Flat out

In the mid-1990s I was working at a small Scottish legal publisher in Edinburgh and struck up a friendship with the PA to the Managing Director. L was smart, funny and irreverent and we became close; I tried as much as I could to support her as she went through a few major life changes: buying a flat in Bruntsfield, splitting up with her boyfriend who had moved out, and finally losing her job with the company I worked for.

I was going through a few life changes of my own at the time: I’d split with my boyfriend of four years, G, which entailed moving out of the flat we shared, a very much un-mutual decision; I was trying to negotiate a move to the London office; a new relationship was in its very early stages. My life was in flux, too. L needed help with her mortgage and had room in her flat; somehow a plan quickly coalesced and I moved in with her.

The whole experience was an utter disaster. Perhaps understandably, L was a very angry and unhappy person at that time: she was upset about being made redundant, heartbroken about her boyfriend, anxious about finding a new job and worried about money. She made a disastrous pass at my ex when he came round to see me and I wasn’t there; he ended up effectively being blackmailed into building a platform bed for her (a baffling sequence of events that I never quite got to the bottom of). She railed against the company and her former boss. She hated having to have someone living with her under those circumstances, and I was about the worst person possible: I had split with G but there was a new man in the picture, who was phoning me late at night and sending me flowers, and I still worked for the company she’d just left; I was happy about my new relationship, had plans for the future, and was positive about getting there. The atmosphere within her flat was poisonous and I couldn’t wait to leave. I was stuck with paying the mortgage for my old flat with no rent coming in and beholden to decision making in London about when I could move to that office and what I would be doing there, so I had to stick it out. 

Weirdly, every time L and I bumped into each other outside that flat – even just down in the street – we got along as well as ever and she was a totally different person. Within the walls of her own flat, however, she was sullen, hostile, and aggressive.

We avoided each other as much as we could, but three particularly terrible episodes stick in my mind from my time there (a matter of months, perhaps four months at the most, but otherwise an eternity).

• ·         Cats’ feet are so delicate. I broke a wine glass in L’s kitchen (plus ça change) and cleaned up as best as I could. Not well enough for L, however, who left me the following note next to a tissue containing a few remaining fragments she had managed to scrape up: “I found these. Be more careful, the cat’s feet are delicate and you could have seriously hurt her”.
• ·         Spanish boys are all the same. In September I went on a wonderful holiday to Barcelona and Madrid with my then-best friend Rachael (about whom more some other time). My friend Campbell put me in touch with his sister Jill, who lives in Madrid, and we spent two weeks being escorted around by her friends; we stayed in Pablo’s flat in the centre of Madrid and Jill, Pablo and Jaime drove us on excursions to hidden restaurants and took us to their favourite tapas places. We gazed at Picassos and Miros in the Reina Sofia Museum and attended a packed house party where we learned to cook tortillas and got gloriously drunk on Cava. In Barcelona, we sat on the beach in the sunshine and ate morcilla and blue cheese rolls from a little hole in the wall cafe. Pablo gave us the keys to his flat as a parting gift. It was a perfect holiday. Back in rainy Edinburgh, when Lucy asked me how the holiday had been, I told her how kind the Spanish boys were to us and what a brilliant time we’d had. Her response? “Oh they probably just wanted to shag you. I lived in Spain, Spanish boys are all the same”. I went to work and cried.
• ·         I’ve hurt my back. In an effort to ingratiate myself with L, I decided to help her get rid of the enormous, mouldering pile of old newspapers that sat in her hallway (at least 15 heavy bundles, most long pre-dating me). I had hired a terrible little car for J’s visit from London and after he had gone home, I humped every one of those bundles of newspapers from her second floor flat to the ground floor, into the back of the little car and off to the recycling centre at Bristo Square. L was at home while I was doing it and I’d thought we could do it together, perhaps even bonding over the task. But instead, she watched me coolly as I huffed and puffed and remarked “Oh, I would help, but I’ve hurt my back”. Did she thank me for completing this Herculean task? Did she hell.

