With Christmas around the corner, I asked my mentor the other day why he has been volunteering to organise the department Christmas party for years. I was intrigued.

Actually, I shouldn't have been.

A story from BBC News today gave me the reason. That comes from an experiment conducted by a graduate student at Stanford University's School of Business. Volunteers were first requested to select an answer from a number of emotional responses to different hypothetical scenarios. Stories like "driving down the road, hitting a small

If you find that you start a busy day that you lose your energy before the fag end of the day, that you don't ever bother remembering it, that you feel lost along the way, it may be that there is nothing at the end to cheer you up.

That end-of-the-day event probably feels like desserts, like ice-cream that we buy ourselves after hard work. You don't need a seven-course dessert. It may simply be a flickering moment of

One day, a professor asked his student to his office. The student walked down a long corridor, came through the doorway, and met his professor.

"Look, this is a scrambled-sentence test. You can find a list of five-word sets in front of you. Your task is to resemble a grammatical four-word sentence as quickly as you can out of each set."

"Yes sir," the student's face lit up at the examination paper. "This is easy.

I went home last evening after giving a talk on open disclosure. That was a big term - open disclosure - close to naked; disclosure is in there, and appearing like a naked display. I wondered what my audience could have thought of my talk, what they could have said. But I was turning my attention to my daughter too soon to wonder long.

After dinner my wife told me a story at home.

Jasmine was crying at the top of her lungs all of a sudden in the afternoon. "

Rare is the family in which there aren't taboos hidden somewhere. I encountered two of them this week.

The Chung Yeung Festival falls on my daughter's kindergarten term break this year. We went to my father-in-law's grave - without bringing Jasmine with us. "How can I explain to her in very simple terms that her grandfather is somewhere else and won't come back?" I wondered. "And, what if Jasmine asks me when her grandpa is going to stop

The president of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh is visiting Hong Kong, and we are invited to attend the signing ceremony (after being accepted the fellowship status). I accepted the invitation with alacrity. With this feather in the cap, we feel we're reaching another milestone in our career. If you're a fan of titles - and who isn't? - you'll love the opportunity to have another string of alphabets at your name card.

At first I thought the ceremony would be

This paragraph, written at McCafe after sending Jasmine to school this morning, gave me energy in the tens of thousands.

If it sounds comfy, I can attest that it is. I didn't go back to work after a week's holiday at Okinawa, and decided to take another half day off. Jasmine and I could then return the furry moose who had hitched a hike with us. When we were waiting for the morning class bell to ring, Jasmine took out the Okinawa seashells and gave them to

Jasmine was excited to learn the good news before our recent trip to Okinawa.