Blow by blow

Isabella Blow, avante-garde dresser and English eccentric, died last week in an extraordinarily dramatic fashion: by drinking paraquat - the weedkiller beloved of garden nihilists everywhere (not least by Jim, our next door neighbour when I was a kid. Jim had his own supply and a natty little spray canister device to boot. It had its own strap which looped over the wearer's shoulder, allowing easy access to the toxic nozzle. When he got bored of walking around other people's cars kicking desultorily at the tyres, or listening to the collected works of Jim Reeves, or shouting at the neighbours' children, or eating mince and tatties in his cabbage-smelling house, or just needed a pick-me-up, he'd liberally spray paraquat hither and thither). Paraquat has a unique and quite disgusting smell - the strength of will required to drink it would be quite considerable.

She deserves to be remembered, amongst other things, for sporting a lobster hat (everyone said it wouldn't work!) and for wearing a Joan of Arc dress complete with heavy, oily chain (for that added authenticity!) which she dragged across the pristine white carpet of Jean Paul Gaultier's apartment ("Sacre bleu! C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre!", he may have cried at the sight).

True originals are doomed never to be part of the mainstream and she was reportedly disheartened by the fact that despite having brokered Alexander McQueen's highly lucrative contract with Gucci, she got "nothing but a dress" out of the deal; but she also had a particularly nasty form of cancer. She told the assembled party at her husband's country house (and you could take another fascinating detour around the family history of her husband, Detmar Blow) that she was going shopping, but instead she stayed home and drank her poison.

Russian droll

Two things to remember about Boris Yeltsin.

Boris was asked by a BBC journalist to describe the Russian economy in one word.

He said: "Good".

The journalist then asked him to describe it in two words.

He said: "Not good".

After Boris's death, his former deputy was asked to sum up the Yeltsin era. He said: "We hoped for the best, but it all turned out as usual."

Pear down

I'm in Singapore airport, about to leave, having just tried some Absolut Pears, which was so good I had to buy a bottle. Pears and vodka, who'd have thought?

I was only in Singapore three days, but this was long enough to be caught in one of the extraordinarily fierce downpours that proliferate this time of year. Huge fat pear shaped rain drops hurled with vigour from the ethereal sky and bounced up inside my umbrella.

I managed to get to my favourite bar in Asia, CitySpace at the top of Singapore's tallest hotel. They serve perfect apple martinis and you can see what seems like the whole of the city laid out like a map - though not one I can follow: small as Singapore is, I'm still confused.

I ergo, ergo I am

As part of our training for the Hamilton Island Cup at the end of May, the 6 women and 5 men from our club competing in the races, who are collectively known as the “Hamo” crew (“hamfisted” in my case), are all completing various on and off-water tests to gauge our fitness. The test results are humiliatingly revealed on a weekly basis and I can tell you that there is nothing more motivating than knowing the email of doom is going to appear for all to see. Nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide!

The toughest, and paradoxically the shortest, test is 750 metres on a rowing machine, or ergonometer (“erg” or “ergo” in the parlance). Panicking at my signal failure thus far to get below 3 minutes, I have gone to the lengths of engaging a personal erg coach, my friend A who’s a brilliant rower and a very attractive woman to boot. For the price of breakfast (and some flattery), she’s going to teach me how to improve my wretched technique enough to scrape a more dignified time.

Education otherwise

It's 20 years since I left school this year, and I am hardly surprised that there has not been as much as a whisper of any kind of class reunion to mark the passing of time (and all of its sickening crimes). Some have died, and some have faltered, and I don't really know where most of them are apart from a few gems I am still in touch with. I suspect that it's really still not long enough ago yet for most of us.

Philip Roth wrote acerbically of school reunions that there are few reasons to go, most of them suspect, and usually based on self-aggrandisement (look how much better than you I have fared!).

Our school was a difficult and troubled place and when I joined at the age of 13 (after four years of an only-partially-successful experiment in rural home schooling, about which more some other time), I was terrified by what seemed to be the premature maturity of my fellow pupils in the big city: talking about learning to inhale, and drinking at parties, and lovebites. I felt completely out of my depth.

Shy and insecure, and longing to fit in but unable to, I made things worse for myself by falling horribly in love with the class celebrity (who would definitely mind being described this way). So popular was he that, when I went past his house on the bus, I would always see at least one person hanging around outside waiting to catch a glimpse. I never stooped to that, of course, but I too succumbed to his rough magic. He had several self-appointed female security guards whose job it was to stop anyone from getting to close to him.

At the first real party I ever went to (ie the first with no adults present), I watched in despair as he carried his then girlfriend, who was wearing a risible schoolgirl outfit with a black lace garter, up the stairs for – what? I didn't know. I had a glass of wine and danced to Mad World, which in that teenage nightmare seemed to speak my life.

The pupils at my school seemed to specialise in psychological warfare – or is that every school? So yes, on reflection I am in no hurry to revisit those memories either; as this article about the Virginia massacre by Lionel Shriver (author of the disturbing, powerful book We Need to Talk About Kevin) says:

"For a lucky few, school and college are where we first distinguish ourselves. But for the majority, they are the site of first humiliation, subjugation and injury. They are almost always our first introduction to brutal social hierarchies, as they may also sponsor our first romantic devastation. What better stage on which to act out primitive retribution?"

Luck be a lady

Imagine my surprise on receiving this in my inbox at work today from the delightfully named "Be a Lady". I am not sure what she's selling, but I just can't wait to buy it. The fact that any Hong Kong shop assistant worth her salt would be describing this unfortunate woman as "Too fat" (a common response to western women when you ask for something in your size) makes it doubly unnerving.

Slip sliding away

I had a vivid, terrible nightmare two nights ago about being on the back of J’s motorbike and the motorbike crashing and sliding across the road leaving both of us badly injured and bleeding. This morning on the way to Stanley for an early morning paddle, we hit a patch of diesel and in slow motion slid across the road exactly as it happened in my nightmare. I hit the ground pretty hard and for a moment was confused: am I still dreaming?

Most of Hong Kong’s roads are bordered by high concrete barriers, which I’ve often thought would be hell to barrel into, but we were going very slowly (the sixth sense of the rider looking for patches on the road) and the bike slid away rather than landing on top of us. J was unhurt; and I got up, my arm sore, pretty shaken, a graze on my knee but my favourite Kenneth Cole trousers completely unscathed (I told you I was shallow – the first thing I thought was: damn, my trousers!), and my bargain buy H&M leather jacket as good as new. Hey, looking good in a crisis is what it’s all about! And we came out of it a lot better than we did in my nightmare.

