There was an uncomfortable scene at Kai Tak airport the other day. One of Hong Kong's most senior bankers - let's call him Mr Black - was seeing off his second wife on a trip to Britain to buy a retirement home rumoured to have a price tag with lots of noughts.
Suddenly, wife number one, who they assumed was 10,000 kilometres away, appeared, saying: 'So you're evidently the bitch who has been mistreating my children all these years.' Wife number one was divorced when the banker was fairly junior. Now that he has reached the top, she feels she received a poor deal. Her conviction was strengthened when she arrived in Hong Kong and saw a report in Business Post about the banker's humungous salary.
So anyway, wife number two gets on the plane, praying furiously that wife number one is just passing through.
Meanwhile, wife number one, who has a remarkable sense of the dramatic, coolly strolls up to British Airways ground staff at Kai Tak, saying that she has to get an urgent message to the plane.
Staff said it was too late, but she insisted, and they relented. The cosy-sounding message, delivered on the flight, had a somewhat ominous tone to it: 'I'll be here while you're away, and I'll be here when you get back.' Yet another brand of sleeping pill has been discovered with an absurd caution on it. Don Hunter, of Happy Valley, found a stern warning on a packet of Euhynos 10 mg tablets: 'Caution. May cause drowsiness'. That Yaqub Khan, an ex-Hong Kong police officer who feels he has been wronged by the Government, is such a mystery. Bump into him in the street, and he seems a charming gentleman, the sort of chap you'd expect to collect stamps.
But Yaqub's main hobby is sending out hate faxes. His favourite phrase is 'stinking Brit racist colonials traitors public scums'.
Yesterday he sent me (and no doubt many others) a reply he had received from one of his correspondents. It contained a two-word phrase. The first began with 'f' and the second was 'you'.
