Vicente

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an Englishman in want of a conversation topic will turn to the weather.  Well, the insult to Jane Austin aside, it's still true - we Brits do love to chunter on about the weather.  The great thing about being a Brit in Hong Kong is that there is loads of weather to talk about.  And not just any old weather.  Oh no, new and interesting weather.  More extreme weather, in particular.


I think I may already have mentioned that it was hot when we went to see Big Buddha: 34C, in fact - that's 94F in old money.  Plus, I may have whinged on about the humidity, which at this time of the year seems quite high.  I don't really understand how humidity works.  I could Google it, of course, and then pretend to know but frankly I can't be arsed. It has something to do with the amount of water in the air, I think: it makes it difficult for sweat to evaporate (sweat's primary purpose) and so difficult for you to cool down (because it's the evaporation that cools you).  All I know for sure is that humidity is a real pain!


And then there are the typhoons.  Boy, do they give you a lot to talk about.  We've just had a big one here in Hong Kong, if you'll pardon the expression.  Typhoon Vicente just gave us a bit of a whack on its way to the mainland.  You want rain, you got it - by the bath-load.  You want winds? How about gusts of 160kph+?  Vicente was the biggest storm to hit HK since 1999 and reached T10 on the scale here.


Fortunately for most people in HK, it was just an inconvenience; some people got very wet, some people had to stay in the MTR for a couple of hours, but HK seems to have coped pretty well.  There were some hospitalisations but, as far as I can tell, none of them were serious.  Some trees came down, damaging some cars and, from the news programmes I watched, some reporters may have caught pneumonia from being forced to stand out in it.  (I was reminded of the great Ollie Williams, from Family Guy: "it's rainin' sideways!")

T10, for those of you who don't know (and why would you, unless you live here and if you do live here drop me a line, I'd love to meet new friends) is technically a hurricane signal.  It means that the sustained wind speed is at least 118kph (about 75mph) or force 12 on the Beaufort scale.  That's right, baby: I just had my first hurricane. How was it for you?