerous peccadillos like double parking in busy streets or obstructing roads reserved for emergency use.

Not wearing a belt is surely the sort of offence which can be easily and quickly dealt with by the issuing of a fixed penalty ticket, preferably for some modest sum within the means of bus travellers, who are not a wealthy bunch.

Sending people to prison for a few weeks used to be common in many jurisdictions but is now often considered an abuse to be avoided as far as possible. It inflicts the sort of disruption which makes a return to law-abiding citizenship difficult; the prisoner may lose job, home or spouse. At the same time it provides no opportunity for the sort of rehabilitative and educational activities which can form the constructive part of a prison sentence.

The inmate is more likely to emerge resentful than reformed.

Our government seems, sadly, rather over-enthusiastic these days for throwing people into prison, regardless of their age or condition. This may be a difficult point to put across to retired policemen turned politicians, but the government is in some ways different from a police force.

Success in police work may be measured by the number of criminals jailed. Success in government is measured by the happiness of the governed. Are we happier this week?

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How did ‘lady’ become a four-letter word?

January 26, 2026 by timhamlett

What went wrong with the word “lady”? Until recently it just appeared to be the polite way to refer to females. It appeared on their public toilets without giving offence, and public speeches were routinely addressed to “ladies and gentlemen”.

Esteemed singers like Tina Turner were routinely referred to by their road crews as “the lady”. It would perhaps be going too far to say that the use of the word was a sign of respect. It was just a polite word in routine use.

I first realised that something was going on here when I despaired of the managerial merry-go-round that was Chelsea FC and started following the club’s female team instead. Female football teams at that time were generally called Personchester Ladies, or whatever. This had been the way since the pioneering days in the 1890s when a mysterious person using the name Nettie Honeyball started the British Ladies Football Club.

The greatest club name of those early years was the Dick, Kerr Ladies (Dick, Kerr was the name of the factory where they started) who drew crowds in excess of 60,000 before the infamous day in 1921 when the Football Association banned women from playing.

Back in the modern era ladies remained the term of choice until one day quite soon after I started taking an interest, when the clubs – or at least those which attracted news coverage – changed direction with the unanimity of a shoal of herring threatened by a shark, and “ladies” was replaced by “women”.

I then noticed that something similar was happening to my copy on its way into the Hong Kong Free Press. The words “lady” or “ladies” were routinely replaced with “woman” or “women” as appropriate. I did not complain, firstly because I do not complain about editing as a matter of principle; it is a thankless task and for every editing error (we are fallible) the writer is saved from ten faux pas of his own. I also thought I was perhaps being rescued from trampling on some new taboo, introduced after I left the UK.

It remains a puzzle. No such odium appears to have descended on “gentleman”, which is usually the other half, as it were. I have occasionally been accused of being a “gentleman”. I always accepted this is a kindness, even if it was preceded, as it usually was, by one or both of “old-fashioned” and “English”.

There was a time when “gentleman” was a class marker. When Henry V promised that “He that sheds his blood with me … this day shall gentle his condition” he was clearly offering social promotion as a reward for military performance. Ladies similarly used to be a rank. In 19th century India the military rule was that “officers have ladies; sergeants have wives; Other Ranks have women.”

But this had long gone by the time I was a kid. Being a lady or a gentleman was something to which anyone could aspire. As Vin Diesel (of all people) has put it “Being male is a matter of birth; being a man is a matter of age; being a gentleman is a matter of choice.”

For males this involved stoicism, self-control, politeness and (outside of law enforcement or warfare) non-violence. Honesty was important, as was respect for ladies, a status which was the default for females.

We were also taught some rituals which have long gone. A male, on meeting a female in the street, would raise, or at least touch, his hat. Men no longer wear hats. If a woman joined your table you were expected to stand up briefly – a habit to which I occasionally still succumb on formal occasions. If you were walking along the pavement side by side the man was expected to take the side next to the road, a meaningless rule after horse traffic disappeared.

I do not know what was inflicted on girls in those numerous books of “advice” with Grace Darling on the cover, but a bit of internet ferreting suggests that much of it was quite similar: intelligence, kindness, honesty and reading are praised, gossip, rudeness and swearing are condemned. There are probably serious objections on the grounds of foot health to “keep your heels, head and standards high” and age has I fear withered the suggestion that ladies should “not kiss before the third date.”

Still I am not sure that there is anything there which parents would not wish for their daughter.

Well it seems that these days no oppressed minority can hold up its head in public unless it has insisted on being referred to by its preferred term. Cautious publications now shy away from “disabled”, “eskimo”, “negro” “Chinaman” and many others. The curious thing about preferring “women” over “ladies” is that “ladies” was always intended to be flattering and respectful. But if women want “women” that is their choice.

I also note with concern that what is being discarded here is not just a word, but an ethic.

Let us digress for a moment. Steven Pinker has achieved much fame by propounding the view that mankind has become notably less violent in the last 300 years or so, and there is indeed much evidence for this. There is less evidence for his inferred cause, which is that people became more sensitive to and conscious of other people’s feelings.

