Coming from Tseung Kwan O, you follow the highway a brief distance up the hill with Haven of Hope Hospital on your left, go through the tunnel, down the road on the other side, turn left at the bottom and a minute later you're picking your toll gate at the Eastern Harbour Crossing.

It has always worked when I've done it, quite rapidly too. In time of travel it's a big improvement on the old road over the hill and I've never seen anything wrong with it.

Why then are we now to spend HK$7.8 billion (and that figure will only go up) to build a 4.8-kilometre-long tunnel with a dual two-lane carriageway on the same route? This will be the longest tunnel in Hong Kong. Tate's Cairn is only (only!) 4 kilometres long.

Someone somewhere in government has gone so tunnel mad that we shall have to call out the boys in white coats pretty soon. It seems this person suffers from delusions that he or she is a mole. How else could this obsession with tunnel digging arise?

Notice the way that this one was phrased as 'the latest plan for the proposed' in a news release that had mostly to do with another of Mrs Lam's I-wonder-where-I-am walkabouts. Perhaps I'm not entirely up on these things but I have never heard of the earlier plans.

In fact, I have never heard of this tunnel proposal at all.

And I rather suspect that's the way things were intended to be. The public finds out only when the public can be told that it had plenty of chances to find out and now is too late. These chances, however, were never intended to be found out.

The facts are that we have built an expensive new MTR extension to serve Tseung Kwan O and the area is superbly served with public transport. The official policy is in any case to favour rail over road.

What is more, plans for further development of Tseung Kwan O have been scaled back, both in extent and density, as population growth has been much less than initially forecast.

But, silly boy, get a grip on yourself. Donald has to have his concrete. It's written in the Basic Law, Article 161, that the SAR shall pour at least 18.3 million tonnes of the stuff every year. This way at least he'll do it underground where it will only be a waste of our money rather than a waste of our countryside too.

'HK-Shenzhen technology project launches'

Government news release, May 6

Thence followed the following: 'Hong Kong and Shenzhen have launched the first major technology co-operation project under the Shenzhen Hong Kong Innovation Circle to form a solar energy research and industrial platform in collaboration with DuPont.'

I take this to mean E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Co of Wilmington, Delaware, a munitions manufacturer turned supplier of raw materials for women's stockings. Its best-known product, the DuPont Lure, is highly favoured by Philippine fishermen. Just drop one in the shallow waters of the reef and BOOM! you can scoop the stunned fish off the surface, pity about the reef.

But let me translate the news release into plain speech - 'Whoopee! We've signed up another one for some floor space in Science Park and it's a legit one this time. Can't remember when we last pulled off anything like that.'

DuPont, we are told, will make Hong Kong its global thin-film photovoltaic business, research and development centre. I take these words as intended to mean that it has picked us as global hub for one of the world's most exciting technologies. May I introduce you to the Tooth Fairy if you believe this. I don't.

In order to be able to say it, however, we have agreed to build facilities for DuPont, no cost figure divulged, and agreed that the manufacturing will go to Shenzhen if anything comes of the venture, this being the price of calling it all the 'Shenzhen Hong Kong Innovation Circle'.

For what is left to Science Park it was not surprising to see Science Park chairman Nick Brooke looking even more glum than usual in the official photograph.

But I have an idea for this venture. Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC), the Shanghai microchip maker that makes big losses and has just got out of the dram business at the bottom of the dram market, is on the hunt for new manufacturing opportunities.

It just so happens that there is no great difference between manufacturing drams and photo cells. We told SMIC to get lost eight years ago when it wanted 200 hectares to manufacture microchips here but perhaps they've grown up a little since then and we could so something with them in photo cells. Why don't you give them a ring, Nick?