Since then, concerted efforts to stamp out “historical nihilism” – this catchy term shorthands any version of the past that competes for public legitimacy with official narratives – have steadily gathered pace. A major challenge for contemporary historians, therefore, is to preserve different versions of past events, and keep key historical details safely intact for future times, even when strongly refuted in the present day.

Historical truth, much like water seepage in a wall, eventually permeates, gradually weakens, and then ultimately rots whatever highly coloured wallpaper currently conceals dangerously unstable structural cracks just beneath the sur­face; historical nihilists all know this.

Likewise, unexpiated sins finally seek out their perpetrators, in the fullness of time; they know that, too, which helps explain fear-driven, fundamentally counterproductive paranoia. Visible attempts to ensure people don’t remember something that officially never hap­pened anyway just makes that long-ago non-event impossible to forget, however sincerely one tries to cooperate. But never mind – awareness of unthinking irony has never been a Hong Kong strong point, whoever was in charge; there is nothing new under the sun. Historians know that, too.

Personal libraries, closely examined, reveal much about their owners; few historians lack some streak of private nihilism. Without an adult appreciation of Lewis Carroll, how else would the Mad Hatter’s tea party make sense as a modern parable? And children of all ages would be bereft without Winnie the Pooh to comfort and amuse them in sad times.

In my case, Mao Zedong’s “little red book”, with its exhor­ta­tion to “seek truth from facts”, and Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire magnum opus, whose faultless prose describes Emperor Nero madly diddling with his fiddle while petty minions viciously persecuted the harm­less and Rome’s skies glowed red with fires left to burn unchecked, compete for shelf space with various eclectic versions of the past – and much else besides.

Last Saturday was spent working quietly at home. About once a year, an urge for candlelight comes upon me; a harmless, sensual pleasure, and invariably indulged. So, when evening fell, and I went downstairs to make some tea, the twin candelabra on the dining table were lit; a dozen wax tapers became gently flickering beacons of light in an otherwise darkened, silent room. “If you can’t do what you want in your own home any more,” I grumbled silently, as the kettle boiled, “then what’s the point of staying on!”

Before long, repressed pyro­mania took over as candle after candle got lit; by mid-evening, the house looked like a seance was in progress. All the place needed to complete the picture was for Madame Arcati, Ouija board under her arm, to appear at the garden gate. But no Blithe Spirits materialised, except in my imagination. Neither did any other less-welcome apparitions show up to tell my fortune, or give a timely fright.

Eventually the candles guttered out; that was that for another year.