Leaving New York

A friend who saw my pictures of Minnesota and New York, below, said they looked cold and lonely. It's certainly cold, and I think my vision is probably lonely (although as the inimitable Roddy Frame said , "they call us lonely when we're really just alone"). I've enjoyed many things about this trip. I liked Washington, if only for the novelty of the board games in my hotel (AKA rooming house, a shabby, glorified B&B presided over by a perpetually delighted Eastern European man with a shock of black hair and a disconcerting squint), with the White House just down the road, the sharp contrast of bitter cold and blazing sunshine, and the (black, middle aged, highly educated) taxi driver telling us he'd probably vote for McCain; Minnesota was an experience, from the ice storm at the airport which nearly prevented us landing, vertical shards of white dashing past the plane windows on either side as I said to myself they do this all the time, they do this all the time, and the question I always ask myself when I travel somewhere new (especially somewhere as monumentally undistinguished as St Paul), how do people end up here?; I've enjoyed getting to know New York, walking down Madison Avenue thinking about Kirsty McColl's song of the same name, buying Kiehl's products in Bloomingdales, passing the Empire State which is currently in a state of renovation, following the Pilates session on the TV in my hotel room and feeling silly lying on the carpet trying to connect my legs to the earth, and visiting the jawdroppingly enormous New York HQ of UK law firm Clifford Chance (the largest law firm in the world, both by number of lawyers and revenue) for a happily coincidental meeting arranged by one of my Hong Kong clients, who hadn't realised I was in New York, the night before.

The thing I don't like about travel is the fact of it. The weariness, waking at 4am with thoughts running round my head as insistent as a headache. Not knowing where I am, what time it is, and whether I should eat. When I've been in meetings I have had no trouble at all. Outside of that temporary adrenaline rush, though, it's been like walking around with several sheets of bubble wrap tightly wound around my head.

What I have positively disliked is the fact that the clothes in every shop I go into seem to be "Made In China". Having just moved house I have an unusually powerful distaste for buying anything, but I feel particularly averse to the idea of buying anything made in China; to China it shall not return, at least not in my luggage. Viewed in this perspective, even the most technically desirable dresses are nothing more than landfill futures.

Sunburst and snowblind

The view from the somewhat dirty window of the Holiday Inn SoHo, Lafayette Street, Manhattan, New York, March 3, 2008

Flying out of St Paul airport, you could see for miles and the whole country seemed perfectly flat and white with snow as far as the eye could see. I don't think I've ever seen so much snow covering such an expanse of land. Today in New York the sun was shining and the sky was a perfect blue, though it was bitterly cold (as I walked along Broadway I thought of "You promised me Broadway was waiting for me" and "The wind blows right through you, it's no place for the old" from Fairytale of New York). I met an old friend from Hong Kong in an Asian cafe called Rice, on the corner of Lexington and 28th Street. She's been in New York for two years and says it's a tough, and toughening, place to work, and people will step on each other to get ahead; but much better than Hong Kong for a single woman looking for a relationship (in Hong Kong, this attractive, intelligent woman had begun to wonder if there was something wrong with her).

In the afternoon I had a facial and a massage at a spa called Eden. Both therapists were Chinese, one from Hunan and one from Fuzhou; the latter, Sandra, was about the same age as me, had an 11 year old daughter (it's amazing what you can find out from someone who's wrapping a hot towel around your chin) spoke Cantonese as well as Mandarin and was delighted with my few hamfisted phrases. I lay on the massage table listening to, apparently, the music which wafts from the speakers of every spa I've ever been to worldwide (the CD is, I think, Now That's What I Call Inoffensive Tinkling 55) and thinking about the circumstances which led a Scottish-born Hong Kong resident and two Chinese born New York residents to a spa on Broadway on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

Mississippi God Damn

The Mississippi, from the Crowne Plaza St Paul Riverfront, February 29, 2008.

Minnesota feels like it typifies the US in so many ways: a land of giants and giant spaces, where everyone dresses down and looks down. Jeans to the office? Sure! Dirty snow in huge drifts. Huge cars, huge roads.The worst hot chocolate I've ever tasted from the vending machine in the office kitchen. Kids in the hotel hallways, here for some wrestling competition, with nothing better to do than stand by the lifts staring. At every restaurant we're served huge, somewhat tasteless portions, larded with butter. So much food... US flags everywhere and bumper stickers saying "Support [or Pray for] our troops". Everyone is friendly, up to a point. Public as well as private spaces are massive and bland. Only the sunshine relieves the atmosphere. The TV adverts are all for drugs. The CNN newsreader says "Communist China".

