Role reversal

Sunday 18th November 2018.  18.11.18.

I meet up with my dear friend Liz, also from St Ives Cornwall but a real born and bred Cornish lady not an Emmet like me.  She’s been out in Hong Kong since July.  Like me she very recently become a grandmother, but her daughter is living here in Hong Kong.  And my little family live slap bang in the middle of England.  So my quarter Chinese grand daughter Phoebe was born in Warwickshire and her 100% Cornish granddaughter was born here in Hong Kong.

I watch Liz for a few seconds, just by the Peninsula fountain.  She’s searching for me I think.  Today everything is back to front.  “Normally I can instantly spot you Laura” she laughs later.  “Dark hair, animated, colourful. But here you’re just one in 7 million”.  Totally get what she’s saying, but this does not bode well for my search for my birth family, just a few amongst these 7 million, and maybe not still alive.

Liz, on the other hand, is one of the liveliest people I know, and is the easiest person to find today.  Blonde, tall and her own gorgeous inimitable style, that some of the very cash rich, but style poor, Chinese might do well to take note of.

We reminisce, stroll the designer baby mall (the baby changing rooms are something to behold, we are so far behind in the UK).   We marvel at Baby Burberry, Baby D&G, Baby Armani, you get the drift.., and later in the Ocean Terminal supermarket (nothing like a supermarket, more like a food art gallery) we gawp at grapes that cost £26, and an onion for £3.  Sweet potatoes are very popular, all sorts averaging at £4 a piece.  This perusing made even more hilarious because Liz’s husband used to run the very wonderful but now closed fruit and veg shop back home in St Ives.  I kid you not, you need a small mortgage to buy cheddar cheese, indeed anything dairy here, except clotted cream which at just under £4 is an absolute steal.  Tuna sashimi anybody.  No problem.  Cheap as chips.