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Tang's go-slow

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DAVID TANG Wing-cheung loves to make a grand entrance. He strides into the living room of his Peak home wearing a white silk suit, a Havana cigar in one hand and a kitsch mobile telephone which is a blur of flashing lights in the other. He's talking loudly to an associate about a large sum of money which, it can be gleaned, a woman is seeking Tang to hand over. 'Is she pretty?' he asks (twice for effect) in his vaguely comical, upper-crust English accent.

Everything appears normal chez Tang. The cigar-chomping entrepreneur, bon viveur and raconteur is as bombastic as ever. After hanging up the phone he bellows a rebuke at a servant who has left a tattered bag on the verandah, mischievously says he can't remember why I have come to see him (despite having sent his chauffeur to pick me up), and tells me what a dreadful newspaper I work for ('It's so bad I only read it for three seconds a day').

But everything is not normal at Tang's Clovelly Path residence. For a start, he's spending far more time here than usual. Nor will he be going anywhere soon. For a man-about-globe, who would once fly to London for breakfast, New York for dinner and return to Hong Kong in little more than a day, the unthinkable is happening: he has been grounded, on doctor's orders.

Tang suffers from psoriasis, a chronic skin disease caused by overactive skin cells which produce reddish blotches covered with scaly white patches. The disease has afflicted Tang so severely this year that he has already endured one spell in hospital and been forced to change his lifestyle radically; cutting back on work and travel, altering his diet, and adopting a daily routine which includes regular bed times and even physical workouts in a battle to fight the flab.

'Looking back I was incredibly stupid not taking more care of my health,' reflects Tang, lounging back on a sofa in the ostentatious room decorated in rich greens and reds with Chinese paintings jostling for every available centimetre of wall space.

'I was moving around believing I was Superman. That was the biggest mistake. It wasn't as if I was doing a lot of exercise. I wasn't Arnold Schwarzenegger to start with ... and I love my food.'

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