One of my students on the evening programme was Frazer Gleig (d. 20 Feb 2009). This blog is dedicated to him.
Frazer attended Reading School, and became a tunnelling engineer, working for Haswell, then Arup.
He'd worked on Hong Kong's MTR (Mass Transit Railway) and in Taipei (presumably on the Taipei Metro).
His middle name was Dewar (he was of Scottish lineage), so when he was in Hong Kong, the Cantonese speakers there pounced on the two sounds in Dewar, which sounds like the Cantonese F-word (dew ah).
When China's 三峽工程 / 三峡工程 / sān xiá gōng chéng / Three Gorges Dam project was in its later stage, Frazer was invited as part of an international engineering consortium to have a look around (and behind the scenes) before it was opened to the public. When he returned to London, he gave a talk to his fellow evening programme Mandarin students about his tour, calling it The Three Gorgeous Dames.
That glass of Guinness is still waiting for you to collect, Frazer. Missing you loads.
PS: Frazer is also featured in this blog https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2013/06/chinese-tones-ii-london.html
After reading this blog I clicked on the link to the 2013 blog at the end, and read that one, that I vaguely remembered having read already, and my first reaction was to ask an obvious question. But then I noticed a comment by Anonymous posted in 2013 with exactly the question I wanted to ask, and another comment with an answer. I strongly suspect I was the Anonymous of the first comment. But why Anonymous? I don’t remember.
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