For the second time in the last year, then, I was in Casualty getting an x-ray, this time of my arm. The doctor looked about 20 and he didn’t know where to look when I took my top off – he had to call in a nurse using what looked suspiciously like a panic button beside him on the desk. Ostensibly this was to chaperone me, but I think he was just terrified.

My main concern now, and this illustrates only how much I’ve been sucked in to the shadowy world of outrigging (I guarantee only my sister will spot me in this clip; and yes, we won), is that I might not be able to paddle this weekend.

School of thought

The Fratellis remind me of everything that's good about being Scottish, and other things too: the warm East Lothian summers of my 1970s childhood, and discovering music for the first time. I was slightly too young to fall for the Bay City Rollers, and dumbfounded by the hysteria, but music's seductive whisper was already at my ear. In my old primary school (destined to become a recording studio where Orange Juice would record "Simply Thrilled Honey"), when I was six, I had a conversation in the toilets with a girl called Margaret McNeil, who lived in a house with turrets, whose father was a lawyer, and who owned a pony: so of course I worshipped her and craved her indulgence:

Me (squeaks nervously): What music do you like?
Goddess (confidently): Slik.
Me (blurts): Why?
Goddess (confidently, and with more than touch of condescension): They're not too loud, and not too quiet.

Despite her confidence, infamy came to Margaret too: the pony and the house had to be sold after her father was disbarred for embezzling the clients' fund; but this was my first ever musical recommendation and I took it to heart. Not too loud, not too quiet: I loved Slik from that moment on.

Of course the Fratellis are (in my English teacher's most withering dismissal) derivative: but that's why I like them. They sound so Scottish, for one thing: and this unexpected wave of nostalgia comes over me whenever I hear "I seen you and little Susan and Joanna round the back of ma hotel - oh yeah". I'm thinking about tartan flares, and football scarves on Top of the Pops, and BA Robertson and Bilbo Baggins (a band so obscure there's no Wikipedia reference for them, but for the trainspotters, they were once "managed" by poor old discredited Tam Paton), and the beginning of my passion for music, and my longing to belong, in the flat grey surroundings of the toilets at my first school.

Secrets and lies

At my grandfather’s funeral, I stood up in church and read “Everyone Sang” by Siegfried Sassoon, which was written in the month he was born (April 1919). I’d forgotten to bring my print-out of the poem, so in a little modern twist, as we drove on the motorway from London to Leicestershire I called a friend in Edinburgh on my mobile and he Googled it and dictated it to me.

Families perpetrate many injustices upon each other – ask anyone – but the one involving my grandfather is worse than many. As global injustices go, this one may be small, but so convoluted and cruel is the story that it’s hard to know where to start.

Granddad was a commercial artist who had ended up sculpting models for shop-window mannequins. His life story was full of regret: he talked most eloquently about his war experiences, his memories of a friend who was court-martialled and shot for falling asleep at his post, and the loss of the family business when the factories were requisitioned for the war effort. Painstakingly, after the war, he rebuilt the business, but then he went into partnership with a cad who betrayed him, and he lost everything again as a result.

Granny died in the 1980s; Granddad lived alone in a beautiful old English village, in a slowly decaying house called Pear Tree Cottage (not just a conceit: there were pear trees in the garden). I spent many happy hours in that garden as a child, polishing a statue of Peter Pan with rose petals. Peter’s hand had been broken off and rather hamfistedly reattached with epoxy and I could never get him, or his reattached limb, clean.

My father was the second of four children. The oldest – let’s call her Ann – went wrong from a young age: she pawned Granny’s jewellery in her teens, asked for (and received) her inheritance in advance in her twenties, dyed her hair blonde, smoked, married badly, divorced, married badly again but this time to money, moved to America, and generally hurt her parents upside down and inside out. How they loved her, though! As teenagers my sister and I were heartily sick of being compared unfavourably by Granny and Granddad to Ann’s children.

By the time of Granddad’s funeral, there was something rotten in the garden: Ann had got very close to Granddad before he died, uncomfortably close, and had taken out an injunction to prevent any of her siblings from entering the house on the grounds that one (J) had been stealing heirlooms (unlikely), one (L) had threatened Granddad with a gun (sadly true), and one (my father) was not to be trusted.

Consequently the wake, such as it was, had to be held in the garden, and fearing that it would be a washout, we had packed the boot with bottles of Cava and plastic cups. Cousin P (Ann’s daughter) brought strawberries and we toasted Granddad on the sunny lawn as if nothing was wrong. Of course there was a nasty aftertaste, and I was astonished to overhear Ann telling the neighbours that she’d organized the “champagne”; but the real bombshell was the news that Granddad, in his will, had left nothing to two of his children (J and L), a small share (some 5%) to my father, and the rest, including the house, to Ann.

My father and his other sister tried and failed to challenge the will on the grounds of undue influence. The will was executed by Ann’s lawyers who claimed it was valid and that Granddad knew what he was doing. Old and frail, and hospitalised for some time before he died, he could easily have been persuaded not to trust the other three of his children by the one with the facelift. So righteous and confident was she that she arranged the sale of the house to the next-door neighbours, who had coveted it for years, as we stood in Granddad’s garden in the sunshine with cups of Cava in our hands.

Everyone Sang

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on - on - and out of sight.

Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away . . . O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

Siegfried Sassoon
April 1919

Foreign lesion

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

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

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

Next, please

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

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

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

Philip Larkin

Eton trifles

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

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

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

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

Differently Alber

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

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

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

From the sublime to the ridiculous

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

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

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

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

Another country

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

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

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

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

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

Pithy epithets

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

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

Two countries divided by a common language

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

Hard times

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

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

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

I am curious orange

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

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

} too ORANGEY
for porn: {

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

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

I AM FULL
STOMACH

but I'm also very fond of

I AM PERFECTLY
FLOWER

and

SUNNY DAY. HE
IS WAIT FOR BUS

Kind of blue

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

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

Able was I, ere I saw Hong Kong

Picture from Divetrip.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Testino times

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

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

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

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

Vaut de mieux Miu

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

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

Miu Miu, Spring 2007, from Vogue France.

