It’s Saturday in Hong Kong. Ask anyone what they’re planning to do and I bet the answer is: ’shop’. I just spent the morning messing around in Central (I’d planned a hike on Lamma Island but didn’t like the look of the weather - and sure enough it is raining cats and dogs now). On the way back to Causeway Bay I met the massed ranks of humanity that spells Saturday here.

The funny thing is I can still remember the dire warnings that some of the chinless British colonial twits used to come up with back in the early Eighties when the subject of handing Hong Kong back to the Chinese came up in conversation. One recurrent them was, ‘The whole damned place will go bust, don’t ya know? What do these people understand about commerce?’

Reminds you of George Bush snarling ‘What do the French know about the word “entrepreneur”‘ really. It’s ten years now since Britain handed over the reins of Hong Kong, with Chris Patten in his feathered hat and Prince Charles privately whingeing, it now appears, about the sun setting on the British empire once again. I’m sure there are people who feel things could be a lot better in some ways, and a more active and visible form of democracy would worthwhile all round (if you get it, please send some back to England, please).

But economic decline certainly isn’t one legacy of Hong Kong’s new found status. This place is booming, happier, more confident and a sight more pleasant to be in than I’ve ever seen it. And how is the tenth anniversary of its new status being marked? It’s there in the photo above. A ’shopping festival’ with the slogan ‘Shopping is Everything’. I wish I could have predicted that one back in the early Eighties, though I guess no one would have believed it.