Fragments

Charmless garments: 6

2012-01-08T16:08:00.001+08:00

Number 6 on the list, and what took me so long: animal prints (albeit this is, perhaps, a category error, a print not being a garment). They've been fashionable of late: I was reminded of my distaste by an email from net-a-porter about "this season's style safari". I've never been into prints all that much, but I will occasionally wear a discreet pattern of some sort; where I emphatically draw the line, though, is with regard to animal prints. The horror is perhaps borne of an instinctive dislike of the idea of wearing the skin of an exotic animal, mingled with my suspicion of those who opt for ersatz when they wouldn't tolerate the real thing (vegetarian bacon, I'm looking at you); but the overall impression of animal prints, no matter how expensively rendered, is all just a bit too Pat Butcher for my taste. (It also appears to be mandatory to adopt a sulky expression when wearing them, QED by the above picture, although Pat, bless 'er 'eart, is always smiling in leopardskin.)

The grandmother of a four year old girl of my acquaintance gave her a "sparkly t-shirt and leopardskin skirt" for Christmas. That this was seen as grossly inappropriate by everyone except (presumably) the grandmother illustrates the biggest problem with animal prints: after all it could be argued that Pat Butcher invests them with some sort of despite-everything dignity. However, they also appear to be the universal tacky garb of underwhelming would-be sexpots and hookers. Not, then, a look for a four year old.

Dreamer

2012-01-06T09:26:00.001+08:00

Eve Arnold, April 21, 1912 – January 4, 2012. She was most famous for taking photographs of Marilyn Monroe, but this is one of my favourites. "It's the hardest thing in the world to take the mundane and try to show how special it is."

Stop making scents

2011-12-28T16:29:00.000+08:00

One other unexpected side-effect of pregnancy has been the development of a superhuman sense of smell, like a dog. I've always had a good sense of smell, but now it has become preternaturally acute, to the extent that I could tell without turning my head that the man sitting next to me on a recent early flight to Canberra had not brushed his teeth that morning; that the person behind me on the train home from work had just had a cigarette; that the woman who got into the lift in my office building at the end of the week had applied Chanel Allure that day; that one of my colleagues had just enjoyed a cup of coffee; and that D had been cutting coriander from the garden as soon as he entered the room.

As with my other obscure skills (I can tell straight away if someone has had their hair cut; I'm very good at writing questions for pub quizzes; I can recognise an East Kilbride accent; and I can quote entire stanzas of poetry I learned at school as well as fragments of quotes from all over the place), one day I'll be able to make money out of this.

Sodade

2011-12-19T08:39:00.001+08:00

From Miss Perfumado by Cape Verdean singer Cesária Évora (27 August 1941 – 17 December 2011).

Sodade

Quem mostra' bo
Ess caminho longe?
Quem mostra' bo
Ess caminho longe?
Ess caminho
Pa Sao Tomé

Sodade sodade
Sodade
Dess nha terra Sao Nicolau

Si bo 'screve' me
'M ta 'screve be
Si bo 'squece me
'M ta 'squece be
Até dia
Qui bo voltà

Sodade sodade
Sodade
Dess nha terra Sao Nicolau

Longing

Who will show you
this distant way?
Who will show you
this distant way?
This way
to Sao Tomé?

The longing, the longing
The longing
For this land of mine, Sao Nicolau

If you write me a letter
I will write you back
If you forget me
I will forget you

Until the day
You come back

The kick inside

2011-12-18T15:19:00.003+08:00

There are a few side-effects of pregnancy which I didn't know about before it happened to me:

Insomnia. Sleep's never really been a problem for me before, even during particularly stressful periods at work, but since I've been pregnant, sleep can be elusive: often I'm awake at 3am, thoughts going round my head as insistently as a headache, with no apparent end in sight. (It's the hormones.)
Kicking. Ah, what a delicate image! It's like butterflies, they (the books) said. No, it's not; it's like having a trampoline inside you with someone periodically jumping on it. Much as I enjoy the signs that he (for it's a boy) is active, and the sheer weirdness of the sensation, let's not be sentimental about it.
Patronising language. According to medical staff (with a few rare exceptions), all pregnant women are "girls"; all doctors are male, and all nurses and midwives are female. The baby is "baby". Sometimes I have to remind myself it's not the 1950s.
Guilt-trip marketing. It would be possible to spend a quite mind-boggling amount of money on equipment, and boy is there a lot of it. There are entire stores (out-of-town, of course) devoted to every little thing you may possibly need for your child, and a whole lot that you don't. And a lot of the marketing is couched in safety terms. Buy this, or "baby" will suffer!
The demon internet. Not that I didn't already know this, but if you have any concerns about anything medical whatsoever, the last helpful place to look is an internet forum. Here, you will almost certainly discover that whatever you are worried about is decidedly abnormal, and will lead in the most terrible directions, all based on what experts (women who have had a baby themselves) are saying.
Gestational diabetes. After a two hour test which involves drinking a glucose juice so horribly sweet I could feel it stripping my tooth enamel, and three blood tests, I've been diagnosed as a borderline case (my age, 43, being the major contributing factor) and am currently on a military-style regime of blood sugar self-testing and strictly timed, weighed and measured meals. If this fails, it's injecting insulin for me. (It's the hormones.)

Despite all the above, which reads like a numbered whinge, I've had a pretty good pregnancy so far, to the point where, prior to the appearance of no. 6 (diagnosed at 29 weeks), I was feeling almost smug.

Shine on

2011-12-03T12:40:00.002+08:00

In summer 1988, at the end of my first year at Glasgow University, my boyfriend at the time, who was a medical student, got me a job at Glasgow Royal Infirmary as a domestic assistant (AKA cleaner). "The Royal" was a forbidding, time-blackened Victorian building between the M8 motorway and Alexandra Parade, complete with turrets and long dusty corridors; through the open windows you could see the beautiful, mysterious Necropolis in the distance and could sometimes hear the faint triumphalist piping sounds of Orange marches in the east end streets. A private company had the contract; the domestics, who were almost all women, had to wear a pale purple A-line uniform with white piping. Many of them were hard-bitten women in their forties who instinctively distrusted outsiders; unfortunately I ticked a lot of the wrong boxes, being a student, "English", studying for a law degree, and taking their jobs; I overheard one younger woman hissing to another "I hate that lassie!" as I left the locker room, and another took great pains to tell me that she couldn't afford Christmas presents for the weans this year. Most of them, though, were decent enough towards me under the circumstances; you'd be assigned to a more experienced domestic on each ward, and though a lot of them would set me to Herculean tasks such as cleaning the metal framework under patients' beds, a job clearly done so rarely that it looked like no one had ever attempted it before, and then sneak off to the "domestic services office" (mop cupboard) to stretch out the windows for an illicit fag, I had fun with some of them too and they taught me a lot.

That summer, I learned how popular Neighbours and Home and Away were: they were shown back to back on the BBC and ITV respectively, at lunchtime and just before dinner, and in every ward, even the terrible sweet-smelling burns ward where there were people in pretty bad shape, those who could walk walked, and those in wheelchairs were wheeled, along to the TV room at the end of the ward to watch every single episode, repeats and all. I enjoyed wheeling around the "maxpax machine" and asking patients if they wanted a cup of tea, coffee, hot chocolate or Bovril (a surprising number opted for the latter). I liked talking to the patients. But most of all I loved the glorious moment of clocking myself off at the end of a shift because I really didn't enjoy the atmosphere of fear and distrust, and in some cases bullying from senior managers, that seemed to be endemic within that company. Domestics were regarded by all other hospital workers as being right at the bottom of the food chain and in many cases treated accordingly. Also, the pay was pretty terrible; small wonder that the domestics seemed unhappy. They were doing a pretty important job, but being screwed by the company that employed them and looked down upon by everyone else.

I was pretty glad when the summer ended and I went back to university; I never worked there again, though they offered me a job the following summer. Some skills have stayed with me from that time, though: I can mop like a professional, make a floor shine with the unwieldiest of buffing machines, and leave a sink as clean as new. I also learned to appreciate the unseen, low paid workers who make things clean for everyone else.

The lotus eaters

2011-11-19T15:44:00.008+08:00

Melbourne's apparently known as Bleak City, and it's true, it's been raining incessantly all day: but today there was a little hotspot of bright colours, excitement, pop music and, most importantly, excessive consumption at Melbourne Central Mall, beneath the towering, incongruous edifice of the old lead pipe and shot factory. Yes, the CP Biggest Eater Competition was in town.

First up was a strangely innocent performance by a Chinese girl band who apparently are currently no. 1 in the Chinese pop charts.

But then came the main event. The ravening crowd were expertly whipped into a frenzy by presiding MC Sam, who with pinpoint accuracy described the contest to come as being "the battleground on which God and Lucifer wage war for the souls of men" and, realistically, as being the most democratic of contests. There were amateurs participating, but they were, frankly, amateurs; all eyes were on the professionals.

The wontons themselves looked harmless enough, and tasted pretty good:

But in a competition to eat as many as you can, all notions of these wontons as substance, or as food, must presumably be banished in order to get as many past the tonsils as possible.

All three professionals, with the eventual winner on the far right. 307 wontons down, and make-up still largely intact.

Ain't it hard just to live

2011-11-19T07:57:00.001+08:00

Written by Randy Newman in the late 1970s, Baltimore is a definite contender for saddest song ever written. I've never heard Newman's original version, but Nina Simone covered the song for the eponymous 1978 album and her version is sometimes almost unbearable: the word "Baltimore" is a moan and a lament, the other lines infused with world-weary sadness. It's a beautiful song, and the imagery is simple and stark:

Beat-up little seagull
On a marble stair
Trying to find the ocean
Looking everywhere

Computer love

2011-10-23T10:46:00.004+08:00

I first played what could be identified as a computer game in the 1980s. It was Pong, which made a distinct "bop" sound when the ball hit the paddle. I was a bit contemptuous of it, but not long after that I played a few dungeons-and-dragons style games, using the C-prompt, where you could choose one of several outcomes. I remember standing helplessly watching someone trying to resolve a problem where the computer wasn't responding, and wondering whether I would ever understand how these things worked.

The first game I got really excited about was Wolfenstein 3D. In the early 1990s I played a lot of Wolfenstein, although the crude graphics had the effect of making me travel sick (run down a corridor, look left, look right, shoot a Nazi guard, go into a room, turn 360°, extract a symbol hidden behind a brick, run down a corridor... I lasted about 5 minutes before I started feeling queasy). My next obsession was Lemmings on an early Apple Mac, followed by SimCity (which is still a pretty damn good game, especially the version where you can make city transport decisions such as deciding where the bus stops go, and building ferry ports and subway systems with real-time data on how many Sims are using the system). After that, I played Shadows of the Empire on the N64: the first truly inspiring game I'd ever experienced (I loved the attention to detail and continuity; the way that, walking along a treacherous cliff-edge path to accomplish one task, I could see the moving parts of the next challenge, already engaging far below; and the experience of running round a junkyard with the droid IG-88 in clattering, menacing pursuit was genuinely terrifying).

I'm still playing, but I'm very particular: despite an early attachment to Wolfenstein, a lot of the first person shooter games never really appealed to me; despite the fact that graphics are a lot more smooth and sophisticated than they were when I first started playing, it's the format most likely to make me feel sick: run down a corridor, look left, look right..., and more than that, unless very well done it can be repetitive and dull. I have an abiding dislike of games set on spaceships, "boss" fights (engaging in pointless battle with a large, relentless foe armed with tentacles/fire/thorns/stingers, who has a tiny Achilles heel that you have to die numerous times to discover), fights with robots, and post-apocalyptic landscapes. I don't like my characters to be as thick as mince, and sadly a lot of them are. My favourite weapon is the sniper rifle, followed closely by the shotgun. I like to be behind my character rather then looking through his/her eyes (third-person shooter) and prefer my opponents to be human, or almost human (I don't mind engaging with the undead). I want a proper story in a believable, if exotic, setting: essentially, Resident Evil and Uncharted are perfect games for me. Both even have credible female characters who aren't afraid to wield a gun and never get their kit off. On that last point, it seems pretty clear that most games are designed for men; games specifically aimed at women have tended to be pretty contemptible (with an emphasis on romance, pets, or shopping). I'm perfectly happy to shoot people (hence the tag for this post, "I know how this makes me look"). I know it's not real. And I don't need to be patronised.

Blistering barnacles!

2011-10-22T15:13:00.001+08:00

I have very happy memories of reading Tintin books as a child: oblivious to any anachronistic colonial undertones – which delayed the publication in English of Tintin in the Congo until 1991, and now, on re-reading, seem pretty dated – I took it all at face value and loved the stories. My attitude to Tintin himself was not dissimilar to my feelings about the hero of the other omnipresent cartoon books of my childhood, Asterix: I thought both of them were jumped up little squits, too smug for their own good, and in Tintin's case, accompanied by an insufferable little know-it-all dog which didn't even have a proper bark (wo-ah! wo-ah!).