Not long afterwards I got confirmation of my move to London. I left L’s flat at the earliest opportunity, departing for London and then Hong Kong. I’m still in touch with everyone else in this story bar one; but from that day to this I have never spoken to L again. 

Barriers to entry

I've always been at best careless, at worst clumsy; since I got pregnant and had Max if anything it's become more pronounced, not least in public (which at least serves the purpose of allowing random drunken strangers to go on about their drunken business feeling satisfied they've helped another human being in need).

We've put a barrier up between the kitchen and the rest of the house, consisting of one side of Max's now-obsolete wooden play pen (gone are the days when he would stay in it). The kitchen is home to all the really interesting/dangerous stuff that he'd love to get his hands on: drawers full of knives, cupboards full of bleach, the bin, the oven, the dishwasher - a cornucopia of delights for small hands. Unfortunately for me, the barrier is just a little bit too high to step over with ease, and I've now had two spectacular falls, in both instances caused by (1) laziness and (2) wearing the lovely furry baffies (slippers) my sister gave me for Christmas some years ago. Cosy though they are, as slippers, they live up to their name and both times the same disaster unfolded in slo-mo before D's helpless sight: I stepped carelessly across the barrier to the kitchen, not troubling to lift my back leg high enough to clear the barrier, the back slipper slipped, and I hit the ground  full length and so rapidly I didn't even have time to outstretch a hand to break my fall.

To D this must have seemed like a combination of high slapstick and endlessly unspooling horror, particularly because both times I lay on the floor humiliated, winded and in some small amount of pain while Max, shocked by the crash and bang and the fact that Mummy was now horizontal on the floor moaning unpleasantly, screamed in fright and stood on the other side of the barrier anxiously.

The second time, my flailing foot caught one of the slats and knocked it clean out and the bowl of sardine surprise I was carrying (after Max had refused to eat most of it) fell on the floor first, in exactly the place my face then subsequently landed.

I now have a large purple bruise on my thigh, about the size of a cauliflower and not dissimilar in texture, and a thoroughly chastened attitude.

Words fail

Because I was spending a fair portion of each day sitting in a chair feeding Max, we hit upon the idea of buying an iPad to enable me to read the news, answer emails, and play games; I'd been a bit sneery about the idea of iPads and couldn't see the point of them, but now I am a total convert. When Max grows up he will be completely au fait with the idea of touchscreen operation - it will probably be old hat by the time he's 5 - but it's still a wonderful novelty to me: close your fingers, or sweep the screen, and everything is available to you. Although I dislike the glacial speed of typing on a touchscreen keyboard, and there are some other slightly irksome features of the interface, it's about as good as a small portable device could be, and I find myself irritably swiping in vain now at the screen of my Kindle, which at the time of purchase, barely 12 months ago, had seemed like such a miracle.

Apple's refusal to enable Flash on its mobile devices has, indirectly, led to a strange brush with the bottom half of the internet. I can't play (Flash-powered) Facebook Scrabble on the iPad, and have had to fall back on its predecessor, once called Scrabulous back in those early Facebook days, and now forced to call itself Lexulous and make some significant changes to the gameplay, including the provision of eight letters, not seven, which at once makes the game easier and necessitates a bigger board. Just as you can with Scrabble, you can play with random, more-or-less-anonymous strangers and if you wish, leave comments for them. In hundreds of games of Scrabble, my messages from them were never much more controversial than the occasional "Good luck" or "Good evening from Auckland". 20 or so games in to Lexulous, I've encountered perplexing, albeit very different, remarks from two opponents. The first one began with a torrent of personal abuse aimed at me. At me personally, because he'd seen my picture, and thought it might be... funny? or provocative? to heap abuse on me. Maybe he was deploying  abuse to make me quit and thus to take the win; maybe he was just very angry for some reason. The abuse was racist, so he wasn't the sharpest tile on the board. I wondered whether to respond, decided against it, got more abuse, maintained a dignified silence, and got my revenge by winning the game.

