The shoe's over

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months. Oscar Wilde

I know this will open me up to accusations of fickleness, but wandering round Lane Crawford’s shoe department (shiny, shiny, shiny boots of leather), I was struck by the sense that Christian Louboutin shoes suddenly seem somehow a little bit vulgar – even (gasp!) trashy. Maybe it’s overkill, or maybe it’s the fact that every cheap shoe-copying designer is now employing red soles, but the once-coveted shoes have lost their sheen for me.

I’ve also gone right off spindly heels, which are wholly impractical for Hong Kong’s hazardous pavements, and Louboutin’s range does seem to offer either verging-on-the-transvestite platform hoofers, or dainty little flimsy things with toothpick heels (even if they are in modish patinaed silver), and nothing inbetween. Give me a nice chunky Marni heel any day of the week. If it passes La Grande Poobah’s “biffer test” (Q. Is this a biffer shoe? – “biffer” meaning, I think, some incredibly easily overstepped line between superb and what can only be described as a transvestite/remedial combo, although perhaps she can clarify) then I couldn’t be happier.

Marni’s autumn/winter collection (I’ll be adding some pictures from French Vogue) is actually quite wonderful. The chunky stuff has in the past been a bit whimsical and childlike but this season it really seems to work.

They're after my body

There’s a solicitors’ firm on the same floor as my office, named after the senior partner, a woman who is apparently very wealthy – and the reason we know this, apart from her general reputation, is that she has a bodyguard, a Gurkha. When she’s in the office he is usually stationed in reception, where there is nothing whatsoever to do, staring disconsolately out at passers-by; and he doesn’t get any activity unless she leaves the office or goes to the toilets on the same floor, at which point he follows her and stands outside. There is a ladies’ toilet and an “executive toilet”, for which only “executives” (including me) have the key; if she’s gone to the ladies, you can expect a stand-off outside as you try to get in while insisting to the embarrassed looking bodyguard that he can’t prevent entry to a public toilet, even if there may, in an extremely unlikely twist of fate, be armed-to-the-teeth mainlanders waiting inside to seize his employer. Standing outside, how can he protect her anyway?

This may seem an absurd over-reaction to an unlikely threat, but since poor old Teddy Wang was whacked in the eighties in an apparent kidnap-attempt-gone-wrong, the denizens of Hong Kong’s wealthier families have all been paranoid about being kidnapped for ransom and bodyguards are de rigeur. It’s also a very effective status symbol, signifying as it does both wealth and importance. I feel very sorry for the poor man, who has obviously never had to combat anything more dangerous than our meek and frankly puny office manager (albeit unusually irate on this occasion) trying to wash her hands.

I can read you like a book - and not a very good one

My first real job was with a legal publisher in Edinburgh, where I was employed as a legal editor writing law reports for an illustrious law journal (and managed as a result to learn a lot more about Scots law than I ever did at university). Plenty of things stay with me from that time, not least the cast of characters who were employed there – a constant turnover of malcontented law graduates, a lacklustre yet arrogant marketing department who used to produce leaflets littered with spelling mistakes (“an ideal book for practicioners”), and a tyrannical Managing Editor who always smelled faintly of TCP.

Duncan was one of my favourite colleagues because he was so determinedly himself in any situation. He was from the Black Isle, near Inverness, had been a prison officer and consequently played the bagpipes in the Inverness Prison Officers’ Pipe Band, and once uncompromisingly described our Managing Director as “a fat oaf, and a balloon” (you really need sound here to appreciate the full majesty of this remark when pronounced in the inimitable Black Isle accent). His catchphrase was “you can’t go wrong with a brass dog!” – his unerring advice to anyone looking to buy a special gift for someone.

