This rough magic

A clutch made from Japanese kimono material by Hong Kong based designer Mischa. And an even more beautiful dress by William Tempest. His name sounds like a nom de plume; Shakespeare's first name and his best play.


ARIEL: All hail, great master! grave sir, hail! I come
To answer thy best pleasure; be't to fly,
To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride
On the curl'd clouds, to thy strong bidding task
Ariel and all his quality.
The Tempest, Act I, Scene I

Working wardrobe

Promenade in green: RM by Roland Mouret


Fade to grey: the deceitfully named Cheap'N' Chic by Moschino


Drapes of wrath: Diane von Furstenburg

Three very different dresses (all from Net-a-Porter) which could conceivably be worn to work. And all you need now is a great pair of shoes.
Come to heel: Rupert Sanderson from Browns Fashion

And finally a dress that could never be worn to work (but which would go nicely with the shoes; for people who like everything to match, of whom I'm not sure I'm one, that's the kind of match they like):


Hips, lips, power: William Tempest from Browns Fashion

Hat in the city

On recent visits to Sydney I've noticed a surprising number of people wearing hats. Proper hats: fedoras and panamas, cloches and gatsbys, and even what could possibly have been a homburg. My friend Davey has been photographing people in London wearing stovepipe hats. I am very fond of hats - certainly of the idea of them and, I suppose, of that romantic connection with the era when it was a social requirement to wear a hat.


Sadly, the reality of Hong Kong (not least the heat - August was the hottest on record and it's been at least 32 degrees every day) is that I am more likely to be seen wearing that most awful and unflattering form of headgear, the baseball cap, albeit only in direct connection with watersports and never, repeat never, at any other time. What I would really prefer, of course, is to be nonchalantly sporting an attractive fedora at all times, even in the canoe.


Attractive fedora from La Cerise Sur Le Chapeau at Net-a-Porter.

Back to basics

A bride-to-be was having her pre-wedding wedding shots done at the end of Stanley Main Street. With the groom nowhere to be seen, she twitched uncomfortably as a busybody attendant slicked extra make-up (wholly unhelpfully) onto her face. She looked altogether rather uncomfortable with the whole thing. I stood on a wall behind her to get the shot of her back.

Jude the Obscure

From the window of a taxi in Happy Valley: poor old Jude Law in a very uncomfortable-looking pair of "slacks", the latest in a highly risible campaign by Dunhill starring the man looking more ill at ease in every one. Look closely; he's perched on a canister, "reading" a "script", with, for no apparent reason, a pair of headphones at his feet.

Take it to the bank

Further evidence of infantilism in Hong Kong culture: the Hello Kitty credit card, brought to you by Dah Sing Bank. Hello Kitty, it appears, also has a towheaded boy friend, Dear Daniel. Wouldn't it be cute if couples were to have one each? Why look, if you put the two cards together the oversized hearts toted by each of them are perfectly aligned. Incongruously enough, the platinum version of the Hello Kitty/Dear Daniel credit card appears to be as black as pitch, albeit with a freakish outline of the pair of them emblazoned upon it, so that's something.

It would be my opinion that anyone immature enough to want a credit card which sports images of Hello Kitty is too immature to be extended a line of credit.

Dear catastrophe waitress

In the year I finished my degree and before I went back to Glasgow to do the postgraduate Diploma in Legal Practice, I spent a miserable summer back in East Lothian. I'd split up with my boyfriend just before graduating; I didn't want to sign on; home was only the place I'd always longed to get away from and seemed cold and damp; I wasn't getting on well with my Mum; I thought I wasn't going to get a grant for my course, and so on and so self-pitying. I took a job as a waitress in Musselburgh ("The Honest Toun"), in a place called Medaci's. Near Musselburgh's one bright spot, Luca's, it was a "Mediterranean Restaurant", which was really just a big room at the back of the kebab shop which the tubby owner had fancied might make a good place for fine dining. The locals viewed it with amusement: as they waited for their kebabs they'd poke their heads through the bead curtain and mock me as I stood there waiting for customers that rarely came.

