Government House
Upper Albert Rd
Hong Kong
Dear Clement,
What a super start my one-and-only has got off to! Not only has she sorted out the logistical issues with toilet roll supplies, but she’s also dealt with those awful scruffs infesting Lego. Or LegCo. I can never remember.
Just in case you don’t remember, in 2014 the government rightly decided that civic square, outside the legislature, which was put there in order that civilians could applaud the government’s bold initiatives in – well, I’m not quite sure as I wasn’t here, but there must have been something – so was not to be abused to express civil discontent. A rabble of malcontents, pseudo-intellectuals and human-rights types thought otherwise, and were duly arrested and convicted but with a mere slap on the wrist as punishment.
They learnt their lesson this week. No mere slap on the wrist, but a good purgative stretch in prison. You’d think it would be as simple as that, but the bleeding hearts are at it, whinging about the legal technicalities of punishing people twice for the same crime. Well, I’ve always believed in giving people a second chance. The first judge, who handed down those ludicrously lenient sentences the first time round, got it so wrong. Of course the judiciary should be allowed a second chance to allot the correct sentences. And a third, a fourth. Until the miscreants have been appropriately hung, drawn, quartered and their heads put on stakes.
While my one-and-only is a little disappointed that even the second judge stopped short of those richly deserved capital sentences, she can at least face her electorate with pride and say “Promise kept”. She did, after all, promise to heal the divisions in society. As you know, set theory isn’t my thing but if one has a barrel containing both rotten apples (set A) and good eggs (set E), the way to create a single, undivided set is not to mix them all up, which would create the abomination of a rotten egg omelette, but to remove set A leaving only set E. This, she has now done with singular, mathematical precision.
Others whine that the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP – or the C2P (pronounced C-squared-P of course) as I prefer to think of them – is behind this. What nonsense. She’s never taken so much as a word of advice from me, and I’m married to her. In any case, my one-and-only can barely understand Mandarin well enough to mind her Ps and Qs, let alone be fluent enough to take an order.
But 2014 was only the start of the divisions. Last year, some of these miscreants’ associates were elected to the legislature. Well, you can imagine where that lead. I mean, turning up to make the laws of the land wearing clothes that most of my students would be ashamed to be seen in – ill-fitting T-shirts, jeans, un-combed hair and the like – it wouldn’t have been allowed in my undergraduate years in Cambridge, I can tell you. Not that plaited ties and tweed jackets were de rigeur, but a certain sense of sartorial appropriateness was called for. A straw boater while punting on the Cam, a dinner jacket in the college refectory, that kind of thing. Not undergarments, working man’s trousers and sporting footwear while debating matters of state.
But their arrogance was such that they flouted the laws they were elected to uphold, and have been ejected to much approbation. Of course, the mob from whom they drew their support have harped on about it, but one cannot have twenty-year-olds making law. Goodness knows, they may even have brought new ideas.
Ah, breakfast has arrived, and I see Thomas the butler has arrived with my preprandial rum. Must go,
Yours,