That was pretty vile, but manageable; the second was just plain creepy, although in hindsight our exchange was also quite funny:

Creep: Did you see my invite?
Me: No, Lexulous can be a bit funny like that, messages don't get through.
Creep: I asked for players who wanted to have a naughty side bet on the outcome of the game.
Me: [Silence as I try to work out how to get out of this gracefully]
Creep: So, are you up for it?
Me: No thanks.
Creep: [Quits game in fit of pique and takes the loss]

The kick inside

There are a few side-effects of pregnancy which I didn't know about before it happened to me:

1. Insomnia.  Sleep's never really been a problem for me before, even during particularly stressful periods at work, but since I've been pregnant, sleep can be elusive: often I'm awake at 3am, thoughts going round my head as insistently as a headache, with no apparent end in sight. (It's the hormones.)
2. Kicking. Ah, what a delicate image! It's like butterflies, they (the books) said. No, it's not; it's like having a trampoline inside you with someone periodically jumping on it. Much as I enjoy the signs that he (for it's a boy) is active, and the sheer weirdness of the sensation, let's not be sentimental about it.
3. Patronising language. According to medical staff (with a few rare exceptions), all pregnant women are "girls"; all doctors are male, and all nurses and midwives are female. The baby is "baby". Sometimes I have to remind myself it's not the 1950s.
4. Guilt-trip marketing. It would be possible to spend a quite mind-boggling amount of money on equipment, and boy is there a lot of it. There are entire stores (out-of-town, of course) devoted to every little thing you may possibly need for your child, and a whole lot that you don't. And a lot of the marketing is couched in safety terms. Buy this, or "baby" will suffer!
5. The demon internet. Not that I didn't already know this, but if you have any concerns about anything medical whatsoever, the last helpful place to look is an internet forum. Here, you will almost certainly discover that whatever you are worried about is decidedly abnormal, and will lead in the most terrible directions, all based on what experts (women who have had a baby themselves) are saying.
6. Gestational diabetes. After a two hour test which involves drinking a glucose juice so horribly sweet I could feel it stripping my tooth enamel, and three blood tests, I've been diagnosed as a borderline case (my age, 43, being the major contributing factor) and am currently on a military-style regime of blood sugar self-testing and strictly timed, weighed and measured meals. If this fails, it's injecting insulin for me. (It's the hormones.)

Despite all the above, which reads like a numbered whinge, I've had a pretty good pregnancy so far, to the point where, prior to the appearance of no. 6 (diagnosed at 29 weeks), I was feeling almost smug.

Computer love

I first played what could be identified as a computer game in the 1980s. It was Pong, which made a distinct "bop" sound when the ball hit the paddle. I was a bit contemptuous of it, but not long after that I played a few dungeons-and-dragons style games, using the C-prompt, where you could choose one of several outcomes. I remember standing helplessly watching someone trying to resolve a problem where the computer wasn't responding, and wondering whether I would ever understand how these things worked.

The first game I got really excited about was Wolfenstein 3D. In the early 1990s I played a lot of Wolfenstein, although the crude graphics had the effect of making me travel sick (run down a corridor, look left, look right, shoot a Nazi guard, go into a room, turn 360°, extract a symbol hidden behind a brick, run down a corridor... I lasted about 5 minutes before I started feeling queasy). My next obsession was Lemmings on an early Apple Mac, followed by SimCity (which is still a pretty damn good game, especially the version where you can make city transport decisions such as deciding where the bus stops go, and building ferry ports and subway systems with real-time data on how many Sims are using the system). After that, I played Shadows of the Empire on the N64: the first truly inspiring game I'd ever experienced (I loved the attention to detail and continuity; the way that, walking along a treacherous cliff-edge path to accomplish one task, I could see the moving parts of the next challenge, already engaging far below; and the experience of running round a junkyard with the droid IG-88 in clattering, menacing pursuit was genuinely terrifying).

