WHEN I first started working as a reporter I was young, fit, active, keen and desperate to impress. None of this mattered one jot when I entered the local council chamber to cover a committee meeting.
No sooner did the words ''On a point of order, Mr Chairman'' escape someone's lips than I found my eyelids creeping inexorably downwards and my head bobbing up and down, like a toy dog in the back window of the cheaper sort of car, as sleep enveloped me.
Of course, it was always a fitful slumber, since the press benches of council chambers are notoriously uncomfortable, and few reporters have the audacity to lay their head down on the desk top to get a proper rest.
Instead, I would awake repeatedly with a start and a grunt, and begin to take shorthand notes like a demented stenographer, worried that I had missed that crucial vote on footpath maintenance and embarrassed in case my mouth was open and my snores were too loud.
The phenomenon whereby a committee meeting will induce chronic narcolepsy among the most hyperactive of people is well known, and in Hong Kong last week we were able to see the results of this inevitable process on one of our own august bodies.
It was reported that the Housing Authority's building committee voted to authorise the spending of $65 million to install higher railings at 160 housing blocks. The idea is that loftier railings will make it harder for potential suicides to climb over and hurl themselves to their deaths.
My first thought was that here was a case of collective narcolepsy. The committee members were clearly fast asleep as they came to the railings item in the agenda. Perhaps the chairman was the only person awake at the time, and when he had finished droning sonorously through the proposal he had to bang the table to wake everyone up. ACUTELY conscious they had been napping, the members would have done their best to feign alertness, and would have grunted assent to the proposal, while digging a pen into their inner thighs in a desperate bid to stay awake.