tim's experiment

To Tin Shui Wai today to play for a small parade. I am not sure why footdrill is considered a desirable accomplishment for young first aiders but if they are prepared to take the considerable trouble involved in learning it then I do think adults should arrange music for the resulting parade. A parade without music is a lifeless thing. The technicalities of parade ground music are very encouraging for amateur bagpipers. Half a dozen of us with two or three drummers can make enough noise to put a spring into the parade step on all but the largest venues. To do the same with a traditional military band would require 30-40 players, with a lot of demanding sub-categories so that the result is reasonably balanced. One cannot, for example, have a Susaphone section of 16. So if you’re willing to pipe for expenses, as we are, there are quite a lot of opportunities.

Tin Shui Wai is, of course, the City of Sorrows for headline purposes. When I am interviewing students for admissions purposes I always ask anyone from Tin Shui Wai how the sorrow is going, and they indignantly deny that the place is depressing. Everyone agrees that the geographical remoteness is a problem. The place looks all right when you visit it. The centre is spacious, the landscaping lavish. There is the usual new town shortage of mature trees. The school we performed in was fresh, spacious and, even on a grey day, cheerful. The school next door was already building an extension. Blocks of flats marched across the surrounding landscape. Clearly a lot of people have views consisting of hundreds of flats much like their own, but there is no easy solution to that.

Historically the “City of Sorrow” label has marched across the Hong Kong landscape with the public housing programme. The latest construction always seems to be in the middle of nowhere. I can remember complaints about Shatin, Tuen Mun, Tsing Yi, Ma On Shan and Cheung Kwan O. The new public housing gets only the tenants who have no choice, and they tend to have other problems. The community facilities and public transport  lag behind the population. From a bureaucratic point of view this is unavoidable. We cannot build a sports centre to cater for 50,000 people until 50,000 people are already there to use it. To do otherwise would be an abuse of public funds. And the private sector people don’t want to open anything until they can see a profit. Still I wonder if we could try a bit harder. In the English new town where I grew up they had much the same problem. So in each  neighbourhood they supplied a small prefabricated building, which we rather unkindly called the “community hut”. But the huts were used and were useful. Many of them, actually, are still there and as busy as ever, though they were meant to be temporary. In the days when the Polytechnic Staff Quarters occupied an estate of their own in Fotan, one ground-floor flat was reserved for community purposes, and accomodated the usual mix of play group, youth groups, interest classes and what have you for many years. Then some planning official spotted what was going on and complained that the flat should only be used for domestic purposes. So the community users were kicked out. Even on quiet estates people shun ground-floor flats, so this one remained empty until the whole place was demolished.

As the Hong Kong civil service cannot be entirely manned by idiots and problems of this kind are rather common we must suppose that the problem is organisational rather than personal. The approach is too departmental. If you put a dozen people on a team and told them to forget their departmental loyalties and build a decent new town they would probably do a good job. Indeed something like that was done, with considerable success, with some of the first New Territories ones. But too often procedure trumps common sense. I once asked if I could take over a disused rural school for use as a place for courses and camps for various charitable bodies. The answer was that as this building was still classified as a school nobody could stay overnight except the caretaker. Could the building be reclassified? “Not my department…”