Off Centre | More to life than money: the gospel according to the famous Mr Magic Miracles, mover and healer

Mr Magic Miracles is explaining to me how the interests of business and health are inimical. “You charge a lot of money, you decide you don’t want to make the patient better,” he says. “You just want him to come back and pay you more money.

“Me, I cure people instead. Too much money, I don’t need.”

It occurs to me to that “Miracles”, as he most frequently refers to himself, might be on the cusp of some kind of revelation – an outlier’s indictment of social good being thrown over for cartel interests, or some such.

But he’s driving, and I don’t wish to distract his attention from the large scrapbook of testimonials he is now excitedly leafing through at the wheel for my benefit.

In an excellent column in the newspaper last week, Peter Guy pondered whether predatory capitalism must always prevail over the common interest in Hong Kong. The city, he wrote, “is obsessed with wealth and its symbols. There isn’t much more to the Hong Kong psyche besides making money”.

I won’t venture to gainsay Peter’s pessimism. There is a spirit of well-reasoned wisdom about it. But still – here I am in Miracles’ van and he is preaching rather a different gospel.