Victoria Sponge

In England when you wake up to cloudless skies you tend to rejoice at the advent of a sunny day. Sometimes it clouds over by breakfast time but on those rare occasions the blue wash wins through it is heaven. Here I am starting to feel oppressed at the sight of another cloudless sky. Don’t they have clouds in Asia? Only pollution clouds it seems; that would account for the hazy grey smog which ensures the sky is not quite blue after all.

I made a cake; a Victoria Sponge. It was a feeble attempt to make my shiny marble walled property developer’s kitchen seem more warm and homely.

It’s funny how so much of the colonised world was named Victoria. Here in Hong Kong we have Victoria Harbour, Victoria Peak, Victoria Park and Victoria City although no-one ever refers to it as that and most people have indeed forgotten the former colonial capital’s name. Did colonial settlers call places after their sovereign when they were desperately missing home? Or were they showing off? And did their wives bake Victoria Sponges to recreate a piece of England and evoke memories of tea in summer gardens? Or were they showing off?

Perhaps I should have made a different cake and called it the Putney Sponge. I could ice it with low flying aeroplanes and have the children make the sound effects.

It strikes me that we have very few outside sounds and certainly no aeroplanes. So used are we to living in a hermetically sealed box to keep out the mosquitoes and the heat that we hear nothing of the roaring city below. If I lean over our front deck and crane my head to the right I can just see a small triangle of water through a gap in the skyscrapers. I think it’s Aberdeen Harbour, named by homesick Scots I presume. When we arrived here, I was slightly put out to find we had no sea view. So much of residential Hong Kong is built facing the water and half way up a steep hill that it seemed something of an achievement to have found a house with no sea view.

Instead we look out on the towers of Aberdeen, the roof-tops (complete with satellite dishes and air-conditioners) of neighbouring apartments and the wonders of Ocean Park. There is a large multi-coloured balloon which floats up and down throughout the day much to the children’s delight, the panda house and the cable car which transports visitors up over the opposite hill, past the giant green sea horse to the dolphins and roller coasters on the other side. A large bird of prey is circling before my window and there is a surprising amount of green, far more than in London where, if I hung at an extraordinary angle from one top floor window I could just see Putney Common.

We forgot to eat the Victoria Sponge. The kitchen is too warm already and the cake didn’t make it a jot more homely. Perhaps the children don’t need reminders of home. They appear to be settling far more readily and quickly than I am. Each morning my four year old declares with the unbridled enthusiasm of the young, “Mummy, it’s a lovely day!” Who am I to burst his bubble?