Proving exactly how fleeting time is and how short our little lives are, this marks the start of HK diary instalment 4. 2001 was where it all started, or at least where the records began. After hearing a horror story from Alex about how she lost 3 months of dedicated diary writing I have decided to leave the good ol’ first diary and start one in this, a beautiful little notebook gifted to me by Rino (constant purveyor of nice notebooks!) last Xmas, which will now be filled with endless amounts of banality and crap.

After wandering round airport Harrods stores for years, my mum finally succumbed and bought something from there: one of their rip-off oil cloth bags as a gift. Commercialism will ALWAYS get you, even if it takes years.

Also, I’ve always wondered what type of person actually buys laptops from the duty free instead of just going around swiping the track pads and tapping ‘the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog’ to test the keyboard before legging it without parting with a penny (moi? Never!). Turns out it’s people who care more about appearance than specs. Overheard conversation:

Sucker: Does this come in shiny black?

Salesman: Yes it does.

S: What other colours does it come in?

SM: Red, powder blue…

S: Powder blue? Like that colour [points at light blue object somewhere]

SM: Yeah, like that.

S: That sounds really nice. [this is a bloke by the way]

SM: Were you thinking of getting one?

S: Yes, just wasn’t sure what colour…

What a difference from us, where such a purchase would involve months of continuous research and price comparison, as if it was a first-time house or something.

Our flight was at 22.30, which was lucky as soon after another massive ash cloud was blown down to London from Iceland, sooner than reported (BBC, you’re wrong AGAIN!) and closed Heathrow and Gatwick for the early hours through until 8am. We imagined our airbus zooming off, outrunning the cloud a la ‘Dantes Peak’ or ‘2012’.