Ashes to ashes

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

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

Shirty tricks

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

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

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

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

Melting moments

In other news, from Popbitch:

Burn baby burn: Iraq to get the Goodbye
Effect

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

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

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

More

For the price of a cup of tea

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

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

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

Cape of good hope

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

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

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

Cape from www.maneaterthreads.com

Rise and shine

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

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

Let's go round again

Yesterday the HKOCC team competed once again in the Around the Island Race. This year we were able to put in a women’s crew. It’s 46K right round the island so it’s a change race – where paddlers jump in and out of the boat in a kind of relay. There were a couple of international crews paddling this year – Team Hawaii (the gods of the outrigger world) and Poksai, a strong women’s crew from Guam. Accordingly, I was acutely aware that yesterday was hellishly polluted, with extremely poor visibility and a faintly acrid taint in the wind: “please leave your tropical island paradise, where the skies are always blue, and come to see the sights of Hong Kong… er… oh.”

To the sailors’ great chagrin, there was no wind yesterday and the water was as flat as a pancake, so every single outrigger canoe (and there were nine), and two oceangoing double sculls, finished ahead of the sailors.

The race itself was pretty tough (our time was 4 hours 50 minutes, compared to team Hawaii’s 3:15), but quite exhilarating, even the sea changes, where you bob in the water as the boat veers towards you, hoping that you’ll have the strength to grab the sides and haul yourself in, in a sort of panicked blur (“Imagine there’s a shark underneath you”, I was advised). I have bruises in all the wrong places (from landing inelegantly on the side of the canoe) and my hands are in shreds, but it was a brilliant experience, especially paddling in through the harbour with ferries coming in on either side, the water like a washing machine, wake and waves everywhere and Hong Kong’s tallest building, 2 IFC, appearing through the gloom followed by the alien structure of the Convention and Exhibition Centre.

The above picture shows our boat coming in (I'm at seat two) - and gives a hint of just how murky the air was.

Not my bag

Asian women are very fond of Louis Vuitton - real or (whisper it) fake: apparently 94% of Tokyo women in their twenties own something bearing the LV logo (that could well be a made up statistic, although not by me: but it has a ring of authenticity about it from empirical evidence). On the bus in the morning, I can see at least 10 LV bags from where I'm sitting. It's almost cliched to observe that for the Chinese in particular, for the purposes of "face", wealth is something you wear on your sleeve.

Counterfeiters in mainland China have taken a very pragmatic approach: given how much money there is to be made, why not go straight to the source and hire Italian craftsmen from Louis Vuitton factories to make it look like the real thing? So good have the fakes become that at one time, before anyone got wise, people were taking fake LV bags in to the mainland's newly opened, less-sophisticated LV stores and getting their money "back".

Surely, however, even the most hardened LV fan will balk at this dog's dinner. As a further, even more unnecessary embellishment, that tuft of fur is frankly the most disturbing feature I've ever seen on a handbag. Marc Jacobs, hang your head in shame!

Find the Gap

From the sublime to the ridiculous: Roland Mouret designing for the Gap. I'm not convinced this is anything more than a cheap publicity stunt.

Mind the gap

There are a hell of a lot of very wealthy people in Hong Kong. Conspicuous wealth is everywhere, from the record sum a billionaire was willing to pay for a truffle (US$160,406), to the tycoon who has just paid US$17.4m for Andy Warhol’s pop-art portrait of Mao, to the proliferation of the world’s largest signature designer shops (Gucci, Armani, Lanvin), with unwearable clothes and baroque jewellery glittering inaccessibly behind heavy windows, to the fact that Hong Kong has the highest per capita ownership of Mercedes and the most dollar millionaires per square metre.

But there’s a lot of poverty and hardship here too: huge families packed in to 700 sq ft apartments; people sweltering in filthy rooms; children who can’t afford books; taxi drivers who throw themselves from the top of buildings because they’re so heavily in debt.

It does bother me that this dichotomy exists, and that I’m part of the problem, with my shallow desires for shoes and rings : from precipitous glass edifices posing as office buildings to rotting shacks – it’s a city of contrasts all right. The only thing we all have in common is that we’re currently all breathing the same filthy polluted air.

Holiday in Cambodia

I haven't really felt able to write about the experience of travelling with my mother to Cambodia because something so multi-faceted needs to time to digest.

It's also incredibly difficult to write about the trip in any meaningful way so I won't try. A few things:

When the Dead Kennedys wrote the song with the title of this post, it was a genuinely appalling prospect to visit Cambodia; and although Year Zero was in 1979, it's only 10 years ago that the resultant civil war finally ended.

Clearly there is a huge amount of poverty, but also, jarringly, conspicuous signs of wealth: along the narrow, crowded streets, amongst the mopeds, and bicycles, and tuktuks, occasionally an oversized 4x4 with blacked-out windows would make its brutish way, and once I saw one of those concrete symbols of arrogance, a Hummer. The city was undoubtedly not designed for large vehicles of any kind and on our way back to the airport our driver took a shortcut which led us straight to the heart of a traffic snarl of unimaginable intractability, at a standstill like a blood clot spreading out from the city centre.

Our visit had two purposes: I wanted to visit Sok Sabay, the orphanage in Phnom Penh where the little girl that we sponsor lives; and opportunistically, I'd arranged to go and visit the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia to see if my company could provide any services to the tribunal trying the remaining leaders of the Khmer Rouge (slogan: "To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss").

We stayed in the Foreign Correspondents' Club, overlooking the Tonle Sap, the wide, muddy river leading from Asia's largest freshwater lake to the Mekong. The river is the focus of the entire city, and along its banks are beggars, people selling hot food from mobile stalls (eggs, insects, pears), and kids selling travel guides from boxes slung round their necks. We saw an elephant, festooned with a red banner, walking along the street. When we sat outside a cafe eating lunch, squads of pocket sized kids crept up behind the protective row of pot plants with their hands out for money, but they seemed happy enough when we took some of them to a food stall and bought them prickly handfuls of lychee-like fruit, or a couple of waffles.

The orphanage houses 69 kids and we waded through calf-deep water in the flooded street to join them for lunch. They're housed in two multi-storey buildings, the upper floors packed with beds, and there are computers and blackboards and books, and the kids are happy and healthy. It is a very pragmatic, cheerful place. The kids were incredibly affectionate: one little mite leapt out of nowhere into my arms for a hug. The little girl we sponsor was quite shy at first but we took her out for ice cream and she seemed to relax a bit and put her hand in mine as we walked by the river. We bought her a little box from the Russian Market; when she was picked up to be taken home on the back of a motorbike, she turned and waved and waved until she was out of sight.