Never mind Tintin: my favourite character was Captain Haddock, mainly on account of his endlessly inventive vocabulary of curses (of which "Bashi-bazouks!" is one of the finest), but also because of his perpetually dishevelled, frequently bemused demeanour, his constant battle with the temptations of booze, and his underlying nobility and capacity for self-sacrifice (see Tintin in Tibet, a particularly moving Tintin book in which my hero (Haddock) offers to die in order to save Tintin). It's because of apprehension about the potential depiction of Captain Haddock (a Scottish accent? I'm still mulling that one) that I find myself with mixed feelings about seeing the new performance capture film, The Adventures of Tintin (although of course I'm excited: who wouldn't be?). Frankly I couldn't care less what they do with/to Tintin; I never liked him anyway.

Look into my eye

2011-09-24T11:34:00.002+08:00

I went to see the film Aliens when it first came out (astonishingly, this was in 1986: this film is now 25 years old). My mum was there, and my brother and sister: probably one of the last times I ever saw a film with all of them. I've always had an abiding love for sci-fi, starting with Silent Running, which made me cry real tears for those lonely little robots when I saw it at my Granny's in the 1970s; and the wonderful, mysterious 2001: A Space Odyssey, from the year I was born, which I first saw on a family trip to Arran in 1977 just after Elvis died, in a village hall, on an antiquated reel-to-reel projector that required a change of reel half way through, to shouts, jeers and moths fluttering across the screen.

My sister's friend Cathy was obsessed with Aliens, and had gone so far as to tape it off a rented video so she could play it in her bedroom. As a result she knew the dialogue by heart. I'd just started at Glasgow University and was very homesick for Edinburgh (this lasted about 6 months, or until I met a Glasgow boy, and after that Edinburgh was dead to me), so I used to come back on the bus every weekend and arrive on a Friday night at Cathy's flat in Gilmore Place. Sharing a bottle or two of (cheap, nasty) QC sherry, Aliens on the video, me and my sister and Cathy and her sister Jackie would get drunker and drunker until we'd start on the Thunderbird (see the Wikipedia entry for "low-end fortified wine"), maybe going out dancing later; idyllic times.

The pedestal upon which I've placed Aliens is, of course, partly due to those memories; but there are a few more reasons why I'd claim that it's the Best Film Ever Made, against which all other sci-fi films must be compared and, inevitably, found wanting:

The heroine, Ripley, is one of the few really excellent female characters ever to appear on film. She's neither sexless nor a sex object (the appalling Sucker Punch (2011) is the antithesis of this: a borderline prurient film, where even in the midst of a lethal kick, the heroine's skirt is flying up to show her knickers) . She's someone to be taken seriously, she can carry and use a gun, she doesn't lose her head and/or scream witlessly under pressure, but she cares about the people around her. A genuine role model for women.
The dialogue is peerless. It manages to be serious and funny and believable all at the same time: I've never seen a better encapsulation of the cameraderie between soldiers. These are people you'd want to spend time with; and you know they'd have your back.
It hasn't aged. It's set in the future, of course, but there's nothing quaint about it, no silver foil, or over-the-top outfits, or hamfisted teleportation, or any of the other features of sci-fi that date badly in comparison with reality. Instead, the sets are utilitarian and the clothing is practical and unflashy.
The aliens are still genuinely scary. Sci-fi films are often a disappointment from the moment the monster appears; the build-up and anticipation is better than the reality, the creatures are often all too human. H.R. Giger created a completely believable, absolutely non-human and completely other creature. A creature with concentrated acid for blood...
It works on many different levels. As a really scary horror film; as a believable vision of the future; as both an indictment and a celebration of human behaviour; as a paean to teamwork; as a thriller; and as an action movie.

Sweet potato brownies

2011-09-21T17:42:00.001+08:00

Behold, pictured above, the results of my first ever attempt (surprisingly, I know, for one so greedy) at making brownies. They were very, very good. I used 70% cocoa dark chocolate, and was slightly nervous about using sweet potato (this makes them less fatty than standard brownies but still very moist), but it worked a treat. Follow the recipe below - double it! quadruple it! - and eat in huge quantities.

Dan Lepard's Sweet Potato Brownies
100g unsalted butter
200g dark chocolate, chopped
200g baked sweet potato, flesh scooped out
125g brown sugar (any sort)
2 medium eggs
2 tsp vanilla extract
100g plain flour
¼ tsp baking powder
100g chopped pecans

Line an 18cm square tray-bake tin (or similar) with non-stick paper or foil, and heat the oven to 180C (160C fan-assisted)/350F/gas mark 4.

Melt the butter in a saucepan, then add 125g of the chocolate and stir until that's melted, too. In a bowl, beat the sweet potato flesh with the brown sugar until almost smooth, then mix in the butter and chocolate. Add the eggs and vanilla, beat until thick, then stir in the flour and baking powder until evenly combined. Fold in the pecans and remaining chocolate, then spoon into the tin, smooth the top and bake for about 20-25 minutes, until barely cooked but still a bit soft under the crust. Leave to cool completely in the tin before slicing.

Charmless garments: 5

2011-09-16T08:42:00.001+08:00

Slippery, shiny, unwieldy, and uncomfortable-looking: why in their right mind would anyone wear leather trousers? They cling where it doesn't flatter and flare where they want to. They get, presumably, uncomfortably hot. These, from Alexander McQueen, are just the first and worst that spring all too readily to the Google images list. Self-evidently, no one fatter than a stick would even attempt it, but you, yes you Victoria Beckham, should know better too. Black leather is only the acceptable face of leather trousers: any other colour whatsoever is infinitely worse (red, anyone? Are you in Whitesnake?) Creepy, without even trying to be. Leather in any quantity (ie bigger than bag-size), on a bad day, makes my stomach churn anyway: its smell, its texture, the fact that it's something's skin. Leather trousers? No excuse. I confess I've worn them, but in the form of ribbed, protective and padded motorbike pants. I looked, from every angle, like a rhino.

And incidentally, down with pleather: it's the equivalent of vegetarian bacon. Except that at least the bacon this travesty is modelled on looks good to start with.

A shot at redemption

2011-09-10T19:16:00.003+08:00

Stelios (September 10, 2011). Reproduced by kind permission of, and © Shot By Shooter 2011

I've known D since I was at school. He was always the coolest person I knew. He was the year above me at Glasgow University, during which time I really got to know him; he always had great taste in music and a sharp sense of style. He lived in Milan for a while and then London; we shared a flat for a while. I went to his first exhibition of photographs in Hoxton: supermodels, popstars, catwalk waifs. These days he takes street portraits. When I started my street fashion blog Sydney Spy, it was inspired by D's incredible photography. His blog, Shot by Shooter, is so far above the rest, including the over-rated The Sartorialist (the man takes a lovely photo, but often seems to lack any connection with his subjects and all too often seems fixated on superskinny fashion victims). D's photographs, on the other hand, reveal so much about their subject, with the eyes often almost inadvertently seeming to open up a plethora of questions and answers, that sometimes it's almost hard to look. D chooses his backdrops carefully and sequences of photos taken over several days can refer wittily to each other: the most recent sequence has yellow as its theme, whether subtly picked out in Felix's dress or Eric's scarf, or foreground, background and centre stage in Kate's case. D's use of light and shadow is so subtle that it's clear just by the texture whether it's summer or winter.

Over 250 people follow Shot by Shooter, but rarely does anyone comment: I think this is because D's photographs are so peerless, there's nothing more to be said.

Bicycle races

2011-09-07T18:48:00.001+08:00

I've been living in Melbourne for nearly three months. Notwithstanding that it's been rated as the most desirable city on earth by The Economist, I must confess that its charms have so far eluded me in comparison to Sydney. Perhaps it's because it feels like a small town masquerading as a big one; perhaps I just haven't given it a chance (and the cold of winter, which is only just beginning to ease, made a big difference to my admittedly petulant sense of aggrieved injustice regarding the place where I currently have to live) - and there's no doubt it looks and feels like a much better place when the sun shines.

One area where Melbourne does outshine Sydney is in the provision and ubiquity of bicycle lanes. The city and inner city are all relatively flat, roads are generously proportioned and laid out in a grid system, and as a result there are a plethora of cycle lanes which get a lot of use every day.

Alongside the light railway line in my suburb (Brunswick) there's a cycle path that runs pretty much all the way into the city. Every morning it's thronging with cyclists, some racing the train to take advantage of green lights at the crossings, which close for the train to pass. There are scores of cool kids in hun helmets (which I believe are more formally known as BMX helmets, and are a far cry from the plastic deformity I have to wear on my head, which is so large it makes me look as though I'm storing some form of foldout tent inside it), and my favourite sight, which is that of two or even three kids packed into a little wooden frontloading cart, speeding along in fine style with a puffing parent behind them, hard at work at the pedals while they sit there, content to be borne along like little nobles. What a great invention! Is it even legal?

In Memory of W. B. Yeats

2011-08-12T16:58:00.002+08:00

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

W.H. Auden

Tears dry on their own

2011-07-24T07:32:00.001+08:00

I've never really liked the use of "RIP", containing as it does a hint of mawkishness as well as delusion (the notion that the dead are somehow "resting", with the implication, presumably unintended, that they will also awaken at some uncertain hour). No offence, but there's a whole heap of well-intentioned but nonetheless hopelessly trite remarks that people are prone to use when someone's died: "goodnight" (so will there be a morning?), or even more mawkishly "night night", "sleep well", "rest well", "with the angels" (or, as a Youtube commenter on Amy Winehouse insisted, "with the angles", which is certainly a more interesting take on the situation).

When Princess Diana died, I was working in London and was drawn into an argument with a colleague, Emily (AKA "Enemy", but not to her face). I pointed out, wholly reasonably I thought, that up until the moment when the news of her death became public Princess Diana had widely been regarded, if she was considered at all, as at best an expensively-clad irrelevance and tabloid habituée, and at worst a parasitic waste of space. My forthrightness was foolish, of course, implying that I was contemptuous of anyone who'd buy into, or participate in, the ridiculous cascade of fawning coverage and the awful public displays of "grief" in honour of someone so hopelessly compromised. "Enemy" was terribly upset and angry, for she had been been part of the sleepwalking thousands wasting fresh flowers by leaving them in the park near Buckingham Palace as they "paid their respects". Things were never the same again after that, and I sat opposite her for another year having burned my bridges entirely.

I'm not implying there's any correlation between Amy and Diana, although I suspect the garage forecourts of Camden will be similarly denuded of cheap flowers today; in fact it is a source of genuine regret to me that Amy has died. I just find the popular consensus and public response to be excessive for what is a personal tragedy, which has happened to someone most of us didn't know and now never will.

A shadow covers me

2011-07-24T06:43:00.000+08:00

Amy Winehouse, 14 September 1983 - 23 July 2011

Now that's really something

2011-07-02T09:08:00.006+08:00

I was lying awake this morning thinking about Edinburgh and about how certain streets and places connect directly to memories from my late teens and early twenties. The particular street I was thinking of is in the west end of Edinburgh, and connects Haymarket to Fountainbridge.

A family from a "community" near Ullapool (in the far north west of Scotland), whose two red-headed sons went to my school, had a flat in the street. (The first time I ever saw the older son, the one who was in my class, he was opening the car door outside the school as we drew up behind - he then bolted away down the street in the opposite direction, which I would also have been doing if I'd had the guts. For both of us, it should have been our first day at that school; it ended up just being mine because, as we were solemnly informed, he had "school phobia"; he didn't appear for another few weeks.) I was a bit intimidated by their flat: the parents rarely seemed to be there, and it was known as a drug hangout and a place to go after the pubs closed. My brother was friends with the younger son and in my prejudiced assessment, if he was drinking hard liquor at the age of 13, it was because he used to go that flat.
Me and my friends used to go a rockabilly nightclub (believe it or not such things were very trendy in the late 80s) in Morrison Street, in the basement of the now long-gone White Swan pub, called "The Lazy H"; there, Edinburgh hipsters kicked the night away to an eclectic mix of "The House Of Bamboo", "At the Hop", and northern soul scene favourites like "Cross the Tracks". To get home from the White Swan, we'd walk along the street in the early hours.
There, after a night dancing at the Lazy H, I stood in a doorway talking to a friend and watched my much-lamented ex-boyfriend's brother, David (a dark-haired, good looking, insouciant character who first put the idea into my head of studying law; he was a law student at Aberdeen and it seemed very glamorous. Needless to say, when I actually went to Aberdeen, the scales fell away), walking along the street hand in hand with his new girlfriend, a very attractive girl called Louise, who always makes me think of this song. Louise had ringlets, but it seemed to work; she looked like Lisa Bonet. I was madly jealous of her, because she seemed to have everything.
When I started my job as a legal editor in 1993, I soon got terrible shoulder and back pain from poor posture while editing (this was in the days before computers, so I was sitting at a desk looking down). I went to a chiropractor and he cracked me around: the pain went immediately, in a rush of relief so powerful that it was almost like taking a drug. His clinic was in the same street. I enjoyed it so much that despite the cost I went back for a second session; he gently told me I didn't need to come back for a third. Not all chiropractors are charlatans.
My sister and I went for dinner with a friend of hers who had a flat there. It was in the days when everyone had just discovered woks and lots of people had one, but few people knew how to use them properly (soggy soy broccoli anyone?). My sister's friend had made a stir-fry with ginger, but had sliced the ginger into large chunks. I bit enthusiastically into a piece, thinking it was a nice juicy bit of chicken. This must surely equate to the moment (happily, not on the same evening)when my sister ate a piece of chalk that was nestling in a bowl of peanuts.
Me and my sister saw Edwyn Collins there, at Marcos Leisure Centre, in the early 1990s. He wore a checked "western" shirt with silver clips and (I could have sworn) a bolo tie, sat on a stool and played acoustic guitar to a hushed audience of devotees. To my sister's disappointment, he didn't play "The Coffee Table Song" (if you don't follow any other link, follow this one). I was hoping to see someone there who also (as a pseudonym, as it turned out) called himself Edwyn.

