I first learnt of this Latin phrase and its reply “Et cum spiritu tuo” as an altar boy maybe when I was 12 in Wah Yan College. After Vatican II, the Catholic Church introduced substantial changes, some rather dramatic, including conducting Masses in local languages, and in our case, in English and Chinese. The two…
I began to plan writing this Year Ender shortly after the beginning of the month, prompted by a notice from Jacky Keung, Store Manager of our mini-store at Tai Wo Hau, that we were to move to another place in Kwai Fong, close to the MTR Station and with hourly parking. Jacky was very accommodating…
I left off last time after a first attempt to manage what we had kept in storage, in preparation for the impending move that would take place before the year end. Since then, we had made two more visits, one lasting some seven hours while the other, barely 90 minutes. The idea was to decant…
Today marks the 47th anniversary of my wedding with Rosita, and for those who had followed avidly the Sino-British negotiations in the run-up to 1997, the 37th anniversary of the death of Sir Edward Youde. We are also good friends of a couple who celebrate their wedding anniversary today. Let me disclose slowly though not…
By now, we have moved to Mei Foo for over ten years. I had said in my first memoir that friends – some friends anyway – were saying that we were moving to the Dark Side and were betting on when we would move back to the Island. Too bad, nobody put down any real…
We returned Wednesday evening from a 3-day visit to Shunde, which was part and parcel of a reunion programme between Wah Yan College alumni marking the 60th anniversary of their graduation in 1963 when our numbers were around 150 plus or minus 10%. Alumni associations are not the easiest organisations to manage, and jokes and…
Today marks the Singles’ Day or Bachelors’ Day, which I learned from Wikipedia originated at Nanjing University in 1993, but has now spread throughout China and even adopted in the West and highly commercialized. I first knew of the date when my first mentor, Joe, celebrated his 80th birthday some years back and his wife…
Su asked me last week to clear my diary for last evening to accompany her and her longtime friend from New York City, which I did. It turned out that he was her ex-colleague in Morgan Stanley operating mainly from NYC, but unbeknown to her had worked in Hong Kong for a month in 1993…
This is a quote from “A Few Good Men” which is a 1992 film featuring Jack Nicholson, Tom Cruise and Demi Moore, among others. It was a low budget film – $40 Million – but which grossed more than $243 million and was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. The film didn’t win…