I'm still playing, but I'm very particular: despite an early attachment to Wolfenstein, a lot of the first person shooter games never really appealed to me; despite the fact that graphics are a lot more smooth and sophisticated than they were when I first started playing, it's the format most likely to make me feel sick: run down a corridor, look left, look right..., and more than that, unless very well done it can be repetitive and dull. I have an abiding dislike of games set on spaceships, "boss" fights (engaging in pointless battle with a large, relentless foe armed with tentacles/fire/thorns/stingers, who has a tiny Achilles heel that you have to die numerous times to discover), fights with robots, and post-apocalyptic landscapes. I don't like my characters to be as thick as mince, and sadly a lot of them are. My favourite weapon is the sniper rifle, followed closely by the shotgun. I like to be behind my character rather then looking through his/her eyes (third-person shooter) and prefer my opponents to be human, or almost human (I don't mind engaging with the undead). I want a proper story in a believable, if exotic, setting: essentially, Resident Evil and Uncharted are perfect games for me. Both even have credible female characters who aren't afraid to wield a gun and never get their kit off. On that last point, it seems pretty clear that most games are designed for men; games specifically aimed at women have tended to be pretty contemptible (with an emphasis on romance, pets, or shopping). I'm perfectly happy to shoot people (hence the tag for this post, "I know how this makes me look"). I know it's not real. And I don't need to be patronised.

Bicycle races

I've been living in Melbourne for nearly three months. Notwithstanding that it's been rated as the most desirable city on earth by The Economist, I must confess that its charms have so far eluded me in comparison to Sydney. Perhaps it's because it feels like a small town masquerading as a big one; perhaps I just haven't given it a chance (and the cold of winter, which is only just beginning to ease, made a big difference to my admittedly petulant sense of aggrieved injustice regarding the place where I currently have to live) - and there's no doubt it looks and feels like a much better place when the sun shines.

One area where Melbourne does outshine Sydney is in the provision and ubiquity of bicycle lanes. The city and inner city are all relatively flat, roads are generously proportioned and laid out in a grid system, and as a result there are a plethora of cycle lanes which get a lot of use every day.

Alongside the light railway line in my suburb (Brunswick) there's a cycle path that runs pretty much all the way into the city. Every morning it's thronging with cyclists, some racing the train to take advantage of green lights at the crossings, which close for the train to pass. There are scores of cool kids in hun helmets (which I believe are more formally known as BMX helmets, and are a far cry from the plastic deformity I have to wear on my head, which is so large it makes me look as though I'm storing some form of foldout tent inside it), and my favourite sight, which is that of two or even three kids packed into a little wooden frontloading cart, speeding along in fine style with a puffing parent behind them, hard at work at the pedals while they sit there, content to be borne along like little nobles. What a great invention! Is it even legal?

Veil of ignorance

Growing up in 1970s Scotland, I was a rather greedy, forever-hungry child. Hungry as I was, often the food adults liked, and took pleasure in eating, baffled me; my parents would describe something spicy, or bitter, or strong as “an acquired taste”, which seemed to be synonymous with “vile”; olives, whisky, cumin, beetroot, coriander or aubergines. On the contrary, I loved bland food, and dreamed of being given a jar of peanut butter for my birthday. As well as being highly suspect, adult food seemed impossibly exotic to me; on the (fairly infrequent) occasions when someone was coming for dinner, and children were to be sent to bed early, I took a very keen interest in what was being prepared.

My mum seemed to have two key dishes which were her dinner party staples: moussaka, and Danish Peasant Girl with Veil. The latter was based on a recipe of my grandmother’s, and was essentially a dish of stewed apple and bread topped with cream and grated chocolate (recipe here). I remember peeking into the fridge as the Danish Peasant Girl sat there in splendour, cooling for the evening; I can’t guarantee that I didn’t sometimes stick a greedy finger in it to steal some for myself, justifying it with righteous indignation at being excluded from the festivities.

