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.

Booked out

I hate to sound churlish (and after all, how good is my Chinese?), but one of the common amusements of expats in Asia is the poor standard of English spoken by people whose jobs have been given to them on the basis that they speak English. I frequently get emails in my inbox at work which clearly have not been read by a native speaker prior to sending. Today one arrived from a Shanghai-based online bookseller which contained the following remarks (emphasis added):

“As we’re embracing another X’mas here in China, we’re being puzzled by the same question: what holiday gift should I give to my family, friends, co-workers and customers? This year, you’ve got a new option. You can visit our cool and innovative website … to search for all the gem American English bestsellers for children, teenagers and businesspeople. Do you believe that we have most of the best known and best selling titles in such categories as children, business & investing, career development, self help and nonfiction? Do you believe that nearly 70% of these titles are not available from any other sales channel in China? … Our hardest core, however, is not the consulting piece, nor our selection, nor our logistic part. Our real core is our passion to make our customers happy at all cost.You may wonder how we deliver our promises. Do business with us once, you’ll know it. We’re a small company with big dream. We know we can’t compete with big guys on the # of items, but we can win by hugging our customers, providing them with more customer value and better customer experience.”

It’s hard to know where to start (and to be fair, you’ve got to admire their enthusiasm), but I draw the line at the idea of anyone “embracing X’mas” or being hugged by someone who is, after all, not my friend, but just someone trying to sell me a book, and a book like How to Make Friends and Influence People at that. Which reminds me of another classic faux pas by someone who came to see me in my office to try to offer some services to my company: halfway through the meeting he brought out, from his inside pocket, a copy of the self-same self-help title and brandished it, claiming that his wife made him read it once a month. How to Make Potential Business Partners Cringe and, Ulitimately, to Guarantee They Drop You Like a Hot Potato would have been more apposite.

Strange fruit

When we were in Palau, we were out to dinner one night and S, a member of our group, ordered the Palauan delicacy, fruitbat. No one was quite sure what to expect, but when it arrived there was an indescribable shocked hush followed by uproar because it was, frankly, the most unnerving dish. The most astonishing thing was the lack of finesse in preparation: it looked as though they'd dunked the bat in hot water to cook it and then sploshed it in to the bowl with some coconut milk and a few desultory vegetables; and the hair, and the wings, were all still intact, with its little face, teeth bared,as well they might be, poking up above the water line.

Such was the commotion on the appearance of this dish that the restaurant staff looked somewhat affronted and I was suddenly cringeingly conscious of the fact that we were mocking what amounted to their national dish -

If you are squeamish, look away now

- but when S sliced off its face to eat the brain - and you have to give him credit for eating, at the end of the day, all the meat he could find on its little body - there was really no way to respond except with a kind of appalled gasp.

I took the photo above using S's camera. I'm pleased with it, under the circumstances, but I don't think I'll be selling it to Nigella for her next recipe book.

You can't tell me...

...these aren't beautiful.

Azzedine Alaia, from the inestimable Browns website.