Life seems like being trapped inside a small cardboard box, with oneself effectively about the size of a mouse. The box is sealed and it’s completely dark inside. Maybe there is a little hole in the side of the box and you can see out, but usually (and I am speaking about myself) the hole is the size of a pinprick, and what you see of the light and things outside is correspondingly limited. Then now and again, for a moment the hole is strangely much larger.

Some people live completely outside the small box. William Blake was one (‘At four he glimpsed God’s head at the window, at eight a tree shimmering with angels’), Pushkin another as related by Clive James whose essay on this ’stoat’ I just read today (’He was in love every time he lusted, and he was in love not because he saw less than other men but because he saw more. He could see everything, and he probably got sick of it’).

It has been my good luck to have responsibility for coaching students to prepare for their poetry readings at the HK Speech Festival, an inevitable ritual of school life. Not only has it been fun to teach them and hear them read, improve and even enjoy themselves a bit with it, but when as sometimes happen they don’t turn up to their alloted half-hour of coaching time in room 109 between 4 and 5 pm, I am at liberty to wander the big echoey space alone reciting poems of my own preference or, mostly, singing, loudly, while basketball games rage on in the playground below. The rooms are effectively soundproofed so I expect that noone has heard me running through a mish mash of singer songwriters, rock classics, show tunes and (another Clive James reference from my reading tonight) ‘well-made’ songs, such as those once sung by Frank Sinatra.

I was sick for almost two weeks with a cold, that has abated and shaded imperceptibly into a persistent mild irritation and gunkiness caused by the pollution, which is very bad in the last few days. But I haven’t been sick to my stomach again.

Some friends from Melbourne are in town on business and last night I met them at Kowloon off their Star Ferry from Wanchai and we went for dinner at a beautiful restaurant with a fantastic view of the harbour and HK island, and walked up Nathan Road to the Temple Street market. On meeting we hugged each other in the excitement of seeing each other again, and especially in the setting of Tsim Sha Tsui (a place name I am only beginning to learn how to say). It was great to see them and go out with others for the first time since coming here. I will see them again on Sunday, going for the notorious Peninsula Hotel high tea, so my touch of luxury will continue. On Saturday I will take a ‘wonderful voyage around Lamma’.

I caught the 11.30pm ferry from Central to Sok Kwu Wan, so at midnight was taking the 20-minute walk along the concrete path to Mo Tat Wan. The 10-foot tall grasses were waving in the sea breeze all around me, and trees gloomed overhead here and there interrupting the yellow glow from the lightposts with deep shadows, while I enjoyed the views of Sok Kwu Wan bay, the channel and faintly shimmering HK island glimpsed through the undergrowth and revealed when reaching a crest on the path.

Last Sunday I spent a couple of hours at the finals day of the HK International HK Cricket Festival (’sixes’). Actually, it was a competition of various standards of teams. This was held at a big, bare, surnburnt-grassed field (reminding me of Australia) at Diamond Hill further north in Kowloon, the last time cricket will be played there as the site is shortly to be built on. Some of the competition was the sort of cricket where teams wear funny hats on the field, but there was also a lot of skill on display at different times. Suitably for cricket it was an unusually hot day for the time of year. After buying a container of curried veg and rice at one stall, I had just bought a plastic pint of cold Fosters at another when I walked past a large shade umbrella at the same moment as a breezy gust toppled it. The side of it fell on my head from behind, causing me to swear mildly in surprise, and drop the carry bag of curry (the container inside was intact, so I could eat my lunch). I held onto the beer though, which made me laugh. I then sat in the shade of a marquee and watched cricket for two hours. The sixes competition is good as the games are very quick. Once players reach (a score of) 30 they must retire, and a low number of assigned overs completes a team’s innings. With only six in the field including the bowler there are plenty of 4s. There was a good catch generally remarked on, on Pitch 1, where a reasonably short, slightly generously proportioned player was fielding on the boundary. The batsman gave a hefty swing and the ball sailed up high and dropped at a nastily steep angle appearing sure to land well behind the motionless waiting fieldsman, for six, until as it streaked down high over his head he made an undemonstrative but determined little jump, stuck up one hand and neatly took it.

There is to be a village Christmas party hosted by my calm Canadian upstairs neighbour next weekend at his delightful, much-envied-by-some rooftop entertainment complex. Then, on Christmas day itself, another convivial neighbour is hosting a Christmas gathering at his delightful, I imagine much-envied-by-others beachfront villa, complete with spacious terrace and million dollar view balcony. I still haven’t decided whether to go to Tibet at Christmas. I like the idea a lot in a vague way, but I feel the inertia of tiredness and a desire to sleep in every day when that is possible, in compensation for what will have been by then three months of early starts, weighing on me already. But I can sleep in in Tibet too, and on the three day train journey there may be little else to do than sleep (in my soft sleeper compartment – nothing sounds more delightfully, fluffily, dreamily comfortable to me than ’soft sleeper’), other than staring at the landscape, stupefied by its awesomeness and the slow onset of oxygen deprivation.

I read The sea and as alluded to above have started Clive James’ Meaning of recognition (essays). It is a coincidence, though, that today I continued trying to teach the five-paragraph essay to my form 6 class.