As the Christmas decorations are packed away and we start to reconsider the wisdom of some of our New Year's resolutions, many of us are already looking forward to Lunar New Year and Valentine's Day, trying to put last year firmly behind us. Most of us would be happy to see 2020 entirely written off. Written off like that interview for our dream job in which we probably should not have quoted extensively from 'The Life of Brian'. Written off like that wetsuit which took an hour to squeeze into before we had to cut ourself out of it in an emergency after taking some ill-advised super-strength laxatives. Or perhaps written off like the blind date who turned up for dinner looking like Monica Bellucci on an evening when we decided to dress down, wearing corduroy pants and Brut 33 aftershave.
Monica Bellucci : not someone to disappoint on a dinner date
The global media spent most of 2020 focused on CoVid-19; the ways in which it was being mismanaged and the race to find a cure. Just occasionally some news items appeared to suggest that every cloud has a silver lining; the pandemic was not all doom and gloom. Manufacturing and transportation dropped dramatically, subsequently, so did air and sea pollution. People increasingly started to stay at home; so bears, moose and wolves curiously tip-toed out of the forests and down from the mountains into the streets of sleepy towns to check out what wasn't happening.
animals come to town
I Am The Walrus !
The first customer of the day, presumably waiting outside his favourite fishmonger in Argentina
While Venice reported that it's waters were now clear enough to see fish again, HongKongers noted increased sightings of its rare and protected Pink Dolphins.
The cancellation of all ferry services from HK to the gambling dens and flesh-pots of Macau had reduced boat-engine noise sufficiently to encourage the dolphins to stay over in HK waters longer and in greater numbers than previous years.
The Grand Lisboa Casino in the heart of Old Macau.
Macau is the gaming capital of the world with a revenue 7 times higher than Las Vegas, whose affiliated casinos it now subsidises. Almost 70% of gamers are from mainland China where CoVid has been brought under control, allowing casinos to partially reopen after months of closure.
Meanwhile, the CoVid closure of HK's Ocean Park zoo, finally gave bashful pandas Ying Ying and Lee Lee sufficient privacy to enjoy some feisty panda-antics. For the last 10 years, zookeepers had failed to create the right conditions for a panda-love but the simple absence of annoying humans knocking on the glass was strangely all it took to put them in a romping good mood.
Picky pandas pensively ponder passion.
Pandas must find each other attractive before they mate - which took 10 years in this case.
Pregnancy can only be detected 14 days before birth, giving the father little chance to deny paternity.
While most HongKongers celebrated their pandas finally scoring a home run, the HK singles community was still despairing if any of them would ever even get to first base. At the end of 2019, as the CoVid outbreak started, survey results suggested almost 40% of HongKongers were single and open to dating - but not finding success any easier than their pandas had done in the last 10 years.
Typical complaints were that many professionals are highly ambitious, very driven but typically only stationed in HK for a couple of years - during this time they prioritise work over everything else. With Australia being 3 hrs ahead and Europe and the USA being 7 & 13 hrs behind respectively, work calls and meetings command every waking hour for many. Moreover clients in Vietnam and Cambodia work Saturdays and Sundays and they really don't care whether HongKongers do or not; HongKongers must also work weekends if they don't want to loose their Clients.
HongKongers are also known to apply an over-riding caveat to their work and private lives; this is best summed up as 'Pending a Better Offer' (PBO). Essentially HongKongers extend the 'upgrade culture' associated with phones, cars, and apartments equally to their jobs and partners. People will readily move to a cheaper gym, faster car, bigger apartment or jump ship to a better company position or significant other as soon as a better offer becomes available.
Most of us know a few die-hard technophobes who continue to resist the inevitable transition to online platforms. They obstinately reject video conferences in favour of face-to-face meetings quoting B-movie cliches like "We need to see the whites of their eyes". We all know this really means; 'I feel like a call-centre Muppet every time I wear my headset'. If nothing else, CoVid has dragged most of these fossils into the 21st Century, forcing them to finally get their heads around Skype, Teams and Zoom, to the point where they now enjoy these platforms so much that they happily sit through calls way past bedtime, at weekends and even on their mobiles while commuting. The same can be said of the people who regularly eschewed dating apps in favour of real life dating with sage explanations like "I need to see the body language to know if I'm really into a person". These people are now so addicted to swiping left or right on Tinder that they'll happily start shortlisting tomorrow night's date during their morning team meeting, while taking a 'comfort break' or even in collusion with tonight's failed date in between catching separate checks and catching separate taxis.
But while apps may make it easier and faster to find a date, CoVid is still hampering the speed of hooking up and getting to first base, second base and the all-important home run. More now than ever HongKongers are finding they really can't get no satisfaction.
The Rolling Stones at Glastonbury in 2013 : demanding satisfaction since 1965
If the signals from the worlds of marketing and advertising are anything to go by, HK's Mr Fruity & Miss Frisky from PhewPhwoor are increasingly taking matters into their own hands.
In pre-CoVid HK, the public advertising of adult toys had been limited to a few discrete corners of the subway which you might easily walk past without actually noticing what you had seen.
SONA by LELO, went largely unnoticed in the subway in 2018
Suddenly in 2020, similar items were being advertised across the full height and breadth of both sides of HK's iconic trams.
Despite it's poorly-judged name, the 'Womaniser' is enjoying a deep and satisfying blush
of sales with the subtle invitation to "Be Guided By Pleasure".
This compares with the much harder-riding catchphrase "SCREAM YOUR OWN NAME !"
which promotes the same product in Canada
Today in 2021 a casual stroll through any part of the subway will introduce you to all manner of self-pleasure devices designed to make more than just your eyes pop. Tenga offers everything from the basic Air-tech Reuseable Vacuum Cup; ''Discover the sensation of aero stimulation".
The cutting edge of technology for men happy to insert their most treasured appendage into a repurposed pencil sharpener, is the FlipOrb. This offers "Flexible orbs encased in soft elastomer that bound and ripple as you pass through" - and come out the other end, presumably.
Perhaps the most incongruous aspect of these adverts is how they casually appear next to everyday items and info. I'd like to meet a person with the mental agility to leap from clitoral stimulators to the fixed penalty for littering without a meltdown in some corner of their neural net.
So as we resign ourselves to limp stoically onwards into a second year with CoVid, many of us will find ourselves thinking again about what satisfaction really means in these challenging times. Definitely we can be satisfied if our friends and family have not caught the virus, if we have not yet been laid off, furloughed, obliged to take months of unpaid leave or shoulder hefty salary reductions. If we can still keep a roof over our heads and feed ourselves. It may be a chance to re-examine how to get more satisfaction from things we already have in ways we previously overlooked.
Sorry it didn't work out with Monica.
ReplyDeleteMe too buddy ! Me too
ReplyDelete