Kiss this thing goodbye

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(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

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

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

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

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.

This is what really happens

Maybe it's that deep marine blue on the living room wall. A house in Minneapolis, Minnesota, from Apartment Therapy.

Fragments

The following, imperfectly remembered, is the poem that appeared in my English "A" Level exam paper in 1987, in my favourite part of the exam: the "unseen poem". In past papers, it had been a 16th century or Romantic poet; so I was delighted to find something as contemporary as this and committed it to memory there and then during the exam. I sat my exam alone, at formidable Miss Kiniger's austere Marchmont house, being the only person in my year taking English "A" Level - this had meant the rare luxury of one-to-one tutoring. I have never seen the poem since, nor have I been able to find it on the internet, so this is all I have of it. Miss Kiniger brought me a cup of strong sweet tea.

Angels
A lacy mobile changing lazily
Its animals, unstable faces, until
I imagine an angel, its vapours trailing
Asleep at different speeds. My failing:
To see images, clouds as something other.

Are all inspirations correspondences?
I want to be theological, stare through
Raw white angel fabric at holy bits of blue.

And truly, if one shining angel existed
What better than the camouflage of a cloud?
Machinery of cloud and angel, both are silent
Both insubstantial. Neither violent.

Let sunlight fade on walls and a huge blind
Be drawn faster than a horse across this field.
There's deranged wind up there. God, its power!
Let me believe in angels for an hour.

An angel drifts to the east, its edges burning;
Sunny sunlight on stony stone returning.

Al Alvarez

Death from above

From one loathsome insect to another: I'm back in Hong Kong, where it's so damp and humid that the floor tiles in my housing block are wet and the walls beside the lift are running with water. I opened the front door on my return from work on Tuesday and immediately caught sight, through the open bathroom door, of a large, fat, brown cockroach sitting, as BOLD AS BRASS (bold caps to illustrate the horror, though mere typography is not equal to the task), plum on top of the soap on the bathroom sink.

I raced around trying to find a weapon with which to do battle and in a panic grabbed the bottle of Ecover washing up liquid and aimed a thick gout at the beast. Instead of doing the decent thing and passing out in a pool of liquid, it had the temerity to stagger to the edge of the sink before sliding slowly and horrifyingly down the pedestal, its tentacles still waving insolently. All reason gone, I battered it repeatedly with the base of a bottle of suntan lotion until it was long past dead.

Do I need to explain that I can't stand cockroaches? I had one in my hair once, during a dragonboat sinking drama round the back of Middle Island; it had flown from the island and alighted (to catch its rasping little breath) on an attractive looking, smallish bobbing island which turned out to be my head. In a fugue state brought on by terror, I smacked it to death with my dragon boat paddle. Since then my hatred and fear has known no bounds.

Hungry ghosts

I inherited from my mum a tendency to react badly to insect bites. A famous family photo shows my mum with her eyes swollen shut and face a puffy mass after a bite from a horsefly. Insanely itchy, raised red welts can materialise from the smallest bite.

I'm in Sydney, where it has been raining; it's warm, and damp, and these are perfectly agreeable conditions for mosquitoes. At night I have to swaddle myself in a sheet, trying not to expose my body to the voracious beasties. The tiny whine of the divebomber still seeks me out and as soon as I'm asleep, and vulnerable, the mosquito fun park is open for business.

I awoke this morning with an absurdly swollen top lip, looking as though my cosmetic surgery had gone wrong: a Paris Pout caused by a kiss from a mosquito. There were bites on my ankles, neck and shoulders too. Stepping from the shower I saw a beastie on the mirror: slow, fat, drunk with success, it made no move to escape as I splattered it on the glass - no quarter given, nor expected - and watched with repulsion as a huge bubble of stolen blood pulsed out from its body.

Now I know how it feels to kill in cold blood - my blood.

McQueen is dead

Alexander McQueen (16 March 1969 – 11 February 2010). A designer of genius, and a man who once wrote "I am a c*nt" in the lining of a suit intended for Prince Charles. Both pictures, above, are from his last, deep sea monster-themed show at Paris Fashion Week in 2009.