Wings of desire

When I was about 8, I was unlucky enough to participate in an exercise with a group of other kids, both younger and older, where we were asked in turn what we wanted to do when we grew up. Bearing in mind that this was the antediluvian days of the mid-1970s, and despite the fact that these were the kids of my parents' friends, artists, hippies, musicians and the like, and perhaps should have been a bit more enlightened (having said that, from experience this often turns out not to be the case: people who pursue what they regard as an alternative lifestyle can often be surprisingly conservative), when I said that I wanted to be a pilot, peals of mocking laughter rang out. Clearly it was ridiculous for a girl to want to be a pilot, because that is a man's job.

One of the other kids played to the gallery with his answer which was "shoplifting, gluesniffing, stealing". This got the laughs he was after (although it may have been as accurate a prediction as anyone else's).

About 15 years later, having gone on an entirely different career path, I had a flying lesson from RAF Turnhouse, near Edinburgh. Despite the excitement of taking the controls for take-off and landing, speaking on the two-way radio, flying over my childhood home, and circling over the Forth road and rail bridges, it quickly became apparent that the career I had dreamed about would not have been a smart choice for someone who gets violently airsick.

A woman who had drifted around the edges of my parents' group of friends came to our house for the day, not long after the career path humiliation ritual. She was a bit of an old, sad figure in my view (horrifyingly, I realised on thinking about it that she was probably younger than I am now), a slightly bulky woman with bleached blonde hair, an oversized baggy mohair jumper, and a miserable expression on her face. She didn't seem to know what to do with herself. The porous clay mug from which she drank her tea was so throughly imbued with the reek of her perfume that it didn't wash off for months. My sister and I cruelly dubbed her "Shoplifting, Gluesniffing, Stealing" and the poor woman has no name other than this in my memory.

On the cover of a magazine

Me and my sister used to read a magazine called Jackie (1964-1993), published by D.C. Thomson in Dundee. In my mind's eye, Jackie has Leslie Ash (wearing a checked shirt) on the cover and a special pullout centrefold of Leif Garrett (wearing a checked shirt) inside. Jackie had a splendid, mordant advice column, called Cathy and Claire, true life photo stories featuring true life (ie boyfriend) dilemmas, and fashion and make-up tips, many of which inserted themselves in my brain so thoroughly that I will never forget them.

never pluck a hair out of a mole
don't brush your hair when it's wet
apply foundation with a sponge
don't wear clashing patterns
horizontal stripes make you look fat
chocolate gives you spots

I was recently invited to an event where the trichologist Philip Kingsley was going to share his wisdom about hair. I wasn't able to go, but I was longing to be able to ask him about the veracity of some of those Jackie legends: wash your hair as infrequently as possible (apparently he says the opposite)? Use the hottest water you can bear? These things are modern superstitions. I'll never forget them, but over time I might have worked out that some of them are subject to challenge. Over time I've also added some of my own (from, gasp, other sources):

blot hair with a towel before blow-drying
only condition the ends of your hair, not the roots
dark chocolate contains anti-oxidants and is good for your skin
tomato ketchup contains lycopene (thanks, Men's Health) which ditto
reading a broadsheet newspaper every day is good for your vocabulary (thanks, Mr Campbell)
only floss the teeth you want to keep

Hungry ghosts

I inherited from my mum a tendency to react badly to insect bites. A famous family photo shows my mum with her eyes swollen shut and face a puffy mass after a bite from a horsefly. Insanely itchy, raised red welts can materialise from the smallest bite.

I'm in Sydney, where it has been raining; it's warm, and damp, and these are perfectly agreeable conditions for mosquitoes. At night I have to swaddle myself in a sheet, trying not to expose my body to the voracious beasties. The tiny whine of the divebomber still seeks me out and as soon as I'm asleep, and vulnerable, the mosquito fun park is open for business.