These were the very first days of email and partly because of the novelty of it, Duncan and I used to exchange increasingly sarcastic messages with each other about the third occupant of the editors’ room. A thin, gaunt man, with a passion for Sarah Michelle Gellar, he became known to us as “Bravo Two Zero” or “BTZ” for short, due to his propensity to make up increasingly outlandish stories about himself. BTZ told me that he’d murdered someone once, with precise details of how he’d covered the floor of his bathroom with plastic binbags beforehand, surprised the victim with a chop to the throat, and disposed of the body by chopping it up and dropping small, bloody pieces from his car window a handful at a time as he sped through the Scottish countryside. He told Duncan he’d had to leave the west coast of Scotland (to come and hide in a small legal publishing office in the west end of Edinburgh) because of a Paisley drug deal gone wrong; and he told me that he’d had to flee Glasgow at the dead of night after the execution of Joe “Bananas” Hanlon and Bobby Glover (two notorious gangland figures who were shot in the head and dumped in a car boot in Barlanark) because he’d been involved in the “hit”.

Bravo’s finest hour was falling in love with, and subsequently stalking, a new, pretty editor. As I approached her desk one day I noticed that there was a huge bunch of roses shoved in her bin which she was kicking vengefully. I asked her what was going on and she broke down in tears and spilled the beans about her creepy suitor, who’d been following her home from the pub where she worked and loitering outside her bedroom window late into the night.

I left the company to work in London and Duncan went to Inverness to join the Procurator Fiscal Service. BTZ was discovered to have been running a record sales business from his desk instead of working for the company which was paying his salary. Now if he’d told us that, we certainly wouldn’t have believed it.

Japan to Japan

I saw my first live band in 1982 at the Edinburgh Playhouse – Japan. Some of the lyrics have dated badly, especially in my current context of living in Hong Kong (from the faintly embarrassing “Cantonese boy/Bang your tin drum” to the unnecessarily mystical: “We walk backwards/Say nothing”), but it’s hard to describe the excitement I remember feeling on going to see them at the age of 14 – the hush and then the roar as the lights went down as the band came on stage; the vision of David Sylvian, who was clearly some sort of god, singing on stage, with Ryuchi Sakamoto dancing on tiptoe beside him; the drum solo in “Visions of China”. Sylvian is playing in Hong Kong in a few weeks’ time and I was quite chastened to realise it would be 25 years since I last saw him live.

My excitement about music hasn’t really diminished in that time. My boyfriend at university said to me “One day you’ll meet someone who is as passionate about music as you are”. Even though I sometimes wonder what 20 year olds think of people like me abrogating “their” music (much the same attitude, I would think, as I would have taken as a 20 year old towards people in their late thirties trying to pretend they knew about music – see below under The Klaxons – They’re Shite), I still buy CDs, and listen to the radio when I’m in the UK, and the way I felt when Maximo Park came on to the stage at Summersonic didn’t feel any less intense to me than 25 years ago.

The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day

I know it’s futile to get worked up about music prizes, governed as they seem to be solely by considerations other than music, but it really is a travesty that the Klaxons should have won the Mercury Music Prize. Why, they’re terrible! I know this from personal experience at Summersonic in Tokyo. By unhappy coincidence, they were on the dance stage before Maximo Park. My sister and I had fought our way to very near the front in anticipation of "the Park" coming on, only to be completely blindsided by hordes of Japanese kids moshing like demons to the crass sound of the Klaxons. Their only half-decent song was a cover ("It's Not Over Yet" - a song title just begging for the response "But We Wish It Was"). Their lead singer, for some reason, was in a wheelchair. Their between-song banter was a joke. So we discreetly moved backwards and geared up for another forward surge.

Inexplicably, once the Klaxons finished, the crowd rapidly dispersed (perhaps because US mouthy shouters Sum41 were on next door) and there were relatively few people staying to see Maximo Park, although they were headlining. So Claire and I got right to the front, hanging on to the railings and gazing up in awe like star-struck teenagers.

I'm in two minds as to whether I really care that Maximo Park weren't as popular as the Klaxons. It's always a shame to see true genius (and I am not exaggerating, I think) go unacknowledged; but on the other hand we got to be right at the front, and I get to keep my sense of being part of something special which not everyone can truly appreciate.

Besides, any fatuous nonsense-peddler can win the Mercury Music Prize, and frequently does: M People, anyone?

