Foreign lesion

I went to have my moles scanned again today at the unwieldily-titled Hong Kong Skin Cancer Diagnostic Unit (HKSCDU) in Des Voeux Road, Central. Unlike last time there was no feeling of euphoria when I left: it was a different nurse who immediately made me feel uneasy as she seemed so unsure of what she was doing. Initially she said tentatively that she wasn’t sure if she could identify the moles that were previously scanned. She couldn’t work the camera and we had to give up on getting my five suspect moles photographed; and when she scanned my moles and tried to mark where they were on my body on the body outline provided in the software, she kept marking them as being on my right arm instead of my left so we had to go through the whole process again for each one (scan the mole with the little handheld scanning “gun”, press too hard so it hurts and arguably distorts the mole, wait aeons till the software loads the photo, mark where the mole is on the electronic representation of my body for easy identification). She casually described one of my moles as “suspicious”, which didn’t inspire much of a sense of well-being; and she had such an air of timidity that I began to wonder if she’d ever done this before. (I had to bite back the sarcastic remark “First day in the job?”)

The problem was that I was feeling increasingly disagreeable, and I knew that I was intimidating her, and as I intimidated her, she became more nervous, and as she got more nervous she made more mistakes (at one point the poor women said “I’m not having a good day”). I just couldn’t help it, though: it’s bad enough subjecting yourself to the uncertainty of submitting your moles for examination in case one of them has decided to mutate, and seeing your potentially-cancerous “lesion” appear on screen at 1000 times its usual size – the size of a small plate, in fact - and the magnification making the hairs on my arms appear like big black cables, without having someone ineptly squeezing K-Y jelly (used for the scanner) all over your arm as they fumble with the technology and nervously chit-chat about how suspicious my moles look.

As I write this I feel somewhat guilty about my absolute inability to empathise with her muddling and wonder whether someone reading this might immediately conclude that I’m a bad-tempered curmudgeon. But I think that professionals should be, if nothing else, professional. Not only that: I am paying HK$2000 per mole to be reassured. That aside, I resolve henceforth to comport myself with better grace under pressure.

Next, please

Always too eager for the future, we
Pick up bad habits of expectancy.
Something is always approaching; every day
Till then we say,
Watching from a bluff the tiny, clear
Sparkling armada of promises draw near.

How slow they are! And how much time they waste,
Refusing to make haste!
Yet still they leave us holding wretched stalks
Of disappointment, for, though nothing balks
Each big approach, leaning with brasswork prinked,
Each rope distinct,
Flagged, and the figurehead with golden tits
Arching our way, it never anchors; it's
No sooner present than it turns to past.
Right to the last
We think each one will heave to and unload
All good into our lives, all we are owed
For waiting so devoutly and so long.

But we are wrong:
Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break.

Philip Larkin

Eton trifles

As anyone who knows me will testify, I am unashamedly partisan towards Scotland. As long as a public figure (usually in either sport or politics) is Scottish, they can do no wrong in my eyes (not you, Tony Blair, you’re just pretending). Lantern-jawed automaton David Coulthard; petulant boy genius Andy Murray; premature pensioner Colin Montgomerie; and last but not least in a very long list, po-faced PM-in-waiting Gordon Brown (despite his apparent attachment to ruinous PFI projects).

I was on a flight from London to Edinburgh at Christmas two years ago and Gordon Brown and his family were in business class (with British Midland, this is nothing special: you get a slightly more comfortable seat and a curtain separating you from economy). When we got off, with no personal security or accompanying minions in sight, Gordon went to the carousel with everyone else to pick up his family’s bags. And somehow that really impressed me.

Overwhelming pro-Scottish bias on my part aside, I can scarcely believe that any British voter seriously thinks that lightweight old Etonian nepotist David Cameron is a viable Prime Minister. Only the most shallow trend-driven unthinker could possibly be considering voting Conservative in the next election. This is all you need to know about David Cameron.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, in the first decade of the 21st century, hundreds of women in India are being accused of witchcraft and either murdered or assaulted and dispossessed by their ignorant, superstitious neighbours.

Differently Alber

There's something about Alber Elbaz'z designs for Lanvin that I find absolutely beautiful: and I'm drawn to the Lanvin racks in Lane Crawford to run my hands over the silk and admire the precise cut, economy of style, and perfect use of texture and colour (different shades of black have never melded so well).