The art of seeing

Disparate connections: a few years ago, in the National Portrait Gallery in London, I saw some amazing portraits by Don Bachardy, including one of Aldous Huxley accompanied by a quote from Bachardy's partner, Christopher Isherwood, which I was very taken with:

"How kind, how shy he is - searching painfully through the darkness of this world's ignorance with his blind, mild, deep-sea eye. He has a pained, bewildered smile of despair at all human activity. 'It's inconceivable,' he repeatedly begins, 'how anyone in their senses could possibly imagine...' But they do imagine - and Aldous is very, very sorry." (Diaries, 1939)

I saw a clip today on the BBC website of a giant oarfish (excitedly described as a "giant bizarre deep sea fish"). The oarfish lives at depths of up to 1,000 metres and can grow to 17 metres in length. Sightings of "sea serpents" originated in Norse mythology but are believed more likely to have been encounters with varieties of oarfish, including the majestic "King of Herrings", the world's longest bony fish. Even after the sharks have gone, the oarfish is likely to remain safe in its solitary depths - Wikipedia thoughtfully describes oarfish flesh as "not well regarded due to its gelatinous consistency".

Huxley died on the same day as JFK and C.S. Lewis - November 22, 1963.

Let's do the time warp again

Beautiful, frivolous, Mihara shoes from Plümo. To be worn with a structured 1940s style dress from Alexander McQueen or Roland Mouret (in that order, below, both from Net-a-Porter).

The air that I breathe

Civic Exchange - 2009 The Air We Breathe Conference - Patterns of Respiratory Illness in Hong Kong, presented by Dr WM Chan (Hong Kong Thoracic Society)

View more presentations from Civic Exchange.

Breathing

This was the view from my office window on Hong Kong Island today (as a reminder, this is what it's like when it's clear). The very faint shadowy shape which you can, just barely, see through the murk (and you probably have to double click on the photo to make it out), is the International Commerce Centre (ICC) on Kowloon side. My friend A works in there and we communicated by email this afternoon: "I know you're out there somewhere...?" This is what we currently accept as normal. And no, it's not fog - it's respirable suspended particulates. I've been coughing, and there's a metallic taste in my mouth. Here in Asia, the recession has been over for some time.

Death and taxes

[Photo credit mrcreighton.com]

They're building another casino in Singapore - a three-towered monstrosity, improbably modelled on card decks, apparently, and built to feng shui principles (earth, wind and fire) near the Singapore Flyer, precisely positioned so that the Flyer ("the world's largest observation wheel - a moving experience at every turn": who writes this stuff?) will, accordingly, deliver good fortune to all who gamble there.

This evening I attended the closing dinner for a week of conferences and events which we were sponsoring. It was held at the Marina Barrage, an enormous, rather unappealing building which features a long, swooping roof walk, a big spiral leading you up to the roof and amazing views back to Singapore's financial district, past the Singapore Flyer's glittering lights and across to the sepulchural three towers of the almost-finished casino.

All this development - and a huge swathe of this part of Singapore is a building site, with thousands of workers from India, Sri Lanka and Myanmar housed in rows of temporary dorms - is impressive, and certainly the scale of it is astonishing and the sheer size of the buildings, if nothing else, is a marvel; but there's an emptiness there that reminds me of my least favourite place on earth, Las Vegas.

The difficult part once the developments are complete is bringing buildings to life. I walked to the top to see people on the roof of the Marina Barrage flying kites, taking photographs and jumping in the grass; appreciating the new view, as I did, and enjoying their new building.

Photo credit mrcreighton.com

A necklace of raindrops

At a glance it looks like a little dragon's head - and I wish it were - but it actually appears to be enmeshed leaves. From Need Supply. But I think I like this one better:

Just like honey

Chilli hot chocolate
Heat a large coffee cup by filling it with hot water. Pour out the hot water. Take two generous pieces of Lindt chilli chocolate and put them in the bottom of the cup with just enough hot water to melt them. Froth a cupful of milk. Pour hot milk into coffee cup, stirring slowly until chocolate is melted. Top with froth. Drink. Enjoy. Repeat.

If you go down to Cramond...

...you'll never come back. Cramond, Edinburgh, by the shore and in the snow, December 23, 2009.

Con toda palabra

Lhasa de Sela (September 27, 1972 – January 1, 2010).

