A long time ago, in a former life, far-far away I remember tasting a succulent, savoury black fruit. I seem to recollect buying them in jars – from all good purveyors of food. I would add them to salads, pasta, maybe in mischief even to a curry. They were known as black olives.
But if such things still exist, surely I must be able to find them in Hong Kong too. Few cities are as obsessed with food and shopping (though strangely not cooking) as Hong Kong. I searched the supermarkets near my home and office. Obviously a Mediterranean fruit would not be a staple component of the Cantonese diet, but surely some stores would sell them.
I went to one after another supermarket. Food sales in Hong Kong is a cosy duopoly shared by Dairy Farms (Jardine-Matheson) and PARKnSHOP (Lee Ka-shing) who between them account for 94.6% of food sales. (This is a fake-statistic because next to no business-intelligence is published in Hong Kong. There is no lovely Kantor World panel, nor any pesky CMA haranguing retail with competition enquiries. It’s approach to competition could have been dreamt up by John D. Rockefeller and Ayn Rand).
Perhaps, in the spirit of Nassim Taleb, the probability of a store selling olives is astonishingly non-random, like wealth or prowess at writing 
best-sellers. Maybe 99.999% stores don’t stock olives, and one store sells has cornered the market. That would be very Hong Kong. I came tantalisingly close in one large retail chain. Next to a jar of green olives, was a can of black olives.
But every new condiment shelf was like the last. I was starring in Groundhog Day but instead of Sonny and Cher singing I got You Babe every morning I déjà vu-ed shelves of pickled vegetables, soya sauce laid out precisely like in the last shop.
But this tale has a happy ending. Hong Kong is one of the only countries in the world outside the UK where M&S still manages to make a profit. It does this by air-freighting all their lovely food-stuffs to Hong Kong circumventing the duopolies stranglehold on local suppliers provisioning their competition. The store in Central had jar after jar of black olives. I bought two.
On 8th November hundreds of millions of people were startled to find their country had inflicted a grievous act of self-harm which would throw society into disarray. If they had bothered to switch on foreign news, they might also have noticed the US presidential election polls were closing. 
Earlier this week my son told me about an end-of-year costume party he was going to attend themed around all the horrors of 2016 and asked how he should dress. His friends would no doubt dress up as Trump, Farage and Boris Johnson. I suggested he should honour His Royal Purpleness, or perhaps David Bowie – both great in terms of wacky clothes. Then, my son mentioned dressing up as a Toblerone to commemorate its tragic downsizing. I assumed he was being frivolous, but he insisted he genuinely mourned its shrinkage. He said lots of other confectionaries and snacks were doing the same thing.
This year, the opposition is being split by the entry of eight, 
As someone who spends more time listening to LegCo debates than is healthy I have a lot of sympathy for the young people’s views that politics is not representing their interests. They characterise all villainy as emanating from Beijing, but there are baddies closer to home, too. A couple of weeks ago I listened to the debate on the medical bill. The Bill aims to make it easier for foreign qualified doctors to practice in HK, and also to increase lay representation on the medical complaints board. The bill was successfully filibustered by the “expert” LegCo member from the doctor’s functional constituency. Another debate on a proposed scheme to introduce premium taxi franchises was roundly attacked by LegCo members for upsetting the existing interests of taxi drivers and taxi license owners. The 
Still can’t get my head around yesterday. In all my adult life yesterday is only the third time I’ve voted for the winning person / option (the other two were voting for Maya in the Camden Council elections). Usually whatever I vote for loses. Maybe I should campaign for Trump to avoid this.