Solid air

Compare and contrast these two photographs from my office window, one taken last week and one taken yesterday. The poor quality camera phone photograph doesn't really illustrate the smog in all its horrific detail, but it had a nasty metallic look to it. The sun continued to shine but you could hardly tell.

The Environmental Protection Department's website said that pollution in Central yesterday was "High" at 63 (on Hong Kong's own mealy-mouthed Air Pollution Index which does not refer to international standards because that would show us as being completely off the scale) and consisted of "respirable suspended particulates". The pre-Olympic crackdown on heavy industrial factories around Beijing may well have resulted in a compensatory powering up of factories in Guangdong province, just over the border, but more likely it's just business as usual for Hong Kong: with a few weeks' respite and glorious blue skies, it became difficult to imagine the pollution (like pain, it's hard to remember the visceral detail of the experience when you're not suffering it).

I've seen the future

Divers (1930) - George Hoyningen-Huene (1900-1968). The composition and the texture of this photograph are flawless. I have a vague memory of it having been the cover of one of Penguin's editions of The Great Gatsby. Sunshine, languor, beauty, and nothing lasts forever.

Which is like love, which is like everything

The Arnolfini Wedding, Jan Van Eyck (1431), National Gallery, London.

Eat drink man woman

I spend some of my time at work doing presentations for lawyers. The law firm arranges for me to come in to their office to do the presentation which lasts an hour and earns attendees the princely sum of one point towards an annual requirement for continuous legal education. The presentations usually take place over the lunch hour so sandwiches are served, almost always in trays from Pret a Manger. I've done probably about 50 of them in the last few years. It's a great way to get in front of clients (usually between 10 and 20 litigators attend, sometimes more) and I really enjoy doing them: I have fun, make people laugh, tell what I hope are interesting anecdotes, know my subject well - or at least better than my audience (except when I was in front of 50 Melbourne barristers, but that's another story), which is what really matters - and we get business out of it because they remember where to come if they need our services.

I never usually talk about work on my blog but I had to break my own rule for this: yesterday's attendees behaved so shockingly rudely that I stumbled in my presentation. When I started my introduction, the only thing the more junior attendees (who were all young Chinese women, as a statement of fact, and there was a gang of about 10 of them seated round the table, ie more than half the people in the room) were focused on was the food on the table: rustling their paper bags, unwrapping them, discarding the contents, picking up another paper bag, swapping with each other, getting the right spoon, asking someone else to pass a Coke can, and eating with heads down and utter concentration on the task at hand.

After about five minutes of this, the most senior person there stood up and said loudly and pointedly that as a matter of courtsey they should immediately stop rustling and fussing about with the food and listen to their guest speaker (me). I said I'd give them two minutes to sort themselves out, did so, and then continued, to hardly rapt, but at least slightly chastened, silence.

Fifty presentations, at least, and that was the first time anything so unnerving had ever happened to me.

Despot housewives

I nearly bought a pair of Salvatore Ferragamo shoes in the sale at Lane Crawford. One thing stopped me though (apart from the fact that they were still ridiculously over-priced): I have vowed, on principle, never to buy anything by Salvatore Ferragamo (whose assistants at the Mandarin Oriental, by the way, exemplify that terrible Hong Kong trait of following you so closely round the shop that if you look round suddenly, both of you get a fright).

Robert Mugabe's wife, spending millions in designer shops in Paris, told a journalist disdainfully that she had to wear Ferragamo shoes and, indeed, could wear nothing else because her feet are too narrow for normal shoes. This, while her despotic husband presides over the world's fastest shrinking economy, ruthlessly murders his opponents (and their wives), and turns his country upside down.

Grace, and that's her name, is the reason why I couldn't buy anything with that logo on it.

The soft bed of luxury

One of the above dresses costs US$2400. The other, a third of that. Can you guess which? And then the real challenge: can you guess why?

A clue: one of them is by Bottega Veneta which seem to have successfully established itself as a premium luxury brand (it was rated the world's top luxury brand in the 2008 Luxury Brand Status Index (LBSI) survey from the ludicrously named New York City-based Luxury Institute, which canvassed the idle rich to find out their opinions; apparently "wealthy women are highly discerning, almost to a fault"); partly by virtue, apparently, of superior craftsmanship, and partly, it seems to me, and this is one of the tricks of the luxury trade, by charging shedloads of money for their product. It works in Hong Kong - and if you look at their site, the roll-call of locations is quite illuminating.

Dresses by Bottega Veneta and Lanvin; shoes by Azzedine Alaia and Balenciaga, all from Browns.

