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Please welcome me, Fyodor Dustyevsky, the person who meant to be the real author of this blog, but E@L keeps jumping in... Bastard

Post T8

It was the middle of his life (assuming he lived to 92) and he was lost in meditation on the meandering walking path of Bowen Rd. The T8 that crashed through town last night had sucked window-panes from office towers, ripped the green cladding and bamboo scaffolding from elevated construction sites, torn down trees and stripped branches off and sent them scattering into cars and shop windows. There was no wind now, mid-morning. An arcade of jungle hung over this part of Bowen Rd, rooted in the hills overlooking Wanchai. Up here away from the damage downtown, the path looked more of a botanical combat zone, blocked like check-points by the occasional large branch, and it was ankle deep in strewn twigs and clumps of dark, wet leaves that hid ankle-turning land-mines of rocks that had slipped down the slopes onto the asphalt. The pungent smell of damp cellulose concentrated in the still air under the overhanging foliage, a thick, cloying, almost shit-like stink, but somehow pleasant and reassuring. And of course the humidity was stifling. Already, after the five minutes it took to get to the start of the walking path proper, he was drenched and sticky with sweat. There were no joggers risking the hazards left on the path this morning. He could walk alone for an hour or so and let his mind drift and maybe find in a few spots, with whatever chance he had, a pocket of breeze to cool his prickling skin.

Was this really the place he wanted to live? A suffocating island, a week of neglect away from being swallowed silently by the inexorable encroachment of its fecund greenery. See the ivy entwined about the bridges - wasn’t it only up to that pillar last time you looked? See the banyan trees launching out a precarious existence half-way up sheer brick walls with their roots tracing an ever thickening biological grout between the lines of the stones, a toehold on the city itself. Choked with pollution (usually - the storm had blown clear air in from the East), on the tip of the typhoon tail which lashes like a dragon up from the Philippines several times a season, and with language barriers on all sides that penned most of the expats into enclaves of incomplete and erroneous understanding in the Mid-levels (such as himself) or in Stanley or Discovery Bay..

Was this the good life? He felt drained of ambition, an agent from some foreign world here only to observe, with no-one expecting him to to anything except maintain his position and report in once in a while. Had he been spoilt by too much money, too much of what he secretly feared was inappropriate praise and bored due a chronic lack of challenge as he continued to work easily and safely in his comfort zone? They joke about merely turning up being most important part of the job, but for him it was very, very close to an unenviable truth.