Charmless garments: 3

Strictly speaking this next item is not a garment, but since it completes the charmless outfit when teamed with items 1 and 2 below, and it is a particularly loathsome thing altogether, it seems only (ill-)fitting to write about it.

My dad was always hopeless at picking clothes as gifts and every year of the 1970s, Christmas was marked, or marred, by whatever hideous gift he'd dreamed up to give to my mum, with a constant absence of success. Probably the most egregious excess, though, on an income that could ill afford frivolity, was a pair of handmade leather and wood lace-up clogs. They looked awful and uncomfortable, and wearing them (which I'm not sure my mum ever did) must have felt as though she were carrying around her own small, but burdensome, wooden cargo on each foot.

The word "clog" is appropriate because the sight and thought of them thoroughly clogs the pathways of the brain. And to add to the ignominy, clogs have gone boldly on to spawn one of the worst inventions in recent footwear history: the Croc.

Yes, the clog richly deserves all the opprobrium that can be heaped upon it: for it is clumpy, lumpy and frumpy all at the same time.

95 reasons

For years my family always owned the same car, in different iterations: a Saab 95. It was never a new car; often rusty, sometimes featuring rustproof paint along the side in a different colour; usually in an an unlovely hue of orange or green. At the school gates or pulling up alongside a satirical queue of couples outside the ABC Cinema in Lothian Road (yes, that's a real memory), it was an embarrassment; shamefully, in conversation with a school friend I once made it (by a slip of the tongue, of course) into a Saab 99; but on journeys it was our car, and there was a peculiar warmth and cameraderie about it. Saab 95 owners would wave to each other: acknowledging, perhaps, the joy and suffering associated with owning a car prone to rust and impossible breakdowns.

Its peculiar design meant that you could sit in the back seat facing backwards, and as a child I used to love being in the back, until I began to develop chronic travel sickness and a directly connected and instinctive loathing of watching the road running away behind me.

I clearly remember travelling along Ferry Road in Edinburgh, having just crossed the Forth Road Bridge on the way back from, possibly, a trip to Fife to pick up clay for the pottery. We were waving at the car behind. The woman in the passenger's seat (and in the 1970s that's where they almost always were) stared stonily back. "Superfluous Doris" we immediately nicknamed her in retaliation (with the emphasis on the "flu" - as a reader, I never had any idea how to pronounce anything, but the word must have stuck in my mind), and we howled with laughter and stuck our tongues out like the little urchins we were. Good memories of this car, then. I still remember the registrations of two of those cars: KNU 459J and GGB 886N. And in the picture above, it now looks like a surprisingly attractive, homely but shapely car.

Fin to finning

The Shark Savers organisation has a simple but effective idea to combat the revolting practice of shark finning for the ever-popular, though tasteless, shark's fin soup. The shark fin trade, which by the kilo can be more lucrative than selling cocaine, exists to service the demand; changing people's minds is the only way to tackle the demand, which is perpetuated at the moment by the sick cycle of "it's expensive therefore it's desirable/It's desirable therefore it's getting more scarce/It's getting more scarce therefore it's more expensive/It's desirable therefore it's expensive".

Yao Ming, who's a hero in mainland China, is appearing in a Shark Savers campaign against eating shark's fin. For US$100, you can sponsor a billboard advert featuring Yao at a bus stop in Beijing or Shanghai - this includes production, installation, maintenance, and lighting for a year. There are incredible statistics on the site showing that these billboards do actually change people's minds about eating shark's fin. Sadly, Hong Kong's billboards are nothing like as inexpensive as this, although as the hub of the shark's fin trade (and Hong Kong diners consume 3 million kilos of shark's fin a year), such a campaign is sorely needed here too.

If you sign up now, one of Shark Savers' sponsors has pledged to provide another billboard to match yours. What are you waiting for?

Charmless garments: 2

I have more than one good reason to loathe the second item in the series, but I confess that what seals their fate from my unbalanced perspective is their strong association with a certain marketing person of my acquaintance: a bleached blonde harpy ("as I came up to Mathers Inn/Three hellish witches drinking gin..."), a colleague in the early days of my career whose favourite smart-casual work look was a pair of black ski-pants, or stirrup pants, teamed with a blouse, high-heeled pumps and loads of gold jewellery.


