TIME TO TALK of big numbers about small places, of outdated land policies that threaten to create enormous rural blight and of private demands for public money to which our government should now respond with a firm 'no'.
If you like going on walks in the New Territories as I do (when will we finally get that sunny, dry and cool December weather?), you will know a New Territories village has a distinct look.
At the edge of abandoned fields now grazed by abandoned cattle (no cow has a better life than these do), you find a higgledy-piggledy collection of cramped three-storey residential buildings in a style once referred to as 'Spanish villa'. They are finished in shiny bathroom tiles, heavily tinted windows and enough chrome or other garish curlicues to put a final definition to the term 'nouveau riche'.
In among them you may find some of the original village housing but it is usually deserted and crumbling, waiting for redevelopment into yet more cheaply built three-storey blocks that can at a pinch serve as housing for six families each and on Cheung Chau do.
On Cheung Chau the inhabitants are still predominantly Chinese. Elsewhere in the New Territories you can be surprised at how much these places have become expatriate ghettoes.
This was certainly not the intention. The idea, formalised in a policy adopted in 1972, was that every indigenous male villager over 18 should have his traditional right in his village to build a home for himself of up to 2,100 square feet of gross floor area.