Today I did something I for some reason have never done before: Went to the Cenotaph in Central to watch the Remembrance Day ceremony.
It was beautiful, solemn and dignified, and lots of people had turned out; everyone from former soldiers

to those just starting out.

When the solemn music started up with trumpets and bagpipe solos, I was glad I was wearing sunglasses. The tears were streaming down my face as I thought of those who had sacrificed their lives.

Some guys from ‘We are not Chinese, we are Hong Kong People’-movement turned up with their blue flags which act as red flags to a certain bull.

They were very nice and let me have a go:

Then they even broke into God Save The Queen! Excellent.

We have so much to be thankful for and so many to be thankful to; all the heroes who just got on with it and did what they had to do.

Here is a film about one of the people I admire most in this world, my uncle Egil who survived the war against all odds. I’m going to the Cenotaph again next year.

Testing testing. I’m actually writing for SCMP and have done since March. This is just a rant, but I also have my own twice monthly column, So Near and Yet So Feared.

Last night, on Halloween, I ventured out in Central dressed as my favourite character on my show Cantonese The Movie on my YouTube channel Cantocourse, to advertise for my Cantonese course. A woman has to do what a woman has to do, and if it means wearing a moustache, so be it.

The above character, Mister Public Security Uncle, incorporates everything I hate about government officials: Niggardly rule-observing, special zones for this and that, no sitting on the grass – you know. There are many great things about the Hong Kong government and I’m the first to praise them when they do something right; starting a business for example takes about 12 minutes. Lose your ID card? They have it all set up again in about three seconds and if you’re not happy with the photo you can take another one.

But when they’re bad, they’re really damned bad. A case in point: Two of my friends bought a house in Pui O outside which there was an abandoned wasteland which was an illegal dumping ground for construction debris, overgrown with weeds, a paradise for snakes and mosquitos. It took my friends several months to get rid of the rubbish and transform the little patch to this:

They planted stuff, put down tiles, even hung up a swing for their son and other children to enjoy. Couples are now coming to have their wedding photos taken there:

Before a festering dump, now a beautiful patch complementing their house and the village in general. You can guess what happened next: Some jumped-up government officials came around saying the swing and plants would be removed to make way for a large metal plaque declaring this to be Government Land.

This is what civil servants spend your hard-earned money on. Meanwhile they are very happy to let this thing slide:

A stream near a construction site (also government land) completely blocked by building debris.

I say everyone in Pui O should start guerrilla beautification of ugly and wasted places. Start planting!

Ah! This is the kind of result we women want to see when we go to the beauty salon. From 76 year-old Chinese woman to 23 year-old western woman, in one treatment. (I presume the left half is the “after” picture.) Long live truthful advertising.

Oh, wonderful Zhongshan where I’ve just spent a day and a half. I came here for the sole purpose of taking one photo that I forgot to take last time I was here two weeks ago, that of a street vendor making my number 1 favourite food when I lived in Beijing in 1988: What I then mistakenly called Beijing Pancake. Although its number 1 slot has since long been overtaken by Sichuan food and I realised “Beijing Pancake” was just called “fried cake” and was available anywhere in the north, I was thrilled to come to Zhongshan for the first time earlier this month and find this a common street food here.

1. You spread some pancake mixture on a hot plate and crack an egg on it

2. You sprinkle some spring onion and pickled cabbage

3. What? No! You DON’T add some sickeningly sweet sausage! That’s a new and horrible thing. Wrong wrong wrong.

4. You fold the thing in two

5. and smear some brown paste on it (possibly oyster sauce)

6. Then comes the all-important chilli paste and some fried dough

7. whereupon you cut it in half

8. and voila! No, I didn’t buy this stack. I made him make me just one, without the totally inappropriate sausage.

9. Throughout the process, you maintain the same beatific smile.

It was in fact one of these vendors who was the author of one of my very first foreigner-cheatings in China all those years ago. He tried to charge me 2 yuan although it clearly said 1 on his cart. When I pointed this out in my five-worded Mandarin, the 30 or so spectators who had gathered around to watch Whitey Buying Something From Someone broke out in wild laughter and applause.

Now, apparently, Fried Cake has increased in price by 800%. I think I was cheated again, but it was worth it. I got the photos and filmed the production process. Now I want to find the place where they make Old Crone look like Young Smoothie! (Or vice versa.)

It had to happen. With recent humiliations such as failing in its bid to build a “super” prison with 7,000 inmates on an island just outside Mui Wo, failing to build a “super” columbarium with I don’t know how many dead inmates on the Chi Ma Wan Peninsula and the latest: Probably having its request to build a “super” rubbish incinerator right outside my living room turned down, the government wants revenge.