The Extraordinary Chamber has taken shape a few miles out of Phnom Penh, in an old army base. The tribunal itself will sit in a converted army concert hall, on a vast wooden stage, with tiered rows of blue seats holding the audience, watching the witnesses and defendants in the spotlight. I asked the Cambodian administrator who was showing me around how the Cambodian people felt about the tribunal given that it is costing US$20m a year (a snip of the US$90m reportedly being incurred by the ICTY). He said simply "People want justice".

Chan meeting

Hong Kong has a waxwork museum, on the Peak, inside the massive anvil-shaped building that contains the viewing tower from which, on an increasingly rare clear day, you can see down to the whole of Central and across to Kowloon. The waxworks, judging by the pictures, are astonishingly inept: the one of David Beckham looks like Steven Seagal, which I suppose is killing two birds with one stone: like a Rorshach blot, if you want Beckham, you get Beckham; if you want Seagal...

Above: Steven Seagal's waxwork (c) Hong Kong Waxwork Museum, AKA another opportunity to publish a risible photograph

I was in the lift in my office building with Jackie Chan yesterday. Had he been on his own I would certainly have said hello, but he was chatting animatedly with the person he was with, so I kept my mouth shut. The interior of the lift is entirely clad in mirrors (profoundly disheartening on a bad hair day) so I was able to observe him from a few different angles. Clearly he looks nothing like he does on the telly, and in fact it immediately struck me how much he looks like his waxwork. Ouch!

Chain of fools

Nicolas Ghesquiere for Balenciaga, Spring 2007. From style.com.

Shock of the new

Nicolas Ghesquiere for Balenciaga, Spring 2007 "ready to wear". On the contrary, it's practically unwearable, but somehow fabulous.

Why should I let the toad "work" squat on my life?*

It's my birthday today, and I'm off work and wandering the streets seeing again, as if for the first time, what people who don't work do all day. When I was looking for work in Edinburgh in 1993, I remember walking along Princes Street looking at people in suits and feeling permanently excluded from their club.

Someone asked me the other day where I get my confidence from and I answered straight away "professional success" (half-quoting from the maxim "professional success is the revenge of the nerd"). Work is extremely important to me: what I do is a major contributor to how I feel about myself. I still suffer from crises of confidence about work, and whether or not I'm competent; but on the whole I feel confident about myself because I have a good job.

I've been feeling a bit disillusioned about work lately but walking around today reminds me that I need to work. I couldn't bear to be a tai tai, wafting around Lane Crawford and spending money on expensive bags to no end.

Amongst other things, today I noticed that a significant proportion of people are boldly walking around with a small flannel tucked into their clothes at the back of the neck. While practical (in the humidity of Hong Kong it absorbs the sweat), it's also frankly a bit disgusting. Do you rinse out the flannel by hand at the end of the day? Perhaps someone should suggest to Commes des Garcons that they should be incorporating this as a style feature in their workwear.

*Philip Larkin

Thick as mince

A very Scottish story.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/tayside_and_central/5363952.stm

Quote: "although the mince had been thrown, it was not hot mince". Now you have to read the story.

Soled out

Christian Louboutin from net-a-porter. Because I like to juxtapose... or maybe I'm just shallow.

[If you're looking for a hagiography of Violet Naylor Leyland, you're in the wrong place. If you want to read some scorn, go here. If you don't know what hagiography means, go here.]

Dollars in the heavens

On the plane on the way back to Hong Kong the pilot remarked that it was a beautiful night for flying. I lifted the plastic shutter to look out of the window and saw the most amazing vista. The sky was perfectly still. There was pale blue light above and dark blue below, and a seam of pink on the horizon, and narrow threads of white cloud here and there, and above it all hung the moon, glowing perfectly white and perfectly full. For a moment I felt disorientated, as though we could have been flying upside down (as John F. Kennedy Jr reportedly did). The sky gradually began to turn deep blue and for a while I watched the moon glow almost unbearably brightly until finally it was covered by cloud.

I'd just been watching "An Inconvenient Truth", which is genuinely scary. I couldn't see a sky like that without wondering if there's something strange and unusual going on as a result of the hammering we give the planet. Amongst moments of levity in the film, and there are a few of them, though mostly in an ironic vein, there's a clip of George Bush Sr's surreal, yet sincere, declaration that "if these environmentalists get their way, we'll be up to our necks in owls".

Meanwhile, on a completely different planet, the University of Utah has been told by the Utah Supreme Court that it can't ban guns from the campus.

Singapore slung

I seem to have nae luck when it comes to taxi drivers in Singapore. I could have sworn today's had Tourette's; either that or he was so pleased to see me he kept on inadvertently trying to turn his head 180 degrees to look backwards.

With a consequent free disregard for the lane demarcations, we coasted along the main road to the airport, which is dead straight (any dead straight road when I was a kid was "a Roman road") and lined in the centre with flower boxes containing attractive pink flowers.
The sight fair gladdens the heart on first arrival in Singapore, but takes on a more sinister connotation when you hear the rumour that the plants can be removed at a moment's notice, presumably withdrawing Dr Evil-style into a massive underground bunker, in order for fighter planes to take off in the event of war.

Singapore's biggest problem is its lack of natural resources: like Hong Kong, it's theoretically at the mercy of its largest neighbour any time they choose to turn off the tap. Considering they used to be the same country (Malaya), Singapore's bitter rivalry with Malaysia is surprising, but, on reflection, it's understandable given the Singapore government's effective inculcation of super-strength loyalty in its citizens.

I'd fear I was being cruel about the taxi drivers, who are perfectly innocent in all this, of course, if it weren't for the obvious point that I've had two near-death experiences on my last two trips to the airport.

You can't hide your love forever

I've just bought the Orange Juice compilation, The Glasgow School - breaking my own rule of "out with the old, in with the new", or is it "never go back"?

Reading the sleeve notes I was astonished to discover that the classic "Blue Boy" (as well as "Lovesick" and the better known "Simply Thrilled Honey") was recorded in the village I grew up in, in my old school, which was turned into a recording studio in the late 70s. I visited the studio (Castle Sound) in the early 90s to see a friend who was recording there, and for the twisted nostalgia of it, I knelt on the polished wooden floor in what used to be the assembly hall (now a recreation room complete with pool table) and sang a few bars of "The Lord of the Dance", just like old times.