The street, of course, is Grove Street, but amazingly, I had such a mental block about the name that I couldn't remember it till I found it on Google Maps.

Kedgeree

2011-06-12T11:13:00.002+08:00

Kedgeree is a wonderful thing: so easy to make, so satisfying, comfort food and exotica all in one fragrant package. My mum used to make it, and it still ranks amongst my all-time favourite dishes. Whenever I think of kedgeree I always have a faint image in the back of my mind of a bejewelled Indian servant offering a platter to a mustachioed colonial type - breakfast in the Raj - although apparently the dish may actually have originated in Scotland; haddock being much more popular in Scotland than cod, it's certainly plausible.

I made this recipe recently and was delighted anew with it (the original recipe, © Readers Digest Association, had tomatoes in it, but that would be non-standard and was thus ignored).

275 g smoked cod fillet

1 bay leaf

2 cups (500 ml) diluted salt-reduced or homemade vegetable stock, hot

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

2 shallots, finely chopped

½ teaspoon ground cumin

½ teaspoon ground coriander

1 teaspoon mild curry powder

1½ cups (300 g) basmati rice, rinsed

small strip of lemon zest

1 tablespoon lemon juice

1 cup (150 g) shelled fresh or frozen peas

2 tablespoons snipped fresh chives

2 eggs, hard-boiled and quartered

	Put the smoked cod in a deep frying pan. Add the bay leaf, then pour over the stock. Heat to simmering point, then reduce the heat, half-cover the pan with a lid and poach for 6–8 minutes until the flesh flakes easily when tested with the tip of a knife. (If you prefer, the fish can be cooked in a microwave.)

	Lift the fish out of the cooking liquid and set aside. Make up the volume of the cooking liquid/stock to 600 ml with water and reserve with the bay leaf.

	Rinse out the pan, then add the oil and heat over a medium heat for a few seconds. Add the shallots and cook for 4–5 minutes until softened, then stir in the spices, followed by the rice. Stir for a few seconds to coat with the oil and spices, then add the reserved cooking liquid and bay leaf and the strip of lemon zest. Bring to the boil.

	Reduce the heat to a gentle simmer, cover and cook for 10 minutes. Add the peas, cover again and cook for a further 5 minutes or until the rice is tender and nearly all the stock has been absorbed.

	Meanwhile, flake the fish, removing any skin and bones. Reduce the heat under the pan to very low, then gently stir the fish into the rice together with the lemon juice and chives.

	Season to taste, bearing in mind that smoked cod is quite salty, then transfer the kedgeree to a warm serving dish and garnish with the egg quarters.

Nothing but the tooth

2011-05-31T19:39:00.002+08:00

I'm having root canal ("endodontic therapy") tomorrow – surely these are words to strike fear into anyone of a certain age (those I've mentioned this to have all shuddered theatrically). My dentist, who appears to be in his late teens, assured me that it no longer hurts as they're better at the drugs now. The dentist visits of my childhood certainly inhabit a bleak place in my memory: agonising pain, endless bad vibrations, a never-ending desert vista of arid desert and jagged rocks. One dentist told me to stop being a silly cow, but only after my mouth was jammed with instruments, fingers, and the wet rubber sheet of a dental dam. The music playing in the background became the soundtrack to horror and the strains of Vivaldi have a sinister effect on me even now (bolt upright like a Brave New World baby subjected to an electric shock).

Perhaps I exaggerate for effect, and the current dentist does have a TV affixed to the roof for distraction purposes, although this is ineffective due to a combination of poor reception and Ellen de Generes; but I lie there, even though it's relatively painless, thinking of the torture scene in Marathon Man and waiting for it to be over.

you being in love

2011-05-29T19:45:00.000+08:00

you being in love
will tell who softly asks in love,

am i separated from your body smile brain hands merely
to become the jumping puppets of a dream? oh i mean:
entirely having in my careful how
careful arms created this at length
inexcusable, this inexplicable pleasure-you go from several
persons: believe me that strangers arrive
when i have kissed you into a memory
slowly, oh seriously
-that since and if you disappear

solemnly
myselves
ask "life, the question how do i drink dream smile

and how do i prefer this face to another and
why do i weep eat sleep-what does the whole intend"
they wonder. oh and they cry "to be, being, that i am alive
this absurd fraction in its lowest terms
with everything cancelled
but shadows
-what does it all come down to? love? Love
if you like and i like,for the reason that i
hate people and lean out of this window is love,love
and the reason that i laugh and breathe is oh love and the reason
that i do not fall into this street is love.

e.e. cummings

The pity of war

2011-05-19T17:45:00.001+08:00

I was thinking about Anthem for Doomed Youth, the first poem I ever memorised, when I watched Restrepo, a documentary released in 2010 and made by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington (who was recently killed in Libya). Restrepo is the story of a valley in Afhganistan, named by the US soldiers stationed there after their friend and platoon medic, Juan Restrepo, who died there.

The overwhelming impression on watching this film is how young and naive the soldiers are and, ultimately, how futile their occupation is: they refer to fighting for their country without, at first, any reflection on how the battle for a benighted little outcrop in a foreign valley could possibly fit that description; then, as the reality of their situation sinks in, they realise, implicitly if not explicitly, that there is no reason for them to be there, no purpose to the deaths, and no meaning to the sacrifice. It's a profoundly depressing film, in many ways, in the sheer banality of the everyday existence in stultifying conditions, punctuated by brief, fierce skirmishes with an almost unseen enemy; the fear of overgrown children under fire; and the terrible anguish of loss with no gain.

Hetherington and Junger were criticised for their lack of objectivity as embedded journalists; but it's clear from this film that they were incredibly, almost recklessly brave; and they don't need to be didactic (there's no voiceover): terrible events speak for themselves.

Anthem for doomed youth

2011-05-17T20:04:00.000+08:00

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

The Hills of Zara

2011-05-02T21:37:00.007+08:00

About 15 years ago, on holiday in Madrid, I saw a pair of shoes in a shop window and fell in love with them. The brand was Spanish and its name was Zara. I bought the shoes (black patent leather, vertiginous heels, t-bar, round toe, 1940s style, with a slender ankle strap that fastened with a button) and wore them till they fell apart. Zara came to London and, when I was in Hong Kong, opened there. It became just another shop to me, albeit somewhere you could always rely on finding cost-effective copies of vastly more expensive catwalk designs, with flair and style and always a little in advance of anyone else on the high street. The clothes were well made for the price (often in China of course) but would start to look shabby fairly quickly.

Apart, perhaps, from the opening of a self-appointed supercool store like Bathing Ape in Queen's Road, Central (they're probably still queuing outside it now), and give-aways of bags of rice or free mah jong sets where some poor old character out for a freebie would always get trampled underfoot by ravening crowds, I never saw anything in Hong Kong quite like the hubbub outside the new Zara in Pitt Street Mall. It's Zara's first store in Australia; even so, the atmosphere, and lines of women queuing outside, were astonishing. As I passed by this morning, on a rather miserable cold day nearly two full weeks after the place opened, there were four people waiting outside at 8.50am.

I know I am perhaps being reactionary, and needless to say I would never dream of joining that queue, but doesn't the very fact that everyone will now be wearing Zara mean that any other brand would in fact be more attractive? Sadly, the other stores were failing to capitalise on this concept; one nearby had resorted, in what looked horribly like desperation, to featuring supersized letters spelling "SEX" and (in much smaller letters) "& fashion" in their window display (pictured above).

Lest anyone think, however, that I've turned my back on fashion and, by implication, am sneering at its acolytes, never fear: I am still as interested in shoes as the next woman, and here are some rather attractive sandals by Zara to prove it. Looks expensive, looks like, maybe, Chloé, but costs less than $100? It must be democracy in action.

The food of love

2011-04-30T21:31:00.001+08:00

It's always astonished me, given the incredible range of fresh produce that Scotland can furnish (salmon, mackerel, langoustines, mussels, venison, oysters, beef, pork, lamb...), that we are so notorious for unhealthy eating. The fact that it gets very cold and the weather's often miserable may have something to do with it (as does enough heavy drinking to obliterate the most discerning palate); but somehow over the centuries Scots seem to have been magnetically attracted to anything deep fried (even the vegetarians can join in: I well remember my friend D's love of a white pudding, no doubt soused in animal fat, from a certain chippie in Leith Walk). I can understand the appeal, of course; and I was thinking about it again today, at Fish On Fire, Glebe's finest fish and chip shop.

The first time I went to a fish and chip shop in London, I was astonished to find that there was actually a choice of fish. In any Scottish chippie, it's just "fush", fish and chips is a "fush supper", and the "fush" is always haddock. On the east coast, where I grew up, you ask for, and receive, "saltnsauce" dolloped lavishly across everything. On the west coast, a request for saltnsauce is met with a blank (and frankly insolent) look. The "sauce" is a patented, secret mix, the ingredients of which are closely guarded by every chippie (I can exclusively reveal that it's statistically highly likely to be watered down supermarket own-brand HP sauce), usually kept in an Irn Bru bottle of dubious provenance and advanced years.

Anyone not used to a Scottish fish supper will usually be horrified by it: where there should be crispness, let me bring mush, because the fat, stodgy, barely cooked chips, when you manage to peel them away to eat them, have wholly absorbed the fat they've been cooked in, on account of the fat fryer's connection being a little bit dodgy and cutting out from time to time; where the "fush" should taste of fish, its precious aromas and delicate flavour is drowned in saltnsauce, and besides the batter's hardened to the consistency of concrete by overcooking or, and you have to take your chances, so undercooked it still tastes strongly of flour. But despite eating what is, by any reckoning, a vastly superior version in Australia (chips cooked just so: crisp on the outside, fluffy on the inside; chicken salt – oh the sophistication! – used for flavour; fish perfectly white, flaky, and fresh – the pristine example above is, of course, Australian), somewhere in a foreign field, there's a part of me that will still forever long for a proper fush supper. At the end of the day, nothing beats sitting in a car in the pouring rain outside the chippie in a godforsaken little east coast town, bolting down pure deepfried goodness that tastes of nothing.

World of work

2011-04-23T10:47:00.000+08:00

My very first job was in the town where I was born, Haddington, a short bus ride (or, given bus infrequency, a daunting cycle) from my village. I had a Saturday job in an art gallery and coffee shop called “Peter Potter's”, a job my sister had had before me, working alongside a selection of Haddington teenagers, one of whom, a Glaswegian, became my boyfriend for a while. I never met Mr Potter, and know nothing about him, but he did exist, a fact perhaps known to the local kids who used to delight in shouting into the letter box at the front door: “Peter Potter picked a snotter!”

Peter Potter's was a genteel, rather pretentious little place run by elderly ladies who seemed to enjoy playing power games. I was 14 when I started there, and was paid GBP2 an hour (even at the time, circa 1983, this was insultingly low pay, barely enough to get the bus to Edinburgh afterwards) to work in the coffee shop, serving ploughman’s lunches, baked potatoes, toasted sandwiches, coffees, teas and cakes to the good folk of Haddington (as well as tourists getting out of the rain, and once, excitingly, Ronnie Corbett, who enjoyed a bowl of our cauliflower soup). As ambivalent as I was about working there, I’m sure I sometimes behaved ungraciously in my role as waitress, but there were only two complaints about me from four years of Saturdays: I was taken aside by one insufferable woman and told that I was “scruffy”; and I refused to serve tea to the daughter of some local knight of the realm, because she arrived, demanding to be served, when the place had closed, and I was packing up for the day and no longer on the clock. This was an early experience of imperiousness that I’ve never forgotten.

I remember wearing a particular pair of tight black cords with a broken zip which I tried to fix, ineptly, with lashings of sellotape, only to have some grinning men point out to me that my zip was down. I remember making the best toasties ever for my own lunch, stuffed with grated cheese, ham, raw onion and Branston Pickle. I remember the smell of fresh paint and wholemeal flapjacks. I remember looking out at the rain and longing for my shift to end.

I'm sure lots of things about this job have stood me in good stead: the ability to be incredibly polite (almost to the point of sarcasm, where they're not quite sure you're not being rude, but don't dare suggest it) to people who clearly think you (as a waitress, or a teenager, or a woman, or all three) are beneath them, and, as a corollary, a lifelong appreciation for waitresses; naturally, a distrust of the sort of people who run small-town art galleries; and the ability to make a damn good toasted sandwich.

