Panda a Hui
March 13th, 2007
It has been a suspicion of mine for some time that, since they set up that truck of a ministerial system with many wheels and the trailer swinging all over the road behind the executive cab, the Chief Secretary hasn’t got very much to do any more. This was confirmed for me with unwarranted comedy when Mr Hui was sent up to China to pick out pandas.
They are to be bestowed upon the SAR for our 10th anniversary . There is a big dough ball of nationalist mysticism out to play here involving munificence and gratitude, condescension and humility and the enforced adoption of notoriously picky mammals which I don’t want to get stuck into.
I have never been able to understand why the panda has become the de facto national beast and attracted such a goo of global sentiment. The creature is in emotional hibernation with heartbeats down to one a week when it comes to showing affection to other pandas. Given a choice between lunch and a newborn cub in need of a licking, mother will go for the bamboo stick every time. No matter what conditions, inducements or panda porn are provided for it, it almost always refuses to shag, anyway.
When they do give birth once every Haley’s Comet, the girl panda assumes she’s passed a gall stone. Never has prospective extinction been more thoroughly deserved.
Still, one panda being looked over by the Chief Secretary felt a Darwinian rush of emotion sufficient for it to kiss Mr Hui. A senior Chinese official who was watching and hoping for what I do not know, declared Hui had become ‘the father of the panda’, one of those faintly flatulent statements which men of Eastern authority come out with and are adopted as Delphic.
Since Raphael Hui went up to Sichuan with Permanent Secretary for Home Affairs Carrie Lam, indispensable for her panda sniffing powers, the salary hours being charged to me and my fellow twelve personal tax payers on this jaunt will be considerable. It would have been better if Mr Hui could have brought home something we need down here like a pair of really hot IT post graduates or two of those circus performers who do exciting things with hoops and plates on sticks.
They’d be easier to keep and heaps more likely to breed.
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