The chef was a foul-mouthed, ex-Merchant Navy chef, an ancient, wiry little man called Tommy; in the absence of any customers, I used to spend most of my time in the kitchen eating delicious spaghetti arabbiata freshly cooked by Tommy as he regaled me with his stories of shagging on the high seas and knocked back whisky. There I learned the waitress's conundrum: you don't want it to be quiet because it's mind-numbingly boring waiting for customers; but when customers do arrive, you loathe and despise them for choosing your restaurant and wish them gone with all due dispatch.

For a while there was a Greek waiter there, who used to stand uncomfortably close to me behind my little counter. The boss told me to re-heat the cold coffee from the day before to offer to customers. I couldn't work the cappuccino machine. I had to invent a banana split from scratch as I had no idea what was supposed to go into one. We had the Gypsy Kings on continuous loop. The boss's nasty little son, an equally tubby 11 year old with a lightning bolt shaved on the side of his round little head, used to sneak in behind my back into the fridge and spray canned cream from the tin straight into his mouth. Tommy became an unlikely ally; he hated the boss as much as I did and even began offering me a drink of his whisky. The summer seemed to last an eternity. At its end, I returned to Glasgow, having received a grant to do my course, and it was no surprise that Medaci's closed not long after that.

Musselburgh's being recommended by The Guardian as a place to visit to get away from the hubbub of the Edinburgh Festival. When I read that, I was instantly transported back to being paid £2.50 an hour at a failing restaurant; and I just can't see anything attractive in the idea of visiting the place. Even now, though the kebab shop is long gone too, I shoot a bad glance in its direction whenever I'm unlucky enough to pass by.

Completely barking

Net-a-porter is currently selling up leather slippers called NewbarKs. The irritating, pretentious and unnecessary capital K aside, there is something quite nauseating about the tone of the puff that's written about them: "Stay ahead of trend ... Take a style tip from off-duty models and wear these achingly hip alternatives to ballet pumps in between appointments ... Go from lounge to plane in magnificent style ... They go with everything! Diamonds, candlelight, Chloé and delicious cuisine... ". This torrent of aspirational flimflam fails to disguise the fact that, made out of buttersoft Moroccan leather though they might be, these look like old man's slippers. And I am not paying £300 to look like an old man in his baffies.

A thing of beauty

Big Bill lives in Jurong Bird Park in Singapore. He is a bird with a great deal of dignity, despite, or perhaps because of, his massive beak. Humiliatingly, Bill is sometimes called a "whalehead", but not by his friends. Bill is a shoebill; there are 5,000-8,000 left in his habitat of tropical east Africa and he is classified as Vulnerable. However, he can eat a baby crocodile, although it seems unlikely that he ever gets the chance in the civilised confines of Jurong Bird Park. Shoebills are magnificent in flight, appearing almost prehistoric, but it is not clear whether Bill ever gets to fly.

The cuckoo's nest

Tom Jefferson, a British epidemiologist working for the Cochrane Collaboration, says in an interview with Der Spiegel that whilst swine flu is undoubtedly a pandemic, there has been a near-hysterical desire on the part of many vested interests (pharmaceutical companies, governments, and the media, as well as certain sectors of the scientific community) to turn it into some kind of killer threat. It might sound like a vast conspiracy theory, but this definitely has the ring of truth about it. The article is worth reading in full, not least for his comments about the SARS outbreak and the relative ineffectiveness of Tamiflu.

Apparently Hong Kong has the world's lowest rates of transmission of swine flu, in theory because we learned the lessons of hygiene during the SARS outbreak. Jefferson thinks the best protection against flu is just washing your hands.

Down the dip

"Squeggs". Reproduced with the permission of designer Dominic Wilcox.