It's no game

2011-04-10T21:49:00.004+08:00

I associate Scary Monsters, Bowie's last studio album for RCA (1980), with a very tall, dark-eyed, good looking son of a judge - that and Talking Heads' Remain In Light (also 1980) will forever be intertwined with a memory of an impossibly unattainable boy and his friends, hanging out on a sunny afternoon in a spacious Edinburgh flat with tall doors and light glancing in through the windows and the smell of fresh paint and tea, in the part of town where all the embassies are, listening to music, with me on the fringes – intruding by accident on the sounds coming from the living room – of what I understood even at the time (I was 12) to be incredibly cool.

Listening to Scary Monsters now it's readily apparent what an incredible record it is: pushing all sorts of boundaries, full of fascination. The title track is otherwordly: electronic dogs are barking, Bowie's cod-Cockney accent is strong, the lyrics are knowing but obtuse ("waiting at the lights, know what I mean"), and it's all delivered with a chilly dignity. Bowie has a knack of making the most risible lyric sound meaningful, even essential, and of somehow effortlessly tapping into the zeitgeist.

Although I love the title track, "Up the Hill Backwards" ("the vacuum created by the arrival of freedom/and the possibilities it seems to offer"), "It's No Game (Part 2)", and "Fashion", the most wonderful song of all is "Ashes to Ashes". The video is extraordinary - now he's in a clown outfit, pacing solemnly with other outlandish characters in front of an advancing JCB; now he's in a 1950s dream home; now he's in a padded cell - best not to ask, just accept it as it is. It still looks like the future.

The tall, good looking son of a judge became a monk; I last saw him walking down a country road in the place where I grew up, heading for the bus stop in the village. I suppose he left me with the indelible connection with this record, but not much else (I can't even remember his name): perhaps just a sense of longing and not belonging, and something just out of reach.

The White Stone of Lewis

2011-04-03T17:15:00.001+08:00

Do not attempt
to lift the white stone.
It is smooth quartzite
and weighs a lifetime.

You would prove your back
could take the strain:
brave, ambitious
you can handle any challenge.

But other strengths are more sustaining:
able to change and take changes
lift old habits from heavy soil
get to grips with the smooth surface
of self deception.

Let others do the heaving and shoving
who shoulder burdens they cannot manage
and set their sights on defeating others
in pointless shows of strength.

You carry the stone with you:
crystal with hope
light with humour
smooth with complete integrity.

Tessa Ransford

Musée des Beaux Arts

2011-03-30T19:52:00.001+08:00

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

W.H. Auden

Beautiful and strange

2011-03-28T20:12:00.002+08:00

In his blue gardens, [they] came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars...
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

It's hard to believe that Alexander McQueen died over a year ago. His label continues without him, and Sarah Burton, who has taken over from him having worked closely with him for years, seems to have been able to capture exactly what it is that made his designs so unusual: this dress, for example, is beautifully cut and deceptively simple, but as always there's a sting in the tail. At the back, there's a graceful dip of cowl neck:

Look at it again. There's something unsettling, almost disturbing about the pattern, which seems to contain elements of delicate pale clamshell, but there's also a Rorschach quality to the print, and something insectile, and mothlike, about the pattern.

Alexander McQueen dress, from Net-a-porter. Undeniably expensive, but it's a work of art.

It's not dark yet

2011-03-27T19:38:00.003+08:00

Despite the fact that I grew up with Bob Dylan's music in the background and it holds very good, and/or sometimes sad, memories for me, I confess I've been a bit suspicious of Bob Dylan's more recent releases (as I am, in callow fashion, of the contemporary output of many a superannuated, still-touring, only-in-it-for-the money rock band who should have hung up their guitars years ago - step forward The Rolling Stones; hang your heads in shame, the Sex Pistols). This ambivalence was not helped by having had the misfortune to hear Dylan's ill-advised Christmas record: I know it's for charity, but that's no excuse. If it's a joke, it's a terrible one, and all of us have to suffer for it.

I've been watching Deadwood, which my sister long ago recommended, and at the end of the first episode of Season 2, a recent Dylan song, It's Not Dark Yet, played over the credits. It was so lovely that I forgave him all the Christmas insults. And Deadwood is wonderful.

A certain slant of light

2011-03-23T21:07:00.004+08:00

Wandering home after work through my adopted city today, at a certain moment I looked right up and thought "I live in a beautiful place". I love cities, and have lived in a few (Edinburgh, Glasgow, London, Hong Kong and Sydney) but this one still catches me by surprise (double click on the photograph above for the full glory of the vista).

As we are approaching winter here, this view made me think of the first two lines of the Emily Dickinson poem, although none of the rest of it seems to fit:

There's a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons...

Veil of ignorance

2011-03-22T18:04:00.002+08:00

Growing up in 1970s Scotland, I was a rather greedy, forever-hungry child. Hungry as I was, often the food adults liked, and took pleasure in eating, baffled me; my parents would describe something spicy, or bitter, or strong as “an acquired taste”, which seemed to be synonymous with “vile”; olives, whisky, cumin, beetroot, coriander or aubergines. On the contrary, I loved bland food, and dreamed of being given a jar of peanut butter for my birthday. As well as being highly suspect, adult food seemed impossibly exotic to me; on the (fairly infrequent) occasions when someone was coming for dinner, and children were to be sent to bed early, I took a very keen interest in what was being prepared.

My mum seemed to have two key dishes which were her dinner party staples: moussaka, and Danish Peasant Girl with Veil. The latter was based on a recipe of my grandmother’s, and was essentially a dish of stewed apple and bread topped with cream and grated chocolate (recipe here). I remember peeking into the fridge as the Danish Peasant Girl sat there in splendour, cooling for the evening; I can’t guarantee that I didn’t sometimes stick a greedy finger in it to steal some for myself, justifying it with righteous indignation at being excluded from the festivities.

Wall-eyed

2011-03-13T20:32:00.002+08:00

From a Sydney local newspaper, a tragic, yet also rather comical tale:

Two men and a woman were charged in relation to an alleged break-in at a derelict hotel in Pyrmont early Saturday morning. About 1.30am, police ... found three intoxicated people - two men and a woman. One of the men sustained a minor injury after falling while attempting to climb a small wall.

Eye of the spider

2011-03-10T09:00:00.000+08:00

I'm not someone who's ever been frightened of spiders - chief among their many qualities, for instance, is the fact that they like to eat my mortal enemy, the mosquito. Since arriving in Australia, I've had to accustom myself to the fact that spiders here are a whole lot bigger than the ones I'm used to - and are also potentially more dangerous than the skittery old daddy-long-legs I did battle with as a child at night (although as yet I have never met anything poisonous, and I've shared living space with one or two large huntsmen spiders which seem benign enough). Despite slightly depressing advice to avoid spiders altogether, occasionally I will be stopped in my tracks by a beautiful creature at the centre of a large web, constructed without fear or favour in a little bush in the street: like the one above, encountered in Myrtle Street, which is an orb-weaver (even the name is magical).

I am curious orange

2011-03-09T18:36:00.002+08:00

I've commented before about having a sneaking suspicion that fashion is a massive joke perpetrated on the gullible – or words to that effect – of whom I am clearly sometimes one. It passed me by in January when it first appeared on the catwalk (how "on-trend" am I? Not very), but this Jil Sander plastic bag (or, to give it its full title, "acetate market bag") is surely another cruel facet of the joke. It's a bag, a plastic bag, and it retails at $150 (if you don't believe me, here it is on Net-a-Porter). I looked, but it doesn't have "I Am A Plastic Bag" written on it.

I spy

2011-03-05T09:09:00.013+08:00

Dresses at V. Lotus

Manic Mannequins at Doug Up On Bourke

Rings from I Ran the Wrong Way

Breakfast at Little Marionette

When I first moved to Sydney, I had some time off before going back to work and so I started the blog A Place A Day. It's quite labour-intensive: I identify a place that is of interest, take around 40 photographs there, distill them down to 20 or so, and write a short paragraph about what I found interesting. Often I would end up covering the place where I had lunch. I put pressure on myself to do it almost every day; and now I'm back at work it's impossible to keep up, so it's more of a place a week (or less) and the title has proved to be fraudulent.

What I learned in doing this was that one of my favourite aspects of the process, apart from photographing and then eating food, was talking to the people who owned the place. Inspired by my friend Davey's Shot by Shooter blog (hands down the best, and most interesting, street fashion blog in operation), I decided to take my camera to work with me and shoot people who catch my eye in the street for Sydney Spy.

Sometimes people say no (older women are often very reluctant, and I lost a beautiful girl in a jewel-coloured gown who said she felt she looked terrible today); sometimes they say yes, then affect an attitude (the only photographs I haven't used so far are of someone who posed petulantly then said "are you done yet?" – why not just say no?). I'm drawn, not to obviously dressed-up or self-important people, but to people who are just quietly going about their day with their own style, and by definition this often means that they're camera-shy.

Someone said to me they'd be too shy to go up to people in the street, but I enjoy the interaction, particularly the pleasure on their faces when I tell them how good I think they look, and I like the idea that they go away feeling good about themselves.

Stefanie

What I've also discovered is that fashion bloggers are very different from food bloggers: for one thing they are almost all women, many of whom photograph themselves and not others: obsessively cataloguing their outfits every day. I'm far happier behind a camera than in front of it.

Eggs are eggs

2011-02-19T14:13:00.006+08:00

When I was about 14, I learned a new language, one absolutely guaranteed to infuriate anyone who couldn't speak it: egg language. Egg language has a noble history, having apparently been devised in the early 20th century by suffragettes (for some reason it's easier for women to learn). The rules are that you insert an "egg" in front of every sounding vowel (and "y" where it's used like a vowel), so my first sentence would read as follows:

Wheggen eggI weggas eggabeggout feggorteggeen, eggI leggearned egga neggew leggangueggueggage, weggone eggabseggolegguteleggy gueggaregganteggeed teggo egginfeggureggieggate egganeggyweggone wheggo ceggould neggot speggeak eggit: eggegg leggangueggueggage.

My sister Claire and I learned it from a sort-of friend of mine, K, who was rather an annoying sort of girl, a game player, a would be mysterious "witch", a girl fond of affecting to walk about everywhere in bare feet, and as it turned out a plain old backstabber; and we used to speak it in any situation where, essentially, we wanted to discuss something and not be understood by adults and/or the person we were talking about. A plain old backstabber's charter, you might say, except that anyone overhearing us talk in egg language would know with absolute certainty that there were terrible secrets afoot or, worse, that they were being laughed at.

I can still speak it without even thinking. So deeply has it entrenched itself in my brain that I awoke at 3am recently with the firm belief that I needed to start reading the news in egg language for egg-speakers worldwide, and that I must communicate this brilliant idea to my sister with all due dispatch.

Square peg

2011-02-06T13:56:00.005+08:00

The other day, hanging some clothes out on the balcony, I mused to myself about the clothes peg: what a simple, yet effective object it is, which in essence hasn't changed for hundreds of years (although life was clearly improved by the invention of the spring-loaded version by David M. Smith of Vermont in 1853). In a flash, the simple act of pegging clothes out to dry connected me with centuries of human beings, and in my own memory, with my younger self, hanging clothes out on a line strung between trees, most now tragically cut down, next to the cottage where I grew up (hoping against hope they'd be dry in time to wear); with a woman glimpsed from a Berlin-bound train in East Germany in 1986, who paused to look up from her wet sheets as we flashed by her green hillside; with, for some reason, and fancifully, pre-Revolution French washerwomen hanging Madame's couture gowns in Paris apartments and Edinburgh housewives draping bloomers over the narrow streets of the Canongate; and finally, and according to Wikipedia, "the little person one drags around in Google Maps" who is called "pegman" because he is shaped like a clothespeg.

There's something so wonderful about freshly-washed, fresh-air-dried clothes: begone the dull, environmentally-unfriendly convenience of the clothes-dryer! Give me a clothes peg and a washing line any day of the week.

Bark and bite

2011-01-25T18:26:00.003+08:00

In all the jobs I've had, I'm sorry (but not that sorry) to say I've never had much time for the marketing department.

Exhibit A, the marketing team for a small Scottish legal publisher who regularly rushed out leaflets without consulting the legal editors, with resultant howlers like "an excellent guide for practicioners" and "a vade mecum for the tyro" (who even knows what that means? They certainly didn't).*

Exhibit B, the same team, when asked to produce a cover for a book on medical negligence. Their suggestion? A picture of a wheelchair.

Exhibit C, the much larger marketing team for a major London-based publisher. Said publisher's offices near Canary Wharf had been blown up by the IRA and all but destroyed. Two people lost their lives. So when, not long after, we published a book on buildings insurance, what did an inspired marketing team come up with as cover art? Why, a photograph of the bombed-out building.

Exhibit D, any marketing person asked to produce promotional materials for the legal services market. The gavel is not in use by judges in any jurisdiction I've ever worked in. In fact, it's not in use anywhere except in some courts in the US. So what always appears on marketing literature in every jurisdiction? It's a gavel!

Exhibit E, the trailer for a US show on FX called Terriers.

What does the name, and the above picture, which was on billboards promoting the show, tell you? It might be about dogfighting. It might be about... dog shows? It's definitely not a comedy drama with noir undertones, about two mismatched, likeable private detectives. Which it, in fact, was. No matter, the show has now been cancelled after its first season because it didn't get the viewing numbers, presumably, and at least in part, because of the terrible marketing campaign.

