I don’t think that my father, Hong Kong merchant Paul Alderton, was a full member of the Hong Kong Airforce Club, which I know very little about. I believe that he was granted something akin to associate membership when a group he was associated with used the club’s premises briefly as a venue for their weekly meetings. I know that he had stopped wearing the tie completely by the time I had taken it off him in 1963. This group to which he belonged – a sociable club that satirically called itself “Alcoholics Synonymous” – anyhow had its own tie, featuring a multitude of foaming beer mugs underlined by the roman numerals XV1, which were dotted over a purple ground. As an additional note, I recall how, during the mid-1960’s, “A.S” was seemingly centred around the genial figure of Dick Hughes, the doyen of the Hong Kong foreign press corps at the time. This group of “dedicated talkers, drinkers and gourmets”, limited to sixteen members but welcoming invited guests, met every Saturday morning for the purpose of “alleviating the cares of the past week”. The members, mainly journalists, businessmen, and diplomats, took turns at being chairman, so that each member’s turn came up in rotation once every sixteen weeks. One eminent guest, the Australian author and journalist, Frank Clune, noted that “the catch is that the chairman has to shout drinks for the mob.” Each meeting was scheduled to start at 11 a.m. and improbably end when the chairman for the week called for the last drink at 11.45. In practice though, the socializing for some members often continued on in an informal manner into lunch and, sometimes, well beyond.