Awful memories from my early working life aside, just look at them: is there a single redeeming feature? High waisted, and therefore unflattering to anyone fatter than a stick (ie everyone); tight where it's unmerciful and loose where it's unwise; and capped off (or bottomed out) by the wholly unnecessary feature of the stirrup. Truly vile.

Christmas bizarre

Walking through Stanley on Saturday morning I saw a large sign proudly advertising CHRISTMAS TREES FROM THE USA. Yes, that's right: someone is flying Christmas trees thousands of miles (from Oregon, or Wisconsin, to Hong Kong) so that buyers can say that their trees are American. There is something so completely wrong about this that I was tempted to stick a note on the sign. Stanley houses a fair few American expat families, especially along Tai Tam Road and around the American Club, and no doubt many of them, and other numpties, will be gleefully ordering their American Christmas trees without a second thought. To satisfy someone's desire to have an American Christmas, a tree will be chopped down and shipped by air or sea to Hong Kong along with thousands of other trees. How does this make sense?

Predictably enough, the trade goes the other way too: 85% of artificial Christmas trees sold in the US are manufactured in China.

Fake bake

There's something a bit unsettling about the recent resurgence of cupcakes. I declare an interest, or rather the lack of it: the cupcake promises much but doesn't deliver, and I don't really like them anyway. But I instinctively distrust the way we're all supposed to be cupcake eaters now: sold the ersatz promise of reliving some halcyon time which never actually existed, in the drawing rooms of 1950s America, where the only thing close to a job description any woman was permitted to have was "cook". Commercially produced cupcakes always taste slightly oily, the "frosting" is too sweet, and the disappointment is palpable.

I read in the FT today that women in the British Diplomatic Service were not permitted to marry until 1973. Cupcakes, to me, epitomise that reactionary era. Give me a Laduree macaron any day of the week. Or, more simply, a coffee and two pieces of Lindt chilli chocolate (see above as freshly made by me).

They do things differently there

Mark T was slightly younger than me and attended posh boys' school the Edinburgh Academy (the uniform, tweedy green, often with brown leather elbow patches, epitomised the school). I met him at a party in the year when the record du jour was Sade, Diamond Life (1985). I was 16 and had already had my heart broken twice. Mark affected the shabby chic of rich kids in the 1980s: his jumpers were cashmere but they had holes in them and he wore battered, pointy suede boots which excited the rude attention of the neds in my village when he arrived on the bus to see me, getting off two stops early by mistake and walking in his innocent fashion through the heart of the lion's den. Mark came from an extremely wealthy family whose house, overlooking the Botanic Gardens, was rented by Elizabeth Taylor one year during the Edinburgh Festival. His pretty blonde sister, 14, had an account card at Benetton. Mark had the entire top floor to himself; he had a juke box, and a pool table, and huge groups of us used to sit around listening to Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground.

I liked Mark, and he said I was beautiful, but he was a bit timid, and I was more interested in Simon D who had a dangerous edge to him (it all seems absurd now); so I dumped Mark and snogged Simon in front of him, in Mark's own bedroom. I don't think about it very often but when I do, I still feel guilty about being so callous.

I was talking to my friend Peter recently about how you can be haunted by hurt you think you've caused someone else; in the meantime they get on with their lives without, probably, a second thought about it. We were imagining what it might be like to be able to go back and say sorry and how delighted, or more likely astonished, the recipient would be.

Simon D aged badly and became something of a joke. I have no idea what happened to Mark. He is probably a lawyer somewhere. I still remember the hurt that someone else caused me in 1985 (clearly "I bear more grudges/Than lonely High Court judges"), of which more some other time - repent, Dougie, damn you! - though despite my exaggeration here for the sake of a story, it doesn't bother me at all anymore. But I can't swear that a little piece of me would not be rather gratified if Dougie came back to apologise. I wish I could do the same for Mark.

Charmless garments: 1

This is the first of an occasional series on charmless garments. Toweringly high on the list? The spandex poloneck. A garment that suits no one and besmirches everyone. Why would any woman with more than a completely flat chest ever squeeze herself into such a mockery? The neck segment clings to the neck, the rest cleaves unflatteringly to the body (if you have breasts, a huge expanse opens up, as per this picture, making you look like some sort of monster), and the spandex... glistens.