St Paul is not a city you could walk around. Without a car you'd be nothing. Everyone drives to work. They drive between buildings on the office "campus". We drove to lunch and back. It's second nature to be driving a car: how will Americans ever give that up? The entire infrastructure is predicated upon driving.

My taxi driver has a black beret and John Lennon blue specs and is playing freeform jazz on the car stereo. He barks at me "I'm going to Lexington because it's quicker". I say "OK". He asks me if the reason I have a crease in the middle of my brow - just there, and he points in the mirror - "is because it's frustrating dealing with the Chinese". Straight faced, he says the people in Hong Kong eat rats.

The Mall of America is near the airport, but I can't quite bring myself to go there. 40 million people visited in 2006 and it's the most visited shopping mall in the world. All very good reasons for me to avoid it completely.

But sitting at the desk in my hotel room, watching the sun go down over the Mississippi, with clouds of smoke puffing in the cold, I have to admit it's beautiful.

Ghost world

View from the window of the Crowne Plaza St Paul Riverfront, St Paul, Minnesota, after an ice storm, February 28, 2008.

The isle is full of noises

Iona is an island on the west coast of Scotland, just off the Island of Mull. The island is three and a half miles long and one mile wide, and is a very special place for reasons which are almost undefinable. Over the centuries it has attracted pilgrims of one kind or another, starting with St Columba, who traveled there in a coracle in 563 and founded a religious community based around the monastery he found, which became Iona Abbey.

My family started going to Iona once a year in the late 1960s after my dad (Chris) accepted a commission from the Iona Community to carve flora and fauna of the island on the cloisters in the abbey. We went there for three weeks every summer; each week Chris would carve one capital. We were taken out of school to go, to some disapproval by our teachers; this may have been one reason for my parents’ disenchantment with the state school system which eventually led them to remove us from the local primary school to be educated at home.

We were given homework to do and I clearly remember filling pages with scratchy drawings of island flowers and birds; I also remember running through the bog, with moss squelching underfoot, and listening to my mum play the piano as sweet chords echoed around the abbey; jumping over sand dunes at the west end towards beautiful white beaches or buying McGowan’s Highland Toffee at the local sweet shop; hitting a fish on the head to kill it, and then being unable to eat it; reading one Agatha Christie book after another – for some reason the houses we stayed in always had loads of old copies and my tally was over 40 by the time I tired of reading them – and sitting alone in my favourite place, a small hollow in the rocks just over the brow of a hill called Dùn Ì, overlooking the sea and the islands far beyond, and thinking about what was at the other side of the water – America? We had riotous water fights, incurred the displeasure of the farmers by chasing through their fields, sang songs at the weekly ceilidhs in the abbey, paddled in the sea, and walked along dusty roads to the Bay at the Back of the Ocean. When we were old enough we went to the local disco in the village hall and danced rock’n’roll with the German students who sometimes came with us (I was always in love with one or other of them).

An American journalist who met my sister and I one summer near the jetty took a picture of us, sitting on the sand with the jetty wall behind us. I’m 12 or 13, wearing cowboy boots and a long skirt, and my hair is short and tousled. We thought we were pretty cool, so I was very embarrassed by the caption in the book she later published, which suggested that we “had an innocence about us that American teenagers of that age have often lost”.

All of those reasons and many more are why Iona is such a special place to me. I feel as though I grew up there, and Iona grew up with me: every year we’d arrive and excitedly observe the changes over the last year: the new shops, the new people, the new buildings. Someone I loved at school sent letters to me one summer while he was away in Germany and I took them up in to the hills to read. The outside world was crowding in and the future was coming at us, fast.

Iona is still there, of course, and probably remarkably unchanged even now, because the weight of the hills and the stone and the white sands and the abbey are the things that make it special, not what grows then withers and dies in time-lapse. Iona is a talisman in my mind for all that is wonderful about Scotland and it’s still, to me, the most beautiful place in the world.

Ghost lanterns

Chinese New Year lanterns at the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club, Causeway Bay, February 11, 2008. The colours are really rich red and bright neon, but my camera phone bleaches everything. Detached from reality it may be, but there's something mysterious about this picture that I quite like.

Wrote for luck

A Marc Jacobs dress from Net-a-Porter in celebration of Chinese New Year: red for luck. Kung hei fat choy!