In any case, the show's theme song, by Robert Duncan, turns out to be much better than the series, which starts well but peters out somewhat, and is certainly no Breaking Bad (if you have never seen the latter, do yourself a favour and find a way to see it). But the marketing department torpedoed any chance of it finding an audience and finding its way, thus proving that my wild prejudices are in some small way justified.

* "An indispensible beginners' guide" would have sufficed.

Second that emotion

2011-01-11T13:39:00.006+08:00

The FEAR remote control (which I thought might have a corresponding concrete TV somewhere, which no one can turn on) is not alone: there are more tiny sculptures scattered around Chippendale. My neighbour Michael Mobbs pointed out the first one to me when I met him in Myrtle Street yesterday: ISOLATION at the foot of a paper bark tree in Pine Street. Then there's a NUMB mobile phone next to the Peace Park in Myrtle Street, and another remote control, HATE, close to FEAR in Pine Lane. I'd never even noticed any of them before I spotted FEAR; it now appears they have been there for some time (and there are more, which I haven't spotted yet). Michael said a local sculptor was responsible, but he didn't know any more than that. Another urban mystery.

Urban mysteries

2011-01-10T14:22:00.005+08:00

Walking home from lunch in the CBD today, I heard a strange, insistent noise as I came along Balfour Street in Chippendale; it almost sounded like a dentist's drill. Drawn by the sound, I slowed as I passed a terraced house and glanced in the window: this is what I saw.

It felt so intrusive that I didn't want to linger, so the shot isn't great: a man with bright blond hair is lying on his side, in someone's front room, and another man is tattooing his back. There was something strangely graceful and compelling about this scene; the sound carried all the way down the street, but as I stood there, the tattoo artist didn't even look up, so absorbed was he in his work. I felt privileged to have been part of this moment, in my tiny, nosy way.

Hope that something pure can last

2011-01-06T08:12:00.007+08:00

It may seem strange
How we used to wait for letters to arrive
But stranger still
Is how something so small can keep you alive

In old news: Arcade Fire promoted their most recent record via a near-ubiquitous website which invited the viewer to insert their childhood postcode and experience the video for the song "We Used to Wait" in the context of completely familiar streets, fields and houses. The song is insistently catchy and the marketing concept is unbeatable: here the sound is stamped on your brain along with the poignancy of ancient memories.

The song itself is about the letters we used to write when we were kids; that for me is the most resonant part, because in my teens, living in a cottage in the countryside, lonely and alienated and feeling as though I was a long way away from everything, the letters I received from my correspondents, many of whom I'd never met, were desperately important to me: Brian in Blantyre; William in Glasgow; Tony in Dundee; Lorna in London. Some have died, and some have faltered; some of them I met, many of them I didn't; some of them I'll never speak to again (for reasons that will become obvious if you read that post); some of them (the lovely Brian) are still amongst my dearest friends.

Arcade Fire occasionally appear to tread that fine line between mawkishness and meaning that Coldplay always fall emphatically on the wrong side of (superficially it may sound like they're attempting something profound, but the lyrics are utterly inane: for the best example, look no further than Speed of Sound). But Arcade Fire are real, and interesting, musicians, and sometimes they seem to be able to meld their music with words in a way that seems truly insightful.

We walk backwards, say nothing

2011-01-05T17:12:00.007+08:00

I've written before about the first band I ever saw live, Japan, at the Edinburgh Playhouse in 1982. How exotic they seemed to a 14-year-old: a wicked combination of accessibility (there they were, just a few feet away on the stage) and unbreachable distance, the halo of fame and their sheen of otherness: people I recognised, because I'd seen their pictures in Smash Hits, but could never know. I thought my heart would burst with this new understanding, and the music seemed to swell around me. Ryuchi Sakamoto joined them for the performance; he was doing a strange, balletic tiptoe dance and seemed to glide across the stage.

Although my favourite was, of course, David Sylvian, I was keen on the drummer, Steve Jansen, who played an electrifying solo on Visions of China. The most exotic band member was Mick Karn: with his hollow cheekbones, dark eyes, and enigmatic expression, he didn't seem to need the make-up the others all wore – he already looked strange enough. His is the distinctive, muscular bass sound that is the essential infrastructure of every Japan song.

It sounds silly, but it scarcely seems possible that he should be dead – any more than it would seem possible that any of the other members of Japan should die, because the memory of that night is still so vivid to me.

Mick Karn, 24 July 1958 – 4 January 2011

Faded glamour

2011-01-03T10:24:00.007+08:00

Yesterday's Observer published some incredible photos by two French photographers, Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, from their book, The Ruins of Detroit. Their observation was that in Europe, generally old buildings are picked over for their antique fittings so nothing much remains; in Detroit, the original 1920s art deco chandeliers in the Vanity Ballroom, where Duke Ellington and Tommy Dorsey one played, remain in place, the ballroom crumbling around them.

I took some photos at Sydney's State Theatre in November. Marchand and Meffre's picture of the United Artists Theater, closed since 1974, is in terrible synchronicity with the State Theatre's gleaming auditorium, of which Sydney is justifiably proud.

Third image ©Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre, 2010

Anguis in herba

2010-12-29T12:37:00.002+08:00

A real snake in the grass: a diamond python (morelia spilota) lying dozing near the water at Patonga, New South Wales. Wikipedia says "some forms can be more irascible than others", but this snake, although it was at least 6ft long, paid scant attention to over-excited photographers and lay quietly, not to say complacently, just outside its hole.

O dear

2010-12-12T09:42:00.006+08:00

Yesterday, in one of those moments when you feel lucky to be alive, I steered a crew in an OC6 through the harbour. The sun was shining, the wind was in our hair, and the eggshell of the Opera House was gleaming in the distance. There were ferries and yachts and pleasure craft everywhere, and our little boat boldly made its way though all of the chaos. The wind was behind us, the crew's timing was perfect, and we rode gentle rolling waves in towards the harbour bridge.

Today, I looked out of the window at another beautiful sky, only to be assaulted by this statement. Is it a smoke ring? Is it the second letter of a cry for help? No, it's a sign, desecrating the beautiful blue Sydney sky, that an American mega-celebrity and "world's most influential person" is in town. (Watch out for terrible puns about "the Oprah House".) Apparently they have also, cravenly, allowed a neon "O" to appear on the harbour bridge - I was spared this sight yesterday; it might have taken the sheen off the day. I'm happy that she is female, and black, and ascended from a terribly impoverished background to her current heights, but I don't want her to have the sky too.

There goes the fear

2010-12-05T15:09:00.006+08:00

At the foot of the wall in Pine Lane, and just to the right of the little red scooter, a peculiar little clay model has appeared. It's a TV remote control with "FEAR" written on it. It's discreetly tucked away in a place where it's hardly noticeable: another little secret. It's a pretty obvious statement about people being controlled by their own fear, but it also makes me think of people sitting mindlessly in front of their TVs - like the couple who live across the way, who have a beautiful roof terrace, but are never seen on it because they are sitting inside watching their garganto-TV instead.

The reader

2010-12-03T09:43:00.001+08:00

When I was 18, just after moving to Glasgow to go to university, I bought a copy of Lanark by Alasdair Gray and was completely bewitched by it. I had dreams afterwards about growing scales on my skin. I related the dystopian landscape of the book with what I saw in Glasgow at the end of the twentieth century, just beginning its economic recovery and rehabilitation with events like the Glasgow Garden Festival (a visit here was the last time I saw my granny before she died; the cheerful newness of the showhouses and a cheap showcase of "modern" design are what I remember) and the accolade of European City of Culture (1990).

I had my precious, battered and well-read copy of Lanark until 1993. It was borrowed by my then-flatmate G to take across the Atlantic, on a boat-delivery mission from Cyprus to the British Virgin Islands. He got sick and had to get off the boat in Minorca, leaving my book behind; on its continued journey, it was seized upon by the captain's girlfriend, who decided it would be a fine wheeze to tear out each page upon reading it and cast it into the sea. On arrival in the BVI, she threw the carcass away.

Favourite books are a special possession in a way that few other things are. I can happily leave a thriller on a plane or in a hotel room for someone else to read, but I sometimes lie awake at night worrying about the safety of books left in the attic of a house in North London. This callous behaviour with someone else's book, by someone who later went to clown school, has always struck me as being an unforgiveable act of vandalism.

Transports of delight

2010-11-26T11:05:00.005+08:00

One thing that's very different about Sydney, compared to Hong Kong, is the amazing proliferation of street art. In the area where I live, Chippendale, everywhere I look there seems to be a mural, or graffiti, or a subtle little stencil like the one shown (seen in Pine Lane). Sites like Acid Midget document street art all over Sydney. Some of it can be crass, or vulgar, and occasionally there's heavy-handed political posturing; but then I'll see something like this one, which is a little secret message from the artist to the viewer. (I used to ride a Vespa around London so I have a special fondness for scooters.)

(Thanks to elj, who captures street art around Newtown, for prompting me to photograph this little vision.)

Stuck in a moment

2010-11-24T11:42:00.010+08:00

Perhaps partly because I've just been reading a novel about a WWII Russian spy by Alan Furst, and also because I've always been interested in that era (Gitta Sereny's majestic biography of Albert Speer, Hitler's Willing Executioners – which I read, incongruously, on a beach in Fuertaventura – If This Is A Man, Stalingrad and, absurdly, Wolfenstein), I was struck by the beauty and mystery of this picture, taken by Mark Hogencamp in Marwencol, the miniaturised battleground he built in his own back garden while recovering from a beating that left him brain-damaged. His tragic story has been turned into a documentary.

Found via the website Look At This Little Thing!

Call the cops

2010-11-08T16:31:00.005+08:00

When I was about 8 years old, I had a crush on a boy called Derek, who was in my class at primary school. He was tall and thin, with swept back blond hair and a cynical look which I found wildly attractive: he was a romantic hero straight out of one of the too-old-for-me books I was fond of reading. He was an extremely fast runner, to add to his allure; my short-lived career as a runner (third in the East Lothian Schools' 200 metres in 1977) may well have been founded on (and certainly foundered on) an attempt to either emulate, or impress, Derek. Of course, he didn't even know I existed.

Not long afterwards my brother and sister and I were taken out of school to continue our schooling in a more maverick fashion, and I never saw Derek again.

My mum just emailed me to tell me that two policemen had arrived at her front door. She confessed to thinking "What have I done now?", having all too recently had an absurd brush with the law involving a knocked over bollard in a supermarket carpark, an off-duty policeman and jobsworth, and a summons to appear in court; but they were just following up on a local burglary. One of them asked after me and my sister; it turned out to be my very early hero, Derek, who's now a local copper. And somehow – perhaps because I still, risibly, harbour a secret yearning to be a police officer myself – that has really impressed me.

Amazing cakes

2010-11-02T12:25:00.003+08:00

From Black Star Pastry in Newtown. In order of appearance: Persian fig, orange and pistachio cake ($6); salted chocolate and caramel tart (seen in a slightly dishevelled, but still beautiful, state after the ravages of a journey back home in the basket of my bicycle) ($4); and elderflower and pistachio cheesecake ($6). They tasted as good as they look. Apparently Black Star Pastry also does extremely good pies - including an award-winning lamb shank pie which I am already dreaming about.

What do I get?

2010-10-30T10:59:00.003+08:00

“My mother once said, ‘We were too poor to be photographed.’ And there began my life’s fascination with the medium.”
Linder Sterling

Wings of desire

2010-10-29T12:43:00.006+08:00

When I was about 8, I was unlucky enough to participate in an exercise with a group of other kids, both younger and older, where we were asked in turn what we wanted to do when we grew up. Bearing in mind that this was the antediluvian days of the mid-1970s, and despite the fact that these were the kids of my parents' friends, artists, hippies, musicians and the like, and perhaps should have been a bit more enlightened (having said that, from experience this often turns out not to be the case: people who pursue what they regard as an alternative lifestyle can often be surprisingly conservative), when I said that I wanted to be a pilot, peals of mocking laughter rang out. Clearly it was ridiculous for a girl to want to be a pilot, because that is a man's job.

One of the other kids played to the gallery with his answer which was "shoplifting, gluesniffing, stealing". This got the laughs he was after (although it may have been as accurate a prediction as anyone else's).

About 15 years later, having gone on an entirely different career path, I had a flying lesson from RAF Turnhouse, near Edinburgh. Despite the excitement of taking the controls for take-off and landing, speaking on the two-way radio, flying over my childhood home, and circling over the Forth road and rail bridges, it quickly became apparent that the career I had dreamed about would not have been a smart choice for someone who gets violently airsick.

A woman who had drifted around the edges of my parents' group of friends came to our house for the day, not long after the career path humiliation ritual. She was a bit of an old, sad figure in my view (horrifyingly, I realised on thinking about it that she was probably younger than I am now), a slightly bulky woman with bleached blonde hair, an oversized baggy mohair jumper, and a miserable expression on her face. She didn't seem to know what to do with herself. The porous clay mug from which she drank her tea was so throughly imbued with the reek of her perfume that it didn't wash off for months. My sister and I cruelly dubbed her "Shoplifting, Gluesniffing, Stealing" and the poor woman has no name other than this in my memory.

