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]

I am curious orange

I've commented before about having a sneaking suspicion that fashion is a massive joke perpetrated on the gullible – or words to that effect – of whom I am clearly sometimes one. It passed me by in January when it first appeared on the catwalk (how "on-trend" am I? Not very), but this Jil Sander plastic bag (or, to give it its full title, "acetate market bag") is surely another cruel facet of the joke. It's a bag, a plastic bag, and it retails at $150 (if you don't believe me, here it is on Net-a-Porter). I looked, but it doesn't have "I Am A Plastic Bag" written on it.

Urban mysteries

Walking home from lunch in the CBD today, I heard a strange, insistent noise as I came along Balfour Street in Chippendale; it almost sounded like a dentist's drill. Drawn by the sound, I slowed as I passed a terraced house and glanced in the window: this is what I saw.


It felt so intrusive that I didn't want to linger, so the shot isn't great: a man with bright blond hair is lying on his side, in someone's front room, and another man is tattooing his back. There was something strangely graceful and compelling about this scene; the sound carried all the way down the street, but as I stood there, the tattoo artist didn't even look up, so absorbed was he in his work. I felt privileged to have been part of this moment, in my tiny, nosy way.

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.

Summer nightmares

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



It says "SUMMER DREAMS".

Accessory after the fact

The relentless drive to infantilise women - with, apparently, our eager encouragement - continues with the launch of the Hello Kitty make-up line by MAC. Clearly I am out of step with what modern women want: I find all of this ("über-cute beaded charm bracelets" and "black plastic brush holder in shape of a Hello Kitty head") loathsome. It will go down a storm in Hong Kong.

Poison pen

Until either (1) the art of letter-writing died out due to the advent of email, or (2) I (sadly) grew out of it, whichever came first (ie up until about 15 years ago), I used to correspond with dozens of people, many of whom I never met: penpals from Middlesex, Nigeria, Minnesota, or Glasgow, the early ones from Tammy and Misty, a girls' comic, and the later ones from a long-defunct Scottish music magazine called CUT. I used to take incredible care with my envelopes, decorating them painstakingly with black and white pictures cut from music and art magazines and using a silver pen to write the address.

I met three of my correspondents in person in the late 1980s, just after I left home to go to university in Glasgow. They were all from the later group and were all completely different from each other. The only one I'm still in touch with, B from Blantyre, I met (by arrangement) beside the Smiths records in HMV in Renfield Street in my first year at university and although we haven't seen each other for a few years, he's someone I think of with great affection as having been a friend when I needed one and as someone I could pick up with again in a second.

The others were more peculiar: William, the only child of elderly parents, ran his father's gas bottle business in Mount Vernon in Glasgow and, as a present, bought me black towels from Harrods which served only to scandalise my room-mate, an uptight Free Presbyterian from Ullapool called Sheena. William was so nervous when we first met he was sweating profusely, and clumsily attempted to kiss me in his father's Nissan Sunny when he dropped me back at my student flat, while I equally clumsily tried to extricate myself. And then there was Tony from Broughty Ferry (the posh part of Dundee), who worked for the Sunday Post - in the advertising department, but he carried himself with the glamour of a journalist. We met in Princes Street Gardens. Compared to B and William, I was quite attracted to him, and we seemed to be getting on well, but it all went badly wrong when we began talking about what each of us had imagined the other might be like. He remarked "I had no idea what you would be like. I was worried you might be a fat Paki".

Motorcycle emptiness

During our week in the US we unwittingly stumbled into a strange netherworld where monstrosities like the above are considered attractive, even desirable: there was a Harley convention in Kona while we were there and thousands of Harley riders on lovingly-rendered custom bikes like these descended on poor tiny Kona town to ride mindlessly around, with the apparent highlight of the whole tour being the humble, grass-covered mini-roundabout outside our hotel (I've ridden on a Harley, and an extremely boring and uncomfortable experience it was too: a perfect example of form over function). Helmets aren't mandatory so no one wears one. I know they are going more slowly than a horse and cart, but to my mind (and I speak as someone who had several near-serious accidents riding my scooter in London traffic) it makes the legal principle of "eggshell skull" seem a little more descriptive than necessary.

It reminded me of the leaked comments of a Harley executive about the appeal of their bikes: "We sell Harleys so that a man whose job title is 'accountant' can roar though a small town and feel good about himself".

All bets are off

I was in Las Vegas in 2001, at an excruciating sales conference. In my jaundiced view, not helped by the event I was attending nor by the ludicrous hotel we were staying in (“New York New York”), it was a profoundly depressing place, and even from the absurdly privileged vantage point of a high-rolling banker’s free suite at the top of the Bellagio, with a glass of Dom Perignon in my hand, it seemed as hollow as it looks. The worst aspect, and sadly this accounts for the majority of the revenue generated by Las Vegas, was the slot machines: people dressed in extremely casual, almost pyjama-level clothing, each handing over their dollars for a big bucket of dimes which they then proceeded to feed into the slot machines for hours on end, as if participating in a giant metaphor for futility.

