Day off hijinks

Tomorrow is Mid-October Festival, if you're a culturally insensitive expatriate, or the Grave Cleaning Day, if you've been half paying attention. Either way, it means Saturday is a public holiday in Hong Kong, which makes no difference when you have an enlightened employer who doesn't make you work weekends.

Having a spectacularly generous employer who lets us have days off in lieu, I didn't have to go to the office, so I rolled out of bed after a proper night's sleep, played with the cat and then went out for breakfast. This should have been relaxing except I made the mistake of drinking a coffee that was strong enough to make my intestines clench up and want to die.

Which was nice.

After that I went to the bank to open a new account. To attract new customers they're taking out big advertisements offering $1,000 for free if you let them look after your cash for a while. Disappointingly, the small print reveals that you only get $1,000 if you give them half a million dollars. I suppose that means that the rich always get richer, although if the best they can get is 0.2%, I wonder how they got rich. Possibly not through astute, high-yield investing strategies.

Then again, I haven't got half a million dollars, so who's the smart one, jackass?

I got to talking to a very tall man (why are all bankers so, so tall?) about appealingly complicated investment funds. One was a bit like Goldilocks: if the market doesn't go up too much, you get a 40% return, if the market doesn't go down too much, you get a 40% return, but if the market goes up too much, or down too much, you only get back what you started with. And then you get eaten by some bears.

I like complicated things, and I like piles of money, and I quite like piles of money arranged into complicated shapes, but I couldn't spend all day talking about that, so I went to the office instead and stared at computers for an hour. Well, it would be dangerous to avoid work completely all day.

The weather was grey and gloomy, so I took myself to the gym and ground myself into submission on the rowing machine, then went home and passed out for an hour.

To finish off the day, I ended up after dinner at Spy, looking at ludicrous clothes. It's always a risk to go to Spy, because there's a fair chance you'll end up wearing a pair of skin-tight lime green bell bottoms when you thought you'd just try on some new jeans. Or then there was the time I asked to look at a denim jacket, and discovered a minute too late that I'd requested the opportunity to wear a romper suit. Or the combination bermuda shorts/bondage pants. Or the tight white t-shirt with integrated silver-fronded scarf and navel-deep v-neck, that the shop assistant told me was "just a little bit too gay."

These wardrobe malfunctions aside, there's always some interesting stuff there, usually in the shape of clothes made to look like other clothes - shirts that are hoodies that are shirts, t-shirts with ties built in, and filthy sort-of-gorgeous stuff with zips and gold and extraneous remnants of other clothes sewn into them. Tonight I tried out a complicated blue top that required instructions on how to do up the collar, which made me look like a 22nd-century pirate fresh off a pastel-painted galleon. Not for me. However, I did pick up a pink striped shirt with wool panels that gives me extra square shoulders (after trying three different sizes because I enjoy teasing shop staff at 10pm when they want to shut up shop) while my girlfriend acquired something labyrinthine in cappucino alpaca, so that was all rather productive.

Back out of Central, watched I Love You Philip Morris, which was unexpectedly funny, after I overcame my initial disappointment of it not being about a man falling in love with a gigantic tobacco conglomerate.