The theory of the big nothing

You take a walk with someone and do it as the most routine of human actions. Some walks are as forgettable as their routes, and some stay with you long after the scenes have dissolved into impressionist brushstrokes. What makes them unforgettable? Sometimes it's pure silence that makes the walk memorable. Sometimes it's what's left unsaid. It could also be the words and ideas you discuss with animated excitement, and then there's that conversation which becomes the very definition of randomness. What's said merges with what's seen and mimics the randomness of the experience. The walk is the conversation, which in turn is the place. Each gets woven with the other into a pattern of casual lightness and slow comfort.

On a walk today I talked with my friend Sophia about the "theory of the big nothing". (Sophia and I share the copyright for this term, so don't try to lift it from here!) It's the idea that we're all eventually the same person in a different time, which in turn means we could very easily find ourselves in the circumstances of another person. Not a very challenging metaphysical concept but it seemed to find ways of manifesting itself even as we spoke of it and observed Tsim Sha Tsui - and that made it surreal... maybe ethereal.

For example, near Chatham Road, on one of the tributaries linking it with Nathan Road (was it Granville... or maybe Kimberley?), we saw something quite unnatural. First, a place called "Bread and Butter", which one would expect to be a bakery or cafe or such. Then "Lamb", which could quite easily be a fashionable restaurant, sandwich shop or deli. Next in line - "Salad".. and then "Chocolate"... and they were all fashion boutiques. And then a t-shirt with "Sugarman" on it. It was like talking about the difference being more imagined than real, and then finding difference vanish altogether. Everything is the same thing. Big bloody nothing!

This, by the way, is not evidence for the theory or anything like that - this is what made the topic worthwhile and the walk, one to remember. And then Sophia made this observation, "...in Tsim Sha Tsui you never really know where you are, but you can hardly get lost." Brilliant. I'm tempted to suggest that it might be true for Hong Kong in general. On that walk, however, in front of the 'Bread and Butter' boutique, it made sense of the theory of the big nothing.