Ground control

There's a fascinating article on the NASA website about the approach to food on space missions in the 1960s. Apparently "On Christmas day, 1968, during the first lunar orbital mission, the Apollo 8 astronauts opened packages of thermostabilized turkey and gravy and ate with spoons". One of the biggest challenges was the astronauts' constant weight loss - not necessarily due to calorie expenditure (Buzz Aldrin used 300 calories an hour walking on the moon), but possibly because of stress, and how unappetising early food options were. "Inflight food consumption proved inadequate to maintain nutritional balance and body weight" and crews experienced nausea, anorexia, and "undesirable physiological responses".

I was laughing the other day thinking about Ali G's interview with Buzz Aldrin. Buzz reacts with appropriate dignity when the mugging Ali G keeps referring to him as "Buzz Lightyear" and asks him if he was jealous of Louis Armstrong for being the first man on the moon.

(Photo via NASA)

Song to the siren

Call me grossly sentimental (I'm grossly sentimental): I find the fact that drivers pull aside when a siren sounds behind them peculiarly moving. Drivers, and I am sometimes one of them, are generally pretty self-absorbed and set on their goals. Lemmings in their cars, part of the problem and not part of the solution, I mutter bitterly to myself as I wait for my bus in Admiralty with the passing traffic kicking up pollution and every car seeming to contain only one person, who's always gazing blindly, mutely ahead. But when a siren sounds, the lemmings wake up to be reminded, and then to demonstrate, that there is such a thing as public-spiritedness.

I was quite shocked to discover that, in fact, in Hong Kong it's not customary to try to move off the road to allow a path for an ambulance, fire engine or police car with sirens howling. Instead, Hong Kong's selfish commuters sit there determined to hold onto their hard won place in the traffic jam. My office looks directly down on a highway and I've never yet seen anyone pull aside; the emergency vehicle waits impotently with lights flashing and siren sounding.

Perhaps this can partly be explained by the fact that Hong Kong's narrow roads, often bounded by concrete walls, and countless loops of flyovers, don't allow for anyone to pull to one side. But the fact that no one so much as makes an effort to move is astonishing.

Station to station

I was telling someone the other day how excited I was, on starting a new job in 1993 (my first proper job, in Alva Street in the West End of Edinburgh) to be able to use the fax machine. If I'm honest the idea of being able to write something on a piece of paper and then have it reproduce on the other side of the world somehow still really impresses me. Here I am now, on a train from London Euston to Penrith, writing a blog post, able to report that the American Christian evangelical (with the pamphlets to prove it) sitting opposite me has a large spot on her ample chin and is sniffing continuously and annoyingly; that it's raining in Tamworth, where the train just stopped; that we're running 15 minutes late... all this of little interest to anyone of course (and that's what blogging's all about!), but despite the fact that I deliver training to lawyers on technology, and consider myself fairly computer literate, I still have a childlike delight in what technology can do. Perhaps that's partly because I'm of the generation that didn't grow up with it. It still seems like a miracle to me that you're reading this.

A truth universally acknowledged

Weddings in Hong Kong are accompanied by incredible fanfare, enormous expense, and fascinating rituals, one of which is the tradition that the wedding photographs are taken months in advance, often in the most ridiculous locations and involving numerous costume changes for the bride-to-be. These photos are then sent out with the wedding invitations to procure as many possible attendees for the wedding banquet. It's purely a numbers game: each guest has to bring a "red packet" full of cash so the happy couple can recoup the enormous costs of staging their wedding feast (and taking the ludicrous photos).

My friend C has someone in her office whose wedding photos were all taken on a trip to the UK with a Brief Encounter-style storyline involving ancient train stations, steam trains, and pensive shots in 1940s headgear. When my IT manager got married, his photos were taken around Hong Kong in locations and scenarios which the bride and groom are, frankly, unlikely ever to find themselves in again; in one shot, he's riding a bicycle across a park while she perches on the back in overblown gown; in another, the one I was lucky enough to be sent, he's crossing a stream, trousers rolled up, in his arms the smiling bride in billowing green chiffon.

It's the day before Hong Kong SAR Establishment Day, a public holiday, and on my way from Admiralty to Lan Kwai Fong for a friend's birthday drinks, I spotted three couples having their photos done. I couldn't resist taking a photo of the last pair: in an absolutely perfect illustration of the aspirational nature of Hong Kong weddings, they were posing outside the Louis Vuitton flagship store in Central.


