1. The friend continued: "The Tangs, who are incredibly generous hosts, are also holding a New Year‘s Eve party to which he has invited several other friends who are holidaying in the area, including Kate Moss.

2. "They have all taken homes very close to us so we‘ll be having something of a do." Hoteliers Lord and Lady Weinberg, who are old friends of the Tangs, and the Keswick family, who own the 300million Jardine Matheson empire, have also been invited to join Mr Tang‘s A–list friends.

3. One moment he offers a worldweary New Yorker‘s humor with observations like his notion that rents in his old neighborhood "are probably about the same as they were in Carthage, or Nineveh, or Peking under the Tangs." A paragraph later he charms with a description of a scene in Chinatown, complete with small, bright birds in wooden cages who call out to sparrows on a fire escape even as two men unroll an illuminated Chinese scroll.

4. Overlooking it is the peak known as Shirley‘s Height, where soldiers were once billeted, and now the scene of a regular Sunday night bash where tourists are ferried in en masse for barbecues and steel bands (the music seemingly turning a bit more local later in the evening, at least when we visited, after an early dose of Abba covers). On the edge of the harbour, we anchored for snorkelling amid shoals of blue tangs. (Keen snorkellers might be better on the company‘s other boat trip, the Eco–Tour, which takes in the strange rock formation of Hell‘s Gate island and some longer stops over coral reefs in the northern islands.) Back on the boat came a more spectacular treat: flying fish, fanning out in our slipstream, flecking silver wings across the waves.