I awoke this morning with an absurdly swollen top lip, looking as though my cosmetic surgery had gone wrong: a Paris Pout caused by a kiss from a mosquito. There were bites on my ankles, neck and shoulders too. Stepping from the shower I saw a beastie on the mirror: slow, fat, drunk with success, it made no move to escape as I splattered it on the glass - no quarter given, nor expected - and watched with repulsion as a huge bubble of stolen blood pulsed out from its body.

Now I know how it feels to kill in cold blood - my blood.

Station to station

I was telling someone the other day how excited I was, on starting a new job in 1993 (my first proper job, in Alva Street in the West End of Edinburgh) to be able to use the fax machine. If I'm honest the idea of being able to write something on a piece of paper and then have it reproduce on the other side of the world somehow still really impresses me. Here I am now, on a train from London Euston to Penrith, writing a blog post, able to report that the American Christian evangelical (with the pamphlets to prove it) sitting opposite me has a large spot on her ample chin and is sniffing continuously and annoyingly; that it's raining in Tamworth, where the train just stopped; that we're running 15 minutes late... all this of little interest to anyone of course (and that's what blogging's all about!), but despite the fact that I deliver training to lawyers on technology, and consider myself fairly computer literate, I still have a childlike delight in what technology can do. Perhaps that's partly because I'm of the generation that didn't grow up with it. It still seems like a miracle to me that you're reading this.

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.

Consider the lilies

I am going to a beach wedding in Phuket this weekend, which poses the challenge of what to wear - not too dressy, clearly, but judging by the extremely glamorous women who attended the hen party, I have to make an effort (and I don't look good in crumpled linen anyway). I've just moved to a new flat and so I am suffering from my periodical loathing of the idea of possessions (so many of them! and to what end?); however, unbidden, this Rick Owens Lilies dress appeared to me as if in a dream. The idea of wearing this to the wedding, teamed with what is now tiresomely dubbed "statement" jewellery (I'm making a statement. This is jewellery), is a vision entirely unrelated to reality. First, I'm not buying it. Second, even if I did, and it fitted me, and more importantly suited me, I couldn't get it to Hong Kong, nor to Phuket, on time.

From Net-a-porter.

Shiny shiny

In honour of the cavalcade of festive gewgaws adorning Hong Kong (what is it about Christmas that allows for, even encourages, major lapses of taste and decorum?), here are a few of my favourite things. The best advice about wearing jewellery: before you leave the house, take some off.Amethyst ring, Marie Helene de Taillac.

Silver cuff, Plumo. Verdier crystal earrings, Fashion Conscience.

Family fortunes

When I read The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe, I liked the first line so much that I memorised it: “When I was a young lad twenty or thirty or forty years ago I lived in a small town where they were all after me on account of what I done on Mrs. Nugent”.

There’s something about the rude vigour of it (and the book that follows) that reminds me of the gypsies who lived behind our house for a few months. We thought of them as gypsies, but called them “The Bussies” (and in my mind, somewhat unfairly, they were connected with a fantasy family that my sister and I used to tell stories about as we lay in bed at night, called “the Slummies”, living in a tenement and roughly based on The Broons); they called themselves “travellers”, and they moved in one day out of the blue, because another neighbour had been keeping an ancient, yellow, single-decker bus (“the Bus”) there with a view to selling it. The travellers wanted to buy it, or so they said, but ended up living there for a while with no money changing hands, with much hand-wringing around the neighbourhood but no one willing to do anything about it.

That site behind our house, next to the woodshed, ironically enough had once housed a real gypsy caravan in the ancient style with awnings and filigree and once-colourful paint; it belonged to another family friend (whose daughter had trapped her arm in one of those old-fashioned electric clothes wringers, a story that both horrified and fascinated me and which affected the way I viewed that caravan: in my mind’s eye there is, illogically, a clothes wringer inside it), and it gradually collapsed in on itself until it had to be towed away to the dump, to be replaced not long afterwards by the Bus.