(I regret that I couldn't take a better photograph and had to use the rotten little camera on my Blackberry. She actually looked rather beautiful and was obviously as happy as Larry; the groom was definitely second string.)

Sunshine, moonlight, good times

The journalist Steven Wells ("Swells") died the day before Michael Jackson. Swells was a Northerner, a vituperative, angry, uncompromising character who wrote for the NME in its heyday in the 1980s, a time when I bought it every week, read it religiously, and cut out pictures for my bedroom door and to paste them onto the envelopes of the letters I sent to my friends (I was fond of a silver pen on a black envelope at the time: I wish I'd kept pictures of those slaved-over masterpieces). I wrote to the NME letters page about something (an interview with the Fire Engines, as it happens). I was over-enthusiastic, and Swells, the letters editor at the time, published it, but wrote a sarky comment after it. It destroyed me. But that's because he was a god to anyone who loved music: even if, often, he was objectionable and just plain wrong.

Swells' last column for his newspaper, the Philadelphia Weekly (watch out for those blue eyes), is a typical example of his trenchant style: and in an extraordinary coincidence he quotes Blame it on the Boogie as his last line.

The ride

The name of the game

An early lesson in cruelty, coupled with the injustice perpetrated by adults: my first friend at primary school was Stuart Osborne, a quick-witted, popular little charmer, whose mother was a teacher at the school (and a woman I can only remember as "Mrs Osborne"; in my memory, undoubtedly inaccurately, she looks like Anni-Frid, the dark haired one from ABBA). We were in the same class and bonded over the fact that we both had English accents in a rural Scottish primary school (never a good plan) and our families didn't have a TV (I remember having a conversation with him, both of us around 6 years old, where we agreed it was a Good Thing not to have a TV; we could be part of our own little club of children who didn't need TV and loved reading books instead). I invented a playground chasing game called (for some reason) "Scrooge", and we taught the other kids the game and played it every breaktime. We still have a photograph somewhere of a Halloween party at nearby Winton Hill Farm; I'm dressed as a witch, in green; Stuart's pictured eating an apple, dashing, dark-eyed, charismatic. I loved him. Until...

Overnight, it seemed, Stuart's family got a TV and he started adopting a Scottish accent. I was completely out of favour; not only that but I was an embarrassing reminder of everything Stuart was now trying to pretend he wasn't, and accordingly he actively loathed me. I watched in the playground, alone, as children played Scrooge around me. Stuart and his friend Darren threw ice and stones at me. And when I complained to Mrs Osborne, she, of course, did nothing, because it was her son, and he wasn't capable of that sort of behaviour.

Stuart's family moved to Canada in 1979 and he now works at Whistler. I never saw him again, but I've never forgotten him and the terrible taste of betrayal.

Hamfisted

I'm pretty keen on vodka and can make damn good lychee martinis; I love bacon, especially in a floury roll with razor-thin sliced tomato and tomato sauce. What I can't countenance, I'm afraid, is any attempt to combine the two. As the website states, confirming all my worst fears: "Yes. Bacon vodka." This is a regrettable development. What next? Bacon sweets? Er... Oh.

Skin deep

As early as I can remember, my mum used to buy Oil of Ulay (as it was called in the UK in the 1970s) and apply it to her face diligently. It was expensive then (and now she can afford it, she buys Boots' own brand moisturiser) but this ritual must have instilled in me at a very early age the ethos of moisturising, and I do it every day without fail.

I recently read a book called "Don't Go the Cosmetics Counter Without Me" (7th ed.) by Paula Begoun. In it she painstakingly reviews cosmetics manufactured by most major companies, based on ingredients and efficacy, and chooses her "Paula's Picks". The book to some extent exposes the cosmetics industry as, surprise surprise, thriving on deceit (she dismisses most claims as to miraculous effects from ingredients only grown behind Guatemalan waterfalls - it's never Newcastle, is it? - as nonsense), the triumph of hope over experience, and female psychology (the belief, for instance, that if a moisturiser is jaw-droppingly expensive, it must be good), although the impact is lessened somewhat by the fact that the author has her own make-up range which, again surprise surprise, features heavily in "Paula's Picks".

