In a column in the Sunday Morning Post, on December 7, Danny Gittings says that I am an example of those 'who seem unable to come to terms with the fact that . . .[Hong Kong] is no longer a British colony'. This is demonstrated, he alleges, by my criticising Hong Kong shopkeeper rudeness, littering, high prices, taxi drivers, etc, in The Times.
But Mr Gittings fails to mention that I was referring to the reasons for the decline in Hong Kong's tourism, not to what it is like to live here, for which there are compensations unavailable to the tourist who does not have the time to find out the agreeable side of Hong Kong. For Mr Gittings to lump me in with so-called 'colonial- ists' because I comment on a widely understood tourist problem in which manners, prices and environmental destruction are key elements is absurd.
JONATHAN MIRSKY Mid-Levels
