Plum Flower Valley

Sha Tin paddy fields 1960

A friend writes:

Once, several lifetimes ago, I used to walk at the weekends over Lion Rock and down the other side into the the tiny fields of fruit bushes and vegetables with their low banks of earth. I'd wander the same way more or less through this network and on past the the only tea-house, all clattering with mahjong tiles - the only building between the mountains at my back and on the tiny settlement of beaten tin huts a couple of miles away. It was a stop on the railway which came straight through the mountain with that lack of respect for our Great Mother that is the hallmark of engineers anxious to prove it can be done. It was called Sha Tin, which means Sand Field, a new name for a made-up place. I used to go further to the edge of the water and then I could call across to get a passing junk to pick me up and take me the almost-mile to the other side. There was a communist village there, all old-style houses and banana tress in front. The narrow valley behind was dry with great rocks and a rough steam ouring down, its energy a little depleted in summer. Kingfishers crisscrossed the stream, flashing blue and white, as it seemed. I loved the place. Now Sha Tin has over a million people and high rises cover the vegetable fields of the place that used to be know as Plum Flower Valley. Shen Zhen existed then, I think, but I never saw it. Twenty miles down the track, maybe less.

I would go back to writing my monthly reports that showed just how much foreign exchange was earned or transferred through Hong Kong to the People's Republic, then a state in total blue and forbidden to people like me and to most other people as well. The huts were the refuse from the 186,000 who poured over the hills from the north when the provincial administration collapsed during the Great Leap Forward. Most had gone on to the City, but a few were content to stay there. My reports were hot stuff but marked TOP SECRET in Hong Kong, London, Canberra and Washington. They showed how China had nowhere to go but towards US. I'm afraid I might in a distant, proleptic manner have contributed to that much greater outpouring of concrete. personally, I like earth.



Sha Tin panorama today



Crepuscular

It is a truth universally acknowledged, some might say, that modern shadow banking is a menace to the proper functioning and oversight of our financial and economic system.

We appear, more widely, to have something akin to shadow governance, But a small example of that, in this country, and what we quaintly call its dependencies, is the British Crown.

While, in previous centuries, the monarchy wielded real, substantial and avowed power and privilege, various rising sections of society displayed extremely vigorous and ultimately effective opposition. Yet, now that it has declined into a kind of genteel Disneydom, any hostile preoccupation with it is generally regarded as impolite or immature.

I used to have some sympathy for that notion, although my chief objection to full-blown republicanism was always the dreadful necessity to elect a president, but now it seems to me that the lingering and near impenetrably obscure constitutional prerogatives of the crown, and the remaining prestige or fascination of the monarchy, create an attraction between it and those who naturally operate in the shadows - which future monarchs, born in a different time and themselves accustomed to a role with even less constitutional clarity, may not be so effective in restraining.

Give me your tired, your huddled masses longing to be free

Critics have accused the government of paving the way for a selective immigration policy whereby only the wealthy will be able to marry who they want from abroad, and only migrants earning more than £31,000 a year will be able to settle in Britain.

They'll just have to go to America. Has our government decided we do not need more corner shops and restaurants, or future Mr Noons?

Smart wheeze

The Treasury has asked Whitehall to review all the tax affairs of top civil servants after it emerged that the head of the Student Loans Company (SLC) is paid via a company without tax being deducted.

The SLC's chief executive Ed Lester has his £182,000 salary paid gross to his private service company, potentially saving him tens of thousands of pounds in tax.

The arrangement, entered into in 2010, was disclosed in a HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) letter obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by Exaro News and BBC Newsnight. Ministers will be dismayed if it is seen that they have been presiding over a system in which senior civil servants have been able to minimise their tax payments, at a time when the rest of the country is being urged that we are "all in this together".

Bish bash bosh

Admittedly, the current focus on Fred Goodwin's ex-honour appears to be a cynical political distraction from matters of real general concern, but he was given his knight batchelorhood, I understand, for 'services to banking' and in the light of what has since transpired, and the FSA report, no-one can seriously argue that he deserves any distinction much greater than the 'been there, done that' tee shirt.

He has the consolation of retaining (at least for the time being) his honorary degree at the University of St Andrews.

There is, in recent reaction, the unmistakeable sound of the closing of ranks, like that of the sound of the old fashioned cinema seats going up as everyone rises to escape before the credits roll.