Post modern

2010-10-25T16:17:00.003+08:00

My sister's art school boyfriend (Ben), in the 1980s, tried at one time or another to send her the following items in the mail:

- an arrow (for Valentine's Day)
- a hard boiled egg (it cracked)
- a toffee apple (it "ruined 20 pieces of mail" said the postie, clearly very satisfied by being able to impart this news)

Looking back, it's amazing the patience with which these items were processed. History does not reveal how many missives were unsuccessful (but Ben might).

I saw a book somewhere of letters which someone had posted to herself with puzzles (crosswords, word games, join the dots etc) instead of the address. If the postie solved the puzzle (and they often did) the address was revealed. It's a clever idea and it seemed as though some of the posties really quite enjoyed the challenge, although I'm sure quite a few of the letters got binned in exasperation.

(Thanks to My Rusty Sieve for sparking this off with a post about W. Reginald Bray, "The Human Letter", who was a pioneer in the field and a wild experimenter. He posted a turnip, a bowler hat, a bicycle pump, shirt cuffs, seaweed, a clothes brush, and a rabbit's skull. Following those triumphs, he posted first his Irish terrier and then himself .)

Streets of your town

2010-10-11T20:27:00.004+08:00

Sometimes Sydney will unexpectedly remind me of Edinburgh: a certain slant of light, or an old building, or the texture of the stones. I usually think of Melbourne as being more akin to Edinburgh, as Sydney is akin to Glasgow: the former genteel, maybe a little smug; the latter brash, sometimes full of itself. Walking down Bridge Lane in the CBD, the first half of the alley was glistening with plastic bunting as part of the Art & About festival. There was a nightclub, apparently called FAKE, at the corner. And a beautiful archway led to Bridge Road, and the light coming through it, and the fact that Bridge Lane seemed like a secret known only by the people walking through it, made me imagine for a moment that I was in a close in the Old Town of Edinburgh, somewhere near the Royal Mile.

Doors of perception

2010-10-09T12:35:00.005+08:00

Ever since I was a kid I've loved secret gardens and hidden away places: my imaginary house has a wooden gate with a little door in it, through which you enter a garden with overhanging trees and a winding path to the front door (this is based on a vague memory of a flaking cream-painted wooden doorway in the town where I was born, Haddington, East Lothian, which led to a potter's workshop and not to a mysterious garden, but I have adapted it for my own purposes). I see myself, fancifully, wandering barefoot through French windows into the dewy grass in the morning with a cup of coffee in my hand.

Hong Kong's urban landscape, being very new, for the most part, has a low quota of surprises; in Sydney, I've been enjoying the ancient buildings, many of which are now being refurbished as the areas around the city centre rapidly gentrify. This doorway is contemporary, but has gracefully met the challenge of its surroundings and is also blending in beautifully; blink and you'd miss it. There's an enigmatic stairway behind the gate and no sign of what's beyond.

Turn suburbia upside down

2010-10-03T11:29:00.004+08:00

I went to a fancy dress party for someone's birthday a couple of years ago. The theme was "Rock stars" so I went as Debbie Harry (and judging by the photos, unfortunately I looked, in my blonde wig and silver top, more like Debbie Harry now than Debbie Harry then). Someone else had also come as Debbie Harry, with a very similar wig. On reflection she may have been unwilling to acknowledge that we were both (equally unsuccessfully) trying to look like Debbie in the glory years circa "Parallel Lines" (at which point she was already 33), or perhaps she was just a bit doolally; in any case, her first reaction on seeing me was to gush "Oh! You've come as that Toyota!"

She meant, of course, Toyah: the middle class poster girl for punk, whose risible hit "I Wanna be Free" must have struck fear into the hearts of sixth form common room prefects and Home Counties G&T-drinkers everywhere with its stirring refrain "I'm gonna turn this world - UPSIDE DOWN!" and, sensibly, "I don't wanna be told what to wear - so long as you're warm, who cares?". Toyah was on the front of Smash Hits, suspiciously perfectly made up with sky blue skin and tiny birds circling above her eyebrows. Toyah hadn't actually shaved her head; she'd gelled the sides. It's a mystery, indeed, how Toyah ever got taken seriously. Even as a credulous 12 year old I was a bit suspicious of her. Even I could tell that the threat to "crawl through the alleyways BEING VERY LOUD!" was a bit pathetic.

And so it came to pass that Toyah became an actress, married Robert Fripp, and was most recently to be seen campaigning against the construction of a centre for asylum seekers near her village in Worcestershire.

And in case you wondered: yes, I was both offended and amused to be mistaken for Toyota.

Kind of blue

2010-10-02T11:44:00.004+08:00

Dresses by London-based designer Osman Yousefzada for his Osman line, also worn here by Anna Friel (it's a beautiful dress, and she looks great in it, though I'm not entirely sure about the legs akimbo look). Victoria Beckham was so impressed with Osman's column dress that she borrowed the dress and then, ahem, paid homage to it with a dress in her own collection. Dresses from Matches (and they are reassuringly expensive too).

Another season passes by you

2010-09-27T11:26:00.005+08:00

It sounds trite, but I find that one of the interesting things about Australia is that when you look at the sky, you know you're in a big country. There's something about the sheer scale of the land mass which seems to impact on the clouds which always seem so much higher in the sky than they are where I grew up, in Scotland, where louring, rain-filled, threatening clouds of slate-grey hue sometimes seem close enough to touch. Even in countryside north of Sydney, in the Hawkesbury Valley which is farmland like the landscapes I'm used to and has similar contours, there would be no waking up from a long journey and mistaking it for East Lothian.
This picture was taken from the balcony last night. It's spring, the days are sunny but the nights are cool, and the moon beamed through the clouds above the city.

Another country

2010-09-23T11:09:00.004+08:00

I've moved cities, from Hong Kong to Sydney. I have a bit of time in hand before I start my new job and have created a new blog, A Place A Day, to give me an incentive to go out every day and find somewhere new. It's been a satisfying experience, although I find that as usual I have put pressure on myself to complete it every day; during a week I was spending at work, I only managed one post and felt strangely guilty about it. I'm so used to working full time in a proper role; I'm in a strange limbo where I no longer have any responsibility for Asia and have yet to take on any responsibility in Australia. It's taken a few weeks but I am beginning to enjoy it.

In the meantime I am also enjoying sitting in the sunshine on the balcony every morning with a takeaway latte and a (terrible, on my first attempt) homemade muffin; buying flowers (beautiful ranunculus and straight-as-a-die tulips); and cycling along civilised streets on civilised cycle paths looking for interesting places.

Vo Vo voom

2010-09-18T15:34:00.003+08:00

At work this week, I attended a meeting of the managers of one of our government contracts. It took place in a drab government office with awkward chairs and yellowing sellotape still stuck to the wall from long-gone admonitory posters. The managers, who'd moved from Castlereagh Street bringing their giant desks with them, were apparently much more well behaved than usual because I was there; and to top it all off, someone had very thoughtfully bought a packet of Iced VoVos which were served on chipped plates. The Iced VoVo is an old-fashioned kind of biscuit, which was described to me as being "the kind of biscuit that old ladies have when you go round to see them". I'd never come across one before and was quite delighted with them - so much so that I ate four. It's a thin biscuit topped with a stripe of jam, banked by two strips of sprinkled coconut. Colourful, tasty, and satisfyingly old fashioned: coupled with the surroundings, I could have been in a meeting in 1975.

Swayed

2010-09-08T18:10:00.003+08:00

Tabitha Simmons Clodagh wedges. Seen in Lane Crawford; picked up, tried on, sighed over. Over $1000? Never.

Simple pleasures

2010-09-05T09:32:00.003+08:00

A planter box full of lavender on a sunny Sunday morning.

I am beautiful and clean

2010-09-03T11:08:00.007+08:00

These beautiful, and beautifully wrapped, objects arrived in a parcel from Singapore this morning. From Vice and Vanity. I love the witty little skeletal arm on the perspex necklace, and the uncompromising uniqueness of the golden half-moon. Objects to display as well as wear.

A day to remember

2010-09-01T14:13:00.001+08:00

Kirsten Owen 2000, by Corinne Day, 1962-2010

The Furniture

2010-08-26T07:46:00.000+08:00

To things we are ghosts, soft shapes
in their blindness that push and pull,
a warm touch tugging on a stuck drawer,
a face glancing by in a mirror
like a pebble skipped across a passive pond.

They hear rumors of us, things, in their own rumble,
and notice they are not where they were in the last century,
and feel, perhaps, themselves lifted by tides
of desire, of coveting; a certain moisture
mildews their surfaces, and they guess that we have passed.

They decay, of course, but so slowly; a vase
or mug survives a thousand uses. Our successive
ownerships slip from them, our fury
flickers at their reverie’s dimmest edge.
Their numb solidity sleeps through our screams.

Daguerrotypes Victorian travellers
produced of tombs and temples still intact
contain, sometimes, a camel driver, or beggar: a brown
man in a galabia who moved his head, his life
a blur, a dark smear on the unchanging stone.

John Updike

Vigorous anonymity

2010-08-23T21:40:00.001+08:00

The Healing of a Lunatic Boy (1986), Stephen Conroy

The first time I think I felt really excited about art was at an exhibition at the then newly-opened Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Belford Road, Edinburgh, in 1987. Entitled The Vigorous Imagination, it was a showcase for contemporary Scottish artists, many of them painters such as Stephen Conroy, John Bellany, Adrian Wizniewski, Ken Currie and Peter Howson. I was particularly taken with Stephen Conroy, whose painting above was used for the poster, which I had a precious copy of for years. I remember feeling such a sense of amazement, walking round the new, expansive space, taking in ideas, that I could hardly breathe. Before then, paintings and sculpture and installations had never really spoken to me, even though I grew up in a house where art was all around me; I had an appreciation of it that fell short of real engagement. The mystery and majesty of Conroy's paintings, as well as his undeniable skill, had a profound impact on me. I longed to own one.

The lone sands stretch far away

2010-08-18T12:33:00.008+08:00

My first view of Dubai was from the window of an airport taxi at 8pm local time, with the oven turned down to 39°C. During the day I stayed in the hotel; it's Ramadan, Muslims are fasting between sunrise and sunset, and may not observe anyone else eating; so if you want to eat or drink, even water, it has to be behind closed doors and almost exclusively in hotels, which have solid doors, no windows and heavy, dark curtains screening off the restaurant areas.

Towards sundown I took a taxi through the city with my colleague. Through a slight haze the sun was a perfect burning orange disc over a flat landscape; the architecture outside the centre is anodyne and the streets were deserted. The taxi driver raced along pristine freeways at 120 kmph, still being passed at much greater speeds by dusty SUVs and sports cars with heavily tinted windows. From very far away the stalagmite shape of Burj al Khalifa, still, for the moment, the world's tallest building, can be seen, but other interesting buildings, bulbous and squat, sail-like or funnel-shaped, cluster around it. There's distance between buildings, unlike Hong Kong, where people's lives are crammed together, and a curiously bland feel to everything.

At Madinat Jumeirah (shown here by day) we walked through an entirely ersatz souk of about 5 years' pedigree, filled with brass lions, lanterns, tea glasses and other trinkets, to a Persian restaurant alongside a manmade creek along which wooden abra transport sightseers. The surroundings have the attractive, though inauthentic, feel of a luxury hotel complex (which part of it is). Heat gentle enough to sit outside, lights strung in the palm trees, a salad of walnuts, mint and goat's cheese, slow roasted chicken, peppermint tea, and the loud insistent sound of a waterpump as a constant, droning accompaniment to the meal.

So long Marianne

2010-08-14T18:52:00.010+08:00

Poster for Marianne Breslauer exhibition at the Berlinische Galerie, showing the Swiss photographer, journalist and androgyne Annemarie Schwarzenbach (1932): "She was neither a man nor a woman, but an angel, an archangel".

I'll be your mirror

2010-08-13T06:57:00.010+08:00

It's a colour photograph of a young woman, in her early twenties. Her name is Anne. She has a bright, intelligent face and long brown hair, parted fractionally to the right and slightly messily gathered in a bunch at the back of her neck. She is wearing a chunky black poloneck and what appears to be a graduation gown with a white collar. It might just have been a slightly fancy late 1970s/early 1980s dress with an embroidered neckline, but I can see someone in the background wearing something similar and both of them are holding red rolls, the cardboard tubes containing degree certificates. There are people in the background: over her right shoulder, a blurred group of four, including the other girl in her graduation gown, are looking her way, with smiles on their faces. Something caught their eye; maybe the person who's taking the photo was saying something loud or funny to Anne which is why she's half smiling, slightly ruefully, slightly knowingly. She has a peculiar look on her face which suggests things unsaid to the person behind the camera. Over her left shoulder, there are three men in brown suits, also blurred, with their backs to us. Anne's right hand is in motion because she's putting what looks like a light blue blanket, but is probably a good winter coat, over her left arm. Her pale left hand appears under the coat, holding the red roll: a strong, thin hand. In the far background, grey sandstone tenements; I think the street is cobbled. It's unmistakeably Edinburgh. Anne is unmistakeably Scottish.

I know some things about Anne: she died when she was young, probably not long after the photo was taken, in a car crash on the A9, on her way home. She was from Wick. From this and the evidence in the photo, I deduce that the photo was taken at her graduation from Edinburgh University, somewhere near St Giles' Church in the High Street, at the latest in the very early 1980s.