Melbourne has a super-casino too, by the river, flanked by strange, huge, sculptural towers spouting gouts of flame every minutes or so; but inside it has exactly the same feel as anywhere in Las Vegas: an ersatz environment, entirely focused on parting fools with their money. Adam Smith could have been thinking of super-casinos, had they existed in the 18th century, when he said: "A lottery is a tax on all the fools in creation".

Macau's casinos, 40 minutes by ferry from Hong Kong, have now overtaken Las Vegas in terms of revenue. In Macau, the interesting thing is that the revenue streams are reversed: 80% of Macau's revenue comes from the tables. This is, not surprisingly, attributed to the fact that the Chinese like people to know how much they are spending; it's a face issue (see below under Maybach, Napoleon wrasse, and Louis Vuitton). No miserable solitude at the slots for them.

Now Macau has become a replica of Las Vegas (which is itself a poor, hotel theme park replica of all the interesting places in the world) it's even less likely I will ever go there again, even if you can get the best Portuguese egg tarts in the kingdom at Lord Stow's Bakery in Coloane.

Freakshow

No more to be said. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Skinny dipping

I was in Kuala Lumpur this week, for two days, enjoying a curry served on a large banana leaf at the Royal Selangor Club and eaten entirely with the fingers (right hand only, as is the Muslim custom), and marvelling again at the spectacular other-worldness of the glowing Petronas Towers from the Sky Bar at Traders Hotel.

Yesterday I witnessed first hand a peculiar trend in the world of spa treatments, at a brand new (and almost empty) supermall near our hotel. This particular spa was known as "Dr Fish". Inside, rows of narrow fishtanks circumscribed the room in a continuous loop and patrons sat on the edge of the tank and dangled their feet over the edge for the fish to nibble at. Apparently although it tickles a bit to start with, it's therapeutic and healthy and the fish eat the dead skin and everything is wonderful, but I find this both undignified and, frankly, quite disgusting. One of our business partners, a large Australian, is very fond of the place: the only drawback is that the fish all flock to his feet as soon as he drops them in the water, much to the chagrin of the other patrons.

It did give me the opportunity to illustrate to my colleague L, a pragmatic Singaporean, the use of alliteration as a literary device with the phrase "I'm frightened of fish getting fat on my feet."

So watch it

My friend L told me last week that, in a week when everyone with an ounce of humanity in them was talking about the earthquake in Sichuan, all one of her colleagues (a lawyer) was focused on - and telling everyone about - was this US$20,000 watch he was going to buy.

I had a discussion about this today with my friend A, also a lawyer, who said that one of his clients, a banker, had so many watches, all worth at least US$20,000, that he kept them in a bag and wore a different one every day. He was arguing that this was an acceptable moral choice (although secretly I know he agreed with me that it is, in fact, the worst kind of self-regarding selfishness).

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.

Kicks like a mule

I was emailing my friend D today about Malaysia, in a wide-ranging discussion about religion, cultural mores, Schapelle Corby, the death penalty for drug-trafficking, and bribery, prompted by a story in today's paper about a Malaysian government official's proposal to require all young Malaysian women leaving the country to carry letters of authorisation, Middle-East chaperone style, to prevent them from becoming drug mules - which they would all otherwise obviously do - and was reminded of my favourite loony cult, the Teapot Cult of Malaysia (see this unreliable source for a contemporaneous report). What I didn't tell him about, but should have, was my other favourite Malaysian story (at least, of those which don't involve me, of which more some other time): the carjacking gang who were wont to force drivers of luxury cars out of the driver's seat at gunpoint at the traffic lights. On encountering the immobiliser in a Mercedes which needed a fingerprint to start it, they cut out the middle man by chopping off the owner's finger and taking it with them.

Wicked, I know, but I have this irresistible image of the scene back at the carjack gang's hideout shack:

"Anyone got the key to the SLK?"
"Hang on a minute -" (rummages in jar of formaldehyde, before triumphantly holding finger aloft) "Here it is!"

On a more serious note: clearly this measure is an attempt to curb women's freedom by the back door and is to be deplored.

A clean sweep

I was intrigued by the story of a Japanese girl who committed suicide using household cleaner - a phenomenon known, apparently, as "detergent suicide". I hate to be cavalier about something as serious as this, but although suicide has never even crossed my mind as an option, I am quite fascinated by it: for instance, did you know that the number one method of committing suicide in Hong Kong is by, er, throwing yourself from a tall building? The second one is by burning charcoal - a modish method which is very Asian in style and which led to calls for bans on the sale of barbecue charcoal in garages, and which Hong Kongers seem to have copied (like Bathing Ape, and Hello Kitty, and other infantile trends) from Japan, after a spate of similar suicides there.

This raises one of the central issues about new reporting of such events - it often seems to serve pour encourager les autres, and no doubt even now desperate teenagers of every nationality are frantically searching the Internet to find out how this 14 year old managed to pull it off in such spectacular style using ingredients found in the bathroom cupboard. So: report the details, perpetuate the problem.

