Picnic in the Park
Only in Hong Kong would you get lackeys emptying (well attempting to anyway) the bins when they're not even half full...what a waste of time and resources. Especially when these bins are clearly designed to be emptied by a big truck - not a couple of numpties who ended up tipping the bin on its side to get to the few things at the bottom, and then left the black bag behind!
This was Discovery Bay's 4th annual Picnic in the Park where the rich and the even-richer gather in Siena 'Park' - we had more grass in the garden at the house in North Cheam - with their myriad offspring and even myriad-er dogs (I've told you before, us writers are allowed to make up words when the sentence calls for it) to fill their faces with processed food from polystyrene dishes and warm beer from plastic pint glasses - kind of like Glastonbury but with less mud and more children. Hmm...yeah, you're right, it's nothing like Glastonbury.
But I am making it sound terrible, which it wasn't. Some of the acts were good, The DB Big Band being particularly superb - love a bit of In the Mood - until they did a ridiculously out-of-genre cover of 'Knock on Wood' where they employed the non-existent singing talents of some loser woman - maybe just don't bother with that one in the future, yeah? Clearly they were hoping that after 6 and a half hours of the PiP (oh yes, there was an acronym, and no it didn't stand for Performance Improvement Plan, Accenture peeps, though after Knock on Wood, it possibly should have) everyone would have drunk enough to think it was well cool. And sure enough, some people were vigorously jigging up and down. People who definitely should not have been jigging up and down.
It was good to have a day of entertainment (obviously using the term loosely) right on the doorstep, yet far away enough from our actual flat that I didn't have to listen to it constantly, and as I'm sure most of you know, I'm a big fan of outdoor drinking - made even better by the free entry and the 'free' beers which I brought from the fridge. Half the reason we moved here to be honest; it's nice to be part of a community.
Plus, the one good thing to be learnt from the day was that there are still some nice, polite children out there, which I discovered when I saved a very small child from falling off the kerb I was sitting on and the slightly bigger child who was running after her thanked me profusely. Well done that child; or more to the point, well done those parents. I'd just assumed all the kids here were ill-mannered brats.
PS don't ask me what the tents were for - this thing only went on from 11am - 9pm; did people really need an afternoon nap? Mmm...now there's a good idea.