My sister and I used to listen avidly to a weekly programme on Radio Forth, hosted by Colin Somerville, called The Rock Report. I clearly remember him playing a few bars of "Blue Boy", which was the second single released on Postcard Records (I resist the tempation to use the adjective "legendary", but it is). I had no idea that what we were taping, using the time-honoured ancient tape recorder crammed up to the radio, which meant that our comments and parodies could often be heard in the background, had been recorded less than a mile away.

I suspect only my sister and I will find this news at all exciting. But I felt a strange stab of disorientation that, as I travelled to work on the number 23 bus from Mid-Levels to Admiralty in Hong Kong, I should be listening to a song recorded by one of Scotland's best ever bands in the building where I learned to write.

The deceitful face of hope and of despair

I was thinking about calling this post "Leaving on a jet plane", which seems appropriate for a number of reasons. I've been suffering from jetlag all week, having arrived back from the UK on Sunday. Jetlag does strange things to your mind, not least because it involves (often) being inadvertently awake at 3am which as you know is the worst time to be awake if you don't want to be.

Yes, jetlag is that contemptible middle class affliction, so you may say I deserve no sympathy (and the cure for jetlag is not to fly); but what it really feels like is suffering from a week-long hangover complete with all those feelings of disorientation, intermittent self-loathing, miserabilism, and helplessness. After the plot to blow up planes mid-air was uncovered this week, my 3am preoccupation was how angry and impotent I feel about the fact that although clearly UK foreign policy is a powerful impetus for nihilistic religious maniacs with murder in their hearts, Tony, and I voted for him in 1997 (or at least, for the lickspittle David Lamy, in whose constituency I was living at the time), persists in his egomaniacal self-serving refusal to bow to anyone's advice, no matter how sensible, at the cost of the lives of hundreds of Lebanese civilians to date, a third of whom have been children.

That last fact puts my own silly preoccupations into perspective.

Cooler than the red dress

Preen, A/W 2006/2007, at London fashion week. (From VOGUE France which is infinitely better than British VOGUE.)

Everyone sang

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on - on - and out of sight.

Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away . . . O, but everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

Siegfried Sassoon

Speak, memory

Yesterday was the first anniversary of the London bombings. A year ago me and J were driving from Edinburgh to Halifax airport, returning our hire car and listening to the radio. We knew straight away what it meant, as most people listening must have, when they said there had been a reported "power surge" on the London underground and that people were emerging injured from the stations.

Our friend G was in the first carriage of the Piccadilly Line train that was bombed, a route I used to meet him on when I worked in London, before I started travelling by scooter becaue I couldn't bear the rush and the crush. He would get on at Turnpike Lane and I would get on one stop later at Manor House, often letting three or four packed trains go by, unable to get on. We would change at Holborn, and he would continue his journey to Swiss Cottage. I know that journey so well.

G is a New Yorker transplanted to London, warm-hearted, generous, inquisitive (he made it his mission to disembark at every tube station in the city in his first year, and walk for ten minutes to either side, so he knows London better than most Londoners do). He makes the most powerful vodka martinis I've ever tasted and laughs very long and hard at his friends' jokes even if they're quite unfunny. He's a loyal friend and a pragmatist. When the bomb went off he was standing in a different place from his usual spot, and thus avoided injury. He walked along the rails to Russell Square, emerged into the daylight, and amazingly, went to work as usual. He hasn't talked about anything he saw. Those are his memories.

I emailed him yesterday to tell him I was thinking of him, and he said he'd made the same journey, the train as packed as ever, and stood in the place he should have been standing at the same time, and thought about what had happened a year ago. No drama, no histrionics, just what he did and what happened to him.

Who you know

I was off ill from work yesterday, and miserable and listless in my flat. I ventured out once, to do some software training for clients which no one else was available to do, and on the way home in stifling humidity and sunshine, I succumbed to buying a copy of British VOGUE.

I should have known better. More than usually after reading it, I felt the mix of excitement and despair that always stems from reading fashion magazines: "I could be like that/I'm not like that". Sometimes the clothes seem baroque, ugly, unwearable, but sometimes deep in my shallow little black heart all I want to do is rush out and buy "autumn's new egg shape".

But this time I was also absolutely infuriated by much of the content. The cover story "COUNTRY HOUSE FASHION GETS A REVAMP" should have alerted me; the nod to the toff Tory leader David Cameron in the editor's letter; the Checklist piece which began "British Fashion has no greater champion than the Queen"; but worst of all, even by VOGUE's London-insular, nepotistic standards, was an article about "YOUNG LONDON" photographed by Mario Testino. Darling Mario says at the beginning

"What I absolutely loved about this shoot was photographing all the kids of my
friends"

- such an unvarnished, unashamed admission of what this piece was really about! And sure enough, across dozens of pages the spoiled, petulant offspring of the rich and well-connected, among them the sons and daughters of VOGUE contributors ("London's coolest teenagers") sprawled their way and, despite the billing ("our 'Young London' story ... shows that teen style can be every bit as quirky and innovative as it ever was", Alexandra Shulman gushes in her intro), they were not even wearing their own clothes. A sample:

"VIOLET NAYLOR-LEYLAND in Luella, LUCY LYTTLETON in Molly Grad ... Photographed at the Cuckoo Club."

"Fifteen year old TAMARA BELL claims she grew tired of the London club scene
when she turned 12. These days, though, she promotes a music night at Madame
Jojo's in Soho."

and most risible of all (but absolutely typical of the fawning tone of the entire piece):

"Art lover CLARA PAGET, the 17 year old daughter of the Earl of Uxbridge, loves
the culture surrounding the drum'n'bass scene and has been known to devote entire evenings to flyering upcoming nights." [my emphasis]

Sadly, none of the above is ironic. Rarely has the phrase "First up against the wall come the revolution" seemed more appealing.

Island of lost souls

I’ve spent the last few days in a strange netherworld, on an island in the Whitsundays in North East Queensland where golf buggies are the only form of transport - almost, but not quite, as scary as Discovery Bay in Hong Kong, near where the new theme park has been built: a Stepford toytown built primarily for the amusement of children, with Disneyland nearby.