Walk out to winter

I am not ashamed to say that I am really excited about the new season (which I might even be persuaded to call “Fall” – that’s how far gone I am, although I do find myself pretentiously fond of the conjunction “A/W” for “Autumn/Winter”). The shops are full of jewel colours and beautiful fabrics, the shoes are shiny, and gone are the unwearable shapes of summer, to be replaced by only slightly more wearable shapes; but that’s not the point, because this season is all about what are fatuously called “key pieces” and my favourites are all there, it seems, ie pencil skirts, peep-toe patent heels, and fitted jackets, though I’m not racing to acquire any pussycat bow blouses (frankly I don’t have the neck for it).

We’ve definitely been here before, but I am happy with anything 1940s-inspired, and thankfully there's a lot of it about. So easy to wear! So chic! And as ever the usual panoply of outrageous fashion in-jokes are being pitched at the unsuspecting, the predictably disastrous results of which which I am looking forward to seeing on the streets of Hong Kong. I can reveal that I haven’t seen any jodhpurs yet, even the Balenciaga ones which reputedly sold out everywhere to women who really want to add inches to their hips, but today I saw someone wearing patent leather knee high riding boots, AKA wellies (a nod to the jodhpurs perhaps). Given that it is still 30 degrees and 68% humidity here, this shows a dedication to fashion that is truly awe-inspiring.

Anything remotely welly-like always reminds me of Fireworks Night, circa 1974, when I spent an entire evening wondering why something felt funny inside my wellies, only to discover on returning home that our cat, Tigger, had the previous evening thoughtfully dumped a dead mouse in my boot as a gift, or as leftovers, and the crunching underfoot was of little bones.

How Chinese is it?

After the recent crash of the China Airlines plane at Nagoya Airport, in a fantastically revisionist gesture worthy of Stalinist Russia, the airline painted their logo out in a hamfisted attempt to avoid bad publicity. Since, as with all airline crashes since the dawn of airlines, the crash will henceforth be known as “the China Airlines Nagoya crash”, it’s hard to think of a more futile gesture. It’s now also likely to be known as “the China Airlines Nagoya crash where China Airlines painted out their logo”.

Creating a stink

Browsing through SASA (a truly excellent, and very cheap, Hong Kong make-up store, which proudly sells individual miniature items of skincare products by Clinique, Estee Lauder and Lancôme et al clearly labeled “not to be sold individually”) and idly glancing at the perfumes, I was astonished to see that there’s a cologne (itself somehow a wonderfully dated word) for men called “HUMMER”, the bottle decked out in suitably masculine steering-wheel type trim.

Not only does the Hummer pollute the streets (I saw a large yellow one with blacked out windows in Phnom Penh, a truly vulgar statement and a revolting contrast to the bicycles, beat-up trucks and pedal taxis that otherwise crowd the narrow streets), now Hummer drivers (aspiring or otherwise) can wear the cologne. I didn’t smell it – that would have been a bridge too far – but presumably it reeks of arrogance.

Hello pity

I’ve commented before about the inexplicable proclivity of women in Asia for Hello Kitty and other infantile icons. Only in Asia would you see a top-of-the-range Mercedes with its back shelf packed with wince-inducing cuddly toys. In a Tokyo department store recently I saw the reduction to the absurd of this phenomenon: a display of Hello Kitty kitchen implements from toasters to microwaves, plus Hello Kitty bra-and-knicker sets (for adult women?) and an entire display of accessories and gewgaws dedicated to Hello Kitty’s evil twin, who bestrode the stand like a colossus complete with goth-style black cape and skull and crossbones logo. The evil effigy had not been graced with a name but clearly it was Hello Sickie.

I wouldn’t want to imply that I’m insulting the intelligence of Asian women but there is a huge market out there for this dross and the infantilism it encourages is to be deplored. As for the Hello Kitty vibrator - you couldn’t make it up.

The pictures (to follow) are not all that great – I took them in a hurry lest anyone think that I was snapping them in order, god forbid, to have them copied cheaply in China.