Grounded

I'm a skyscraper wean, I live on the nineteenth
flair,

But I'm no gaun oot to play ony mair...

O ye cannae fling pieces oot a twenty-storey flat,

Seven hundred hungry weans will testify to that,

If it's butter, cheese or jeely, if the breid is plain or pan,

The odds against it reaching earth are ninety-nine to wan.

The Jeely Piece
Song (Adam MacNaughton)

Me and my sister used to sing this song at ceilidhs in Iona, an island on the west coast of Scotland where we went on holiday for three weeks every year because our dad had a commission to carve birds and animals of the island on the cloisters in the old abbey. We lived in a cottage, so the song never really meant anything to me.

At the end of the month, after five years of living in high-rise buildings, I'm not going to be a skyscraper wean any more: we're moving to Stanley, on the south side of Hong Kong island, to a ground floor flat with a patio garden. I've grown so used to living at such great heights that it's going to be a strange transition. I'll miss the amazing view (see above), and the sheer, epic laziness of having access to a supermarket directly underneath my block, even if it is only Wellcome; I'll miss being able to get the bus at quarter to 9 and still be early for work, or better still, walking down the escalator and arriving at the office in 20 minutes (or longer, depending on how high my heels are that day). But the place we are going to is a peaceful, calm refuge, and that can't be said of our current flat, where noise is all around and you can hear brakes squealing and car horns and the people upstairs running the bath, or arguing and slamming doors at all hours.

Not landing

As my flight from Singapore to Hong Kong came in towards the runway last night as I was looking out of the window, wondering how cold it was. The approach is over the sea, and when the clouds are low the plane emerges late in the descent, so sometimes you look down wondering when the runway lights are going to appear, we seem so low over the water. But the runway lights flashed and we were descending, a little fast. Midway through the descent, at the point when I was bracing for landing, the engines suddenly surged and we abruptly changed direction and started ascending again.

Clearly the pilot had aborted the landing, but no one said anything for a few minutes - playing it cool - until I turned to the guy next to me and we appraised each other nervously to see how scared we should be. After about 10 minutes the pilot laconically announced that we had been unable to land on that runway and were going around again to try another one. That was all.

I had been thinking earlier in the flight about how you should really tell everyone you love that you love them at the earliest opportunity, in case anything ever happens: I'm not really a nervous flier anymore, I have done it too often, but for some reason it crossed my mind while I was gazing idly at the tiny screen in front of me (watching, as it happens, an amazing performance by Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises).

Kind of blue

Calvin Klein, from net-a-porter. Beautiful, in the sale, and the only sizes left are for skinny wretches.

Realty bites

Photographed outside Midland Realty, Robinson Road, Mid-Levels, January 25, 2008. I see the Opening Toady as a small bald man who'll follow you around the flat bowing and scraping for you on demand. This might be almost pleasant after a bad day at work. Rare in Market, indeed!

Decontextualised

An new trend has emerged in Japan, according to the New York Times, which is the text message novel: originally written on mobile phones, then uploaded to dedicated websites, and subsequently, in some cases, published in the real world, the country of purists which produced the first novel now has text message novels taking up 50% of its annual bestselling novel list.

I was astonished by the justification of one of the protagonists: 21 year old Rin, who sold 400,000 copies of her first novel, said that ordinary novels were not attractive to members of her generation because the sentences are too difficult to understand, the expressions are intentionally wordy and the stories are not familiar.

I can't resist the temptation to say that this is, surely, part of the point of the novel, and at the risk of sounding harsh, you have to conclude that Rin and her generation are simply illiterate.

Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind

The view from the bedroom window, on an unusually clear day in Hong Kong, January 12, 2008.

Saving face

In today’s (low) Standard: the shock front page headline “PORK PRICES SOAR 70PC” – and the frightening news for pork-lovers is that it may rise to above HK$46 per catty if the supply of live pigs to Hong Kong does not increase – and on page 3, news of a “gold thread facelift” which involves injecting gold under the skin of the face to form a web which, according to the charlatans offering the treatment, “boosts collagen secretion and increases skin elasticity”. The reality is that the “web” disintegrates and the gold presumably goes in to your bloodstream, as a 40 year old patient cited in the report discovered when she started to suffer constant severe pain in her face after three injections over a number of years.

Having read about the horrifying side effects, if you still want to have this done, the Standard helpfully adds that you can’t in Hong Kong, but your local cosmetic clinic will, with scant disregard for the ludicrousness, not to say mind-boggling recklessness and stupidity, of the treatment, arrange for you to receive it in South Korea.