I was led in the end to a most peculiar Wikipedia page on suicide methods - which seemed to be to be nothing more than a "how-to" guide for those looking for an easy way out. The strange nature of this entire entry, which lists different methods in alphabetical order starting with "Beheading", is illustrated by the following entry under the distinctly American-sounding "vehicular impact":

"Jumping in front of a fast-moving vehicle, especially a large one, such as a truck or train, can prove fatal. A classic example of suicide involves one tying oneself to railroad tracks in order to be run over by an oncoming train. The self control required to stay on the tracks as the train approaches can be quite immense, and the result quite traumatizing to the driver of the vehicle."

Thanks for that! I had no idea!

Forbidden collars

After all this talk about fabulous dresses, here's the antithesis: in the window of Jil Sander, on the corner of Queen's Road Central and Lan Kwai Fong, a garment non pareil, which can surely only be described as a salmon pink house coat.

Bite the hand

I was in Singapore on Tuesday night to give a presentation to around 120 senior clients, or potential clients, who were, as usual, 95% male. Now, I always get hit on at these events – not, of course, because I’m any kind of goddess, but because certain sorts of men in Asia seem to think that western women are up for anything. My enthusiasm for my business and the promotion thereof has often been mistaken for interest of another kind. One old gimmer, who had once been someone very important in Australia, emailed me after one event to say he was going to throw caution to the wind and come to Hong Kong just to take me to dinner… Anyway, two Indian men came up to me after the talk with great enthusiasm. They both heartily shook my hand and said how good it was to meet me and how we can work together in India, etc etc. One of them shook my hand again, but this time he curled his middle finger on to his palm – an unmistakable signal of some sort which would still have looked to any observer like a legitimate handshake. When I told L (the general manager of our Singapore office) about it, she said it was a sexual overture. If this is true, and I can’t think of anything else he might have been trying to signal to me, that is really quite extraordinarily revolting.

The mobile blues again

Oh, Mama, can this really be the end
To be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again...
Bob Dylan

As a twelve year old listening to this song I thought he was singing "stuck inside a mobile..." meaning a mobile home, meaning a trailer or caravan... Perhaps I ought to explain: it's not, or not just, that I led an unusually sheltered life; but because when I was twelve the mobile phone did not exist as a concept. Amazingly, for such a simple idea, and now so widespread, science fiction cinema of the 50s and 60s never posited that in the future, along with their Bacofoil suits, everyone in the world (or at least, Hong Kong) might be carrying a mobile means of communication. My word association with the word "mobile" as a twelve year old might also have had something to do with the gypsies who lived in a bus behind our house for a few months (AKA as "the Bussies"; and that's another story). Whatever the reason, being stuck inside a mobile was a genuinely sad prospect, and not just because of the way Bob whinged it. My friend Gordon once described a wild Highlands party which culminated in him waking up criminally hung over, "on the floor of someone's caravan, wrapped in a blanket, with my head on a welly". Amazingly, all those connections and that imagery spring unbidden to mind when I think of the word "mobile".

To the point, though: I will regularly, and have done so twice in the last couple of days, ask someone shouting in to a mobile phone to tone it down. I am, as my friend C, AKA La Grande Poobah says, assertive, or perhaps that's just disagreeable. In my view the mobile phone bawler lacks self-awareness and more importantly, consideration for others.

The reactions are varied: usually, and gratifyingly, they say sorry, and comply (I do ask nicely); but yesterday, I got a very aggressive response. There was a sign on the wall (in the spa, as it happens: a place where people go to relax), so I was within my rights; but this made no difference to madam, because she had to speak to her friend.

I think this problem may be particularly common in Hong Kong, where there's an obsession with answering, or being on, the phone come what may. People will routinely answer their phones in the cinema. Sadly, the Trigger Happy TV sketch where Dom Joly answers an enormous phone during a film screening and shouts into it "HELLO! I'M IN THE CINEMA! YES, IT'S SHIT!" is not that funny in Hong Kong: it's the normal state of affairs.

Smugby

My favourite time of year (hardly): the Hong Kong Rugby Sevens. A time when Hong Kong fills up to the brim with self-righteous expats convinced that their favourite sport (drinking all day in the sun) is everyone's favourite, heart-warming. just-can't-help-yourself activity. Why do I hate the Rugby Sevens? Here are a few random reasons: 1) I can't stand having to justify why I'm not going. Again and again. 2) It's a time when poeple think it's really cool to dress up as cowgirls. All ten of you and your friends, lassoos and all. Or is it angels? Or werewolves? 3) What do the Chinese think of us? Yes, we're all fat, pie-eating, drunken bastards. Aren't we? 4) Call me an inverted snob (I'm an inverted snob), but rugby originated at Rugby. 5) England won this year.

All the fools in creationism

An elegant demolition of the risible notion that creationism should be taught in schools as the "other side" to evolution theory:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,13026,1559743,00.html
(The headline for this is purloined from Adam Smith's maxim that "A lottery is a tax on all the fools in creation".)