I am trying to find Waltzing Matilda as a ringtone to add to my phone in order to annoy my workmates as much as possible this week. By Friday I imagine much of my personal wealth will be wagered backing Australia against England.

The weekend was the usual mix of birthday parties, swimming and playgrounds. This time though it was punctuated with two visits to the couch to watch two very solid games of Rugby. Mrs M and JC spent Saturday evening in the bowels of Admirality finding a ballet costume and consuming junk food. They were successful in both missions.

However the crux of this post is the events of Saturday afternoon. One of the few things I like to think I excel at is the game of squash. I have been playing since I was a young lad, following my Dad down to the courts and having a muck around. I never really played much competition but have been fairly consistent in playing socially for years.

Additionally a key part of many expats lives in HK is clubs. These are "havens" from real HK, where expats can sit with each other and congratulate themselves on their good fortune. These places have great facilities like swimming pools, playgrounds, restaurants and the like. They provide a social outlet as well as somewhere to go on the weekends outside the apartment complex. They are also getting harder to join. Many companies are like my own and are restricting which staff members can take up club memberships. Joining on a personal basis is possible but there are wait lists and the costs can be prohibitive. This combined with a long term decline in HK as a centre for expats (in step with its inevitable decline as a entry to China) means clubs face dwindling membership.

Nevertheless some of these clubs offer cheaper ways to skip the queues and pay discounted entry fees. The way to do this is to join as a sporting member: you play competition for the club and they rush you in. So Saturday afternoon I rocked up to this particular club to try out for the squash team. The captain had already warned me that to get the sporting membership now I needed to be in the top 4 teams, as they had too many in the past who snuck in under this category of membership. I started playing one guy who was good. I took a few points, but then he proceeded to teach me a lesson. A little crestfallen, I thought he must be top grade. I played another guy, who was over 50 and had the most unusual style I had ever seen. This time it was more even but I still went down. Next was a local guy who had lived in Sydney once. We played and it turns out his "thing" is to keep the ball high the whole time. This meant my vision was partially impared at the end of it by the glare of the lights on the roof of the court. Of course I lost but it was close. Finally I played the captain. He was good. And he's a police officer in his day job so I couldn't get too carried away with the sledging. Needless to say he beat me, although I felt good taking a few points off him each set. Inevitably thought there was the "chat": the basica theme of which was go away and practice and come back in a few months.

D'oh! I returned home crestfallen. Mrs M was there to make things better. Her words of "Never mind, letting down the family like that isn't the worst thing you've ever done" would normally have me smiling. Instead I did what any male in such a situation would do - I slumped on the couch and waited for my rugby team to lift my mood.

That they did. I like to think my little sacrifice may have been a small part of the Wallabies win. That's how my fragile ego is dealing with it.