The real answer might be to abolish the whole rotten system of state honours which our erstwhile prime minister tried to prop up by admitting a sprinkling of lollipop ladies to its ranks (lower of course).

Earth-bound

Some of my best friends are architects, as one says - well, I know a few - and so I hope they will forgive me for what may appear to be 'architect bashing'. (Don't the bankers deserve a break?) I am in fact in awe of architects, who know so much and, sometimes, can do so much, but what I criticise is more their position in society, and I am acutely conscious that, in this respect, furniture 'designer-makers' are in no position to start calling any kettle black.

We all, these days, in our modest, if destructive, occupations, aspire to the status of artists. Perhaps as 'genuine' 'artists' (note the separate inverted commas denoting a complete breakdown of connected thought) have turned to the contemplation and arrangement of the mundane ('artists' as 'arrangers' as in 'flower arranger' or, more sinisterly, as 'fixers', as in relieving the rich of their money?) there has ceased to be any policeable boundary between 'art' and artifice (not that there was in centuries past).

Architects, as the inevitable hand-maids of Mammon, whose adherents have long dominated (after the public functionaries) the honours lists, for services either to making money or to giving some of it away in their comfortable maturity, have certainly got their feet, and other parts of the anatomy besides, into the pantheon, to the extent that they too are now the recipients of buggins-turn knighthoods and peerages.

It used to be, when I was young, just the musicians who were thus honoured by the establishment, bringing a discreet sprinkling of culture into the grown-up world, as the captains of industry snored at the opera - music being largely a safely abstract form of art. (Thus Victoria gave us Sir Arthur Sullivan, but that unpleasantly acerbic W S Gilbert remained plain Mr.) The visual arts were a little riskier but at least there was the academy to ensure a supply of properly respectable practitioners among the riff-raff. And literature - well it was always plain what that was talking about (more or less), though the recently published list of refusniks has shown a good many modern-ish writers to have declined honours. (I didn't notice any architects there.)

The trouble with architects as artists - and their work is now routinely praised or condemned in terms of a kind of lax art-speak - is that their oeuvre is so much at our feet, or in our face. We cannot avoid it in the way that we can decline to enter the gallery (the modern art asylum) or open the book. In times past, partly for that reason, architects (even the modernists - amongst themselves) subscribed to an order, or something approaching an agreed aesthetic and visual vocabulary. No longer so - at least not deliberately.

Open to the public

Shenzhen, the Chinese 'settlement' on the border with Hong Kong, which, in the past (when the earth was flat), before Den Xiaoping declared the backwater a Special Economic Zone in 1980 (which astrophysicists have recently identified as the date of the Big Bang - which led of course to all those Big Bucks) was a fishing village of junks and paddy fields, is now a city of more than ten million population (think of where those people have come from) with the third largest 'container' port in China (think of what is 'contained').

It is now the recipient or host to British architect Terry Farrell's (think of the Thames-side extravaganza for MI6, those kind purveyors of mystery travel and entertaining quiz nights for British citizens and others)) first skyscraper, which will rise to 100 floors.

This monument to the possibilities of physical and spiritual displacement is to have, at the top, above floors of offices, a 250-bedroomed hotel, which 'is all rounded off with a delightful sky lobby, rather like a vast and ultra-modern birdcage, with a bar and terrace open to the public.

There will of course be the regulation architect's indoor garden to compensate for the fact that in the space of a quarter of a century we have left no room for plants - those refugees of our civilisation - on the 'ground floor'. What can be sadder than those container-bound 'mature' plants dragooned into service by the architects, star and earthly, of buildings from Portcullis House onwards. Future archaeologists, peering at the physical detritus of our lost civilisation (unable to decipher the quaint technology of our electronic communications), will doubtless nominate us as the 'container people', and whilst earlier peoples mystified their remote successors with a plethora of what we can only term 'ritual pits', we shall have left behind a generous scattering of 'ritual towers'.

But to return to Shenzhen in the here and now, the space inside this glass tip is taken up by an egg-shaped pod several storeys high containing small private spaces, some perched on balconies, where guests can sit, drink and take in jaw-dropping views of Shenzhen and beyond.'

Which public will those in the 'small private spaces' in 'egg-shaped pods' be allowed to let their jaws drop at, as their expensive drinks approach their mouths?