Of course, I checked what I use against the list, only to discover that in most instances I've gone completely wrong: for instance, I've used Origins products for a few years, especially A Perfect World, but Paula doesn't rate Origins at all, mainly based on the fact that some of the ingredients, there chiefly to make the product smell nice and/or sound good, are potentially irritants for the skin and add no other value.

I think my mum's use of Oil of Ulay was based to some extent on the feel and the smell and I can't help thinking that if there are no nasty side-effects, and you like the smell, and it encourages you to put it on, this is a legitimate part of the ritual. I love putting on my current moisturiser (Estee Lauder Daywear Plus with SP15, which smells faintly of cucumber and incidentally gets the nod from Paula). It makes me feel, shallow and strange as this may sound, happy and contented and ready for anything.

Seeing the light

I wandered around The Rocks in Sydney today, taking photographs until my battery went dead and the light had gone (happily almost simultaneously, although just after the camera went out of action I saw a big-bearded Methuselah with his gigantic-headed, but benign, dog; the latter was lapping happily at a bowl of water the waitress had brought him and would have made an excellent subject). I sat on a bench opposite the old police station with a takeaway English Breakfast tea and oversized wholemeal scone. Before I could spill hot tea all over myself (and as sure as night follows day, I did) I was musing to myself, first, how nice it was to have nothing pressing to do; and secondly, that I still feel an obscure sense of delight and vindication when handing money over to someone, anyone, to pay for something, anything: such as a cup of tea in a tiny little café. It makes me, I think, feel part of the world; and without wanting to sound maudlin, I also remember what it was like not to have money to pay for things. I also felt disinclined to go shopping and was satisfied with buying some small refreshments, so it works at very small quantities.

Cycle of decline

Regular readers of this blog might readily believe that I would go to the ends of the earth for a great pair of shoes; would you swallow, though, that I would cycle for 30 minutes just to find a shop that sells a top with a great name which I saw in a magazine? Unluckily, they were sold out in my size (phoning ahead might have been good planning, but recklessness of thought and deed was my watchword today) and in any case, it was an A$180 top that, though lovely, was in no way necessary.


The 30 minute cycle ride was to Paddington; the shop, Bracewell; the top is pictured here (click on 7 under "Queens of the Speedway"; it's the purple one for preference although there's also a rather unappealing Dijon mustard hue), and the name, HARLOT YES BUT TRAITOR NEVER, allegedly the last words spoken by Mata Hari.

Take it to the bank

John Lanchester writes a book review in the New Yorker (of three recent books about the reasons for the current financial crisis, all of which sound well worth reading: Gillian Tett, Fool's Gold; Richard A. Posner, A Failure of Capitalism; and Shiller and Akerlof, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism, although you may feel that just reading the excessively long title of the latter is sufficient). The book review itself is a model of clarity for those like me who find the wall of terminology deployed in banking frustrating and incomprehensible (it always seemed to me that obscure coinages and "in-talk" were as much of a self-protection methodology for financiers as they are for lawyers, mutatis mutandis: if no one understands what we're talking about, somehow that will really impress them, and not only that, our language will be a barrier to entry).

Lanchester writes: "At its heart, banking is a simple business. Customers deposit money at a bank, in return for interest; the bank lends that money to other people, at a higher rate of interest. This isn’t glamorous or interesting, but banking is not supposed to resemble skydiving or hip-hop; what recommends it is that it’s a good way of making steady money (and of creating credit in the economy), as long as the bank is careful about whom it lends money to."

But in banking, unlike the law, it's all about the short term (quoting Posner, who incidentally is a judge and legal academic): "The greater the gains are from taking risks that enable very high short-term profits, and the better cushioned the executive is by his severance package against the cost of losing his job, the more risks he rationally will take".