A friend posted Anne's picture on Facebook and I've been returning to it without knowing why. I find it poignant that he's tagged her in the photograph, but there will never be anything for her name to link to in that prosaic, often uninvited Facebook way: pictures of her life, friends, marriage, children, laughing in the sunshine in the garden, raising a wine glass in an ironic toast, emerging grinning from the sea after a swim. It seems mawkish yet irresistible to conclude, from the expression on her face, that she somehow knew what was going to happen to her at that moment and transmitted the yearning for her lost life into the lens. This might be the only picture of her on the internet. And she's looking out of her short life and telling me to be happy.

Photograph courtesy of David Heavenor.

Kiss this thing goodbye

2010-08-04T08:14:00.005+08:00

In my teens I used to proclaim (somewhat smugly, I think) that "nostalgia is the enemy of the future". Although most of the records of my teenage years (during the 1980s) are available on iTunes I've generally avoided revisiting them, with a few notable exceptions (Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, Scary Monsters, Sulk). This might be a reflection, cynics would suggest, of the generally ephemeral quality of much of the music I was passionate about in the 1980s, a lot of which now sounds amazingly dated (The Brilliant Corners? The Bodines? The Close Lobsters? The Woodentops?), but I also have a sense that there is more than enough interesting new music around without the need for retrospection.

In a conscious departure from usual practice (which in a strange way actually made me feel a little ashamed) I recently downloaded del Amitri's eponymous first album. Recorded in more innocent times (1985, to be precise), before they embraced Americana as many Scottish bands do, it still holds up fairly well: many of the lyrics are obvious juvenilia (the definition of "irony" in the lyric to "Former Owner" is as inaccurate as Alanis Morrissette's), but much of it still sounds as fresh, clean-cut, and passionate as Justin Currie used to be.

At the time, I was obsessed with the record; even now I can recite the lyrics by heart despite a gap of at least 20 years since I last listened to it. I wrote to them and got nice letters in reply. My sister and I went to see del Amitri in a club in Tollcross, Edinburgh, not long after the album came out. There were only a handful of people there and we stood slightly awkwardly on the dancefloor watching. Afterwards, leaving, we met the band packing their van for the return trip to Glasgow. They offered us a lift; we declined. They weren't looking for groupies; they just thought, being the nice boys they were, that we might need a lift home.

I moved to Glasgow in 1987. After the success of their subsequent records on the back of their second album "Waking Hours" (1989), which I of course snubbed, due in part to their massive popularity - no longer a minority taste to be proud of - and also to what I saw as their capitulation to the mores of mainstream success by embracing a much more laconic, lazily rockin', American, and accordingly less distinctive sound, I used to see Justin Currie loping along the streets with his pointy cowboy boots, skinny jeans and massive sideburns. I also met him a few times at the Cul de Sac in Ashton Lane, Glasgow, near the university. I told him how much I'd loved their first record and he smiled ruefully and said he loved it too. And listening to it now reminds me of things which are worth remembering.

From a distance

2010-08-04T07:10:00.004+08:00

Being awake much too early with work preoccupations has its advantages. The view from my window towards the goddess of mercy at Kwan Yan Temple and Stanley Bay beyond, just after 6.30am.

Such great heights

2010-08-03T22:48:00.002+08:00

The view from the CitySpace bar at the top of Swissotel the Stamford, Singapore, at sunset, with two apple martinis waiting to be devoured (in this instance, one by me, and one by my colleague from the UK office). Every time I go there I remind myself how lucky I am. And not just because of the apple martinis, although they are the best I've ever tasted.

Detailed

2010-07-28T18:37:00.005+08:00

Coleman Street, Singapore. A whole "fox" tail, with a texture suspiciously like real fur, dyed in the style pretentiously known as "ombre", attached to a bag by means of a little gold hook, and all for no apparent reason and to slightly disturbing effect.

Scotland

2010-07-22T20:39:00.001+08:00

It was a day peculiar to this piece of the planet,
when larks rose on long thin strings of singing
and the air shifted with the shimmer of actual angels.
Greenness entered the body. The grasses
shivered with presences, and sunlight
stayed like a halo on hair and heather and hills.
Walking into town, I saw, in a radiant raincoat,
the woman from the fish-shop. 'What a day it is!'
cried I, like a sunstruck madman.
And what did she have to say for it?
Her brow grew bleak, her ancestors raged in their graves
as she spoke with their ancient misery:
'We'll pay for it, we'll pay for it, we'll pay for it!'

Alastair Reid

Go with the flow

2010-07-19T19:27:00.002+08:00

Beautiful, and possibly unwearable, unless you happen to be entirely lacking the key characteristics of the female form (curves, dimples, cellulite). Roksanda Ilincic, from Net-a-Porter.

By the neck

2010-07-05T21:05:00.006+08:00

In a shop in Stamford Place, an old building in Singapore (which hosts the hilariously outdated Singapore Walk of Fame which boasts, amongst other where-are-they-nows, Debbie Gibson's handprints on a concrete plaque), I saw an amazing jewellery collection by local Singaporean designers Vice and Vanity. There's a handful of little shops running along one side of the building, with old-fashioned grey-painted exteriors: interesting-looking, one-off boutiques, a nice contrast to the shopping centre Raffles the Plaza opposite, with its worldwide identikit stores (Ralph Lauren et al) and perpetual sales. On my recent trip, caught in a heavy downpour, I sought the shop out again but it had closed - I'd been thinking about their striking necklaces ever since and wishing I'd bought one. I didn't even know the name of the designers, but their style is so unmistakable that when I saw a necklace by Vice & Vanity in a copy of Singapore ELLE, I knew it was by the same designers.

What I like about these necklaces, aside from the fact that they're so incredibly striking and unusual, is this combination of industrial design with iconography that seems almost primitive (the ancient Egyptians spring to mind), but is actually very modern both in its execution and in its materials (perspex, spage age lightweight metals, and plastic).

Saying stop your sericulture

2010-07-04T18:24:00.007+08:00

Male silkworm moth, picture by Kevin Wanner, an entomologist at the University of Illinois.

China accounts for 70% of global silk production, but according to the Financial Times the price of silk has doubled since the start of 2009 and now stands at its highest level in more than 15 years. The China Cocoon and Silk Exchange said that the price of silk cocoons reached RMB92,700(US$13,570) per tonne in mid-April. Those poor little silkworms only eat mulberry leaves, and the breakneck urbanisation of the key silk-producing region around Shanghai has reduced available land for mulberry trees.

Output has declined 15% to 84,000 tonnes last year, and the drought that began in late 2009 has exacerbated a slide in production. Prices are forecast to rise further, but it's also suspected that Chinese investors are squeezing the market by hoarding silk in the hope of increasing demand and therefore price.

Lanvin green silk draped dress. What an amazing creature is the silkworm!

Five leaves left

2010-06-29T16:40:00.003+08:00

A banana leaf lunch at the Royal Selangor Club in KL. We began with an ice-cold lassi. The banana leaf is loaded up with savoury condiments (chopped cucumber in yogurt, mango, deep-fried chilli pods, spicy cabbage) and steamed rice ("with extra vitamin B", said our host). A choice of sauces is ladled on top of the rice - I chose curried daal and then took this picture. Then a sequence of little dishes are passed around - mutton, chicken, beef, and fish - and with the right hand, you scrape up a collection of different flavours and eat. When you're finished, the banana leaf is folded over and removed. A highly efficient way of eating and so tasty that, urged on by everyone around me, I ate much more than I was hungry for as our host and his friends talked Malaysian politics, corruption, legal gossip and compared blood sugar levels (really).

Truly Asia

2010-06-28T08:19:00.007+08:00

I'm in Kuala Lumpur, probably for the last time in a while. It's a city quite a few people I know profess to dislike. My first ever visit here seven years ago got off to a shaky start when my overeager taxi driver started telling me his wife didn't understand him and asked me to come and sit next to him in the front seat as we sped in his battered Mercedes along a near-deserted highway from the airport, surrounded by jungle as far as the eye could see. As we raced past an exit ramp clearly marked "Kuala Lumpur", I clutched my mobile phone, which had run out of battery, nervously.

The cityscape here is quite different from other Asian locations such as Hong Kong and Singapore. As Malaysia more or less successfully keeps its inherent racial, ethnic and religious tensions under control, the architecture reflects the mix of cultures and the exigencies of the climate, albeit with a relentless mall-creep which is typical of Asia's successful cities. The extraordinary, gleaming Petronas Towers rise boldly above the city, visible from miles around and startlingly illuminated at night.

There are plenty of flaws: the religious police, the corruption, the terrible traffic, a constant prurient interest in western women on their own; but I always feel a sense of wonder, curiosity and interest here. The lack of uniformity in the buildings means there's constantly some new and interesting conjunction to observe of Islamic minarets, multi-inclined Imperial Chinese roofs, shiny shopping malls, colonial turrets, ancient shop rows and dirty shacks.

Divided by a common language

2010-06-14T07:44:00.008+08:00

Because I work for an American company I'm often subjected to the newest corporate newspeak, either directly from source or after it's been adopted with alacrity by my more eager-to-please UK colleagues. The most irksome ones, with the only sensible response in brackets thereafter:

Reach out. Sample usage: "I will reach out to her about it." (Er, no, surely it would be quicker and easier just to email?)
Around, as in "have we made a decision around this?" (No, but we have made a decision about it.)
Sunset. "Corporate have decided to sunset this product". (Does that mean it will come up again tomorrow morning?)

Can someone please explain to me how any of these tiresome augmentations of the language advance the use of it in any way?

National velvet

2010-06-11T21:22:00.008+08:00

I bought the new record by The National, High Violet, in HMV yesterday. I listen to music sitting at my computer, with headphones on (which means I can't hear the phone ringing), which can be unsatisfying as I'm distracted by what I'm reading, the news about peculiar apparent murderer Joran van der Sloot (how can someone who was born in 1987 be a peculiar apparent murderer already?) or looking at fractal patterns or an exposition of geometry in nature, or going on some other internet odyssey or down a blind alley in search of something I can't quite remember.

Listening to this, though, I'm closing my eyes just to take it in. Matt Berninger's voice is deep and resonant, if sometimes world-weary, the arrangements are lush, the lyrics are intriguing ("You'll find commiseration in everyone's eyes/The storm'll suck the pretty girls into the skies" (Little Faith)), and every song draws you into itself in a different way, even though that's often with a kind of graceful bleakness. The first two tracks, Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks and England, are both haunting and absolutely beautiful. The latter, in particular, builds to an incredible, wounding climactic chorus and then dies away in contemplation. The sound is brooding and intelligent; at its best, this is an incredible record.

On the cover of a magazine

2010-06-03T19:38:00.007+08:00

Me and my sister used to read a magazine called Jackie (1964-1993), published by D.C. Thomson in Dundee. In my mind's eye, Jackie has Leslie Ash (wearing a checked shirt) on the cover and a special pullout centrefold of Leif Garrett (wearing a checked shirt) inside. Jackie had a splendid, mordant advice column, called Cathy and Claire, true life photo stories featuring true life (ie boyfriend) dilemmas, and fashion and make-up tips, many of which inserted themselves in my brain so thoroughly that I will never forget them.

never pluck a hair out of a mole
don't brush your hair when it's wet
apply foundation with a sponge
don't wear clashing patterns
horizontal stripes make you look fat
chocolate gives you spots

I was recently invited to an event where the trichologist Philip Kingsley was going to share his wisdom about hair. I wasn't able to go, but I was longing to be able to ask him about the veracity of some of those Jackie legends: wash your hair as infrequently as possible (apparently he says the opposite)? Use the hottest water you can bear? These things are modern superstitions. I'll never forget them, but over time I might have worked out that some of them are subject to challenge. Over time I've also added some of my own (from, gasp, other sources):

blot hair with a towel before blow-drying
only condition the ends of your hair, not the roots
dark chocolate contains anti-oxidants and is good for your skin
tomato ketchup contains lycopene (thanks, Men's Health) which ditto
reading a broadsheet newspaper every day is good for your vocabulary (thanks, Mr Campbell)
only floss the teeth you want to keep

Animal magic

2010-05-31T09:02:00.002+08:00

Animal Kingdom is a relentless, powerful and utterly compelling film - without a doubt the best thing I've seen all year. It's Shakespearean in its ambition and in the tragic arc of the story, featuring an incredible performance by first-time actor James Frecheville in the role of a young man dropped into the heart of a Melbourne criminal family which is about to be torn apart. The characters are beautifully, yet economically drawn; the cinematography is precise, the action evolves with intensity, there's humour and there's despair. Music is used sparingly but effectively, and the key actors' performances are often low key but always true. A quite incredible film which you must see at all costs.

Jolie laide

2010-05-15T09:47:00.006+08:00

You can't tell me he wasn't a genius. This isn't beautiful, by any means - hence the title of this post - in fact it's quite disturbing; the pattern is hypnotic, you're looking into the belly of a beast; it draws you in, it rustles in the grass, it follows you stealthily... To be worn once, and then kept in a glass box.

Alexander McQueen, from Net-a-Porter. GBP3,300, and already sold out.