Fuschia perfect

From the ridiculous (the Moschino doggie bag, below) to the sublime: when I was 15 I was wanted to be Fuschia, a character in Titus Groan, the first book in Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy. Perhaps as a result, I've always loved the colour. The Greek lines of this Donna Karan dress are perfect. I found sky-high python Alexander McQueens to pair with it, but they were too avant garde and would distract from the simplicity of the shape; these are Nicholas Kirkwood. Beautiful silver earrings by Lara Bohinc; all from the fabulous Browns website.

Gold! Always believe in your soul

A man shot dead in Merseyside yesterday was driving a gold Range Rover. I hate to make sweeping generalisations but does that not tell you all you need to know about the incident?

In other gold news, Moschino Cheap’N’Chic (which is, of course, neither), was displaying the above abomination in the window of the Seibu department store in Pacific Place. I took a picture on my mobile phone, but I don't have Bluetooth connectivity yet, so the full horror of the slightly brassy gold version can't be experienced as yet. It seems futile to criticise the execution of this risible idea any further, but did they have to make the dog quite so gormless-looking?

Home and away

Then your life becomes a travelogue
Of picture postcard charms…
Joni Mitchell, “Amelia”

January 6 marks five years exactly since I arrived in Hong Kong. Five years seems like a landmark, for no apparent reason except, perhaps, that it’s easily divisible and multipliable (although there are good historical precedents for five, 10, 15, 20 and 25 years being treated as significant markers and denominated as specific anniversaries, centenaries and jubilees). Accordingly, this may be a time for reflection – as I have now spent what amounts to almost 15% of my life so far, so far away (5,985 miles, to be precise) from the country where I was born.

Returning to the UK, as I did recently, is always an interesting experience; without wanting to sound too pretentious, each time I return I’m aware of feeling less connected to the culture, in the simplest sense: what’s on TV, who’s in the news, what people are talking about, or how they style their hair. The UK has been described as somewhere where people are overly concerned with local news at the expense of what’s happening in the rest of the world; this is surely a universal issue, but although I think of the UK as being much less insular than the United States, the island geography must contribute to a certain sense of isolation. I remember being in the US not long after the invasion of Iraq. Numerous other disasters were happening around the world as the implications of the Bush administration’s criminally fainéant approach post-invasion became clear: but the top news story on every channel was whether a certain talk show host’s new short haircut meant she was a lesbian.

I have never knowingly bought Hello! or any of its derivatives, finding its fawning approach to celebrities quite nauseating (“Jackie Collins shows us around her gracious London home and tells us of the secret agony that drove her to write 60 best-selling novels”). A fairly recent trend is for celebrity mags to be a lot more caustic, Heat being the best exemplar of this, and initially funny and rather readable for its irreverence. But the longer I’ve been away, the less interesting it becomes, partly because I no longer know a lot of the micro-celebrities, ex-Big Brother 25 or X-Factor 15 winners featured in its pages; have no taste for Britney’s cellulite, Jordan’s crippling synthetics and Cameron Diaz’s craterous forehead, nor any part of Jade Goody; and no longer care about Sharon Osbourne, a woman whom the popular consensus seems to have deemed to be some sort of heart-of-gold trouper but who comes across to the objective eye as a thoroughly self-absorbed and nasty piece of work.

It’s far too simplistic, of course, to extrapolate from my distaste for Heat and its ilk that I’m becoming detached from British culture, and I can still hold a conversation with only a minimum of puzzled responses – and let’s face it I’m well used to dissembling, having grown up without a TV: the sample classroom conversation having gone from this:

“Did you see the Incredible Hulk last night?”
“No.”
“–.” (turns away to find someone more interesting)

to this, once I learned to lie on the realisation that they weren’t really listening to me anyway:

“Did you see the Incredible Hulk last night?”
“Yes, it was great.”
“Did you see when he …?”
“Aye it was brilliant, he just burst right out…” (and so on)

All this trivial stuff perhaps obscures the real point which is that I’ve now spent quite a lot of my adult life away from my home country, and my responses to what’s around me are informed as much by recent experience as by my past: the person who arrived five years ago (and just as I can remember not being able to read street signs when I was three years old, I can remember not being able to read the landscape of Hong Kong) now seems quite remote in some ways. Now I am someone who can dive, who can paddle either in a canoe or a dragon boat, and who can (after a fashion) row; who can speak Cantonese (albeit still embarrassingly poorly); and who no longer finds flying intimidating (I have completely used up my allocated lifetime of environmental impact in five years). I’ve met thousands of people and seen things I could never have imagined.

