Peter Rhodes: The trouble with public transport

I HAD four working trips to Hong Kong between 1982 and 1996 and saw the growing concern, and final resignation, as the deadline approached for the handover of the colony to China in 1997. I recall a very pukka member of the HK government assuring me loftily that all would be well with the 50-year agreement because China and Britain were such old hands at the art of diplomacy. Now, just 20 years on, China is saying that the treaty signed with the UK has “no practical significance.” Not so diplomatic, after all.

ACCORDING to the Local Government Association, bus travel in Britain is at its lowest for decades with a drop of 75 million journeys from 2015-2017. By pure chance, this news broke on the very day I applied for my bus pass. Also on the same day a court report appeared about a thug in Stourbridge who punched four bus passengers. He wasn't a psychiatric case; he was just ”having a bad day.” That's the trouble with public transport. Your journey is only ever as pleasant as your least pleasant fellow-passenger.

WHICH is why I have such fond memories of public transport in Hong Kong. The Star Ferry and the Mass Transit underground were packed with polite, smiling Chinese folk and I never saw even a hint of trouble.

WHEN the Hong Kong government asked passengers to stop flicking their tickets on the new Tube (the racket was like a locust invasion), the flicking stopped instantly. You wouldn't get that in England.

FIFTY years ago this week the BBC first broadcast colour television. It must have been a couple of years before the Rhodes family got one but I remember the first evening clearly. As the magical new machine came to life, BBC News was covering that day's riots in Northern Ireland. Petrol bombs exploded in vivid blotches of yellow and red. I remember thinking it didn't seem right. News was supposed to be in black and white. Screening it in colour made it seem like entertainment.

I FOUND the remains of a helium balloon in our yard. There was a fragment of black rubber tied with pink ribbon to a card with the message: “Fly high, Angel. Love always, Mummy and Daddy.” I feel like a bit-part player in some distant tragedy.

YOU may recall my piece a couple of years ago when my optician warned darkly against keeping contact lenses in the bathroom “a deeply unhygienic, guano-encrusted hell-hole with a foul faecal miasma spreading infection” (my words, not hers). Sure enough a report this week in Business Insider magazine tells us that when you flush a toilet, the swirling water that removes your waste from the bowl also mixes with small particles of that waste, shooting aerosolised faeces into the air.” Apparently, this “toilet plume” can travel 15 feet. There are two lessons here. First, close the lid before you flush. Second, don't read this column while you're eating.

DURING the Victorian era, it was a close-run thing whether the water closet or dry closet would become the norm. The WC won. If we had known then what we know now, maybe we'd all be using earth closets. After you with the shovel . . .