Mad Dogs and Englishmen

Sunday mornings are spent at Valley Fort RFC in Stanley. Here on the site of the old British Army barracks on a vast open playing field the entire ex-patriot community of Hong Kong's rugby playing nations, Brits, French, Americans, Canadians and Australians, join together to see their offspring knocked into shape and shouted at for being off-side.

By a quarter to ten the normally quiet road leading to the Fort is packed with cars, bumper to bumper, all heading for the extraordinary phenomenon that is the RFC. At the gate each driver is required to stop and produce HK ID while our registration number is noted down by a soldier with a clipboard. That done, we are waved through by pairs of white-gloved PLA soldiers who employ the most mesmerising, mechanical hand signals to point us on our way. Evenly spaced along the road to make sure we don’t take a wrong turn, they are like automated mannequins, wound like clockwork dolls in anticipation of the Sunday morning influx. Giggling is quite inappropriate in the light of their stern soldierly faces and yet I love this waving-on ritual so much I’d happily reverse the car and join the back of the queue way down Wong Ma Kok Road just to see it all again.

In a stately manner befitting our surroundings, the file of cars processes past soldiers’ quarters from a bygone age to a vast tarmac car park where we unload water, picnic rugs and rations from the boots of our cars and proceed to the field. Here in temperatures exceeding 33 degrees boys of all shapes and sizes, and even a few girls, charge around for up to two hours in thick nylon kit to the exhortations of too many amateur coaches. Fathers watch and photograph their offspring reliving vicariously their own sporting youths while mothers cling to the shady edges with siblings too young to play. One woman does yoga headstands under a tree, others walk their dogs. I tend to wonder what on earth we are doing there.

My boys have joined their under 10s, under 8s and under 5s teams with gusto and, having bemoaned the loss of space for them to kick a ball, who am I to complain at this weekly opportunity to get it out of their systems? Never mind they return with scratched faces and squashed heads, red with exertion and sunburnt to a crisp; it’s all jolly good fun and proof, if ever any were needed, that only mad dogs and Englishmen, and their sons of course, go out in the midday sun.