I can see clearly now

The view from my office window of Victoria Harbour, Hong Kong, July 3, 2008. On my way in to work on the 260 bus, I saw islands in the distance I didn't know were there. The reason for this unusual clarity and excellent visibility? Depending who you ask, the factories in Guangzhou have been closed by flooding, so they aren't spewing out toxicity; and/or storms have cleared away the smog. Paddling on the water in the last few weeks, though, has been like navigating through a vast mobile junkheap of flip-flops, wrappers, branches, shoes, plastic bags, dead dogs (really) and empty bottles. So you can have either clear skies or clean water; never both.

London

Charing Cross, from the window of the Charing Cross hotel; early morning, late June 2008

Whole country goes down pan

I always spend a bit of time when back in the UK browsing the supermarket/newsagent shelves for front page tabloid headlines, an effort which usually repays itself tenfold; if for no other reason than to get a wafer-thin impression of what people are thinking and talking about and how poorly and crassly it can possibly be expressed.

The winner this week? The beleaguered Labour government has introduced some tentative, watered down legislation to encourage employers to take on, er, more women and ethnic minorities in view of the fact that they, again er, tend not to. All subtleties of analysis, not to mention statistics, are cavalierly cast aside, though, by the Daily Express with this:

WHITE MEN FACE JOBS BAN

Modern neon

Walking along behind this woman in Central today - all in black except for her neon satin shoes - I was suddenly pierced by the strongest memories of the early 1980s. Neon colours do that to me, perhaps because they are so clearly associated with that era, just when I was coming alive to colour and texture and the allure, elusiveness and changeability of fashion, and have never really been worn since - until now, apparently.

More specifically, I'm in Miss Selfridge in Hanover Street in Edinburgh, with The Church of the Poison Mind (which even at the time I derided as puerile) on the shop's stereo and spectacularly bad-tempered Shirley Manson serving behind the counter. I'm picking up a blue and white striped ra ra skirt and contemplating a neon yellow bangle or belt to go with it.

When I was 14, Miss Selfridge was the key to being the person I wanted to be: happy, confident, popular, wearing my stripy skirt, neon dangling from my ears as I skipped along Princes Street.
I think perhaps cynicism began to set in not long afterwards, and I favoured black (and dyed my hair to prove it); I never wore neon again and probably never will. It was strange to be skewered today by the sight of someone's shoes.

All bets are off

I was in Las Vegas in 2001, at an excruciating sales conference. In my jaundiced view, not helped by the event I was attending nor by the ludicrous hotel we were staying in (“New York New York”), it was a profoundly depressing place, and even from the absurdly privileged vantage point of a high-rolling banker’s free suite at the top of the Bellagio, with a glass of Dom Perignon in my hand, it seemed as hollow as it looks. The worst aspect, and sadly this accounts for the majority of the revenue generated by Las Vegas, was the slot machines: people dressed in extremely casual, almost pyjama-level clothing, each handing over their dollars for a big bucket of dimes which they then proceeded to feed into the slot machines for hours on end, as if participating in a giant metaphor for futility.

Melbourne has a super-casino too, by the river, flanked by strange, huge, sculptural towers spouting gouts of flame every minutes or so; but inside it has exactly the same feel as anywhere in Las Vegas: an ersatz environment, entirely focused on parting fools with their money. Adam Smith could have been thinking of super-casinos, had they existed in the 18th century, when he said: "A lottery is a tax on all the fools in creation".

Macau's casinos, 40 minutes by ferry from Hong Kong, have now overtaken Las Vegas in terms of revenue. In Macau, the interesting thing is that the revenue streams are reversed: 80% of Macau's revenue comes from the tables. This is, not surprisingly, attributed to the fact that the Chinese like people to know how much they are spending; it's a face issue (see below under Maybach, Napoleon wrasse, and Louis Vuitton). No miserable solitude at the slots for them.

Now Macau has become a replica of Las Vegas (which is itself a poor, hotel theme park replica of all the interesting places in the world) it's even less likely I will ever go there again, even if you can get the best Portuguese egg tarts in the kingdom at Lord Stow's Bakery in Coloane.

Draw a veil

In space-strapped Hong Kong, in Repulse Bay, on prime land overlooking the water, there's a huge car showroom taking up about as much room as a spacious residence with garden, or, let's say, a library, a school, or a public swimming pool. It only houses one car: the Maybach. It's a boring, big-bonneted, dim-looking car with strangely whimsical curtains in the back (for the esteemed passenger's privacy, I think) which remind me of those funny little elasticated curtains you get in caravans; and it costs about US$500,000. Not as ugly as the Chrysler Crematorium: but clearly not an attractive car in any way. (It's a must-have buy, of course, for your average Hong Kong tycoon; I think Stanley Ho has one.)

Not such a clever buy after all, though, Stanley: this is a car that, in the first three years of its life (and as soon as you've taken off the shrink wrap) depreciates by US$1,200 a week.