Sweet memories

In conversation with La Grande Poobah the other day, I made the claim that I never eat chocolate except at Christmas. This is, in fact, largely true, although it would perhaps be more accurate to say that I never buy it, in much the same way as I never buy Hello!, but occasionally and reluctantly accept it if offered. I’ve always been fonder of a sausage roll or a cheese and onion pasty from that Scottish high street fatty-pastry stalwart, Greggs (the dough-faced assistants in the Greggs round the corner from the first office I ever worked in, in Queensferry Road in Edinburgh, once excommunicated one of my silly colleagues for asking for a cheese savoury in a funny voice, thus marking him out immediately as a) English and b), a deduction not unnecessarily unconnected in the dough-faced mind with a), a twat; this had the lifelong fatwa-style effect of disbarring him from ever being able to buy so much as an egg sandwich in there).

However, sitting at my desk on a somewhat jetlag-ridden afternoon, bathed in sunshine reflected from the Far East Finance Centre and eating a Lindt chocolate from a box I bought for the office at Heathrow airport and transported to Hong Kong, I mused that what I really, really liked to do as a student was buy a king-size Milky Bar and wolf it down with a cup of tea. The sickly sweet taste of the little white Lindt chocolate ball had sufficient Pavlovian impact on my memory that for a moment I was back there, at my desk in my flat in Glasgow, with the delightfully promising package of a whole slab of white chocolate goodness opened before me, forcing myself to focus on my ill-advised project of translating from German an article by Fritz Stark on ever-greater union amongst European states for my degree dissertation on European law, at a time before computers were taken for granted and no one could possibly dream of having one of their own (I cringe to remember that I wrote my first CV by hand). Not an altogether pleasant memory, to be sure, and one that will, mercifully, serve to keep me away from the rest of the chocolates.

Reason to be jolly

I've been in Scotland for the last few days, and have, happily, largely managed to avoid the dispiriting experience of "the shops" before Christmas - except on Christmas Eve, unfortunately, where other feckless no-hopers who haven't, smugly, completed their shopping four years ago, roam like the Day of the Dead around John Lewis picking up gift sets. So much pressure, so little pleasure!

The high point for me was a walk along the beach at Gullane on Christmas Day in the sunshine, with a clear cold blue sky high above, pristine sand, and hardly anyone else around. In previous years I've been bent double walking along the same beach in high winds with a sandblaster etching at my face; but this year it was perfect.

Other small pleasures: biting the head off a chocolate Santa at 8am; shiny patent forties-style lace-ups going cheap in the Jenners sale; my sister's home made almond croissants; driving the enormous van we were given at Edinburgh airport ("Ah've given ye an upgrade to a bigger size for yer comfort", the woman behind the counter said mysteriously) at breakneck speed down country lanes; and watching The Big Sleep, with fish and chips and a few glasses of shiraz, curled up on my sister's couch on Boxing Day.

Ready to wear

I frequently mock myself as shallow, but my love of clothes - nice clothes - goes back a very long way: to my early childhood, probably, and dressing up in shiny fabrics and embroidered capes from the dressing-up box; but definitely before I was ten, because I remember going shoe shopping with my mum and being absolutely definite about the shoes I wanted, even though she thought the heels were a bit too high for me (they were brown leather with pale brown plastic wedges, decorated with raised ridges in a box pattern, from Clark's in Dalkeith). Sophisticated I might not have been, but I loved beauty.

I still like to walk around Lane Crawford touching all the clothes as I pass the racks, running my fingers down chiffon sleeves and across cashmere collars and satin bodices. That I could actually own beautiful clothes still seems like an impossible joy to me.

I grew up wearing clothes passed down by my older sister, or made by my mum, or bought in jumble sales, until I could afford to buy my own; and I always seemed to be wearing something that was too small, or made out of strange fabric, or patched, or had holes in it, or was really made for a boy. I longed to look the same as everyone else. The pain of being different; the pleasure of wearing something beautiful, of looking good: these things are intermingled.

My favourite era is the 1940s, and the style epitomised by Lauren Bacall. I don't know where this comes from, because I don't think my mum ever felt the same way as this about clothes, and my sister's style is quite different from mine.

The picture above is as close to perfection as you could possibly be.