Fit to Fly?

It’s an indulgent buckshee week in Hong Kong. Zac and dad head to the movies, to the arcades, barely surfacing from the air-conditioned tunnels and plazas that link one mall to another, except to indulge in Adventure Time marathons on Cartoon Network.

Me? I engage in that mixture of pissing around on social media and making to-do lists that I so easily confuse with work, treat my Hobbit feet to a thorough Hong Kong pedicure, eat considerably more than is good for me, and try on a range of frocks in the hope of finding one that will actually close around my giant Western rib cage.

We enjoy a family outing to World War Z, with Haagen-Dazs and popcorn, a movie that Zac and I have been waiting for pretty much since the adaptation of the book was first announced.

I love going to the movies in foreign countries – hell, I love going to the movies everywhere – and, after Skyfall in Kuala Lumpur, Star Trek in Inner Mongolia and some movie so unmemorable in Bangkok that all I can remember is the way even the hipsters stood for the national anthem, World War Z in Hong Kong is the perfect counterpoint.

I’m amused to notice, as Peter “Malcolm Tucker” Capaldi makes his debut appearance on what is by light years the worst third act of any movie that ever made it into cinemas, and the auditorium breaks out in the kind of laughter I last heard when attending a preview screening of Troy with some fellow classics grads, that The Thick of It was clearly big in Hong Kong.

Doctor Wong’s office is in one of those weird Hong Kong addresses that begins by specifying the floor, proceeds to specify the block name, and adds the street address only as a token “what-don’t-you-have-a-smartphone-loser?” afterthought.

Friday rolls around, and it’s time to get Zac’s arm checked out, to see what lurks under the thin strip of plaster, whether the bone is healing correctly and whether Zac is, in airline parlance, “fit to fly”. I can’t imagine that he isn’t, but we can’t get on a plane without a doctor’s letter, and, anyway, there’s a teensy-weensy chance that his arm might be healing weirdly.

Doctor Wong’s office is in one of those weird Hong Kong addresses that begins by specifying the floor, proceeds to specify the block name, and adds the street address only as a token “what-don’t-you-have-a-smartphone-loser?” afterthought.

Zac and dad opt for the maze of A/C, striplit subterranean tunnels which they consider by far the best way of getting around Hong Kong.

Me? I choose daylight, every time. I like humidity. It wraps me. And I like street life.

Oh, yeah, and I have no sense of direction, whereas Zac has mercifully inherited his dad’s.

We decide to settle this debate, once and for all, with a race at walking speed, me above ground, the boys below.

I make it to the rough location of Doctor Wong’s office with plenty of time in hand and a sense of smug self-righteousness. And then I flounder. TST is so dense, so shopaholic, that it’s hard to find the correct high-rise. There are stores on the ground floor of every building, and it seems kinda odd to proceed to a doctor’s office by way of a ground floor full of clothes shops and a first floor full of restaurants. Eventually, I surrender, and ring S. He’s been having the same problem as I have, but has found the correct building.

Our race, we conclude, as we enter the lift, with five minutes to go before our appointment, is a tie.

I fill out the forms. “She means two minutes,” I say to S. “It’s 11.58 now.” “And our appointment’s at 12,” S confirms. “Not 12.05.”

Doctor Wong’s office is compact, like everything in Hong Kong, on a floor populated largely by other medical professionals, and sheeny-shiny with lots of sliding glass and plasma screens that appear to be the default in these parts.

“Fill this in, and wait two minutes,” the receptionist says, with Cantonese efficiency. The other patient in the waiting room is busy, Hong Kong style, on a smartphone so large it’s almost, but not quite, a tablet.

I fill out the forms. “She means two minutes,” I say to S. “It’s 11.58 now.”

“And our appointment’s at 12,” S confirms. “Not 12.05.”

I hand the forms back, receive a neat file of notes, and we head up five more floors in the lift to the radiologist’s office to get Zac’s arm X-rayed.

In a shockingly inefficient display for Hong Kong, we have to wait a whole fifteen minutes. (In Blighty, for the record, this sort of follow-up appointment typically takes up half a day minimum.)

S and I inspect the X-ray. All looks good to our untutored eyes, and back down we go, bang on time for Doctor Wong who might, I suspect, have booked the X-ray appointment in for 12.15 because we look like the kind of people who’d be late.

Doctor Wong’s eyebrows shoot skywards. “Rockclimbing, not for two months at least,” he says. “Theme parks? He can walk around and look at things, but no rollercoasters for six weeks.”

Doctor Wong skims the X-ray, checks Zac’s shoulder rotation, and nods approvingly. He’ll need some physio in the UK, but it shouldn’t be much.

“We have some activities planned for the UK,” I begin. “Will Zac be able to do rockclimbing? Or go to theme parks?”

These are all activities we have lined up for an epic family reunion when we head back to the UK – though quite how we’re heading back to the UK, I don’t know yet. S gives me the death stare. He’s definite that Zac won’t be able to do any of these things, but I think there’s no harm in asking, so I’m asking.

Doctor Wong’s eyebrows shoot skywards. “Rockclimbing, not for two months at least,” he says. “Theme parks? He can walk around and look at things, but no rollercoasters for six weeks.”

I shrug. “Sorry, Zac,” I say. “I guess Alton Towers is out of the question.”

I’m bummed about the rockclimbing. One of my cousins – one of my little cousins who’s still about ten in my head but actually has a proper grown-up job and a proper grown-up relationship and is generally further down the path to adulthood than I – is an expedition caver, champion kayaker and a relatively serious climber, and I’d really been looking forward to testing out my fear of heights while Zac got some proper climbing in.

I figure that also means tree-climbing is out. That’s going to be an issue.

Doctor Wong, god bless his cotton socks, is recommending we fly business class out of Honkers on a proper first world airline. And, hell, I’m down with that.

And, finally, the moment we’ve all been waiting for. The plaster comes off Zac’s arm. S and I zoom in with camera and phone.

All there is to show for a fortnight’s drama and a six figure sum of travel insurance money is a rapidly healing incision with a couple of undissolved stitches and a little bit of bruising.

“He’ll need to wear a plaster over it for a couple more days,” says Doctor Wong. “Just take it off when you get back to the UK.”

Quite how we’re getting back to the UK, I’m not entirely sure.

S flies back to Oz this weekend. Our current routing is Beijing-Almaty-Heathrow, with a long layover in Kazakhstan that looked most cost-effective when I booked it, prior to the arm, but Doctor Wong, god bless his cotton socks, is recommending we fly business class out of Honkers on a proper first world airline.

And, hell, I’m down with that. Although, I have to say, Zac and I are both most gutted to be missing Beijing. Hong Kong dim sum, as Zac keeps remarking, are not the same as jiaozi. Not at all.