Birthday in Hong Kong

I woke up this morning on a 777. I still can't quite believe that this great U shaped convention hall can fly. Not only that, can fly in a straight line from Auckland to this murky, noisy, teeming place where every single one of the taxis seems to be the same make of car (Toyota Crown Comfort)and where not one of the millions of people going about their business with such determination knows me.

I don't know how we managed it on our budget but we are in a hotel with inlaid marble floors and where someone has gone to an awful lot of bother to spread fresh chrysanthemums around the place. We look out of our window and there, seven floors below, on the roof of the fourth floor, is an enormous swimming pool. I don't have any togs, and marvellous though they might be, 777s are not great places to sleep, so I won't be swimming. We've walked though a market.Two or three blocks of shops selling flowers, another couple selling birds and pets, and all the low priced tat that China can produce stacked up in four lanes down the middle of the road. There are some bargains to be had, especially if you ar in the market for umbrellas and t shirts. Tomorrow we'll explore a bit more and head for Rome in the evening.

I'm wearing a St. Christopher's medal. I know, I know, I shouldn't be pandering to that sort of superrstition, but it was given to me, and it somehow symbolises the prayers of all the people back home, so I'm carrying their faith with me around my neck. And over the last 24 years we seem to have been looked after. I left my camera on a cafe table in Dunedin and a lovely Indian family ran breathless after me to return it. Others have appeared at just the right time and given smiling assistance, including, incidentally, the lady in Auckland who weighed our hand luggage. A piece of medieval fiction he might be, but St. Christopher certainly seems to be on the job.

No picture I'm sorry. The hotel internet computer doesn't have the right slot for my camera card. Next time maybe.

Comments

Peter Carrell said…

When I was Vicar of St. Christopher's, Blenheim South, I was slightly chagrined to learn that the RC Church had 'downgraded' St. Christopher to some status less than a full saint. But then, what would they know about saints compared to us Anglicans????

14 April 2009 at 20:55

Kathryn said…

Happy Birthday, Kelvin. I was thinking about you today knowing that you also were turning a year older.
I'm so glad that you are feeling well and that you are on your way to Europe for your wonderful holiday.
I think St Christopher has a lot going for him, he kept me safe for years after an uncle gave me a necklace when I was 11 years old.
Have a great time and I hope you enjoy every moment.
God Bless you, KH

15 April 2009 at 02:02

Anonymous said…

When my sons James & Thom were babies in Mainland China in the early 1980s, they were, in love, both given little Bhuddist amulets by older Chinese friends. James had his presented on his "100 day birthday" in North China; Thom at his "30 day birthday" in the South, with its historically lower infant mortality. I have kept these red-corded trinkets, though some Chinese Christian friends have, through the years at different times, urged me to burn them. They were given in love - as was your St Christopher's medal. Travel well, Kelvin & Clemency!

15 April 2009 at 07:54

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire. Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon...

Kindle

Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on. I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incomp...

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and...

The Traitor

A couple of people have questioned me privately about the Leonard Cohen song The Traitor , and about Cohen's comments on the song, "[The Traitor is about] the feeling we have of betraying some mission we were mandated to fulfill and being unable to fulfill it; then coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it; and the real courage is to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you find yourself". What on earth does he mean, and why am I so excited about it? For the latter, check with my psychiatrist. For the former, my take on the song is this: The Traitor is another of those instances, as in The Partisan , where Leonard Cohen uses a military metaphor to speak of life in general and human love in particular. Many of us hold high ideals: some great quest or other that we pursue. These are often laudable things: finding true love, finding the absolute love of God, becoming enlightened, spreading the Gospel, writing the great novel or some such ...

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede...

Available Light

Search This Blog