What, but it’s a master plan! And it’s'greening’! You may protest. Green is good, right? Yes, green is indeed good. But if you look at the background of the photo above, a giant banner posted outside Pui O primary school (but nowhere else), you will see that it’s a photo of Lantau taken from Google Earth and that it is already pretty damned green.

So what’s with the greening? Are they going to paint non-green things green? That’s been done in the past, notably on shotcreted slopes.

Whenever I see a banner like this, I fear the worst. And looking more closely at the photos, you will see that what the government actually has in mind for Lantau is this:

It looks to me as if the “greening” is going to be removal of trees, the few that are left trimmed to the death, and fascistically manicured flowerbeds making some kind of ghastly cartoon shape.

Nooooo, not again! Why can’t they just keep their interfering hands off our island? It’s already green!

So I have to go to that meeting – sigh – and listen yet again to a bunch of jumped-up government officials bleating on about how the people who are against their madcap schemes “haven’t understood” what the government means yet, and need to have it explained, while sitting down and shutting up.

Ominous, that’s what it is. Ominous.

Sometimes I just don’t know what all of the things in Hong Kong are for…

Chair with no seat stabiliser?

Cat footbridge?

Some people also question what my films are for. Why, to catapult Cantonese to world supremacy of course!

Finally! Last Sunday saw the first, “soft” opening of Tap Tap, a new tapas bar with real Spanish chefs and everything, in sleepy backwater Pui O! Hooray. The demise of Pui O Delicious which was the former inhabitant of the premises, had been sorely felt by many.

I went there with my friend Ceri and new dog Koldbrann

(formerly “naughty”, now a lamb under the stern tutelage of Cesar Millan, through his keen disciple me) at 7.30. Unfortunately, seeing it was the first day and all, we couldn’t have dinner until 8.30. We could have wine, though, and did. On an empty stomach.

I put Koldbrann’s leash on a barstool on the pavement outside and sat on it. Just in case. He is a lamb but a lamb in dog’s clothing.
Suddenly Koldbrann saw some kind of enemy on the other side of the road and made a big leap, pulling the whole barstool and its human cargo with him. Fortunately I had had two glasses of wine on an empty stomach and fell in a leisurely and relaxed manner, crashing lightly down on the road with only probably 30% of the injuries I would have sustained if sober.

So you see, drinking isn’t all bad! And certainly not the drinking in Tap Tap, whose food, what we tried of it (calimari, some fried bread with tomatoes and olives, some kind of soup and something I can’t remember) was superb. Superb! In sleepy backwater Pui O!!! Pui O has so far seemed to be a place where mediocre-to-crap food establishments come to die.

I expect great things from this place. Do come along.

I’m just watching an Austrian go up into almost space to free jump back down to Earth, trying to break a record set in 1960. 1960!!! Why hasn’t anyone tried to break it in 52 years?

Maybe they have. But failed? I have to look into this. Whatever it is, it’s riveting stuff! It’s about time someone did something about space again.

Do you still think USA and Israel are the evil enemies of freedom in the world?

Do you think Islam is good, Christianity bad?

Do you think honour killing, female genital mutilation, hanging homosexuals from cranes, attacking and killing people for (someone else) drawing some cartoons, covering women in bin bags, “marrying” 6 year-olds and blowing up buildings is in itself quite bad but excusable because it’s cultural and at the end of the day not by far as bad as what the evil Christians did 800 (or whatever) years ago?

Then I urge you to watch the above clip, which elegantly sums up in less than 10 minutes everything to be said about islamism and leftism. 2+2 has never made anything but 4. Now more than ever, we must see what’s staring us in the face and stop thinking that “all cultures are equal”.

If you think that “it’s natural when people want to defend what’s holy to them, after all they are poor” why wasn’t there an orgy of burning and violence in the muslim world when Osama Bin Laden was killed? Why wasn’t there a single attack on a US embassy?

Because killing him was a show of strength.

Everything else the western world has done since the jihadists started throwing their weight around; starting with the fatwa on Rushdie and continuing with 9/11 and atrocities too numerous to mention, has been a show of weakness.

You can’t blame people for taking advantage of weakness, but you can blame weak people for lying down, saying: Please take more advantage of us!

When I first met Koldbrann, he was stand-offish. A village dog who had spent his first two and a half years on a leash, never running, never playing, and, of course, never in the vicarious presence of one Cesar Millan (the Dog Whisperer) he would naturally treat humans with a certain kind of scepticism.

We walked, hard and fast. I trained him to sit by giving him a treat only when he sat. The first time he got the treat, he tried to kill it. He shook his head vigorously, throwing the treat up in the air and catching it again. I thought: Was Okka (