EASTER

And Free Beer

Was talking to Pat this week, and he noticed that I had bumped an elbow which was bleeding. Of course, I had not felt a thing and was oblivious. Pat understood this, his mum is a similar age, and that and lots of sun exposure and all the other travails of life can leave us both a bit inclined to bleed at the least provocation.

Pat’s a gent so he offered a plaster and assisted in it’s application.

A little later, just before I left, I thought I would give Pat a bit of a wind-up.

“Pat, I said, a word of advice for the sake of the business, when you are dispensing medical care in Hong Kong, you must first ask if the recipient is privately insured and that was at least five hundred Hongkies for an insured person”.

In response Pat says,

“Jack, you must understand, that any service I render to you is already on your bill”.

Readers, if you think you can out-banter Pat, turn up and have a go. I have had plenty and can never seem to win.

If you do succeed, you can be assured of a free pint.

(see below)

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Liverpool and Manchester are only 30 miles apart.

I watched a video of what looked liked a plane passing from the centre of Manchester to the centre of Liverpool and it took no time. I knew there was a Manchester Ship Canal, but figured it had to be a hundred miles or so. No, just 36 miles.

Why do people talk so differently when they grew up in cities less than an hour down the road? Growing up in rural Australia, that was local, a two can trip.

Every day is a school day, but how did I not know this?

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A quite lovely and quiet Easter and Chin Ming festival over the weekend, we get the double up every few years as the different calendars line up.

Chin Ming fell on the Sunday, it’s a traditional Chinese festival dedicated to ancestor worship, filial piety, and welcoming spring. Families visit cemeteries to clean graves, burn incense and paper offerings, and share meals.

The government gazetted holidays as follows, Good Friday, Saturday was the Day Following Good Friday, Monday was the Day Following Chin Ming, and Tuesday was the Day Following Easter Monday, and of course Sunday, Easter and Chin Ming, is a holiday anyway and doesn’t need to be gazetted.

Make what you will of that, but you have at admire the skill of the Hong Kong civil service in making sure we get plenty of holidays.

It’s a bit far for me to be grave sweeping, and I must be lacking in filial piety as I have never visited my parents grave. They moved to a new area while I was in boarding school, and while I could see the attraction of their new home for them, it never really took hold of me, and it’s not an area that I frequented after they died.

The long, long weekend saw Hong Kongers rush for the airport, and I’m told it was very very busy Monday as the first returnees arrived back.

They didn’t all take a plane.

The South China Morning Post,

Over 685,000 Hong Kong residents left the city on the first day of the Easter and Ching Ming break (April 3, 2026), with huge crowds heading to mainland China, particularly Shenzhen, for dining, shopping, and entertainment. The high volume of travel, driven by lower costs and improved convenience, is part of a surge expected to see over 6.4 million passengers pass through Hong Kong checkpoints during the holiday period.

The Hong Kong Free Press,

a growing number of residents have been travelling to neighbouring mainland Chinese cities for weekends and holidays. They spend on dining, shopping, and even medical services, taking advantage of the lower costs of goods and services.

A British friend has been advised to have a colonoscopy and his doctor said he should get it done in Shenzhen. Top medical care, new facilities and much less expensive.

My mate has been suggesting all the lads head over for a colonoscopy weekend, a sort of new variant of the boys weekend, medical treatment instead of golf, gambling or bar hopping.

Let’s just say he’s not been knocked over in the rush of acceptances.

He has a point of course, medical tourism is good business because the demand is there, and it’s not the worst excuse for a lad’s weekend away, but he is finding it is lonely being the trend-setter.

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On X,

we’ve come a long way from Maxwell House..International Roast and Chicory Essence..thanks to our post war immigration and the introduction of the 747 Jumbo which made overseas travel affordable

How did that happen?

Cafe Florentino claim that they had the first espresso machine in Australia during the 1920s, and it so flummoxed the state that operators needed a boilermakers licence due to the high steam pressure used, but coffee culture didn’t really take off until the late 1960s.

They had machines in University Cafe in Carlton and Pellegrinis in the city from the 1950s, but I think the poster on X is correct, it was the introduction of the 747 and widespread international travel that caused the culture to become widespread.

Amusingly Australia now exports it’s cafe and coffee culture, you can see straight knock-offs in New York and Hong Kong, and traces of it everywhere.

Just look for the tell-tale signs, Avo Toast, Short Black, Flat White, Long Black, and you will know you are in a little bit of the land of Aus.

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Anti-Americanism is very fashionable again, perhaps driven by wide-spread dislike of the current President, but it was rife at university in the 1980s,.

But you know, even the most anti of the activists were slavish in following American cultural trends. They were cultural Americans, from blue jeans to music, films and TV, food and drugs, right through to how they protested.

They still are, they imported BLM, Taking the Knee, Cultural Appropriation, MeToo.

It always amused me, it had elements of What Have the Romans ever Done for Us.

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I love living in cities were a big chunk of the population is from somewhere else.

On X

The real challenge with B cities isn’t the lack of the MoMA, it’s the fact that unless you’re from there, or you move right after college, everyone’s social circle is basically set to people they grew up with or worked with at 22.

Meghan McCardle,

It’s a real problem if you move to one of these cities. I’ve had friends who moved to great cities like Philadelphia and left because it was too hard to find folks who were looking for new friends.

This is not a problem in Hong Kong, there were less than a million people here in 1945, over 2 million by the 1950s, then around 6–7 million by the late 20th century, driven almost entirely by migration from mainland China rather than natural growth.

The end result is almost everyone or their grandparents came from somewhere else, and it accounts for the energy of the city.

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Troy Bramston review of Bell Shakespeare’s new Julius Caesar at the Sydney Opera House.

“I should have suspected how bad the performance of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar at the Sydney Opera House would be after seeing a notice posted at the entrance to the Playhouse theatre. Patrons about to take their seats were advised “this production features depictions of violence in line with Shakespeare’s original text”……

We quickly discovered that Brutus, the main protagonist with the most stage time, was now a lesbian. It was not that a woman, Brigid Zengeni, was playing the key role – after all, Shakespeare had men play women – but that Brutus was now a woman referred to as “she” and “her”……..

Caesar (Septimus Caton) wears a toga but the others are clad in modern white suits and, bizarrely, Mark Antony (Mark Leonard Winter) wears a red track suit”.

Thanks @TroyBramston

If I were in Sydney I’d be lining up to see this, at least while the season lasts.

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