More Soliloquys
We were busy managing our diaries since back from Yonago – over ten days by now – and we found ourselves running between restaurants and for me trying to squeeze in a few sessions at the gym. The weather had not been stable, but we were lucky to miss the worst days. The fishing-ban period had ended and prices of seafood had actually come down, rather dramatically for some catches, so that we ended up eating more, which we won’t complain. For example, Su had returned from her fishmonger friends in Mei Foo with a huge chunk of what we called Spanish mackerel of sashimi quality which she filleted and kept deep frozen, cheap lobsters, fresh shrimps and live marine fishes. With such fine food, we simply couldn’t stop drinking. Again, we won’t complain.
Meanwhile, we seemed to be always having good food. We had a session last Sunday in the Japanese restaurant in Mei Foo. And we had only just recovered from last night’s Italian food and wine tasting organized by Simon Cheung whom we first met nearly four years back when Covid was still around. It’s a long story. Simon is an apparel manufacturer with factories in the Mainland. During the pandemic, he had learned to operate by remote control and had developed a side hobby of sampling Italian wine through organizing wine tasting dinners with good food. He has a young daughter Emma who is a private banker and who assisted her father by inviting some of her clients to these dinners. One day in October or November 2021, she invited a guest who was a brother and who in turn invited another brother and Su and me – to make up a table of four – to a hairy crab dinner featuring Italian wines, where we met her father. We had since attended a few such dinners – normally through WhatsApp between Simon and Su – and last night was the second one in August 2025. Last night, we met up a few new and old friends and one had already invited us to dinner in her place in Lei Yu Mun. That would probably be another story; but the highlight last night turned out to be the Italian steak from Piedmont. The chef had ordered the meat directly from Italy for the occasion. It was simply delicious. I wonder whether we can ask the chef to organize something similar and exclusively for us.
Tomorrow will mark the start of a new school year. My godson will start his Secondary One in Wah Yan College and his brother will start Primary Four. Su was worried that we might miss Matt’s confirmation in May/June 2026 when we would be on a cruise around Iceland, but was relieved to learn that the rules had changed such that the confirmation would only take place in 2027.
Still on wining and dining, we had booked ourselves for a dinner tomorrow at Amigo at Happy Valley and had asked two friends to join us, making a table of four, to make the occasion merrier. This place is marking its 58th year of operation and has put out on Facebook last week a tasting menu at rather reasonable price. The menu had already received very good responses. I had been using this place with my die-hard drinking friends since 1970 if not earlier when it was in Percival Street, when a half pint of draught beer was $5 or $10 and when we could park outside the restaurant on Percival Street itself or at the meters on Jaffe or Lockhart, and more relevantly when there was no drink driving laws. Our group of friends met there every night, very often beyond midnight and into the small hours, sometimes ending up in their staff quarters on Jaffe, drinking, chatting, singing and sleeping. Those were the days. This group had actually made an appearance on one evening at dinner during our wedding week when some of them wouldn’t let go the microphone before being encouraged to return to their seats.
Su was also organizing a birthday dinner next Friday in Wanchai for a good friend. It augurs to be a predictably jovial occasion with plenty of good food and wine, and one for catching up with a few friends we haven’t met for a while.
Still on Amigo, I probably would devote in my sequel – if it ever sees the light – more space to what happened there over the past six decades. In short, a lot, and probably too much. I met friends there, lost a few and saw off quite a few more. We were rather close with the staff and the camaraderie between the group members was beyond description and comprehension to those outside the group, not least the spouse amongst us.
Back to the sequel I mentioned, I was looking up my website on what I had written between 2004 and 2009 during which period I lost my first wife and got my second one. There were some blank periods, partly due to the breakdown of a laptop where I used to keep many of my letters and emails. I found a few letters in which I updated my readers on what Rosita was going through with her various treatments and therapies. I also found records of my dialogue with the late Reverend Father Deignan who was preparing her baptism which eventually had to be fast tracked because of her deteriorating conditions. It was a difficult period. But I found a rather interesting blog written in 2004 on periodical cicadas. These insects spent their lives for long years in their wingless nymph forms, feeding on the sap from tree roots, waiting to emerge from their underground homes when the conditions became conducive, which could be as long as 17 years. Theories are abound as to how the cicadas know that 17 years is up, and some scientists speculate that these periodical cicadas possess an internal molecular clock that would figure out the passage of years through environmental cues, maybe in similar manner that Su claims she has an internal GPS by which she would guide me through foreign territories and indeed through our lives.