Track record

I've always loved trains, above all other forms of transportation. One of my earliest memories is of being taken on a steam train journey in Devon and I still remember the excitement and mystery of it. Once I attempted to create some new memories for my little sisters, then aged 6 and 8, by taking them to Glasgow with me on the train; although it's a much more prosaic journey, something about racing along the tracks, looking out of the windows as the landscape flies past, even buying a coffee from the trolley, serves in some small way to deliver a fraction of the experience of Robert Powell in The 39 Steps, all the Agatha Christie novels I tore through, Adlestrop by Edward Thomas, and the beginning of Stardust Memories.


Sydney's trains are double-deckers, with excellent, practical green leather seats kitted out with a middle section that converts from one side to another so you can change the direction you're facing in (an important consideration for me because my travel-sickness is exacerbated by facing backwards) and shiny fittings glinting in the light. The windows are scratched to hell and the interiors are dim; it's not the Trans-Siberian Express, but I'm completely satisfied.

Rural dalek

I found this dalek lurking by the postbox at the bottom of a driveway in Lawson, a little town in the Blue Mountains north of Sydney. With his plunger on the right hand and egg whisk on the other, he seemed rather benign, but I didn't chance it by going any closer.

Flowers in the rain

A taste of history

Lasagne recipe from my mother's kitchen. c.1966 and still going strong. Recipe © Marg Hall 2009 (and Good Housekeeping? 1966?)

Showstoppers

Joanna Vanderpuije, a Central St Martin's graduate, has just produced her first collection and it's beautiful.


Perhaps it's the spare, elegant aesthetic of the photographs that contributes to the impact: these are clothes you'd be proud and excited to wear.


As Alber Elbaz says in a recent interview (and it's worth reading: he's such a likeable character, with his insecurity about his weight and his preference for sandwiches over avant garde cuisine): "A good shoe or a good dress does something to you. It's not just about fashion victims. It really does do something for all women".

All photos ©2009 Jaime de Almeida.

Hiatus

For the first time since my working life began in 1992, I have six weeks off. Six weeks to do nothing, or something. In the middle of the first week, I am still fighting off the urge to be doing something: get up, get out, tick things off, you'll run out of time... the shape of the day with nothing mandatory in it is strange and a little intimidating. I cycle to a cafe where I read the paper outside in Sydney's winter sunshine. I had my hair cut. I go to the gym. I play Scrabble on Facebook. I have felt oddly reluctant to write my blog. I took my camera (an excellent Nikon D80, kindly lent to me by one of my clients) to the park and took hundreds of close-ups of spiky birdlike flowers; I stalked the unwary on street corners to take pictures of the casual grace of pedestrians waiting for the green man. Other than brief conversations with the man who sells me coffee or those people who seem to like to stop and talk to me when I have my camera in front of my face, I hardly speak to anyone all day. It all adds up to not very much, but I think I will get used to it. When I come back, perhaps I won't be able to say what I did with my time, except that, trite though it sounds, I am learning how to relax about not having anything to do.

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

Photo credit mrcreighton.com

Summer nightmares

Evidence of the atrocities perpetrated on the helpless in Hong Kong:



It says "SUMMER DREAMS".

Temple of heaven

Sado Island, Japan, April 2009: the most peaceful and beautiful temple, absolutely deserted, long abandoned, and slowly decaying. These ancient trees flanked the stone steps leading up to the temple. The temple itself was half hidden by trees and covered in moss. My dad's friend Johnny and his Japanese wife Chieko met us from the ferry and took us straight here; we went through Tokyo at rush hour to catch the shinkanzen from frenetic Tokyo Station to Niigata, where we raced to a taxi and finally embarked on a two hour ferry journey, changing pace at every step, slowing, until finally we arrived here.

