Radio Gonzo

As many readers of my burblings will know, I spent my formative years in Hong Kong, only leaving a few months before I was twelve. I do not use the term “formative years” lightly, because a large amount of the stuff which has shaped my adult life came from my childhood years in the last jewel of the Imperial crown. I still dream in Cantonese, and remember much of my childhood, which in many ways was weird and wonderful, and in other ways would - these days - be judged as being quite horrific. Other things were pretty normal. For my sixth birthday, for example, Uncle Mac, who was some office acquaintance of my Dad, a leading light in the local Amateur Dramatics Society, and - I discovered many years later - a notorious homosexual, (a snippet of information which is totally irrelevant to the main thrust of this narrative), gave me a book which would change my life. These days children don't seem to read at this age; in recent years I have given youngsters of my acquaintance books that I think they would enjoy