We were fascinated and frightened by the travellers: there were about eight of them, including children, but their numbers seemed to be very fluid with new people arriving or departing regularly; they were obsessed with Elvis and within hours of arrival had bedecked the Bus with pennants and red and gold banners proclaiming He was King. When I went out the back with the wood basket, to collect wood for the fire, I was a bit scared of what the travellers might do to me. This must have been around 1978, when I was 10. I have the clearest memory of a girl a bit younger than me, with ruddy cheeks and long black hair and a stern expression, who spent her time pushing an equally ruddy-cheeked toddler around in a pushchair. One shameful day I followed them into “the dell”, a scoop in the hillside that the road passed through on its way to the village, with a stream at the bottom and trees all around; in the quiet, with no adults around, I pinched that little toddler’s cheek very hard, to see if he would cry (he didn’t) as the pair of them stared at me fiercely (and with good reason) but without a word being exchanged between us.

The travellers disappeared in the dead of night, after a furious row, and as soon as we were sure they were gone for good the neighbourhood kids swarmed all over the bus to see what they’d left. It was a mess of broken Elvis records, discarded pots and pans, and clothes; they’d broken a window, and the Bus had stopped working so it couldn’t be sold, so it too took its turn to be towed away to the dump.

It seems with hindsight quite a bizarre thing to have happened; but aside from the nasty little cheek-pincher (me) there was a remarkable tolerance (which could, have course, have been engendered by fear, but was more likely just bemusement) of their presence there. We accepted them as they were and everyone got on with it. I don’t even remember wondering where they might have come from or what might have happened to them after they’d gone: they were there, and then they were not, and they didn’t exist outside my solipsistic little world, except that we had some scratched Elvis records and other little souvenirs to remember them by.

Silhouettes and alcohol

I had a red-hot chilli martini with some friends in the bar at the top of the Mandarin Oriental and then with my head spinning and throat burning, came home and watched the video of Alexander McQueen's A/W collection on net-a-porter. Clean lines, perfect silhouettes and simple but elegant tailoring. It might be the vodka talking but these seem to me to be things of beauty, with no hint of gimmicks (though I could have sworn the model wearing Look 5 has knock knees; you'll have to watch the video to spot it).

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.

Friends again

My sister and brother and I spent part of our childhood being educated at home. After a difficult time at our rural Scottish primary school (we were either “tinks” because we were dressed in second hand clothes and clearly poor, or “toffs” because we had English accents) we didn’t have a peer group around us except for each other; and I think this affected all three of us: we felt like outsiders and our social skills (probably) and self-esteem (definitely) suffered as a result.

The other-ness that made us shy and fearful when we were children is, perhaps paradoxically, part of my confident armoury now; but one legacy from those days is that friends are hard-won, and important to me: I don’t collect them like bangles. The end of a friendship is something in its way as devastating as the end of a romantic relationship.

I started at a new school in Edinburgh, at the age of 13, having spent four years in the “little school”. It was a terrifying experience: how sophisticated they all were with their clothes and hair and make-up and cigarettes, and talk of snogging and lovebites and drinking at parties; how self-conscious I felt with my cheap clothes and hennaed hair. Another girl, F, joined a year or two later, an outsider in a different way, and we gravitated towards each other. She was very different from me: her parents lived in a huge house in Morningside, her father was a name partner in a firm of accountants, and she had come to the school from a well known all-girls school. F was overweight with dyed blonde hair and given to dressing in long black all encompassing tops and skirts. She was clever and funny too, but defensive and prickly and prone to outspoken criticism of others. She used to say she’d love to be a traffic warden because of the power it would give her over others. We were similar too and shared a love of the Smiths and of quoting lyrics at opportune moments (“aye, there’ll be blood on the cleaver tonight”). We went clubbing together at the (legendary, for Edinburgh) Kangaroo Klub, and I often stayed at her house. Her parents liked me. We never fought over boys. We had fun together, even though I resented her family’s wealth and she probably resented me for being slimmer than she was.