I once knew a man (let's call him "Reptile", for so he was dubbed by me and my friend Fiona) who was fond of sporting one of these monstrous items in pale blue: immediately marking himself out as someone who could not be trusted. (And so it came to pass, but that's another story.) He is now an MP; what does that tell you? And a woman I know, a very very nice person, wears a white, shiny, especially tight one, and it's all I can do not to say something to her or attempt to stage some sort of intervention.

Signs and wonders

Yesterday morning I jumped into a cab outside my flat, having missed the bus. It was only as we arrived at my office that I realised I didn't have my wallet with me. Chastened, I told the taxi driver I had no money (to be precise, HK$102 was the amount owing), whereupon he immediately suggested that I could transfer it to his bank account and wrote down the number for me, from memory. This morning I got an email from him: "Thanks for your payment. Jimmy Yip (Taxi Driver)".

I quake at the thought of trying the same stunt with a spectacularly bad-tempered, know-it-all London cabbie - or indeed with any cab driver, anywhere else in the world. Perhaps it was patronising of me to imagine that a cab driver in his fifties would not be using the internet? It was lucky for me that my driver turned out to be Jimmy Yip.

Put a sock in it

There seems to be a fairly uncritical acceptance of the assertions in the (astonishingly long) Wikipedia article about Beyoncé's single "Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)", which are epitomised by the statement that the song is "empowering". Aside from the fact that history will not judge the use of that word kindly, if someone could outline just one example of how that song could be regarded as "empowering" I'd be happy to hear it. Don't get me wrong, I think it's a catchy song and Beyoncé and her sexy acolytes look great in the video; but how is stamping around in a leotard insisting that a man gives you a ring to prove he loves you (with the glaring implication that what all women want is to get married) in any way "empowering" for women?

If you were to ask the women in Afghan Hands whether this is "empowering" I get the feeling they would laugh in astonishment.

Room to read

One of the shortlisted businesses in World Challenge 2009 is Afghan Hands, run by Matin Maulawizada, whose family escaped to the USA during the Soviet invasion in the 1980s. It employs women who have been widowed by the last few years of conflict and gives them an income embroidering designs for an American fashion house, as well as teaching them literacy and numeracy.

The joy and excitement on these women's faces, as they look at pictures from western magazines showing what they've embroidered, with their names sewn into every piece, and the pride they take in their work, is truly moving. One of them talks of hearing of her husband being taken into the desert by the Taliban, never to return. This is a wonderful project; if it wins World Challenge (and you can help by voting for it), Matin plans to buy permanent premises in Kabul and to offer more women the chance to learn to read, use their skills and earn some money.

Car trouble

AP reports that, following a 55% surge in growth in the first nine months of the year helped by tax cuts and subsidies for small, fuel-efficient cars, General Motors expects its sales in China this year to exceed 1.6 million vehicles. As a result China is now the world's leading auto market: 9.66 million vehicles were sold in the first nine months of 2009, up 34% year-on-year, and sales are forecast to rise to 12.6 million units this year, up 35% from 2008.

This amounts to a mind-boggling number of new cars on the roads in China this year alone. The major cities are already grid-locked and horribly polluted; rural roads are falling apart. Where are all the new cars going to go?

Rather than see this as an encouraging sign of China's economic resurgence, I find the news thoroughly depressing. This, surely, is a situation where questions need to be asked about sustainability instead of the tacit approval of the mainland's headlong rush towards becoming a car culture.

Modern sensibility

The tragic ballerina Tanaquil LeClercq, photographed in 1948 by Irving Penn (June 16, 1917 – October 7, 2009).

Salute

Another beautiful bunch of flowers from Tenny's flower stall, Stanley Market, Hong Kong, on China National Day 2009. It's a special one this year, celebrating 60 years of communist rule in China. Sadly, I didn't have my camera with me walking down Stanley Main Street: there was a parade of dragon dancers accompanied by banging drums, followed by a procession of little kids with intricately painted faces in Chinese opera (Yuèjù) style, young women in traditonal Chinese shoes, and incredibly dignified old ladies with beautiful gowns and brightly coloured paper parasols. These flowers remind me of fireworks: in some small way a gesture for National Day, not forgetting that there were also human rights protesters in the streets of Hong Kong today, something that will definitely not be happening on the mainland.