Trail etiquette, dude!

Today is a holiday in Hong Kong, commemorating the handover back to nChina in 1997. Rather than celebrate the erosion of the British Empire by staying in bed all morning, I got in a van with my bike and headed up to Tai Mo Shan for a ride.

Perhaps I overdid it at the gym yesterday. Or perhaps if you get back on a bike after a month without riding, you shouldn't expect to keep up with the others. Either way I was tragically slow.

The others were diplomatic about it, ostensibly stopping to fix punctures, tighten bolts, or recite Shakespearean sonnets while I lumbered into view. At one point they paused at the top of a flight of steps, and three guys rode towards us, the last one calling out "you're in the trail, dude" in a very English accent.

I was disgusted. Have standards slipped so much in the last 14 years? We're not dudes. We're not standing around on a ranch in Colorado, fresh from roping steers and seeing who can spit tobacco the furthest. We're in a former British colony, and anyone with the least bit of manners should realise the correct form of address would be "sir" or "my good chap", or "you there" if addressing a member of the lower orders.

"Dude" is only appropriate if at least one of you is wearing leather chaps, and that's no guarantee. If you found yourself in a nightclub under Charing Cross station and all around you were wearing leather chaps, it still would not be right to ask "dude, pass me the amyl nitrate".