Tomorrow, boum boum

Our contractor, Mr Fok, has been working in our flat for five days now. And yes, saying his naming without smirking is even more of a challenge than putting up with the white dusty footprints on our black shiny floor.

Knocking through to make a new bedroom and baby room was supposed to take two days according to Mr Fok's original estimate - although he doesn't speak English and I don't speak Cantonese, so I realise now that that might have been a miscommunication. In fact, when I asked him yesterday when he thought he would be finished, he answered "tomorrow, Friday, three days, tomorrow, boum boum". It's anybody's guess!

Meanwhile, being the former British colony that it is, Christmas is in full swing in Hong Kong. (I write this sitting in the building where Krusty works as the Cirque du Soleil take over the atrium in a strange display of Egyptian bellydancers, Victorian ladies and Red Indians flying away towards a Santa on stilts...)


Giant trees, skyscraper high light displays and kitsch midi carols are everywhere, and overbearing as it is, it has put me in the holiday spirit. We're having Christmas in our flat for the first time ever, and my parents and brother are coming over to celebrate. We've bought our first ever tree (which of course, as I was the one who chose it, was judged not to live up to the Krusty standard once it arrived in the flat) and I have decorated it with the strangest ornaments I could find (courtesy of those Scandinavian weirdos at Ikea). Krusty complains every day that it is just too odd, but I like our underdog tree with its huge holes, bent trunk and floating bearded heads... I even knitted a star to put on top, which doesn't really look like a star unless you squint at it from a distance. It's the thought that counts, eh?!