The Kowloon Diaries

Why The Road Works

(Hardly a day goes by here, when they're not digging up the streets, so in the spirit of if you can't beat 'em join 'em, I've written a poem of appreciation for road works.)

Today they're digging the roads,
Scraping back the surface of the city,
Revealing how it works.
Lying in the mud,
A mess of pipes and wires.
It looks chaotic, but it isn't.
It's an intricate grid, through which
The power of mathematics brings us everything,
Secretly.
Gas from beneath the South China Sea
Heats the soup.
Water from Dongjiang reservoirs
Falls from the shower.
Pulses of electricity
From an atom split in Shenzhen
Hum down the lines
Like a flock of mosquitoes
To make toast.
The damage is repaired.
The diggers dump the mud back.
Re-tar the road.
The grid is beautiful,
Yet nobody wants to see it.

To Those Who Ask, Give

(Just a little story I wrote after reading about a couple of brothers who found a 140 million year old fossilized spider's web.)

A rare sunny day in the Scottish highlands and Ernest and John were kneeling in the dirt searching for fossils.

'What would your most precious find be?' John asked Ernest.

Ernest sat back on his heels and considered. 'A spider's web,' he said.

They searched a little more, and ate their sandwiches and drank their orange juice. They didn't talk much. It was enough just to be out there on the hillside looking for fossils. They didn't find anything that day, but the next week they were back. In the week in between there had been a storm and much of the surface shingle had been washed away.

Ernest was sorting through a pile of rocks when he found a black lump. Ten years of searching had given him an instinct for these things. He felt the adrenalin surging through his veins-the ancient hunter inside coming alive. He brushed off the dirt and saw a pattern of intricate lines appear.

'John,' he shouted, 'come here and take a look at this.'

Professor MacGonagal of Aberdeen University confirmed it. 'A spider's web,' he said stroking his beard. 'One hundred and forty million years old. I'd say the web became trapped in conifer resin after a forest fire and then became fossilized inside the resulting amber.'

'Amazing,' said Ernest, 'Imagine, the Cretaceous Period. The heyday of the dinosaurs. This web was that old.'

'Actually,' said Professor, 'all matter is that old, even the atoms in your body. Older in fact. It's just that most of it changes shape and your fossil has stayed the same.'

That summer was a whirl of activity. Ernest and John were summoned to fossil conventions up and down the country. A cult who worshipped the past offered to appoint them grand masters. Ernest got tired of the fuss, but John loved it. At the end of the summer Ernest went back to his fossil hunting, while John went on a world tour.

Alone on the hillside Ernest was scraping the ground when a shadow fell over him. He looked up and saw a girl he'd met at a convention during the summer.

'Hi, remember me?' she said.

'Sure,' he said.

'I hope you don't mind. I came out here hoping to meet you again. I really admire your work.'

'That's OK,' he said.

They knelt on the dirt together.

'What would be your most precious find?' he asked her.

'A fish, maybe,' she said.

'Be specific.'

'A really old fish, like from before mammals existed. In fact, make it the first fish with legs, the ancestor of all human beings.'

'OK then,' said Ernest, 'let's look.'