IT WOULD BE tempting to dismiss this vanity-published collection of rehashed columns as a cynical festive season cash-in - if the author had not beaten me to the punch. 'The title of this book was chosen for frankly mercenary reasons,' the veteran columnist explains in his foreword. 'The legend in publishing circles is that books in English do not sell in Hong Kong unless they are either suitable as Christmas presents or about Hong Kong itself. In mitigation of my shameless attempt to push both these buttons at once, I plead that the proceeds of this book will not be coming to me.'
Monies raised will help fund trips to English-speaking countries for local journalism students. So it's all for a worthy cause.
The problem with this sort of collection - as Hamlett himself confesses - is that most columns of a topical nature turn stale faster than the fish they might subsequently be used to wrap. And they would truly be on the nose if resurrected years later. For the most part he has chosen his more timeless efforts and when he's on form, he's very good. Hamlett writes with a wry turn of phrase and a sharp eye for Hong Kong's countless quotidian absurdities.
Readers with long memories, however, will remember that when he's bad, he's horrid.
One effort that stuck in my craw - and that prompted a flurry of vituperative mail - was a piece five years ago defending Japan's use of 'comfort women' on the grounds that other armies did it too and that it was a 'sensible public health measure'. It shows an appalling lapse in judgment to give this offensive apologia for wartime atrocities another public airing. His columns date back to 1980 and include pieces for this newspaper as well as the defunct publications Window and The Hong Kong Standard. The first piece, one of the oldest, has been handily renamed 'Hong Kong Christmas'. It's a convoluted nativity story skewering the Grinches and Scrooges who inhabit Hong Kong's bureaucracy.
Other topics given the Hamlett treatment include baldness, McDonald's, spin doctors, drivers, racists, judges, erotic tropical fruit and that odd local phenomenon, the 'cake run'. He gets the last laugh by publishing a side-splitting piece on an unfortunate chap caught in a compromising situation with a dog in a public toilet, which was deemed too risque for the Post's genteel readers.
