I particularly liked this week's post! It was a little softer in tone and less intellectually anarchic perhaps than some of your other writing :) I also enjoyed the Lamma references. The island does have its very own atmosphere, although it always smells a bit of colonialism, of yet another place that is meant to be forever England. - I also admired how you found that one spark of redeeming humanity in the existence of the plastic chair. More depressing is the realisation that 2 bn chairs, each weighing around 2kg, equal 4bn kg or 4 millions tons of plastic that will eventually end up in the oceans, like all the rest. This is equal to the plastic pollution through decomposing textiles worldwide for a period of 8 years. I can't quite believe that the generosity of the strangers who left the plastic chairs at that Lamma roadside would have found it impossible to express itself through a bench made of a few sticks of bamboo. All these Chinese Tang poets must have been sitting on something while writing their poems, long before plastic chairs were invented; and I'd like to think that we could return to that without giving up on scenic seating opportunities altogether. Anyway, thanks for the interesting article!
Hi Julian, is there an email where I can reach you at? I have a question for you. Thanks
Veronica
Lamma Island was so amazingly unexpected; so unHongKong. A Thing of beauty indeed.
And I must confess to a sneaking affection for Comic Sans, so unfairly maligned.
I particularly liked this week's post! It was a little softer in tone and less intellectually anarchic perhaps than some of your other writing :) I also enjoyed the Lamma references. The island does have its very own atmosphere, although it always smells a bit of colonialism, of yet another place that is meant to be forever England. - I also admired how you found that one spark of redeeming humanity in the existence of the plastic chair. More depressing is the realisation that 2 bn chairs, each weighing around 2kg, equal 4bn kg or 4 millions tons of plastic that will eventually end up in the oceans, like all the rest. This is equal to the plastic pollution through decomposing textiles worldwide for a period of 8 years. I can't quite believe that the generosity of the strangers who left the plastic chairs at that Lamma roadside would have found it impossible to express itself through a bench made of a few sticks of bamboo. All these Chinese Tang poets must have been sitting on something while writing their poems, long before plastic chairs were invented; and I'd like to think that we could return to that without giving up on scenic seating opportunities altogether. Anyway, thanks for the interesting article!