Despite the ill-advised black fright-wigs the poor models were given to wear at his recent A/W ready to wear shows in Paris (was this a fashion anti-statement or a simple mistake?), the shoes are astonishing (viz. the wobbly red heel in the second picture) and the dresses are inviolable.

Pink Crocs anyone? (The previous post was nearly titled Croc of Shit, but I thought better of it.)

From the sublime to the ridiculous

Having tried and failed to post pictures of jaw-droppingly wonderful Lanvin dresses at the weekend (watch this space), and with my head full of pleasant thoughts of the new season which, despite veering off towards the unwearable (sky high spring heel shoes, lucite wedges and violent blue patent leather everywhere you look), has shown some interesting signs of being more than just a barely-disguised copy of, sorry hommage to, the 60s, the 80s, let-them-eat-cake, whatever, I was walking through Hong Kong's International Finance Centre this morning. Imagine my distress when I passed a man in a formal, dark blue pinstriped business suit wearing a pair of pink Crocs.

Not a clog, not a flip-flop, not a water shoe - it's a fully fledged abomination and the hands-down, top-ranking, toe-curling candidate for ugliest footwear ever designed.

Yet this guy had this smug look on his face, the look of a self-proclaimed iconoclast: (a) hey! check out my cool shoes! (b) They're the funky sting in the tail of my formal attire! (c) Baudrillard's not dead!

All I can say is: (a) Yes I have (though I dearly wish I'd never set eyes on you). (b) No they're not. They are a scourge of humankind. (3) Yes he is.

Another country

Perhaps I'm toughening up - hallelujah! - or maybe I'm already as hard as nails without even realising it. I'm pleased to report that the work disasters of the last few weeks have passed by me on the waters. The advice I give to anyone in trouble - "just step over it" - which in turn I was once given by one David Beaumont in the hallowed, and drug-steeped, environs of a bar called La Sorbonne in the Grassmarket in Edinburgh in, good grief, 1985 - seems to have worked for me, too.

It does seem hugely self-indulgent of me to complain about work, in any case. I wanted responsibility? I got it. Now shut up and get on with it.

I could say the aforesaid David Beaumont - a rakish, good looking individual who must, I admit, take some of the blame for the fact that I decided to do a law degree, as he'd just completed one at Aberdeen - meant well, but clearly he didn't, and the insouciance and quasi-contempt with which he delivered the lines really stuck with me. Yes - I kind of liked it.

No need to talk about why he gave me this advice, at least not this time.

The past is another country. They do things differently there.
L.P. Hartley

Pithy epithets

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
Louis Hector Berlioz

What if they conquer us?
The tea has come.
In at most a thousand years
Someone will conquer them.
Chinese philosopher

Two countries divided by a common language

Oscar Wilde said this about the UK and the US, but he could have been talking about Australia: last night, watching TV in a hotel room in Melbourne, I puzzled over the use of the word "hoon". Any guesses? It's an abbreviation of "hooligan". Hoons are a problem, with their souped up cars and their attacks on the innocent with golf clubs in dry grass-lined suburban streets; so there's a "dob in a hoon" helpline to report the miscreants in your own back yard.

Hard times

I had the worst ever day at work yesterday. Things went wrong; we made a mistake, which was my responsibility, and I ended up offering my resignation. It wasn't accepted, but I've spent yesterday and today putting myself through hell.

I feel that I really only have the thinnest layer protecting me from blows: I take things like this intensely personally and excoriate myself for everything I didn't do or should have done. I have hardly slept, I can't eat, I feel completely devastated by what has happened. I realise that it's an emotional reaction akin to the way I feel if things go wrong in my personal life, and this may not be appropriate for work: for one thing mistakes do happen, and if I can't cope with that, perhaps I shouldn't be in that job. But one of the things that makes me good at my job is that I care about the business, and care about the people I work with, and it makes it very difficult for me to cope with disasters like yesterday. I lack perspective and forget how lucky I am.

I know the measure of the individual is the way he or she reacts to things going wrong, and I just have to grit my teeth and get through this. It feels pretty damn hard right now, though.

I am curious orange

One of the little amusements about life in Hong Kong is spotting people wearing t-shirts bearing slogans in English which often skirt perilously close to doggerel - a phenomenon which is a subset of Hong Kong women's wacky fashion sense and which more than a few times has made me wish I had one of those most tacky of accessories, a camera phone.

