Lady Southorn and ME!

Cool news. I'm truly thrilled and I'll go down later and take a photo so you can see for yourself.

What's happened is that a plaque has just gone up at Southorn Park saying that the land was a gift from Lady Southorn "for the children of Wan Chai".


If you're shrugging and saying "So what!" it means you've forgotten the story I told you over a year back; how I got all huffy when developers started talking about Southorn Park and "doing more with the land"?

Remember how I went to that public meeting about the proposal? I promised Keith I'd just go to watch but it started getting so creepy I couldn't help myself and so went all Xena and called the microphone over and told the mass-meeting "You have no right saying any of this. This land was a gift from Lady Southorn to the children of Wan Chai so they had somewhere to play with their feet on the earth and the sun over their heads. All this discussion is illegal and you should all stop it right now!"

And it happened! The meeting stopped dead! Wow, I finally felt I'd earned the right to be my mother's daughter.

Well, that's when I got pounced on by all the media and they all wanted to know all about Lady Southorn thinking maybe I could be her representative ... which, in a way, I was, if you think about it ... so I told them that she was the sister of Virginia Woolf's husband and was a famous writer in her own right. Incredibly, some of the journalists had actually heard of Virginia Woolf and asked me if Lady Southorn had been a member of the Bloomsbury Group and they so wanted me to say yes, I did. And then I compounded it by saying that the Bloomsbury Group had all chipped in to pay for the land and, boy, they were thrilled to bits ... even the ones who previously hadn't heard of the Bloomsbury Group.

Wow, the Bloomsbury Group were also active in HK! How many literary merit points does that earn us!!

Anyway, the plaque has gone up and now everyone knows so there won't be any more discussion about "doing more with the land".

See at the back there?
The bit with the trees?
That's the only part of the park
where children can play.
(Wow, this is an old photo.
See how the old buildings of
Wedding Card Street are still standing.)

All I need to do now is push for the MTR to tear down the buildings they've illegally placed on it ... see them on the left ... and Lady Southorn's legacy will be returned to the children of Wan Chai.

Such a pity the relentless football and basketball fixtures means they're never permitted to play anyplace other than that little bit there!


And just because it's interesting, here's a photo of Southorn Park back in the 1930s:

And here it is today: Note it's all about men playing soccer. Was then: is now!