in here: From Wah to Waugh

The people I have met have been friendly, cultured, un-arrogant and fully informed about Seventies' pop music. The bastards

My brother and sister-in-law live in a block where most of the tenants have moved out because of the bad Feng Shui. Its owners want to knock it down and build a Southfork-style Big Face house in its place. But from the roof you can see a green swatch of South Hong Kong and vistas of container ships drifting through the smog in front of Lamma island, and they don't want to leave.

Just before I sat down to write this, the jungly greenery on the hill below was plunged into jagged relief and the black kites which play in the thermals around the TV aerials started squawking. I looked up, expecting a thundercloud, and saw instead the eclipse of the sun. It was total at Angkor Wat, apparently, and Cambodia's tourist trade is booming. No one else seemed to be looking; cars continued their crawl up the Peak unperturbed. This place is weird and wonderful.

It has its downsides too, of course. I'm still getting over the weekend. You know that sweaty feeling you get when you find yourself at a truly awful party with no remission? Well, try it in 80 per cent humidity. I spent Saturday night propped against walls as my feet swelled in the old slingbacks, and what are euphemistically known as the "young singles" brayed around me. I went from Wah to Waugh and back that day: the full Hong Kong experience.

In some ways this was a relief. I came in search of easy targets and the lack of them was a bit worrying. Four years ago, they were everywhere: men whose wit comprised dissing servants, women who rattled their gold bangles and said that they would work if only the Amah didn't take so much supervision. It was a high-rise Fulham with added shopping opportunities. But this time the people I have met have been friendly, cultured, un-arrogant and fully informed about Seventies' pop music. The bastards.

But it's OK. I finally got the full whammy with little cloisonne bells on. Firstly, I heard my first full example of the Wah, which is a bit like seeing your first Mexican wave. "Wah" is a word that expats use to describe the Cantonese, a bit like using "beauggh" to describe the French. As the races don't do a lot of social mixing, I had thought it was one of those pieces of racial stereotyping like the charming acronym, LBFM, employed in certain quarters to describe Cathay stewardesses.

But that was before I went to see Apollo 13. Hong Kong cinema audiences are notoriously inattentive: the average RSC-goer would blench at the shared meals, the simultaneous translations, the mobile phone business deals. Anyway, Tom Hanks was Hanking on about space travel when suddenly the entire audience sat bolt upright and said, with one voice "Wah!". That was all. No chat afterwards, no obvious reason. Weird.

So I had a bath, and then we had to change for a fancy dress party. Expats like fancy dress parties. Possibly it's because you get bored wearing your Chanel suit if you do it on an habitual basis. More likely, though, it's the fear of ageing: they think people won't notice they're nearing 40 if they ape students. Having been in permanent fancy dress since I was 15, I went in my street clothes. The sibs mixed 'n' matched and we headed down the hill in a good mood.

It didn't last long. Floating over the plushy air came that eeriest of sounds, the British party animal giving tongue. "Waugh" it went, as in Evelyn "Waugh Waugh Waugh Waugh Waugh". We descended some steps and walked into a room full of Filth.

Filth is another acronym. It stands for Failed in London, Try Hong Kong. With the Ghost of China Future hovering over the community, this is rather less true than it used to be of the people who work here: competition from the locals has hotted up and there's less room for the younger sons who couldn't get into the Army. But boy, oh, boy: this sure is the tired old hoyden's graveyard. I have always vaguely wondered what happened to those of my Pony Club contemporaries (oh, yes - I can't deny my past) whose education didn't fit them to get a life .Well, at 28, they jumped on the cattle boat and came out here. And here they stay: thirtysomething, still bleaching their hair, quailing with fear at the thought of that beckoning shelf.

And as a result,: there are a fair number of men here with an even more over-inflated picture of their market value than that normally prevalent in the testosterone community. Baldy pates and hairy paunches vied with each other to talk down to women wearing T-shirts and knickers. "Waugh," they said. "Yah," quacked the females. Big cardboard placards saying for god's sake somebody marry me would have been more subtle. No one danced; someone actually turned off the record player. I found myself next to a man in a silk dressing gown and socks . He was talking to a woman in camiknickers and pearls. "Of course," he was saying, "he's related to the Duke of Rutland, you know." I swear. It's true.

Two millennia later we crawled home and cracked a bottle of plonk for a spot of sibling bonding on the roof. The lights shimmered in the fog like something out of Ridley Scott. Brother and I were on the verge of sorting out the meaning of life (something to do with Chateauneuf du Pape, I think) when a hornet whine of moped engines broke out below. It was the Domino's Pizza delivery boys drag racing. Someone took a corner too fast and crashed into a banana tree. His companions converged upon him in a shriek of brakes and stared down at his struggles One word drifted up on the night breeze. "Wah", it went