Today on my way up the escalator I spotted this on someone's back (reproduced in full, complete with superfluous curly brackets and colon):

} too ORANGEY
for porn: {

I glanced at her face on the way by. I don't think I'm wrong in concluding that she clearly didn't have the faintest idea what her t-shirt was saying about her.

I've collected a few of these now: my favourite is still

I AM FULL
STOMACH

but I'm also very fond of

I AM PERFECTLY
FLOWER

and

SUNNY DAY. HE
IS WAIT FOR BUS

Kind of blue

Looking at some of the shoes in the shops recently, I can't help wondering whether they're a manifestation of some sort of conspiracy by designers against women foolish enough to buy and wear them. I'm all for unwearable shoes if they are, at heart, beautiful, and have a few pairs in my cupboard to prove it; but when I'm wandering round Lane Crawford's shoe department, frequently I'll pick up a pair that look wonderful only for the nasty aftertaste to hit straight away - the Lanvin shoes above are a classic example (from the excellent Browns website). Elegant in almost every way, and strangely compelling, but then your senses are assaulted the deplorable uber-wedge under the toes, and it's all over.

One fall-out from the year-long hangover of the Marie Antoinette film starring, risibly, Kirsten Dunst as la reine Marie, has been pre-revolution style excesses all over the catwalk : crinolines anyone? Designers like to think they echo what's happening in the wider world, but draining ideas from a Hollywood movie is just fashion eating itself. Perhaps it's just a rehash of the Christian Dior "New Look" subterfuge of 1947: post-war austerity startlingly countered by dresses requiring acres of material which, coincidentally of course, required the services - and consequently revived the fortunes - of France's struggling material manufacturers.

Able was I, ere I saw Hong Kong

Picture from Divetrip.

On a trip to Palau in 2004, I went snorkeling for the first ever time, in the most amazing clear blue waters, in idyllic conditions, in the sunshine, and with a group of really lovely paddlers who were competing in the Micronesia Cup outrigger competition.

Palau is where one of the Survivor series was filmed and is reputedly the only place where they didn’t have to clean the beaches to make the islands look deserted. I’ve seen the detritus first hand elsewhere – empty water bottles, plastic cartons and, for some reason, flipflops by the thousand, cast aboard from dirty, careless international industrial ships - floating heedless in the sea until it arrives somewhere, anywhere, to lie on previously unsullied sand everywhere there’s a tide.

Palau’s not really made for tourists, being too remote (fly to the Philippines from Hong Kong and turn left … then keep going), and thronging with Taiwanese sightseers who snorkel in lifejackets because they can’t swim. It was all we could do to buy suntan lotion at the local store. But the sea is sparkling blue and the fish are abundant, and I couldn’t have had a better place to learn to breathe underwater.

The Napoleon wrasse is a big, ugly, unhappy-looking fish, so named presumably because of its enormous proboscis-like snout and its weak chin. I met one in the water and couldn’t help being drawn to its huge despondent presence - a justified despondence, because it’s on the verge of extinction – Hong Kong imports 60% of world supplies and it’s just been listed by the World Conservation Union as being endangered.

Poor old Napoleon wrasse – not an especially tasty fish (and I confess, I’ve eaten some, in a Japanese restaurant in Palau, before I realised how endangered it is), in fact, downright bland; but victim to the Hong Kong consumer’s insatiable, irrational, self-perpetuating appetite for anything rare, for which read expensive, for which read sought-after, for which read rare…

(A palindrome based on Napoleon's supposed last words: Able was I, ere I saw Elba.)

Testino times

This bombshell courtesy of Catwalk Queen: Super-nepotist and friend of the famous Mario Testino is now photographing the usual suspects for Burberry's new campaign, Otis Ferry (Bryan's son and enemy of the fox) amongst them. This reminded me of the alleged exchange between Ernest Hemingway and starstruck F. Scott Fitzgerald:

Fitzgerald: The rich are different from us!
Hemingway: Yes. They have more money.

Interestingly, I've never had more hits on this blog than from people Googling Violet Naylor-Leyland (who was kind enough to write in to take issue with my scathing comments about last autumn's execrable VOGUE piece). Violet, who seems like a nice enough person, aside, I still take issue with the assumption that just because you're rich and well-connected, you're automatically interesting.

(The Wilbert Harrison version of Stick Together, which coincidentally just came on to my iPod, is light years better than Ferry Senior's efforts (thanks, Peter; and so there, Ferry!).)