My outrigger team (HKOC) participated in the Hamilton Island Cup. We didn’t win anything, because competition is fierce and sport is a religion in Australia; but we had a great time on the water and off, with much drunken capering at the party on Saturday night (tip: never drink a shot of any description containing Bailey’s) and have started to recruit teams to paddle in this year’s Round the Island Race.

I was in the support boat for the 46K change race, having applied super-strength anti-emetic patches the night before (usually I’m seasick at the slightest provocation), and M and I had a great time bobbing up and down on the high seas with two laconic Australian fishermen, one of whom cracked open the beers at approximately 10am and kept drinking all day, to the sounds of Jack Johnson (clearly Maximo Park would have been preferable, but there’s some thing nicely soporific about Jack’s voice that went well with the sunshine), while we waited for the canoe and held up seat numbers for the changes. The team finished in under 4 hours, which was a fantastic achievement.

Later we went up the hill - me behind the wheel of the buggy belonging to our villa, which turned out to be the slowest buggy in the kingdom, although I got up a good turn of speed on the downhill with the engine off - and watched the sunset next to a mobile bar, which appeared out of nowhere and packed up when the sun went down.

One thing I found extraordinarily frustrating during this trip was the lack of availability of international news from any source. The only TV news seemed to be very local, as was the newspapers’ coverage. Having been in Sydney and Melbourne for work the week before, I came back to Hong Kong feeling as though I’d been in a vacuum for two weeks.

Head on the block

In keeping with the rich, somewhat narcissistic blog tradition of making the slightest incident take on unbearable weight because it happened to me: today unbearable weight did happen to me, in the form of the unbearable weight of the ama hitting me on the head during a huli drill. The rest of the crew had to paddle me to shore with blood streaming from my head and I ended up in the emergency room getting five stitches.

I've been in a&e before with a head injury: during a school dress rehearsal for The Importance of Being Earnest, when I was 16, in which I was playing Algernon (complete with pencilled on moustache), I had to be taken the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary for stitches - six that time, so obviously today was a walk in the park - because a piece of scenery fell on my head.

Unlike the Royal, today the Hong Kong hospital x-rayed my head, and so I saw the skull beneath my skin for the first time - a fascinating sight.

At the time I had a big crush on my English/drama teacher, Mr Snow, who took me to a&e, so I milked the situation for everything I could - "hold my hand, I feel faint!". What a manipulative little cow.

Today I had my crew members holding my hand - the sort of bonding experience, and accident drill, that you don't really want to engineer, but it was a perfect example of everyone staying calm and working together to retrieve the situation.

They had to shave a little of my hair off, so I think my place in the Miss Outrigger Hong Kong Beauty Pageant will have to be forfeited.

The way of the dragon

The Royal X-Women, Stanley Dragon Boat Day, May 31, 2006

Falun angel

On my way to work every morning I cross a pedestrian bridge over a busy highway heading up from the harbour to Mid-Levels. A pocket sized woman mans the bridge every day from about 8am, handing out free newspapers to passers by and calling out "jo san!" (good morning) to the passers by, if they're Chinese, and "morning!" to the gweilos.

As the newspaper she's giving away is in Chinese, I've never picked one up, and after a few half-hearted responses in kind, I started ignoring her as I walked by. She seemed to take this very personally and whenever she saw me she'd leap like a dervish across the pathway to stand right in front of me and shriek "morning!" at me reprovingly. Eventually I gave in because she started to make me feel guilty: after all it's a pretty lonesome furrow she's ploughing and it must be extremely depressing when everyone walks past you stony-faced. So now she says "morning!" and I say "jo san!" and we smile complicitly at each other, although she still seems faintly dissatisfied with my behaviour.

It was only very recently that I realised what she was giving out: it's a Falun Gong newspaper with garish pictures of beaten bodies. She has started to put up pictures on the railings all the way along the walkway, which is surprising in itself that the police haven't tried to move her on. It's an appropriate place for her to be: just over the way looms the former British Army base, now home to the Chinese Army. I can see it from my office window: soldiers marching across the square, and the swimming pools and tennis courts from colonial days lying unused. It certainly explains her look of forbearance and determination, but not her personal gripe at me. Whenever I've seen them before, the Falun Gong have been demonstrating peacefully, chiefly it seems by sitting in the lotus position, closing their eyes, and sitting incredibly still for hours, but I don't think my wee woman has read the manual.

The drive of your life

The first time I got into a taxi with a Singaporean, I was surprised that she addressed the taxi driver as "Uncle". I quickly realised that of course they weren't related: it is part of the Singaporean tradition of showing respect for your elders.

My Uncle on the way to the airport today would have been more properly addressed as "Grandad". The fact that this is an insult in UK culture is a sad reflection of our attitude towards the old; but in my taxi driver's case there were genuine reasons to suspect that this sort of caper wasn't really good for him: we made truly erratic progress as he leaned forward across the wheel, peering myopically and somewhat pessimistically through the windscreen, as the taxi veered freely across the three lanes of the highway. I was just about to suggest cheekily that if he stuck to just the one lane, I thought he'd find that we would not have an accident, when even more alarmingly he began to fumble in what appeared to be a specially fashioned pocket in the dashboard for his box of mints. How he got the plastic wrapper off I'll never know, because I was in the Brace Position at the time.

The vigorous imagination

Last night I went for dinner with the General Manager of our Singapore office at a new development called Rochester Park, which is an area in the north west of Singapore island filled with large white colonial “bungalows” (in reality, two or three storey houses) built for army officers in the days of British rule and set amidst the trees. L’s grandmother used to be an amah for a British family there and she has an early-1970s vintage memory of her father taking her swimming in their pool.

Now the houses have all been converted into restaurants, and you sit outside surrounded by the cacophony of crickets, with lights strung through the trees in the evening warmth, and it is wonderful. We ate at a Chinese restaurant decorated with vintage black lamps and clean pale wooden tables, and had mouthwatering Beijing crispy duck served with the familiar pancakes and hoi sin sauce. You could also fill your pancake with traditional garlic sauce and spicy cabbage – an unexpectedly brilliant combination. Compared to the rather raddled, dry and stringy duck which often appears, this was fresh and juicy, the skin crisp but not hardened. I had a “Great Wall” cocktail, which consisted of lychee liqueur and soda.

In Hong Kong such buildings would have been razed years ago, and there would certainly not have been any similar leap of imagination by the government to adapt beautiful old buildings for modern use. Instead, they’re knocking down the Bauhaus-influenced Wan Chai market and concreting over all the paths.

