Slight return

I'm very happy with the internet today, because it helped me find a cartoon from my childhood. I had vague memories of seeing it, when I was maybe six or seven, and only ever after visits to a hospital that I somehow remember included a rocking horse several times taller than a fully grown man. Since I don't believe even in the early 1980s that the NHS would have had the budget to provide giant rocking horses as part of their standard medical equipment, I assume that part is an exaggeration.

The cartoon itself was outside of the normal corpus of Cities of Gold/Dogtanian/Transformers that everyone can remember. Rather, it had a small girl, stuck on a planet with an army of evil, phallic-helmeted robots, all in black apart from their buffoonish Mussoliniesque white robot leader. I remembered almost nothing more than that; a vague idea of an origin story where the girl had got trapped on an accidentally launched rocket, and some tragedy befalling the evil robot leader, where he was demoted.

A few searches for "80s children cartoon robots" and similar permutations later, and I found it was actually a dubbed French production, from the same stable as Dogtanian, named Robostory. And there are some episodes on Youtube, although it never made it to DVD or video. It sounds suitably unconventional; none of the usual happy endings or resolutions of children's cartoons that make them beloved. Rather more unsettling than that. I have cued up an episode and I'll watch it shortly, hoping not to be disappointed. What better way to prepare for Christmas?

On the way home through Causeway Bay, the tram passed the Regal hotel. I'd never noticed it before, but it's an astonishingly wonderful looking hotel. The atrium is a huge glass bubble, at least two and maybe three stories high, full of chandeliers and Christmas decorations, shining light and beauty out into the night. It's a real treat for anybody travelling past in the dark Hong Kong night, which raised to me the perplexing question of why it should be so. The hotel is at the rougher end of Causeway Bay, where there's nothing pleasant to look at - for most residents of the hotel, the best view there could be would if they blocked all the glass. Which makes the atrium an astonishingly selfless act of generosity to passers-by, sacrificing comfort and a nice view for the good of others. Which is nice of them.

I would make a point here about how it presents a single bubble of golden light, surrounded by a malefic darkness that seeks to extinguish it, but it's not the season for H.P. Lovecraft and besides, with all the neon these days, there's not much darkness left in this part of Hong Kong.