Vaut de mieux Miu

Somehow this should be wrong - the avant garde shape of the sleeves, the disorientating vertical slash of red, the uneven neckline - but it looks so right. I think you might need to be precisely 20 to wear it.

The po-faced expressions of the Chinese women behind the equally po-faced model are priceless.

Miu Miu, Spring 2007, from Vogue France.

Ashes to ashes

Crass stupidity of the week award: 50% of smokers (as opposed to 27% of the general population) think that the occurrence of cancer is down to "fate".

Hong Kong has just banned smoking in pubs and restaurants (with a few weaselly exceptions such as mah-jongg parlours). Since smokers clearly don't know what's good for them, as evidenced by the above, it's the only way to be sure.

Shirty tricks

I once had a personality assessment at work and one of my characterisitcs apparently was that I bear grudges. The following story may well be proof: Some years ago my friend Greg gave me a beautiful slate grey shirt from Cruise in Glasgow. It didn't really suit me (I think I'm too chubby-faced for collars) but I coveted it and admired it as it hung in its hallowed position in my wardrobe.

At the time I was sharing a flat with my then boyfriend and his sister Helen - a girl I never really got along with, especially after she tried to get my boyfriend back together with his ex (a saintly woman whom everyone apparently much preferred to cynical smart-mouthed me - and who can blame them?). Helen was one of these pinchfaced Scottish girls who always looked a bit miserable.

One day she was proudly showing off some black and white studio photos a friend of hers had taken of her - for some sort of portfolio perhaps, I can't remember - and in a truly jaw-dropping moment I realised that without asking me, and without mentioning it, she'd taken the shirt out of my wardrobe to wear for the photo shoot, and then slyly replaced it afterwards.

So blatant was she that I didn't even bother to remonstrate with her - it was too late for regrets by then. Perhaps some sort of socialist what's-mine-is-yours argument might have ensued (the same line of thinking as that of a onetime boyfriend of my sister's who at the bus stop espoused the view, on the basis that he was a Buddhist, that money was utterly unimportant, but then asked me for the fare when the bus came). But when this incident crossed my mind the other day I felt the newly kindled heat of outrage.

Melting moments

In other news, from Popbitch:

Burn baby burn: Iraq to get the Goodbye
Effect

Let's hope the US doesn't pull out of Iraq until we can see their great new weapon, the ADS, utilised. The ADS is a non-lethal crowd control weapon that beams microwaves at people, making them feel like their face is melting and provoking "highly motivated escape behaviour". Security experts have called it the "Goodbye effect".

The ADS has been tested in secret for 10 years, costing $40m. In human tests most
subjects reach their pain threshold in three seconds - no one has passed five seconds. The military claims its effects don't last long but this has yet to be checked independently.

What a great idea. Surely beams of searing pain from armoured Hummers liberating the streets of Baghdad can only help Western-Iraqi relations?

More

For the price of a cup of tea

My clothing labels today:
Jacket (Reiss): made in Portugal, bought in London
Skirt (Reiss): made in Portugal, bought in London
Shoes (Zara): made in Spain, bought in Hong Kong
Top (Gap): made in the Philippines, bought in Edinburgh

I’m ashamed to say I hadn’t even really thought about looking at the label for country of manufacture before I buy something:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/globalisation/story/0,,1967404,00.html

Cape of good hope

An apology: to the woman in Harvey Nichols, to whom I said, in an unguarded moment as I swung past, “It’d be a great look if you could walk in the shoes”. Mea culpa: I immediately regretted sounding so catty because really, you did look great (short coal-black cape-like coat, deep blue pencil skirt, towering black suede heels, red lipstick and hair like Eva Marie Saint, above: now will they see?).

My only defence is veritas* - you really couldn’t walk in those shoes.

*Veritas convicii excusat, a principle in Scots law that the truth of a statement exonerates the maker from liability - a defence to a charge of defamation.

Cape from www.maneaterthreads.com

Rise and shine

I'm in East Lothian, in the place where I grew up, just for the weekend before returning to Hong Kong tomorrow. It's cold, but crisp, and the sky is icy blue and clear. The air smells so fresh you could bite it. I went for a run with my sister today along the old railway walk: the simple pleasures of mud underfoot, breath streaming out in front of us, feeling warm, talking as we ran. Bacon sandwiches this morning and Midlake on the CD player.

Sometimes when I'm in the gym in Hong Kong and losing the will to live on the treadmill, I try to visualise the railway walk disappearing into the distance, the woods around me, and the way I feel: the run and the day could go on forever.