A year since the Liberals lost the NSW elections

… and by any measure they ought to have won. However, a combination of Peter Debnam and, I think, a growing revulsion against The Great Grey Garden Gnome then squatting still in Kirribilli House, brought the Libs down and delivered us to an ongoing Labor Government that has merely grown in ineptitude over the ensuing twelve months.

Very ordinary Chinese food

That is what Sirdan and I experienced in Kensington yesterday, despite the yellowing copy of a review by David Dale in the window awarding the establishment 8/10 for food. Chinese Whisper this wasn’t. Not that it was all bad; it was just, well, ordinary. Generic sauces, Sichuan food that wasn’t by any stretch of imagination what it claimed to be, and minimal variety in vegetables.

I have found a test of Chinese restaurants: when you go in, ask what tea they serve. If it is only jasmine and a very ordinary generic “green tea” and they look at you strangely when you ask for “Dragon Well”, go to another restaurant…

As we left I said to Sirdan, “I expected Kath and Kim to arrive at any moment…”

Cold wind from the north

I am regularly in touch with people from the Peoples Republic of China one way or another and have been for around eighteen years now. It can be said that by and large they get on with their lives in ways increasingly like our own lives and ignore what the powers in Beijing are doing as far as possible. Devotion to communism seems marginal; those old enough to actually remember Mao and the Cultural Revolution do so with irony at best, and often with some bitterness. But every now and again when Beijing gets a bee in its bonnet a cold wind, it is said, blows in from the north.