WE all have things in our past we would rather forget, memories which even after the sooting passage of years still have the power to make us cringe.
Most of them, looked at objectively, are more a matter for embarrassment than for serious guilt. They can still be a burden. A whole school of modern psychology has grown up around the idea that people feel better about themselves if you persuade them to edit their mental biographies appropriately.
So we must all feel some sympathy for Mr Tsang Hin-chi, who quietly deleted a 20-year-old conviction for fraud from his official curriculum vitae for stock listing purposes.
It is only human to believe that the past, at a certain point, becomes so past as to be not worth mentioning in the present.
No doubt this explains the galloping case of collective amnesia which seems to be afflicting Hong Kong newspapers when they consider the large number of local buildings which are falling to pieces.
There is nothing new in crumbling concrete stories here. I worked on a particularly fine specimen about 10 years ago myself. Rooting through the annals of the newspaper I was working for at the time I found a whole series of precedents going back to the early 50s.