Colour me bad

Wandering around the shops in Richmond, where the new season's clothes have just arrived, I was struck by the fact that the two most ubiquitous colours were those of my least favourite foods: beetroot (more charitably described as puce, and euphemistically as burgundy) and tinned sweetcorn (mustard, or "chartreuse"). It's another injustice perpetrated on the unsuspecting. At least autumn ("fall") brings with it remotely wearable clothes, although legions of infantile smocks and balloon-shaped skirts are still in evidence; but the magazines (and you've got to believe them) are all saying that it's OK to wear a pencil skirt again.

The heart of light, the silence

We went to the Tate Modern in London last week. Despite the fact that it's such a huge space, I find it strangely disappointing that the gallery rooms are all small, so that it feels as though you have to file by the artworks, which is a bit too close to ticking off the sights for my taste, and follow the familiar pattern of white walls and pale wooden floors. What's exhibited consequently seems somehow stale and dead.

On each of my visits I am always drawn to the same place: the Rothko room. Rothko was commissioned by the Four Seasons Restaurant in the Seagram Building, New York, to create artwork for their walls, but before he'd even finished the sequence of paintings he abandoned the idea of putting them in a room full of people eating, as being incompatible with what the paintings ask for, which is contemplation. This was the right decision (although when I first saw them, in a room at the old Tate Gallery, I was childishly moved to comment that they were rather foodlike - one of them clearly depicts two fish fingers on a slice of burnt toast - as usual in attempt to avoid being pretentious I went to the opposite, prosaic extreme). What springs to mind on looking at them is the line about looking in to the heart of light, the silence. They are displayed in their own room, although there is no door, in dim light as specified by the artist. Having been to Stonehenge for the first time a few days earlier I was struck by the parallels between those bold shapes. Doors open or closed? Gateway or barrier?

The most compelling for me is T01165 - portrait-shaped, with blood/rust red oblongs on a pale, almost lilac background. I'm pulled in to thinking about nothing and minutes pass by effortlessly.

After seeing them I wandered out into the gallery again, but the rest just seemed like noise.

-Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed' und leer das Meer.

TS Eliot, The Waste Land

Costing a packet

Hard on the heels of recent shock news about the price of pork, prices for instant noodles, the most popular convenience food in mainland China, are increasing nationwide due to dramatic increases in the cost of raw materials and "product improvement" (does this involve making them longer? more crinkly? less soggy? less toxic?).

Sources from an organisation I confess I had never heard of before this news emerged, the World Instant Noodle Association China Branch (clearly the most powerful branch of all), said that prices will rise at an average rate of about 20% with the highest hike being around 40%. The China Economic Review said that "Prices of high-end instant noodles have already climbed and further price rises will mainly come in locally made medium- and low-end noodles."

Considering there are 1.3 billion people in China it has always struck me as astonishing that there aren't more instances of social unrest. The GDP keeps rising at an alarming rate (over 10% this quarter) and the cost of raw materials is inevitably increasing. When the cost of a bowl of noodles rises by 40%, and the average wage is still only US$1,000 a year, you can see a crisis coming.

(There are low-end noodles? This must be the equivalent of the introduction of first class post. The service stays the same, but now you have to introduce a poorer version and call it second class.)

A different world

I had a thought-provoking conversation yesterday with a Singaporean criminal prosecutor. He was about the same age as me (late thirties), and very senior: judges and lawyers often seem extraordinarily young in Singapore. According to one of his colleagues, meritocratic principles apply whereby someone who is fresh out of law school and in their mid-twenties is not deemed to be any less capable of presiding over a court than someone in their fifties. This is an interesting reversal of the equation of age with wisdom.

In Singapore the death penalty applies for murder and drug smuggling as well as other crimes, so I asked him how he felt about the fact that the outcome of a successful prosecution would be the death of the accused. He said that his first time was the hardest, but that he had dealt with some horrendous crimes and had no doubt that where someone was convicted of such a crime, they deserved to die.

As part of a presentation he was giving, he had a collection of photos of forensic evidence from the murder of a child and it was all I could do to stop him showing them all to me: "I've seen enough", I said politely. It was something he had become so familiar with he didn't even realise how terrible the photographs were. He did his job well in that case: the accused in that case was convicted and was hanged.