Perhaps because of our conflicting feelings about each other the sine curve of our friendship sometimes horrifyingly dipped into hatred and I particularly remember sitting cringeing in a maths class as I heard her loudly bitching to my brother’s ex-girlfriend about me. She was competitive and vindictive, and I was probably no better; when we were friends I loved her and when we were not I loathed her, and I’m sure she felt the same way about me.

After we left school we kept in touch; she went to Manchester University and I went to Glasgow, and despite a disastrous visit to “Madchester” where we went clubbing (I still remember dancing to the (pre-Blur) Mock Turtles’ “There’s No Other Way”) and she thoroughly alienated me and our friend Tara by spending the whole evening chatting up some skinny bloke and then announcing to us at 3am in her room to me and painfully boyfriend-less Tara “I’ve just got a boyfriend!”, we were still what you would call friends. When I applied for my postgraduate Diploma in Legal Practice she lent me some money to do the course, which was incredibly generous of her.

This was the seed of our downfall though: after I finished the course and started work, I was a bit slow to pay her back as I wasn’t earning much, and I missed a few payments. Instead of calling me about it, though, she took what was probably the advice of her parents and sent me a “legal” letter by registered post threatening me with legal action if I didn’t repay her with immediate effect.

I sent her a letter with postdated cheques for the remainder of the money, and said I was sorry and that I hoped we would laugh about this in years to come. I have never heard from her since.

I still think about her from time to time and wonder how she is and where she ended up. I heard she works as an audiologist and is very successful. I've never forgotten her, but I'll probably never speak to her again.

The past is another country

When I was 14, my class at school went to Chur, Switzerland, on an exchange trip. We were all parcelled out to what we rather facetiously called our "Swiss mothers" in different houses around the town, and attended the local Steiner school.

I was quite new to the class, having only joined the year before, and already rather unpopular for having been given (how dare I be) the role of Miranda, the only female appearing in The Tempest. In Chur, however, I was cast into outer darkness by the entire class for saying that the two popular girls, Laura and Tara, only bought clothes at a trendy shop in town, Globus, because it was trendy, and not because they really liked them. (This was the early 1980s so we are talking fluorescent batwing t-shirts here.)

This throwaway, bitchy remark, of course, may have been true, albeit rather cruel, and was given in a moment of madness to Olwen, a nasty little washed-out sneak fond of wearing lipstick the colour of bubblegum. Of course in an instant it became a classroom sensation (I can even remember the news passing like a Mexican wave through the classroom as one person whispered it to another); the fatwa was issued; and I was a wretch, to whom it was forbidden to speak, from then on.

Laura and Tara had been invited for lunch at my house, but the news broke the day before and they didn't turn up. My Swiss mother had cooked a splendid meal and I was unable to explain what had happened ("sie kommen nicht... sie kommen nicht") and cried copiously into my pasta. They were forced by our teacher to come round and apologise with flowers, a humiliating act which made them hate me even more.

My problem was compounded by the fact that my own mother had volunteered to come along to help the class. So I was not only a cast-iron bitch, but a teacher's pet as well. I avoided school as much as I could, and stayed in my attic room watching poorly dubbed Lee Majors series ("Ein Colt fur alle Falle") and reading an American magazine about how to get your "fanny" into shape and why Karen Carpenter's death resonated with us all. The view from the little window is burned into my memory forever.

Years later I shared a flat with Tara at university and she apologised to me for the way they had behaved. I wasn't ready to be magnanimous then: it was the biggest, most devastating event of my life so far. The rest of the trip I've pretty much blocked out. By the green shores of impassive Lake Lucerne, I redeemed myself slightly by losing at spin the bottle, in a late night game in our youth hostel, and having to run across the room naked. So I thought, but when we got home and the photos from the trip came down from the wall of the classroom, having been displayed there fora few weeks, I discovered that someone scratched my face with the point of a compass in every picture I appeared in.

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.