Skin deep

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

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

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

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

Seeing the light

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

Cycle of decline

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


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

Take it to the bank

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

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

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

Track record

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


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

Rural dalek

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

Flowers in the rain

A taste of history

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

Showstoppers

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


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


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

All photos ©2009 Jaime de Almeida.

Hiatus

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

The Second Coming

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

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

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

Photo credit mrcreighton.com

Summer nightmares

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



It says "SUMMER DREAMS".

Temple of heaven

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

Heel for heel and toe for toe

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

Signs and wonders

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

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

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

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

Zen and the art of gravel maintenance

Ginkaku-ji Shrine, Kyoto, April 16, 2009

Life in Kyoto

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

I am the egg man

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

Prints of darkness

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

Teach us to care and not to care

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

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

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

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