Camilla

“The Dragon's Back” is a mountain ridge in southeastern Hong Kong Island that passes through Shek O Peak. My Swiss grandfather Max would hike it regularly!

We are back in 2025 and Camilla is still with her daughter Portia, who is attending a medical conference. Whilst Portia attends her conference, Camilla wanders around Hong Kong and spends time with her old friend Trudy at the club, where she meets Lachlan McDonald, a fit widower. Score!

So here’s a question, have you ever wondered whether the ultimate high point of our individual fairy tales is one where we find a partner and live out our days in coupledom?

The dragon tormented Camilla’s own father (please watch Roger if you missed him), he was riddled with PTSD and alcoholism, unable to care for himself and of course his own children.

His dragon was war…and then booze.

Now “the dragon’s (come) back” again here with Camilla, except what exactly is her dragon? And why doesn’t it seem scary actually? Oh wait a gosh darn minute, is the “dragon” that we speak of “getting into a relationship”?!

Is the dragon in this video also possibly Camilla’s co-dependency?

Many in my generation (millennials) struggle with whether they should marry or “partner up”.

Most in Camilla’s generation (boomers), and indeed most generations pre-dating Camilla’s era, have had the notion bred into them by family, religion, school and state that it was marriage - or bust. Especially, maybe even specifically, for women; if you don’t find a partner and/or marry, you have failed (with the second tier judgment criterium being “Breed woman, breed!”).

Throw in Camilla’s co-dependency; her own fear of abandonment from growing up with a suicidal parent, it feels like destiny that she would jump “into a relationship”, in her case, a relationship means pouring attention away from herself and focusing entirely on someone else.

“You cannot stay away from yourself forever; you have to return, have to come to that experiment, to know whether you really can love. That is the question - whether you can love yourself, and that will be the test. To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing red-hot iron: it burns into you and that is very painful. Therefore, to love somebody else in the first place is always an escape which we all hope for, and we all enjoy it when we are capable of it. But in the long run, it comes back on us.”

Carl Jung