Change your spots

I may be the only woman in the world who doesn't like Sex and the City. I really can't be moved by anything about it. What I do share with (what I understand to be) one of the bubble-headed pre-occupations of its protagonists (I may be being unfair here, but so be it) is a love of shoes I can't explain.

Today, at lunchtime, in Lane Crawford: Alexander McQueen.

Nostalgia is the enemy of the future

Oh, but they look so good...

Freakshow

No more to be said. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Take the low road

My brother, sister and I were bullied by the kids in our village (see under "home schooling", below) for being toffs or tinks and well, just weird or different. I started going to school in Edinburgh aged 13 and used to have to get the bus home (no 113, 55p) and alight in the village by the phone box and walk up "the low path" through the woods to get home. The kids from the village were always hanging about near the bus stop intimidatingly. I remember practically hiding in the phone box one day calling for help; and I always felt a sense of relief on crossing the bridge and turning through the doorway onto the path away from the village.

With your family you often fall into a pattern that is hard to break even when you move away, and it's the same with bullies: even years later they can trigger some pathetic button that says they're in control. After I finished university I had to spend the summer at home and took the same bus journey from my part time job in a Musselburgh kebab shop, running the gauntlet of stares and abuse from Tennant's Special-toting losers by the Trevelyan Hall every day. One day the verbal attacks were particularly vicious and I went home in tears of anger and helplessness. My younger brother R, who'd suffered as much as I did, had just bought a beat up old second hand car and when he saw me he said "come on", and we got in and sped into the village whereupon he waded in to the group of louts shouting "say sorry to my sister!"

Brave and foolhardy, you might think: but the cowards were cowed and they muttered "Er, sorry hen" and slunk away into the evening. I never had any trouble from them again.

A moment to be proud of and a completely cathartic event for both me and R - and you don't get those very often.

Elementary, my dear

Much to the consternation of my fellow passengers (that 260 bus at 8am from Stanley to Central carries some heavy hitters, all of them on Blackberries and phones and laptops or talking about buying and selling gold) I laughed out loud on the bus to work this morning when I read the following email from my friend D, whom I’d challenged to use the word “lachrymose” in conversation:

“I felt pretty lachrymose at 2:00pm today when I read that Guy Ritchie will be
making a big budget Sherlock Holmes franchise, and that he will be ridding the
character of his ‘Victorian stuffiness’.
It all took place in seconds:
disbelief, denial, lachrymosity (starring Russell Crowe) and then a soul deep
need to push Guy Ritchie down a flight of stairs.
PS: Quite apart from
anything else, the character was never ‘stuffy’, or even particularly
‘Victorian’.”

And yes, a sense of revulsion and disbelief engulfed me too at the news that cack-handed Mockney Ritchie is to be entrusted with this pointless adaptation (“No Shit Sherlock”?) – no doubt plumbing the depths of the popular consensus and making Watson, and perhaps even Holmes himself, into some travesty of a Luvvable Cocker-ney into the bargain. Russell Crowe is part of the incipient farrago in the title role; as for Watson, is Michael Caine looking for work?

Any colour you want

Airhead "Nicky Hambleton-Jones", who is apparently the presenter of something called 10 Years Younger, although she doesn't look it, says in today's South China (and please put on a silly posh English accent when you read this to yourself, or indeed to any incredulous acquaintance or passer-by): "Your hair can also be incredibly ageing and jet-black hair is incredibly stark and draining on any skin. You can soften it by going for a dark brown or warm brown so it takes the edge off the black that's so popular in Hong Kong."

Er - that would be the natural hair colour of most people in Hong Kong?

Is not elegance being able to completely forget what you are wearing?

Yves St Laurent, 1936-2008.

Skinny dipping

I was in Kuala Lumpur this week, for two days, enjoying a curry served on a large banana leaf at the Royal Selangor Club and eaten entirely with the fingers (right hand only, as is the Muslim custom), and marvelling again at the spectacular other-worldness of the glowing Petronas Towers from the Sky Bar at Traders Hotel.

Yesterday I witnessed first hand a peculiar trend in the world of spa treatments, at a brand new (and almost empty) supermall near our hotel. This particular spa was known as "Dr Fish". Inside, rows of narrow fishtanks circumscribed the room in a continuous loop and patrons sat on the edge of the tank and dangled their feet over the edge for the fish to nibble at. Apparently although it tickles a bit to start with, it's therapeutic and healthy and the fish eat the dead skin and everything is wonderful, but I find this both undignified and, frankly, quite disgusting. One of our business partners, a large Australian, is very fond of the place: the only drawback is that the fish all flock to his feet as soon as he drops them in the water, much to the chagrin of the other patrons.

It did give me the opportunity to illustrate to my colleague L, a pragmatic Singaporean, the use of alliteration as a literary device with the phrase "I'm frightened of fish getting fat on my feet."