You may be forgiven for thinking that this English girl has fallen of the face of the Net and died. The truth is not too far from that.
On Monday last I was struck down in 24* broad sunshine with a cold virus the likes of which only Hong Kong, it seems, can foster. Now, I do not wish to name names, but... I blame Erin. A chatty Common Entrance 13+ who arrived at our 11 o’clock lesson the Saturday before chatting less than usual from behind a green surgical mask. And I tried to keep my distance, but it appears the damage had already been done - had perhaps been written in the stars. For, waking up several hours earlier with nausea-inducing shock at the alarm, I had been fighting the desire to sleep my way through the morning when Erin arrived. The promise of coffee hovered before me like a mirage, seemingly moving ever further away the closer I came to it, until finally 1pm and salvation in a Pret coffee that, mainlined, saw me safely through the afternoon and to the point at which I could crawl back under the duvet, from which slumberous grave I have surfaced only occasionally since and then in fittingly zombie-like mode. Diagnosis: the real-life equivalent of Man Flu; a particularly virulent strain of common cold which mixed in the right doses with panadol, Diet Coke, near fatal quantities of grapes and Stieg Larsson, has seen me day-dreaming deliriously through teaching all week. Oh yes. For, somewhere between Heathrow and HK - at some indeterminate point, possibly while drifting finally into dreamy unconsciousness over Kazakhstan - tolerance to Sick Days is hijacked and every incoming expat is issued with ineffectual prescriptions for over the counter drugs, made to don surgical face masks that leave you resembling an extra from 28 Days Later and told to carry on about your business regardless of wishing just to be left to sleep and sneeze and blow your nose in private instead of, like my student when she returned yesterday (minus the mask) being obliged to excuse yourself, cough up phlegm into the nearest obliging receptacle, while thoughtfully suggesting that "you might not want to look in there." Aiya! So, from behind my own regulation green face mask - which let me tell you does nothing to prevent the spread of germs, rather force you to hyperventilate over your own, but which does act as a very good sign for “Don’t F*ck With Me, I’m Sick” and, adequately pepped up on meds, gives one delusions of ER grandeur – I have spent the week being subjected to interminably long, dark hours creatively writing students' coursework (which I understand is most immoral and which, certainly in this case, may have serious repercussions - namely along the lines of "What on earth were you smoking when you wrote this?!"), tutored on the illusory nature of love and the delusions inspired by literature (subjects that in my drugged up state I felt somehow over-qualified to lecture on) and tried to explain to one charming student why swearing in school entrance exams is inadvisable: "Jonathan, you cannot use 'bull.' It's an abbreviated swear word." "Bullsh*t." "That's right, but don't swear."
All in a week's malingering work.
It was in among these dreams of walking to and from work, through IFC mall and past the large shining skyscraper housing innumerable offices and my local Pacific Coffee [pron. par-sif-ic Ca-fay] that I noticed the arrival of Christmas. A thousand beautiful white lights adorning the trees and public space in front of The Centre: lights hanging above the entry way and from the vast ceiling, garish poinsettias lining the escalators and, slowly coming into sight like a heaven-sent revelation, a fibre-optic tree the size and scale of which designed to make your heart skip a beat. (Oh, and an enormous plastic replica of a Victorian toy rocking horse which was attracting rather puzzled looks from passers by.) Well, seeing all this my heart certainly did miss a beat, but whether out of pleasure or panic is unclear. As I drifted in a daze through IFC I felt the need to reach out, stop someone and ask "What day is this?" Had I done a Scrooge and missed five whole weeks - the end of November and majority of December - to wake up to find that it was Christmas Day already? This magical wonderland of ....well, no, not quite snow. This is Hong Kong after all and it might be mid November but the sun is still shining, only with (contrary to the wishes of the director in Lost in Translation) a little less intensity than before. I may have been wrapped up like an Eskimo (sorry, Inuit), but this was more in protest to the air conditioning than the outside temperature, which was in fact serving as a pleasant reminder of why, even in my current state, I was glad that I chose - back in those first freezing months of the year amid scenes of snowy chaos - to return to more tropical climes. What was a cold compared to the raging cold of an English bleak midwinter? But herein lies the puzzle. Why does HK seem to 'do' Christmas with more intensity than England where it is a much more important - nay, necessary - and even for some religious, holiday? Is it that the traditions of their some-time colonisers have lived on after they/we did? Is it out of exuberance to embrace all Western holidays that HK welcomes Christmas with the same gusto that it does Halloween and with the same terrifying effect? Or is it more sinister than that? Many have considered the over commericialisation of the holidays to be mere opiates for an over-worked masses. Those eggnog lattes, the intoxicating scent of so many fir-trees (shipped only Mao knows how many miles!) and the mind-numbing holiday muzak that is, as I write, being piped through the palaces and arcades of consumer worship are then purely state-sponsored economic rituals designed to keep businesses booming and the proletariat spending, and then working to pay off their spending. But if this is true, shouldn't we all practise a bit of the old "Bah Humbug" Scrooge? Should we not rise up in political counter point to precisely those values that Scrooge himself stood for - money-making and greed - and say "No, I shall not give in; I shall not spend; I shall not sup at thy red latte cup!"? For if not that, then what does that old tale teach us? Where is the real heart of the holidays?
