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SCMP Reporter

IT HAS been a week in which pornography has featured in my life. At the barbers, where I went to have a haircut, the patron handed me a lavishly-produced hardback book to read while I waited.

  It was Health, Loving & Sex, and featured colour photographs of young people decorating each other's wedding tackle with rose water.

  It's all part of something known as tantric sex.

   'Bathtime is a good time to get to know each other and perform basic health checks,' intoned the text, next to another photograph, of a couple in a tub, he apparently squeezing pimples on her back.

  I was not sure whether to take this as a compliment or an insult. Do I look like the kind of sad expatriate half-wit in need of a quick ogle while I wait for a short back and sides?   If I didn't before, I do after the haircut I got.

   The barber held his thumb and forefinger about half an inch apart and said something I did not understand, but which I presumed translated roughly as: 'One length only, take it or leave it.'    I took it, and as a consequence look like a hedgehog that has walked under a combine harvester. Girls are not paying attention to me, but hedgehogs are falling over themselves for my telephone number.

  The following day, and in the name of journalistic research, I found myself in KPS, hovering uncomfortably in the section for debauchees.

  A film magazine in Tokyo, where they know pornography when they see it, had asked me to write a feature on the legendary British Confession films; the ones in which breasts the size of barrage balloons burst forth from impossibly skimpy polka-dot bikini tops and Robin Askwith, playing a holiday camp entertainment officer, says: 'I'd like to enter you . . . for the beauty competition.'   The humour in these films is of the sniggering, innuendo-squeezing variety and is aimed with unnerving mediocrity at the kind of juvenile British people who think flatulence - 'botty burps', as my roommate at university used to say - is hilarious. I was the obvious person for the job.

  Checking out of KPS with Confessions of a Window Cleaner, Confessions from a Holiday Camp, Confessions of a Pop Performer and Confessions of a Nazi Spy was the most embarrassing thing I have done in Hong Kong.

  Imagine my surprise when I got home and watched Confessions of a Nazi Spy, only to discover it was directed in 1939 by Anatole Litvak and stars Edward G. Robinson.

   Make that the second most embarrassing thing. Something else happened to me this week. It's been a week of high drama in the Dalton household.

  If Mass Transit Railway stations are bad for one thing it is for being taken sick in.

  It's difficult to know how to tackle such an unpalatable subject in a newspaper that might be read by children and members of the Civil Service.

   I will try to remember that you are doing one of two things while reading this: a) eating breakfast b) having a hangover, and that you probably do not want to be too intimately acquainted with details of my untimely indisposition.

  But it's a story worth telling, so told it will be, if only because it shows what you can do in an MTR station before people realise you are stricken and offer assistance.

  I am convinced I could have stood on my head at the turnstiles reciting inflammatory passages from the collected speeches of Emily Lau and still the authorities would have dismissed me as another irksome tourist and got on with the serious business of pacing up and down with their hands behind their backs.

  There are, as many with young children in tow have found to their cost, no public conveniences in MTR stations.

  The logic is reasonable; people use toilets for, well, going to the toilet in. No amount of high-powered air conditioning would prove capable of removing the resulting malodorous hum from its confinement.

  The idea behind the MTR's no-toilets policy is that commuters are better off crossing their legs and praying than being forced to do what comes naturally in an unpleasantly enclosed space. Are you still enjoying your breakfast?   My own disagreeable experience occurred at Tsim Sha Tsui station. I will spare you the details; suffice to say it involved the sudden and chronic onset of the most awful biliousness, the result I suspect of a dodgy lunch in one of those places that sells plates of bubbling oil with a chicken wing on top.

  Think about this over the weekend: what would you do if, in an MTR station, hundreds of yards from any form of relief, it became apparent that you were about to - how shall I put this - make an unscheduled and unpaid-for addition to the Mass Transit Railway Corporation's floor coverings?   I hastily arrived at a solution, and an ingenious one it was too. Those of you who would like me to fill in the blanks can e-mail me on dalton ahk.net.

  All I can say in a family newspaper is thank goodness for Park'N Shop carrier bags.



Short cut to a nightmare on the MTR