Through the window

My grandfather, Donald (Don) Hall, was a commercial artist who designed mannequins for shop windows. These were proper mannequins, with cheekbones, and stylised hair, and pointing, elegant hands, designed to sport Dior; and thinking about this the other day as I walked along Des Voeux Road I realised that I had no idea what the mannequins looked like in any of the shops I pass every day. That's not just because I'm fixated on the clothes, but because they are not mannequins but dummies: designed to fade in to the background, and be as unnoticeable as possible. Many of them have no heads and no hands, or if they have heads, their faces are featureless. Look at them the next time you pass a clothes shop and you'll see what I mean. The dummies used to be aspirational for the women looking longingly at the clothes, part of the dream of what I could be if only I wore that dress; but now a dummy with a lifelike face would be unnerving, the lipstick garish, the eyes disturbing and the image all wrong.

Grandad was still desperate to create with his hands long after he stopped working, and insisted on creating, out of clay, an awful, mawkish effigy of my grandmother which he glued to her gravestone with epoxy resin - someone should have persuaded him otherwise, although I feel sad saying this, because to him it was real.

Not with a banger, but a whimper

Swine disease in southern China has killed millions of pigs in the last year and that's led to an increase in the price of pork in mainland China of 30% in May alone. The recent high pork prices have prompted forecasts of higher inflation this year due to the importance of pork to the Chinese diet. So much so that presumably to avert pork riots, Wen Jiabao said the government would "go all out" to keep pork on dinner tables.

This bombshell came at an appropriate time in my linear little world (sample interior monologue, in no particular order: "clothes ... shoes ... politics ... music ... sausages"). After the previous post, I was thinking about how much I love sausages, proper sausages like the ones pictured above. Serving suggestion: stashed in a bap, with a smear of tomato ketchup, and eaten with a mug of hot, milky Scottish Blend tea held securely in the other hand: pure culinary heaven.

Of course sausage travesties abound: at hotel buffets in Malaysia and other Muslim countries, you often encounter the peculiar, disappointing chicken sausage, which has a texture like cushion stuffing (appalling though this is, it is as nothing compared to the horrors of turkey bacon); and I've never had a proper sausage on a plane yet. Nothing will dim my enthusiasm, though. Pork riots? It seems fair enough to me.

In at the shallow end

At a time when blank-hearted nihilists and confused young men bent on death are thinking about the best way to kill as many people as possible - and inept as the attacks so far have been, they have the sense of being a series - the news in Hong Kong is all about the 10th anniversary of the handover of Hong Kong, and the traffic restrictions and enhanced security as a result of the Chairman (Hu Jintao) being in town ("number one! China number one!", my taxi driver said excitedly yesterday, concurrently and ill-advisedly removing his hands from the wheel to gesticulate), and the complete non-event that is the second official crowning of Donald Tsang as our Chief Executive complete with over-long footage of interminable official ceremonies.

Even though I am on the other side of the world, my anxiety levels are quite high, and I was shocked by the pictures of the burning Jeep Cherokee which ploughed into the side of Glasgow airport. It feels a bit too close to home. The anxiety is hard to explain, but it must have something to do with my fears for the people I love, even though rationally they are not in imminent danger, at least no more so than anyone else is. I chide myself for this involuntary response too, because this is not downtown Baghdad, and it's nothing like the danger the Iraqi people face every day.

Beyond my own selfish response to it, though, I have the strong feeling right now that it is quite impossible for me to comment in a meaningful fashion, still less control what is happening in any way. So here's something meaning less to look at: from the top: Ring by Marie Helen de Taillac; dress by Donna Karan; shoes by Marc Jacobs. All from Browns Fashion. It was either that, or a picture of a sausage: you have to take your shallow comfort where you can find it.

At the violet hour

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back

Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits

Like a taxi throbbing waiting...

From The Waste Land, TS Eliot

Unreal city

The view from our bedroom window, 7.20pm, June 15, 2007.