Seasick, yet still docked

Yesterday morning we set out from Stanley to paddle round to Shek O in the OC6 (six person canoe). It wasn't a particularly nice day, and it was windy; when we passed Cape D'Aguilar, the waves were the biggest I'd ever paddled in. It was slightly scary, but we reached Shek O Back Beach, and had a Snickers bar each and shared a couple of bananas, and then set off back to Stanley.

The waves were on the ama side on the way back and I felt slightly nervous about flipping, but it was an experienced crew and J was there so I felt reassured. About 10 minutes out, the waves were high and unexpected and the inevitable happened: as if in slow motion, but in a nanosecond, we hulied, the boat flipped upside down and we all fell or jumped out.

When you huli, you get the boat back over as fast as possible and a couple of people jump in and bail. But our bailers weren't tied on and so two of them went straight to the bottom, leaving us with one. The waves were so big that one bailer wasn't enough to empty the boat and we quickly realised that we weren't going to be able to get back in. It was a horrible feeling having to get back in the water, and when we put our lifejackets on, it started to feel pretty serious. The water was still big, and we were a few hundred metres off Shek O main beach, so two of us got back on the upturned boat and tried to paddle, and the others swam alongside trying to guide the boat away from the rocks.

The only progress we were making was wherever the waves wanted to take us, which was in towards the beach but also towards the rocks, so after about 20 minutes of floating, we ended up firing a flare, which glowed a satisfying ultraneon firework pink which was seen from the beach and eventually a jet-ski came out to us.

As the weakest swimmer I knew I'd be a liability if I stayed but it was a wrench to leave the rest of the crew floating with the boat. I got on the rescue platform on the back to the jetski and the lifeguard crouched over me as I was pulled back to the beach. It was surreal arriving at the beach with people frolicking in the surf as if nothing was wrong, looking curiously at me as I emerged shakily from the water. The lifeguards were about to put the jetski away, and I had to play the angry gweilo and shout at them to get them to go back out - they were all shrugging their shoulders, having fulfilled their duty by calling the police. There was no sign of the police boat, though and I knew the crew would be hoping someone would come back, maybe even with rope to try to tow the boat in, so reluctantly they got back on and went out again.

I stood on the beach watching, wearing my lifejacket to keep warm, as people ran by me in bikinis, like a nightmare scenario where no one believes you that something is very wrong; but when the dull grey police ship appeared it seemed as though the whole ordeal was over.

I was brought a red blanket and stood on the beach like a refugee with family fun going on all around me, but nothing seemed to be happening and so I retreated to the lifeguards' station where I sat disconsolately with binoculars while the lifeguards smoked fags, chatted and stared at me. I was feeling sick as a dog and must have looked pretty bad, because they tried to look after me by buying me a bowl of noodles with a big fat fried egg on top.

It took the police nearly four hours to do nothing: it emerged that they had no idea how to tow the boat and I watched in disbelief as inertia seemed to set in. The other members of the crew, after a lot of faffing around, were transferred to the police boat and sat there for hours getting seasick; they had the worst of it and I was lucky to be on shore, though it felt pretty bleak at the time.

I was just starting to lose the will to live when a friendly face appeared on the beach below: L, who had been competing in an open water swimming race at the Back Beach, had been called by the crew from the police boat's phone and told to come and find me. She took me round to the Back Beach where everyone was hanging out and chilling to funky beats. In the meantime the crew had got fed up with the inertia of the police and called the Yacht Club who sent a boat round from Causeway Bay and got them all fixed up within ten minutes. We watched as they emerged round the corner with the OC6 bobbing disfunctionally behind the Yacht Club boat, and the remains of the crew jumped from the boat, which couldn't come right in. I went down to the shore to help them come in, still in their lifejackets, and pulling the wretched OC6 behind them on a rope.

I'm not very good in big water and am not a strong swimmer, and I am grateful beyond words that everyone else looked out for me. While we were floating in the waves, there was no panic, although clearly the situation could have been very dangerous; there was black humour - some one said "Thank goodness we had those Snickers bars" - and we joked about who would play us in the movie (Angelina Jolie, in case you're wondering). It was everything it could have been: calm, everyone looking out for everyone else. Teamwork and camaraderie are the reasons I paddle and yesterday we had that in spades.

Paper over the cracks

Anwar Ibrahim is in Sarawak participating in the 2006 election campaigns there and drawing huge crowds. Needless to say, Malaysia's ruling party have attacked him again with insinuations about sodomy - for which he was disgraced and jailed (eventually serving four years) by former PM Mahatir, having been Mahatir's protege and sidekick until he got too popular. The South China yesterday, without a hint of irony, described these allegations as "below the belt".

My favourite South China solecism was the caption to a picture of an ultra-orthodox Jewish kid standing grinning in front of barricades with reinforcing strips of metal all over his teeth. The headline was "Gaza braces for further trouble".

It's in the stars

A horoscope from The Onion today:

CANCER. June 22-July 22
The position of the stars, phase of the moon, and orbital paths of the planets will have absolutely no bearing on your life this week. Enjoy the feeling of being in complete control of your actions while it lasts.

And mine:

LIBRA. September 23-October 23
You will ignore the voice of reason once again this week, but that’s only because it’s gone hoarse and grown nearly inaudible over the years.

And an article on a study finding that drunk humans do not fare better than sober ones against alligators:

"Our data strongly indicates that human intoxication does not transform an alligator into a docile creature that enjoys wrestling" …

Market forces

For a city where the free market supposedly reigns supreme, the state of Hong Kong’s supermarkets is a sobering reminder that there is no such thing as fair competition.

It’s a truism that every 20 minutes of being in Hong Kong you are putting money in the pocket of one of the three or four large companies which own everything, from the mobile phones to the pharmacies to the cable TV to the supermarkets. Rumour has it that a major British supermarket chain tried to open in HK (as it has done successfully in other countries in the region, not least China) but was forced to close following price-fixing collusion by the two other main supermarkets which it couldn’t compete with.

Apart from the fact that they are either cheap and nasty, or horribly expensive, with nothing inbetween, the thing that annoys me most about Hong Kong’s supermarkets is that they are all named insultingly inaccurately:

· you can’t park at Park’N’Shop;
· GREAT isn’t (Great);
· Gourmet isn’t for gourmets (indeed for some reason they sell toothbrushes as well as food);
· City Super isn’t (Super); and
· you don’t get much of a welcome at Wellcome.