Heel for heel and toe for toe

Shoes from the 1800s (fur-lined for warmth and, presumably, purple velvet for nobility). Sado Island, Japan, April 2009

Signs and wonders

In the garden at the potter Kawai Kanjiro's house, Kyoto. The wisteria on the trellis above had just produced its delicate lilac-coloured blooms and was packed with bumblebees. The house was beautiful and in keeping with the appealingly strict aesthetic we have seen everywhere; the pottery was a bit disappointing, although Kawai did have the biggest kiln I've ever seen.

Sanjo-dori, Kyoto. It all seems fair enough, really.

Fearsome, if somewhat bemused-looking dragon painted on the vast ceiling of a wooden temple at Kennin-ji, the oldest zen temple in Kyoto.

These are pretty humble photos taken by my Blackberry, owing to the fact that my camera is currently refusing to co-operate with any plan I draw up for it.

Zen and the art of gravel maintenance

Ginkaku-ji Shrine, Kyoto, April 16, 2009

Life in Kyoto

We're in Kyoto, visiting temples filled with maples and cherry trees, admiring zen landscaping and wandering along tiny streets filled with houses with wooden gates hiding secret gardens. It's my Dad's birthday, so he was allowed to read me one of his own poems at lunchtime, in a tiny deserted restaurant decorated in a worryingly kitsch English country garden style and called "My Favorite". The food was excellent: stir fried pork, beautifully moist rice, miso soup and delicately flavoured tofu. He also wanted a rickshaw ride so we were carried by Yoshi, who'd been pulling tourists around the narrow streets for 11 years and had legs of steel. Yoshi taught us the Japanese word for maple and how to say "thank you" in Kyoto dialect.

I am the egg man

This man (smouldering fag in hand) was cooking eggs at a handsome egg station in Ueno Park (home of the National Museum of Japan). He's also tossing handfuls of unappetising strips of bacon carelessly on to the cooking eggs. I am fond of eggs in all their guises but there was something about the insouciance with which he handled his egg duties, and his filthy red apron, that made for a happy egg station, although if you had any sense, the clues all being there if you cared to look for them, I don't think you'd be sampling his wares.

Prints of darkness

I'm in Tokyo, on a family fortunes trip with my father (two days in, and he has already introduced me to someone as his sister; analyse that!) where, to be sure, there is worse to be seen than this (Charlotte Olympia, Browns, GBP380), but not much worse: there is nothing attractive about this shoe. Its only redeeming feature is that it's a lot less expensive than the risible Chanel cage shoe. Do designers think women have no brains when it comes to buying shoes? (Don't answer that.)

Teach us to care and not to care

A few years ago there was an advertising campaign in the UK attempting to make the teaching profession more attractive on the premise that everyone remembers a good teacher. This is true, of course, although I remember a few bad ones too.

Mr Campbell was in his 60s when he taught me, a tall, rather ugly man with a bulbous nose and threadbare white hair, who was given to wearing tweed suits; he was known throughout the school as "Dirty Donald" for his predilection for rubbing his hand up and down the table leg while he spoke and a rumoured, although never substantiated, over-solicitous interest in the young women in his classes. Mr Campbell was a Cambridge scholar who spoke and read Latin and Greek; he had once commanded a much higher salary in a conventional private school, but he became enamoured of the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner and ended up teaching English to wise-cracking smartmouths at my school (on my school copy of Othello, which I still have in an attic somewhere, someone had written across a solemn picture of Othello strangling Desdemona, "My God they make these dolls tighter these days").

I was the only person taking English A Level in my year, so I had the rare privilege of one to one lessons with Mr Campbell. Although he liked to close the curtains in the library when we were in there (cue countless impromptu "visits" for the duration of the lesson from studious pupils urgently requiring a copy of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch), he never made any inappropriate overtures.

Mr Campbell's lessons were so erudite that they were a joy. We read and laughed at Chaucer; we discussed Pride and Prejudice, and The Importance of Being Earnest, and marvelled at Paradise Lost, and Othello, and The Waste Land; and the excitement of the language, and the sense of discovery, and the thrill of learning, still stays with me. Mr Campbell understood what words can do, and knew how to bring out my ideas and responses to what I was reading, and gave me the confidence to think aloud.