Richard has had to leave Shanghai for a couple of days for work, so I took advantage of his hotel room and have come along too.
Over Shanghai
We left the UK before the film The Theory of Everything, the biography of Stephen Hawking came out, but I’m pleased to say that the film had just been put on Cathay Pacific’s film system. The flight was not quite long enough to see the whole film, but that didn’t stop me from watching what I could of it. No doubt in a couple of weeks I can pick up a pirate copy round the corner from home in Shanghai for no more than the equivalent of £1.50 It’s shameful the way that many of the Chinese have no respect for the intellectual property of others. Are we wrong to buy pirate copies of films, yes. Are we fools not too, of course. The various media industries should sort themselves out and find a way of making their films or music “uncopyable”, or stop sending demo discs out to China in the first place. They do it in the hope of getting their film shown as one of the 30 or so foreign films allowed in the country each year on general release, but that is how the films end up being copied. (Postscript I managed to watch the end of the film on the return flight). The Theory of Everything had an amazing number of resonances for me personally, much like Gavin Extence’s Book The Universe Versus Alex Woods. Gavin Extence’s book is about a boy and his growing caring relationship with a man who is diagnosed with Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP). You probably won’t have heard of it, but it is the degenerative brain disease that Dudley Moore had, and my mother had it too. The effects of the PSP are very similar to the effects of Motor Neurone Disease which is what Stephen Hawking has. In MND it is motor neuron cells themselves that are damaged – those that control voluntary muscle activity such speaking, walking, swallowing, and general movement of the body are affected. In PSP it is the nerve cells deep within the lower brain that tell the motor neurons what to do, that atrophy. The effect is very similar. The first serious manifestations of her disease were her falling over, say in the street, as she was walking alongside me. She ended up in a wheelchair, unable to speak for the last 5 years of her life and unable to move practically any muscles although she could thankfully swallow and raise one arm so that she had a way of answering yes or no to questions. The alphabet chart she had was not as sophisticated as Stephen’s and her attempts to control an electric wheelchair were a big failure. PSP was also depicted in the biographical TV drama A Short Stay In Switzerland which starred Julie Walters as the GP Dr Anne Turner who had PSP and who had watched her husband die of the same disease. The short stay in question was at Dignitas, which is where Alex Wood ends up with his older friend in Gavin Extence’s book. My mother did not go to Dignitias. Most people nowadays are aware of Alzheimers where a person’s grey matter is destroyed and it is often the only degenerative nervous/brain disease that people think about. But there are others such as MND and PSP which leave the thinking part of the brain in tact. The patient is totally aware and mentally capable but unable to control their bodies. My mother could laugh at a joke. But it wasn’t a noise made in her throat, it came from her stomach. A totally different noise altogether. It is a very cruel disease. But the similarities didn’t stop there. Stephen Hawking did his PhD in Cambridge and the film was filmed at St. John’s, although Hawking is actually a Don at Gonville and Caius. Both of my brothers did physics at St. John’s, one as an Exhibitioner, the other as a Scholar. They both know Stephen Hawking. The Scholar was asked to stay on after getting a First to do a PhD – like SH he could answer physics questions with remarkable ease. Doing double maths and physics at A-level he never did any homework. He would just sit down before the lesson and answer all the questions then and there. The Scholar in the family declined the offer of a second degree saying “I’m not a physicist, I can just answer physics questions”. But I have always wondered what would have happened had he stayed on at St. John’s. So the views of Cambridge and those in St. John’s in particular brought back memories of going to visit my brothers at the university whilst I was still at school. A good while back I had cancer and was cured with operations, chemotherapy and radiotherapy. The long term side effects (be they from the disease or the treatment none can say) have affected my memory and my reasoning skills and I now also find it difficult to take in information if I’m not paying proper attention. (The family get very frustrated with me because of this.) I’m an ENTP personality type, constantly coming up with new ideas and I analyse the world incessantly making connections between what I experience with what is stored in my memory. I think that this is one of the reasons why I get so tired when I’m out and about in new places – Shanghai everyday for example – because I’m seeing and assimilating so much that is new. Richard watches me like a hawk because deep down he worries that I shall get PSP like my mother, or some other related brain disease like Parkinson’s which one of my brothers has. Personally I think the long term after effects of having had cancer are enough to contend with, thank you. But the resonances of the film didn’t end there. I watched this film on a flight to Hong Kong, which is where I am sitting as I write this piece, looking out from Quarry Bay on Hong Kong Island over-looking the Harbour from our hotel room. Indeed I’m looking at the end of the old Kai Tak runway. Now that was an experience; flying into Hong Kong in those days. Nowadays you come into the new airport on Lantau island and there is a standardised computer aided 10 miles straight approach into the airport. In my parent’s day, the airport had to be built on land owned by Britain, and not on land leased for 99 years from China, so the runway was built stretching out into the harbour from the Kowloon peninsula. The planes would fly directly eastwards parallel to the mountains north of Kowloon on a guidance system and then the pilots would manually have to turn the plane through 90 ° when they had physically sighted and then reached Chequerboard Hill, very near the end of their descent to sea level. Over time, high rise buildings were built up on this approach. If you were in that part of town, and looked up, it was a bit like a noisy village hall skimming over the top of the tower blocks. In the plane as a passenger it was like landing in London’s Oxford Street. If you had a starboard window seat as you came into land in the evening and looked down the wing as the plane banked you could watch people in their kitchens cooking with their woks. Heavy cross winds made the landing more dangerous and if the plane didn’t stop on the runway you would have ended up in the Harbour. This video illustrates what I mean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PCOcyt7BPI My mother was in Hong Kong when her symptoms first started to seriously manifest themselves (my parents were here for four years) and when I visited them we started the process of getting her to a doctor to do some tests. They lived on Hong Kong island a little further west from here. They too had a view of the harbour. So, I have not been able to write about my visit to Hong Kong without explaining why I am feeling a tad emotional today.
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