Soliloquy of the Solipsist

A poem I loved when I was sixteen for its bleak humour and self-preservation masquerading as arrogance:

I?
I walk alone;
The midnight street
Spins itself from under my feet;
When my eyes shut
These dreaming houses all snuff out;
Through a whim of mine
Over gables the moon's celestial onion
Hangs high.

I
Make houses shrink
And trees diminish
By going far; my look's leash
Dangles the puppet-people
Who, unaware how they dwindle,
Laugh, kiss, get drunk,
Nor guess that if I choose to blink
They die.

I
When in good humor,
Give grass its green
Blazon sky blue, and endow the sun
With gold;
Yet, in my wintriest moods, I hold
Absolute power
To boycott any color and forbid any flower
To be.

I
Know you appear
Vivid at my side,
Denying you sprang out of my head,
Claiming you feel
Love fiery enough to prove flesh real,
Though it's quite clear
All your beauty, all your wit, is a gift, my dear,
From me.

Sylvia Plath

Code read

GRANT

HANKS

I just had an odd, if prosaic, revelation. I've seen several trailers for the new The Da Vinci Code film and I wondered vaguely who the actor was, because he didn't look familiar (not that I was really paying attention, because I refuse to read the book or see the film). Glancing from the bus this morning on my way to work I saw a Chinese poster for the film with only one phrase in English: TOM HANKS, and it dawned on me who it was. What on earth has happened to him? I always thought he was one of those actors in the mould of Sean Connery, which can only be Sean Connery in any film. Has he shaved his sideburns off? What's going on? Is he remodelling himself as Richard E. Grant?

True to type

For some reason I have been quite taken lately with trying to remember all the obscure indie bands I liked in the 80s. How quickly we forget - until I looked them up I'd almost forgotten they existed: The BMX Bandits; Close Lobsters; The Orchids ("I'm drinking Irn Bru and I'm thinking of you" - clearly a classic of its time); The Bodines. In some circles it was a point of honour to be able to name bands no one else had heard of.

Before CDs, before the internet, before digital technology of any kind, you could write off for a fanzine (one I remember particularly was an Edinburgh "'zine" called Alternatives to Valium, which I thought was very cool at the time) which would consist of four sheets of photocopied A4 paper stapled together, with a seventh-generation band photo on the front and written entirely in Courier because that was the only typeface on the old typewriters - the kind where you had to hit the key quite hard and a skinny length of metal shaped a bit like a grasshopper’s leg, with the letter on the end, would spring out of its bed and whack a length of ink-soaked cloth to create an imprint on the paper.

I think in some ways the fanzines were a reaction to the looming onslaught of technology and the shock of the new, the slickness of the 80s; they were home made and low-tech, and often came with a flexidisc of some quasi-plastic material hardly more durable than rice paper, which when played on your turntable emitted the tinny, scratchy sounds of effete guitar bands with whimsical names. CDs were regarded as the enemy; as heralding the Death of Music; and as somehow not being as real as vinyl.

When I first started in legal publishing, which was in the mid-90s and not that long ago, all the terms used actually meant something: “leading” was the divider between the lines of type holding them in place, which was made out lead; and “typesetting” was literally setting type, each letter individually placed in a row next to the others to make up a page.

We outsourced typesetting to a company in Roslin, near Penicuik, which was full of old men who had been working there for years; they all seemed to have beards and pot bellies and stood around with their sleeves rolled up, with the ease borne of long experience, smokin’ a fag with half an eye on the machines, presumably wondering what things had come to with these wee lassies telling them what to do. They were already using newer technology but still regarded the old methods as the real thing, and one of them showed me the rapidly-obsolescing equipment with real pride, hefting the heavy letters in his hands.

Bench mark

There's something about these bags which is really quite lovely. Buy one here. Alternatively, perhaps I am going mad and I just like them because the way that they're displayed is reminding me of the old wooden bench in my mum's garden, on which I used to sit, cup of tea in hand, looking out over green lawns (belonging not to my family but to the laird, a nasty wee nyaff of about my age called Francis) in the sunshine. I always used to say, rather pompously, "nostalgia is the enemy of the future", but it comes out in funny ways.

Party fears too

I've been having a wonderful holiday here, hence no posting for aeons; getting an almost-but-not-quite tan (factor 50, on account of my huge collection of moles, does seem to prevent the slightest hint of having been on holiday from getting to my appearance), learning to swim under water, and paddling a lumbering two-person canoe which was shaped like, and handled as heavily as, a child's bathtub (for the record, we broke the all-comers fastest time by paddling round the island in 50 minutes). I think I finally began to let go of thoughts of work by about day 5. As I surfaced in the pool in the sunshine, the very picture of bourgeois contentment, a topic for my blog suggested itself: and not just another essay on the futility of blogging.

The topic is: things I will never tell anyone. Though this seems rather unpromising as subject-matter, since I'm not telling anyone, it's got possibilities.

For example, I will never tell anyone what I, as a gauche, dyed-black-haired 18 year old said to Billy Mackenzie in a nightclub in Edinburgh (called, for what it's worth, The Kangaroo Klub).

Like the old Top Tip from Viz ("Pensioners! If you're feeling the cold this winter, just think of Neil Kinnock, at the triumphalist Labour Party rally of 1992 [just prior to the election, which they lost] shouting 'Comrades! Well all right! Well all right! Well all right!' - You'll flush from head to toe with embarrassment - no need for costly heating!") this particular memory could heat Hong Kong.

Just shoe me

Walking around Lane Crawford today, in a more than usually bad mood having been ignored by one blank-eyed shop assistant too many, I experienced the nadir of the shopping experience TM when I idly picked up a particularly vertiginous shoe from a display which turned out to have been barely holding itself together until I came along. In a domino-style collapse worth of Heath Robinson, my act of lifting the shoe (the one pictured above, as it happens) from its tiny metal platform was enough to send at least five ludicrously expensive pairs crashing to the floor along with the metal plates they were sitting on.

The nearest shop assistant looked around with barely concealed disdain at the clanging sound, as did the overdressed tai tai customer she was fawning over, and after picking up the shoes and putting the whole edifice back together as best as I could (and on reflection, if only I had had the chutzpah to sail away nonchalantly!) I hastily exited out of the nearest side door, blushing horribly. Yes, this sort of thing happens not only in American sitcoms, where it is completely unfunny, but on my Sunday afternoon, where ditto.

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.