If you are using the toilet at home before going on a junk trip, flush hard. Otherwise you may find that you have not bid adieu to your, er, deposits, but merely au revoir. You'll be leaning over the railing of the junk when certain objects will float by, saying, 'Hello, remember me?' It is becoming clear that the sewage scheme that was going to rescue Victoria Harbour (which should more accurately be called Victoria Toilet) has stalled.
You remember how Hong Kong's two most environmentally friendly governors, Sir David Wilson and Chris Patten, enthused endlessly about the 'Strategic Sewage Disposal Scheme'. (How does one know whether one has emitted a piece of Strategic Sewage or a non-strategic one? This question has never been satisfactorily answered.) Today, the new sewage system, like democracy, has been given an unspecified arrival date sometime in the next millennium.
While we wait, let us examine the fascinating history of that distasteful but important item of everyday life which doctors call 'poop'.
A copralite, as you know, is a fossiled piece of dinosaur poop. Paleontologists treat them with the worshipful adoration a Hong Kong tai-tai lavishes on her gold toothpick collection. There have been no significant copralite discoveries in Hong Kong, suggesting that natural recycling was working well for the first few 100 million years.
The first fisherfolk inhabitants of Hong Kong used the same toilet we do: the harbour.
But they dispensed with the middlemen. They would simply position their bottoms over the edge of the boat.