Fighting jet lag in Hong Kong

My parents and my sister arrived in Hong Kong today, in a week largely marked by Qantas having engines explode on its planes; thus I was pleased that they came via a British Airways plane, which didn't have any explosions. Although given that BA managed to land a plane before it reached the runway a year or two back, it's not like they have a spotless record for safety. (Nobody died when they put the plane down short of the runway at Heathrow, although at least one man went on record complaining that nobody got him a cup of tea afterwards.)

There's various things one should do after a long plane journey: avoid caffeine and alcohol, rest up and not try to take too much on until your body has adjusted to the new time zone.  So we plied them with wine and sake, and then made them use chopsticks to eat a Japanese meal, with varying degrees of success.  I'd never before realised, for example, that you can saw a piece of fried taro in two with a chopstick.  I doubt many chopstick users had ever attempted this, but my mother was undaunted in her decision to slice where others have only ever gripped.

This isn't to castigate my mother for not knowing how to use chopsticks - after all, I have terrible table manners and manage to miss my mouth so often that it's only because of the scandalously large portions in most restaurants that I don't starve to death.  Or perhaps it's because of the girnormous portions that I try to ensure as low a percentage as possible goes in my mouth, to prevent ingestion of excess calories.

Although coming to think of it, if I have terrible table manners, surely my mother should take some responsibility for that.

Then again, by my age I should be capable of taking responsibility for my own actions.

But if by this age I can't take responsibility for my own actions because I'm feckless and irresponsible,  well, who's fault is that?

Golly, this is confusing.  I'm glad that my parents and my sister are here to help me through this complicated time.

Although if they weren't here, I wouldn't be working myself up into such high confusion.

This is difficult, isn't it?  Perhaps my father was feigning deafness to avoid being brought into such untoward existentialist discussions.

In more boastful news, I've clocked up 2045 words today on the new novel, bringing the total count to date to 10,850.  See if you like it (starts here), most recent post here