London kills me

I am wide awake with jetlag at 2am having just returned from London on Saturday and I was lying thinking about London and the impact it always has on me. I last lived there nearly 5 years ago and was happy to leave for something new - London is one of those cities rich with potential but also a sense, if you live there, of missed opportunities and sometimes, of life taking place elsewhere, beyond reach.

There seemed to be a real buzz there this time around - of money, of style, of creativity; so used have I become to the relative uniformity of how people dress and, crucially, the average body shape in Hong Kong (conservatively; and slim) that for the first few days I people-watched quite hungrily, feeling as though I were looking in to a cakeshop window (although I must say, without wanting to be cruel, that plenty of people in London look as though they have gone rather further than just look in the window). The temperature was warm, the sun shone, and I went to a work dinner in Exmouth Market where everyone was sitting outside with glasses of rose at 10pm, and I went to lunch at Rhodes 24 in the old Natwest Tower, with vertiginous views of the City and the Gherkin in astonishing perspective, and Stephen Fry sat chatting nearby, and everywhere I walked there seemed to be people outside bars, and vulgar light blue Lamborghinis racing down side streets, and a wildly diverse mix of people, and hair colour, and what can only be described as Widow Twankey shoes in the shops (I'll try to find an example, stand by!).

I also had a flying visit to Edinburgh for my twin nephews (AKA the Peas)' fifth birthday. I brought them Spiderman figurines and robot hands ("with ratchet sound") from Hong Kong, and arrived to surprise everyone at their birthday party at my mum's house (always a gratifyingly jaw-dropping experience when I turn up unannounced). Edinburgh was several degrees cooler and, perhaps accordingly, seemed much more staid than London where something is definitely happening.

On the plane, out of sheer boredom, I read a copy of Tatler - a ludicrous publication written, and presumably read by, people called Binky Tippington-Smythe - which a concerned reader once advised me to subscribe to since VOGUE had irked me so much. One article was complaining about how the super-rich (the Mittals et al) had spoiled London for the upper middle class who can no longer afford to buy houses in Kensington and Chelsea. These vulgar arrivistes have apparently spoiled it all for the old Etonians who used to be the cream of the crop and can't even get in to the social milieu anymore. Welcome to the real world, where someone is always wealthier than you and the social rules are being rewritten by the obscenely rich for their own benefit (who else's?). That's the nasty side of London.

Bloomsday

In the last two days apocalyptic weather conditions have beset Hong Kong: yesterday, at dragon boat practice at Middle Island, the dreaded red tide (algal bloom) was everywhere to be seen: sometimes frothy, sometimes thready, like egg yolks in the water, sometimes red, thick and gloopy and resisting the stroke of the paddle. The official line is that it is harmless to fish and humans, but looking across the bay at the tide of scum floating on the water, catching in the shark nets and forcing the closure of Repulse Bay and Deep Water Bay beaches, it seemed as though we might be the unsuspecting future victims setting out for an innocent paddle at the beginning of a B-movie entitled "RED TIDE".

Today we were in Lamma for their first International Dragon Boat Festival. Huge amounts of effort had clearly gone in to organisation, but there were amber rain and thunderstorm warnings at 7.30 am and conditions did not improve. The setting was spectacular, if determinedly urban, with a massive power station just to the left of the beach and the races running alongside the power station sea wall. After a handful of races in pretty rocky conditions, the heavens opened, the waves thrashed the shore and the races were halted, purportedly until the lightning stopped. I spent the next few hours huddled under a carapace of umbrellas with three other members of the women's team, getting to know them a whole lot better than I'd anticipated as the rain dripped down our necks (this is when you discover the true meaning of "waterproof"). Then the whole thing was cancelled, and we trudged back to the ferry with the rain lashing us all the way.

So familiar does this scenario seem that, as we huddled together for warmth in our umbrella cocoon, and I sat with my head on my knees musing to myself about the vagaries of the weather, I had a hard time remembering that I was not, in fact, on a camping trip in the Highlands, sheltering disconsolately inside a sodden tent.