An older theory is that the reduction in violence was due to a change, not in sensibility but in manners. Polite society was set about with rules. These rules condemned violence and encouraged polite modes of intercourse. Some of them were meaningless – it really doesn’t matter how you eat your peas – but they formed a rules-based society in which most people obeyed the rules because they were the rules. In a sense it did not matter whether there were good reasons for them.

Those of us who were young in the 1960s will remember the glee with which many old rules which no longer made sense were swept away. But eventually the idea that there were rules which we should all follow went the same way.

Nobody goes to church any more. Teachers dare not condemn misbehaviour. It seems that politeness, honesty, sincerity and respect are no longer requirements. So we are free to enjoy … Donald Trump.

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Time for an old tree to bough out

January 15, 2026 by timhamlett

I have never written an obituary for a tree before, so this is a first.

The tree in question stood close to the footpath which connects the car park at the top of Sui Wo Road with the Lions’ Lookout.

The Lookout, a tasteful rendition of a traditional Chinese pavilion in reinforced concrete, used to be an important bit of infrastructure; officials would take visiting bigwigs up there to look down at the huge building site which would become Shatin.

Nowadays it leads a quieter life, still popular with tourists and morning exercisers (in daylight) courting couples (after dark) and picnicking domestic helpers (on Sundays).

However its significance for me is that the walk to the Lookout and back is an ideal distance for the day’s shorter dog walks, before breakfast and after dinner. So I have walked past that tree four times a day for about 30 years. I must literally have looked at it thousands of times. Four Hamlett dogs have watered it

Recently a government tree inspector seems to have decided that this tree was a menace to passers-by and it had to go.

Sad though I am about this it must be admitted that the tree had not been looking too well for a long time. There are many similar trees round our way, all planted some time around 1980 when the road, our estate and the Lookout were all new.

Comparing my tree with its many siblings it was clearly not flourishing. They are all some variation on the pine: evergreens with needles instead of leaves. The tree had some foliage, but it looked sparse compared with the bushy hairstyle of its siblings.

Its most interesting feature was a parasite, which had attached itself to one of the bigger branches – not mistletoe, but the same principle – and may have contributed to the tree’s ill-health. Well if it did, punishment arrived last week, because the demolition of the tree left the parasite homeless.

The dog and I noticed as soon as we left the house in the morning that some sort of bandsaw festival was taking place near by. From the car park you could see the team in action. I say the team because there were clearly enough people for a cricket or football team, though a different choice of sport might have been advisable because some of the workers were women.

Clearly the days are long gone when ailing trees were felled by a solitary specialist using a two-handed axe inherited from his grandfather, and dressed like an extra from the live action version of Babes in the Wood.

A little crowd, attired with a praiseworthy care for health and safety in high-vis jackets, helmets and ear protectors, were milling around the bottom of the tree. Near its top a man had been hoisted on one of those elevating platforms that TV crews use to look over people’s garden walls at their illegal swimming pools. He was cutting chunks off the tree with a large bandsaw.

As the pieces hit the ground they were dragged away, cut into more manageable bits with smaller bandsaws, and then another group took them off to a growing roadside heap of amputated tree limbs.

Also on the team were the drivers of two vans (one sporting the logo of the Civil Engineering and Development Department, which I assume was responsible for the work) the operator of the lift, and a man who appeared to be in charge. He was operating like a World War 1 General, dressed for the office and standing a safe distance from the front line.

The overall impression was quite impressive, and we watched for a bit. Later in the morning the dog became restless, I became curious and we ventured out again to see how the work was going. This was about 11 and the job was done. There were two large heaps of tree remains (they disappeared a day later) and a neatly finished stump about a foot or so high.

I suppressed as ungrateful the thought that if they had left a bit more it would have made a nice picnic table.

The question which now arises is: will there be a replacement? Official policy on trees seems to vary, possibly with the department concerned. Sometimes when one is removed there is a promise that it will be replaced, and this promise is kept.

A problem spot next to the carpark has hosted a succession of unfortunate trees, and is now occupied by an interesting newcomer, a frangi pangi tree. This is a weird thing, native to the Hawaian Islands, but it is a solid-looking low-rise tree and has already survived two major typhoons, so we have high hopes for it.

Isolated frangipani or plumeria tree without leaves on white background

But usually the big old trees are not replaced if they go. The stump sits and rots gradually. This is disappointing. There was a time when the government decided that Hong Kong needed more trees and District Boards were encouraged to plant them in any plausible spot.

We were also encouraged to go en famille to a distant hillside where you would be issued with a baby tree each and a trowel, to be used to plant your saplings. I remember going to this interesting event with my son but he was quite small so it must have been a long time ago. I remember we took careful bearings so we could return and see how our trees were doing, but we never did.

A similar wilting of interest seems to have afflicted the government, because after years in which my tree had lots of company from newly planted trees – few of which survived – planting on my short walk route has almost stopped altogether. Family tree planting is still encouraged elsewhere. Green my walk, please.

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