Well, I grant you, the lights are twinkly, the festive red cups adorned with white snowflakes and filled with hot nutmeg and cinnamon milk do make a welcome change to anything iced, and Christmas stockings walking the streets with true Hong Kong sartorial panache are a glad sight. So I guess I don't make a very natural Scrooge, but the music? To encourage children to sing Christmas carols in mid-November: is not this a form of abuse - if not of them then of us who must endure it, must quell our inner grump and put on a smiling face and tell them "very nice" in the dear hope that they will stop? So, Scrooge, yes. A Christmas carol? Please, not yet, no.
But in all seriousness, apart from the off-key singing of precocious lil Britney wannabes, perhaps what saddens me in all this preparatory festivity the most is that - aged and cynical as I am - I know that with such build up to the time of great excitement and unthinkable happiness and joy, the holiday will be over too soon. Those thousands of poinsettias will be taken away and the decorations down, the red cups will gradually fade away and the reindeer jumper pass out of circulation because Christmas has, very distinctly, a sell by date. It is one day, or three days off work (if you are lucky). In taking Christmas out of storage so early, are we not tempting it to go off long before we are? Will not that the excitement - for, yes, I think it was childish excitement that I felt at seeing those first lights - have already dwindled and faded, and will I not wish I was home in England far from the glitzy/kitschy lights of the city? Will not I long simply for real cold weather, snowflakes that actually fall from the sky and the necessity of warming one's hands by an open fire or around a cup stove-mulled wine? Snowed in with nothing but UHT milk and last year's leftover Christmas pudding (the question of who ate the centre of the Terry's Chocolate Orange but a distant memory), wrapped up in one of my mother's hand-knitted scarves and playing scrabble; my dyslexic-poetic family and I? Perhaps this is why Christmas in Hong Kong can have the effect of feeling more hollow than a plastic replica Victorian tin rocking horse. Not simply is there not the bitter, icy cold and long dark days of England, but there lacks the warmth and solidity for me of hearth and home - the reassurance of a tradition that if it saw a life-size horse it'd know what was meant by it.
I say this not to moan or lament though; only to answer those people who ask "Are you going home for the holidays?" that, no, I will be here, wearing my Christmas cardi with a due sense of irony, fondly listening in to King's College carols and sipping my latte in the sun while a Chinese santa and his obscenely dressed tai-tai (the one day of the year she works, apparently) hand out presents to the kids on the beach. And I will think warmly of you all back home unwrapping with delight your tin rocking horses and soldiers, sitting round the fire, chestnuts roasting as you listen to the Queen's speech on the wireless, sip at your sherry and remark on how fast the snow comes down roundabout -
"So deep!"
"So crisp!"
"And even."
And I will be glad that you at least have escaped the hackneyed cliches and tired epithets and can enjoy a very Merry Christmas. Because the rest of it is quite possibly, as Jonathan would say, all a load of bull.
I say this not to moan or lament though; only to answer those people who ask "Are you going home for the holidays?" that, no, I will be here, wearing my Christmas cardi with a due sense of irony, fondly listening in to King's College carols and sipping my latte in the sun while a Chinese santa and his obscenely dressed tai-tai (the one day of the year she works, apparently) hand out presents to the kids on the beach. And I will think warmly of you all back home unwrapping with delight your tin rocking horses and soldiers, sitting round the fire, chestnuts roasting as you listen to the Queen's speech on the wireless, sip at your sherry and remark on how fast the snow comes down roundabout -
"So deep!"
"So crisp!"
"And even."
And I will be glad that you at least have escaped the hackneyed cliches and tired epithets and can enjoy a very Merry Christmas. Because the rest of it is quite possibly, as Jonathan would say, all a load of bull.
