My buddy who helped me arrange my flights for this trip wrote me yesterday. He said sorry for the crappy day. Then he said “Oh I thought you were just being creative with your writing…”

Folks this really happened. I’m stuck. Like up to my armpits stuck. In Hong Kong. No Green card. No Go.

I’ll be the first to admit that I have in fact taken some creative license with some of my previous musings, but I promise you – not even I can make this up.

Don’t feel bad though, as I’m camped out in a swanky apartment up on The Peak and about my only real dilemma in the morning is choosing what I want Rose the housekeeper to make me for breakfast. And where I want to go for lunch. And what time should I make myself a G&T (as I get older, that time of the day is decidedly getting earlier and earlier).

It pays to have friends in high places. Actually, it pays to have friends in every expensive city in the world.

I’ve eaten so much Dim Sum in the past 36 hours that I am beginning to look like a glutinous rice ball.

My humorless wife went to the local FedEx store in our town yesterday and apparently she and the other female staff all had a bloomin’ good laugh at my expense. Green Card is in an envelope and winging its way here to HKG.

This truly is a first for me.

To be honest, I didn’t really fight too hard to get back to the US. I suppose I’m lucky in the sense that I didn’t have a boss to call and say “Hey boss, you’ll never guess what happened…?”

My wife is well, you know used to me calling and explaining the predicament of the day to her. This is not her first rodeo.

Now when I call her it goes something like this…

“Hello Petal”
“Police. Paramedic. Or Attorney?”
“What??”
“Choose 1 of the above. Or all 3 if it’s bad”
“I just called to say hello..”
“No you didn’t”
“Yes I did”
“Listen, after 19 long and arduous years of marriage, you just don’t call up out of the blue and ask how I am”
“Well, consider this a first then”
“What have you done now?”
“Nothing” I whimpered

Because she is a Ninja trained Mom, she can tell a lie from a thousand paces. So she decided to try and distract me and change tact.

“How is our daughter?”
“No idea”
“What do you mean no idea”
“I haven’t spoken to her for a few days”
“But I know she is fine because I am watching her move around Melbourne”
“Did you do something creepy with her phone?”
“No”
“What then?”
“I’m just watching her move around Melbourne by what she’s spending on my credit card”
“You gave her a credit card!”
“Yes”
“Are you insane?”
“Probably, but we had to leave some money with her and I thought this was the safest way”
“You’re an idiot”

Then she promptly hung up. I never even had the chance to explain my Green Card predicament to her. So like all courageous husbands, I sent her a text asking her to take it to FedEx and get it here asap.

She knows the boys I am staying with well and is fairly confident that it is hard for me to get into too much trouble with 2 fifty something gay guys. About the only danger I face is being told that my wardrobe sucks and that I should exfoliate more. Whatever that means.

After this little ordeal, I may have a rethink now about getting my US Citizenship.

I decided to occupy my new found house-arrest status by organizing my daughters return flight to the US. I had left he return open, well, because she is 14 years old and like all members of the opposite sex, changes her mind 11 times an hour. I was also hoping that my own mother (or sister) would offer to keep her until she turned 25. But that was wishful thinking.

My weary wife decided that she was going to go meet our youngest in LA because she didn’t trust her clearing immigration and connecting to her DEN flight.

Besides, it was academic. She is an unaccompanied minor according to UA so we had to pony up the $150 bucks to have some airport staffer hold her hand and escort her on and off the plane. Someone had to meet her in Cali anyway.

I had visions of terror.

I don’t know about your kids but our daughter is one of those fiercely independent humans. And now that she is one of those petulant, emotionally unstable things we refer to as teenagers, she is not going to react well when I tell her that a man or a woman from UA’s ground staff in Melbourne is going to escort her all the way to the gate.

Knowing her, she will have convinced them to lend her their credit card, stop and have a chai latte and do a spot of shopping.

In true FT spirit I found a solid looking W fare and then a very generous FT’er, SMFlagg, donated a GPU and the seat went from four million H to 3A in the blink of an eye. My wife thanks you. I thank you. And my ungrateful teenager probably would thank you. Or tell you that those pants you are wearing don’t match the shoes and that you really should think about plucking your eyebrows more often.

She actually does this. I will explain even if you don’t want me to.

As some of you know, your body, when you turn 50, starts to send you visual signals that you are in fact, well beyond in need of an oil change and that you are in fact, more in need of a major overhaul.

The hair on your head falls out at an alarming speed, however it starts to grow back at the same alarming speed from your nose and ears. You start to get very squishy around the middle and when you’re in the shower and look down at the floor all you can see are your feet. Trust me, when you’re a male, that is not a good thing.

You catch up with friends from a bygone era and you say to you wife when you get home “geez, Jack looks old” Or “Holy Cow, Margaret has really let herself go” But then your sympathetic wife reminds you that you are exactly the same age as the both of them and that I might want to take a look in the mirror. When you do, you don’t recognize the ageing human looking back at you.

My next wife though will be cracker. I promise.

I will be sitting innocently on the sofa, watching TV and my daughter will approach me with one of her mobile make up trollies, which looks more like a crash cart you’d find in an ICU ward. Then the tweezers will come out and she will gasp and shriek mildly that there are disgusting hairs growing out my nose and ears and the side of my face and that she must attend to running a weed wacker over every square millimeter of my head.

Let me ask you this. Have you ever had a nose hair plucked out? If you haven’t. try pulling one out of your nose right now. While you’re reading this. Go on. I’ll wait here.

The first time you do it, you will probably cry. Tears will cascade down the side of your face. I don’t care if the last time you cried was when Ronald Reagan was in office. Doing this will make you well up like nothing you’ve ever experienced. Then you will sneeze. Like 25 times in rapid succession.

You will then start to convulse violently.

Your dogs will run and hide under the other couch. And the cat will dial 911 on your behalf.

“Stop being a baby” my daughter will say in a condescending tone
“You’re killing me!!!” I would wail.

And meanwhile my son and wife would both be there with their cameras out taking pictures of me now in agony, writhing around the floor, watching our daughter essentially torture me senseless.

See what my life is like. I may not leave Hong Kong at all now…