My avatar

Later that same night.

The avatar photo was taken at the Company Chinese New Year bash in Hong Kong.  Earlier that year I had taken a course of singing lessons – a little late in the day, some might think, but, hey, what the hell!  I try to set myself the task each year of learning something new – not just the little things we all learn each day, even at my semi-advanced age, but something substantial that takes some effort and will help to stop my brain turning to porridge.  Easy enough when I get a job in a new country; learning the language will fill the bill, but for other years I like to try something different.   Anyway, that year it was singing.  

People have often told me I can carry a tune, and that year I had started singing with a small band in a bar near to the office.  We used to use a bar actually in the building where the office was located – Hong Kong, remember – but the manager, whose knickers, if you’ll excuse the expression, I had been trying to get into for some time, and who – but that’s another story.  Anyway, the lady was moved to a more up-market bar a couple of streets away, so we all de-camped en masse.  The new bar had a small band three nights a week and, one evening, when there was almost no-one in except a few of us from the company, they began to play a Sinatra number which was one of my party pieces, so the lady manager shoved me up to sing with them.  There were few people in, and one thing led to another, and one beer led to another, then the party began to get a little raucous, (In HK terms – that would be riotous anywhere in Europe,) that attracted more people, and pretty soon we had a full house,( in HK terms again – that would be breathing by odd and even numbers anywhere in Europe,) and I was still singing with the band – pretty damn badly by this time, and after a number of beers, but no-one really cared.  Anyhoo, the next time we were in there with the band, they invited me to sing again and it turned into a regular thing.  I don’t want to give the impression that I’m a professional, but I got free booze and a meal, and had fun 🙂  The pianist with the band was a Japanese lady who… but that’s another story also.  She was, however, a great accompanist.  She could pal, lift a finger to signal ‘pitch up a bit, or down, or speed up, or big finish or whatever without breaking up the song, or slow things down, or speed up or do whatever it took to make sure that we all finished a dong at roughly the same time, and it was she who suggested, in that polite, understated way the Japanese have, that it might be a good idea to take some lessons.

But back to the avatar.  I had ben singing with the band for some months, and had the course of lesson under my belt, by the time the New Year dinner came around, so I got a spot at the do singing a popular canto-pop number that chimed with the theme of the evening and the successful promotions we had carried out that year.  I was rehearsing in the afternoon when the lady in the photo, a famous, but waning* Hong Kong cantopop singer who was starring in the show, arrived.   She was more than a little surprised to see a ‘Gweilo’ belting out this song in Cantonese and signalled me over for a chat when we’d finished all the tech adjustments.  (Fortunately, she could speak Mandarin, though not as well as me – which was another surprise for her.)

After we had been chatting for a bit, she suggested we do a song together, so we rehearsed. ‘You don’t bring me flowers,’ and sang that during the evening.  It went down very well, and we did the Sinatra.Celine Dion version of ‘All the way’ as an encore.  That’s when the avatar photo was taken.  After the dinner, we went on to a club – the New Tonnochie, for anyone who might have been through HK, which was a bit more upmarket then than now – and the lady was prevailed upon to sing there, and got me up to reprise the Sinatra/Dion number.  The photo in this blog was taken there by her personal photographer, which is why it is so professional.

My fifteen minutes of fame actually lasted into the following week, when a local gossip rag published a picture of the lady leaving the club in the early hours, ‘with an unknown Gweilo’ 🙂

*She was 30 -ish, almost a dinosaur in the hectic world of cantopop.