WORDS
Spoken & Written
BIOGRAPHY: I am an Englishman who has lived or been based in Hong Kong since 1980.
Because a bout of nineteenth century boundary drawing was tweaked so that the Earl of Stamford and Warrington could have all his property in one fief county, my home town of Stalybridge is in green and milky Cheshire whereas its once dark satanic mills marked it indelibly, filthily as a Lancashire cotton town.
Propelled by the desire to get out of the place and kindly assisted by my Dad who sensed I would be well out of it too, I was “crammed” to pass the examination for a place at The Manchester Grammar School.
There my accent moved up from the flat Lancashire of back-to-back terraces to what is known as “educated Northern”. After three deeply undistinguished years reading history at Downing College, University of Cambridge, where I was admitted on a wave of hilarity after naming the then poet laureate as a pre- Raphaelite painter in my interview, the accent was upgraded again to “Received Pronunciation” also known wrongly as BBC, Oxford or, queerly, the Queen’s English.
After spending a year of teaching the sex and violence version of history to secondary school boys and being declined by the government of the British Solomon Islands because I was squeamish over the prospect of flogging the natives, I joined the Church Commissioners for England in 1974.
I spent a lot of time as the deputy press officer telling white lies in the name of God and I acted as secretariat to committees of Commissioners which involved me looking straight ahead and saying “Good morning, my lord,” to bishops in the urinal line up at coffee breaks.
Foolishly spurning the opportunity to begin as a professional actor in a company touring Cornwall in the summer of 1977, I was accepted as a mini-mandarin into the United Kingdom Home Civil Service, Ministry of Defence. To this day the Official Secrets Act prevents me from saying a word of what went on in there except to mention that I knew roughly in which towns in England the children would be being taught in Russian by day two of a war with the Soviet Union.
In 1978, in what I believe was a sort of hint, I was sent to Hong Kong on the staff of the Commander British Forces. I lived jollily for a year in the Headquarters Officers Mess in that part of Victoria Barracks which is now the garage for Regent on the Park apartments. With the sort of inevitability that Hong Kong expatriates will be familiar with, I had moved to the Hong Kong Government as an administrative officer by 1980. I learned about eating out every night, partying late, shopping for bath towels in the Lane Crawford sale and how surprisingly powerless a colonial government was.
As some expatriates will also know, decline was delicious, the merry handcart to Hell unstoppable. I began as a locally based writer and journalist in 1984. They also know that autobiography from this point is far too fogged to be of use. There now follows and approximation of what I wrote and what I do.
From 1985 until 2005, I produced weekly columns in one or more English language newspapers or magazines. Long running columns included TV Watch in the TV Times magazine for which I had to buy a television, Column 8 in the Saturday edition of the South China Morning Post for which I had to dodge writs and The Way It Is in the Sunday Morning Post for which I had to be photographed in silly postures.
Stuart Wolfendale
Tel (852) 2241 4141 / Mobile (852) 9048 1806
E-mail: wolfthal @netvigator.com