Burn baby burn

2010-05-09T21:09:00.008+08:00

Every year for the last 6 years I've raced at Deep Water Bay dragonboat races. Every year, my team's kit has had tops with thin straps; and every year, the sun beats down and despite the apparently perspicacious, not to mention frequent, application of sunscreen of factor 30 and above, I get weird burn-then-tan marks around my shoulders in the shape of little straps. How old am I?

I'm ruined, then, for dresses like this one. But this year I decided enough was enough and though it didn't arrive in time for today's race, our kit has cap-sleeved t-shirts instead.

Dress, Alexander McQueen. Espadrilles, Chloé. Both from Matches.

To be a light

2010-05-04T20:13:00.004+08:00

Not long ago I watched a documentary about the 7/7 bombings. At the end, there was a clip from one of the remembrance services and someone was singing a beautiful piece of music that I recognised. I use my mother as a MyPhone app: if a fragment of music has been haunting me, I'll phone her and sing it to her. Often she knows it straight away; if not, she writes it down (one of the advantages of being able to write musical notation) and asks someone in what I imagine to be a vast network of musical contacts: Paul the clarinettist, Mary the conductor, Alan the treble recorder player, Morag the composer...

This beautiful, elegiac piece of music was sung in Rosslyn Chapel in 1983, and recorded there, by my classmate J, sparsely accompanied by our class teacher on what I remembered as a clarinet. I remembered both words and music but not enough to find it on Youtube.

Marg didn't know what it was called, but amazingly, she found the cassette recording within minutes and played it to me as I sat enthralled on my sofa in HK. It wasn't a clarinet; it was a treble recorder (which Marg plays). J himself did the rest: I emailed him and of course he knew it. Here it is - it was used as the end credits for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979), this time accompanied by a trumpet.

In a peculiar coincidence, I bumped into my friend Claire at Pret a Manger this morning and was telling her about hearing J's voice from 1983 down the phone from East Lothian, and the story of how I'd come to be listening to this before leaving for work. She told me that she was at school with Paul Phoenix, whose voice you have just heard.

Charmless garments: 4

2010-04-23T21:37:00.009+08:00

Let me introduce this latest contender in the pantheon of Charmless Garments by stating that in my view it should only ever be worn by children under the age of 5 or by people trying to ingratiate themselves with the same (children's TV presenters or paedophiles?). Yes, it's the dungaree. A boundlessly unflattering item, to be sure, proven to give the wearer absolutely no waist, to contain unnecessary accoutrements of straps and buckles and the like, and sad to report, now featuring, in leather and in a wholly unpleasant shade of brown, in a modern style yet still absolutely vile (see for yourself!), in the window of Chloé in the Mandarin Oriental building in Des Voeux Road.

I confess to owning a pair when I was old enough to know better: they were from the legendary What Every Woman Wants, and were pale purple, slightly shiny, and made from brushed cotton with a zip at the back. I must have been 14 and had just started at a new school where everyone was cooler than me. One day I picked up on a strange atmosphere of barely concealed hysteria during a morning lesson. I had no idea what was going on; it just seemed as though suppressed laughter was crackling in the room. It was only some months later that someone kindly enlightened me that the hysteria had been caused by my dungarees: the zip at the back had begun to creep down as soon as I sat in my chair. The person behind me spotted this and alerted everyone else within view; as I sat oblivious and innocent, the zip continued to descend, helped along by a ruler wielded, gently but presumably with much pantomime, by the person behind me. (Oh the cruelty! That this should have been the only person I had ever wanted to impress only added to the retrospective, woeful, mortification.)

But you don't need me to tell you that the dungaree is rotten to the core. Just look at the picture.

Play misty for me

2010-04-15T16:28:00.002+08:00

The view out of the cab window on Tuesday morning as we left Stanley. I did feel like asking my taxi driver whether he might not be getting a bit too old for this sort of caper: we crept along as he squinted uncertainly out of the window and tentatively tapped the accelerator as though he had no idea how to drive. It has been cool and very misty for a few days: I was absent in Singapore for a week, during which time my beautiful healthy plant grew sticky white mould on its formerly glossy green leaves, the couch got strange patches on it, and everything feels damp to the touch. I've had the dehumidifier running (I recycle the water into the cistern, never fear) and it fills in a day while I'm out at work.

Red hair got me into brawls

2010-04-12T22:57:00.008+08:00

Aside from a period of around 8 years' duration when I dyed my hair black (although I emphatically wasn't a goth, I favoured pale skin and red lips, as well as black clothes, and consequently earned myself a cheerful greeting from a stranger in a Glasgow street: "Hello Morticia!"), I have been hennaing my hair since 1983.

I started at a new school at the age of 13, having been experimentally educated "at home" for the preceding four years. I was out of practice at being normal, and every day I was taunted by the sophistication of my new classmates: barely into their teens they might have been, but they knew things, they smoked cigarettes, they went to parties, they drank too much and they had lovebites bestowed upon them. Every day was terrifying to me.

With the money from my Saturday job I'd saved up and bought new clothes from the dirt-cheap fashion store on South Bridge, Edinburgh, What Every Woman Wants ("What Everys" for short), and emboldened I giddily acquiesced to my sister's suggestion one Sunday night that we should henna my hair. We mixed up the henna with a fork as instructed and piled the hot, stinking, red-brown vegetable matter onto my head. It stayed on for a long time, much longer than instructed because we had no idea what we were dealing with, and when we washed it off, in an astonishing transformation my hair was bright, shiny, and suddenly very red.

As bad luck would have it, I was late for school the next day. As I crept to my desk to sit down, I felt eyes on me in the silence. Then someone hissed loudly, nastily: "What's she done to her hair?"

"Probably dyed it", came the contemptuous answer. I shrank into my seat.

Early over-enthusiastic disasters behind me, I still henna my hair from time to time. The side-effects are always the same: it creates a terrible mess, with glops of muddy matter dropped everywhere by my careless hands; it's very strong and can dye your scalp if you let it; and it has a powerful smell, which doesn't wash off for a few days. But henna leaves my hair feeling soft and looking healthy, in pleasant shades of red which shine in the sun enough to gladden my shallow little heart.

[Picture from Tim Burton's fashion shoot for Harper's Bazaar]

Dulce et decorum est

2010-04-11T16:59:00.002+08:00

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen (18 March 1893 – 4 November 1918)

Rankle

2010-03-31T23:27:00.003+08:00

There are so many things wrong with this, why, I don't even know where to begin. The man (nominally) responsible for this deplorable quarterboot suedette sandal (this is my name for it, but I welcome other attempts to describe it) is Michael Kors. Kors - hang your head in shame! The worst offence is the sheer pointlessness of it: the excess fabric that some poor animal died to provide, uselessly adorning the unlucky wearer's upper ankle, and the insolence of that gold-look buckle, coupled with an entirely petty heel... it's the cankle (a condition whereby your ankles and your calves merge into one) made all too real. This unspeakable item can be yours for US$295. As an ex-colleague of mine from a best-forgotten summer job at Edinburgh University Registry was fond of remarking: "I could scream!"

Damned lies

2010-03-23T22:15:00.009+08:00

(Photograph Tyrone Siu/Reuters)

Not long after I arrived in Hong Kong, a lavish, shiny brochure came through the door for an incredible-looking new development, "Bel-Air on the Peak". In the pictures, graceful landscaped gardens wound down to a pier where a white boat awaited. Chandeliers glistered and Old Masters glimmered from the walls of high ceilinged French-style apartments. A woman in a couture gown darted barefoot along soft grass; beyond lay a building resembling the Palace of Versailles.

Closer scrutiny revealed the following: the building was not "on the Peak" (the most expensive place in Hong Kong and a prestigious address); it was in a new development, built on reclaimed land and therefore much closer to sea level, called Cyberport which had been handed by the government to the wealthy princeling son of one of Asia's richest men without going to competitive tender. There was no access to the waterfront, and there would therefore be no elegant boats waiting to whisk the residents to the Riviera. There were tiny gardens with no grass. The pictures were of a French palace - in France.

It turns out that this entirely fraudulent depiction, which would not be permitted in other jurisdictions, is quite commonplace in Hong Kong. The adverts often follow the same pattern: featuring beautiful couples (often of Western appearance), the women in extravagant dresses, the man in a suit, comporting themselves smugly/elegantly before a generously laid table with champagne glasses in hand, an incredible view out of their window. Blue skies, expansive space, greenery everywhere.

I was reminded of this trickery this morning on glimpsing another risible, aspirational ad: a man playing chess with a genius child in front of their floor-to-ceiling picture window with, again, clear skies and twinkling lights just like diamonds. Compare and contrast this with what is really outside every window in Hong Kong: in the last couple of days, pollution levels well over even the piss-poor, forgiving Hong Kong scale. Tonight's paddle was cancelled due to pollution - a first. But I suppose Hong Kongers will continue to convince themselves, as they drive to work in their Mercedes, encouraged by deceitful advertising and the government blaming sandstorms in Beijing, that they aren't part of the problem.

Turn the wheel and look to windward

2010-03-20T08:59:00.004+08:00

This is a photograph of my parents, Chris and Marg, taken on a trip from Esjberg in Denmark to Harwich in 1963 by, according to my dad, a psychologist from Albuquerque who Chris remembers for "his beautiful jade and silver rings". I love this photograph, which is nearly 50 years old but has a strangely modern quality.

Spring heeled gym

2010-03-09T21:57:00.000+08:00

I first joined a gym in 2000, when I worked in Fleet Street in London. It was a Fitness First, with trademark anodyne slogans, apparently intended to inspire, stenciled on the lime green walls (so bland were they, I can't remember them now, but they would have been of the "power comes from within" variety). Since then I've been a member of a few.

Each gym is astonishingly similar to the next: brightly lit, garishly painted, and always pumping with execrable music (today, in Seasons Fitness in the Citibank Tower in Hong Kong: Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart to a pounding disco beat, and more Black Eyed Peas than anyone could possibly deserve: thus cementing my firm belief that My Humps is one of the single most vacuous, idly offensive, and stupid records ever made. "My lovely lady lumps!"). Generally speaking, though, and despite the urban myths, even the most expensive gyms tend not to be places where people show off. Absurdly, my current gym has a "Women only" section which is always empty. That's because everyone is studiously minding their own business and no one cares if you're sweating and grunting because they are too.

I've had a personal trainer, a Chinese guy called Peter, for the last few months. We've rarely done the same exercise twice and I often laugh out loud during our sessions because I'm enjoying it so much, despite the fact that he works me so hard. In a complete reversal of fortune from my 20s and early 30s, I need to exercise and get miserable if I don't. I'm always complaining about the music, though, to no avail - whether it's writing "No more Black Eyed Peas Please!" on the feedback form at Seasons Fitness yesterday, or suggesting to a blank-eyed creature, who was languidly arranged behind the counter and apparently in charge at Red gym in SoHo, that perhaps the self-indulgent faux-suicidal howlings of American goth rockers Evanescence might not be conducive to positive thinking, gym-style.

Those are pearls

2010-03-08T21:30:00.004+08:00

Shoes, Chie Mihara, from Plümo.

This is the second pair of Chie Mihara shoes I've stumbled upon (weirdly, on her website - watch out for the noodling Spanish guitar, running water and birdsong - I couldn't find a single pair I liked). These are a little bit chunky, but have such a lovely mother of pearl detail that I can forgive them anything. They have a 1940s feel so at first I thought that a teadress might be a perfect match, but I think they are perhaps too complicated to compete with a pattern, so red it is, and what's more no jewellery is to be worn, or else.
Dress, Giambattista Valli, from Browns.

Tagine over the asylum

2010-03-08T21:00:00.005+08:00

An excellent recipe for lamb tagine from Taste.com. I'm not the greatest cook, and I don't really like to follow recipes (too impatient), but I followed this one, the results were delicious, and I was inordinately pleased with myself as a result. I love the sweet and savoury combination of lamb and apricots. I was once told by a po-faced personal trainer, who fancied himself as a nutritionist, that I should never combine fruit and meat: I am frequently delighted to ignore that advice. If this doesn't make you feel hungry, here's some painstaking sausage-related research.

Ingredients (serves 4)
2 teaspoons sweet paprika
2 teaspoons ground coriander
2 teaspoons ground cumin
1 1/2 teaspoons ground ginger
1 teaspoon chilli powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon white pepper
1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom
1/2 teaspoon allspice
2 teaspoons salt
2 tablespoons olive oil
grated rind and juice of 2 lemons
1.2kg diced lamb
1 cup chicken stock
3/4 cup dried apricots
1/2 cup raisins
1 cup thick, Greek-style yoghurt
1/2 cup pistachio kernels, roughly chopped
couscous, to serve

Method
1. Combine spices and salt in a large bowl. Add oil, rind and half the juice and stir to form a paste. Add lamb and stir until well-coated in paste. Cover and refrigerate for 3 hours if time permits.
2. Preheat oven to 180°C. Put lamb mixture into a casserole dish with a tight-fitting lid. Add stock and remaining lemon juice. Stir until well-combined.
3. Cover and cook for 1 hour. Stir in dried apricot and raisins. Cook, covered for a further 40 minutes or until lamb is tender. Serve immediately with a dollop of yoghurt, sprinkling of pistachio kernels and couscous on the side.