Thief in the night

Phuket (formerly known as "Junk Ceylon") is only three and a half hours' flight from Hong Kong and, according to the woman I sat next to on the way home, is where everyone from Hong Kong goes on holiday. Although the name apparently means "hill" in Malay, and there is a mountain range on the island, most of the landscape where we were, near Surin Beach, was extremely flat.

Most of the wedding guests stayed at the Chedi, a slightly down-at-heel resort consisting of villas on stilts in the hillside near the sea, linked by a network of wooden steps and bridges. The wedding took place in a curiously bland mega-villa owned by a prominent Hong Kong couple. The sun shone, everyone was happy, and the groom, an Australian, quoted Alasdair Gray to describe how he felt about being with his wife, a Scot: "Work as though you live in the early days of a better nation". When it got dark, we released huge paper lanterns into the night sky; they disappeared twinkling into the distance.

The only small blot on the weekend happened on Saturday night. While I was asleep, some opportunist opened the sliding door of the villa, which was unlocked, and took a few steps to my bedside to find my camera, wallet and phone. The camera was, humiliatingly, clearly found wanting (and to be fair it's seen better days) - that was discarded outside the door; the cash from my wallet was taken too but they left the credit cards. People kept asking me if I was traumatised by the experience. I wasn't: I didn't know any better; I was asleep at the time. If anything I feel lucky: I didn't wake up to see them there, they didn't get much, and no doubt they needed the money more than I did.

Consider the lilies

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

From Net-a-porter.

Hard boiled wonderland and the end of the world

The South China reported on Friday that fake eggs, reputedly from Hubei province, have been discovered in Macau (I prefer the term artificial ova myself). Mrs Wong bought them at market; after being cooked the yolk was just like rubber (not just a problem with her technique then?). Locals buying them from street vendors in Xiamen found the yolks bounced when cooked.

Mrs Wong of Macau, meanwhile, with admirable fortitude, ate six eggs that "tasted strange". Since she gritted her teeth and ate the evidence, it might never be possible to determine what the ersatz eggs were made of.

Factory fates

The Chinese government's concerns about social unrest must be reaching fever pitch following the news that 20 million jobs have been lost in Guangdong province alone, where a third of the mainland's exports are produced. A senior Guangdong police official warned that the public security outlook was "grim" as jobless workers could turn to crime. Projections are that the number of rural jobless - people formerly working in the factories in Guangdong, just across the border from Hong Kong, and now returning home - could double. The numbers are mind-boggling.

Ring of roses

I love the simple pleasure of buying flowers at a flower stall where you can pick your favourites and they meld them together perfectly and wrap them in brown paper. These were made by Tennie, at my favourite flower stall in Stanley market. We were all so pleased with this combination that Tennie's fellow florist took a picture of it too. (Not roses, despite appearances and this post's title: to be maddeningly imprecise, some kind of chrysanthemum (the deep red one), and another flower I can't name (the white one) which always seems to last forever, accompanied by tendrils of something with tiny little white buds.)

Surfacing

Out on the water today, we raced three OC6s with novice steerers, from Stanley Main Beach across the bay past the American Club, into Tai Tam and out again, around the buoys near the quarry at Hobie cat Beach, and back to the pier at the Sea School. I sat at seat 5 coaching the novice steerer in the boat (which mainly consisted of shouting back to him "don't paddle, just steer"; "pick a point and aim for it, don't deviate" and "keep the boat straight", it being a classic error of all new steerers to try to paddle too much rather than steer - in a race situation, the crew just want the boat to head in a consistent direction.) My crew were given a minute's head start as we were all women except for the steerer; but after 50 minutes of hard paddling we held off the other crews to finish first, despite the fact that A's steering was erratic: we zigged, and then we zagged...

The water in Stanley Bay was fairly clear, in that looking down, you could see the sand on the sea floor; but there was a strange reddish scum covering much of the sea's surface, which lapped against the boat, leaving a sticky residue as we passed. On arriving back at the pier, tomato-faced with effort (in my case at least), we floated for a while, idly watching a little sampan chugging out diesel fumes and spewing adulterated water into the sea. When they lowered a large test tube shaped object into the water it became apparent that they were taking a water sample. It was all I could do not to remark to them that 1) I could tell them what the water quality was - it was shite; and 2) they might find if they switched their diesel engine off, they would be contributing less overtly to the poor quality water they were purporting to measure.

(Picture from the Around Hong Kong Island Race, November 2008; ©Lydia Ronnenkamp)

Hair of the dog

When we were kids we always had gerbils. There's something a bit challenging about gerbils: they're cannibals, eating their young if they are surplus to requirements (too many mouths to feed); they are, when newborn, pink and hairless and squirming; and their little cage always seemed to reek (cleaning out the cage, ridding it of its sodden kapok and sawdust, was a chore to be dreaded but endured if you wanted a pet). They also bite down with alacrity on the webs between your fingers, given half a chance, and don't let go. But they can be cute and snuffly, and have the advantage of being fairly accessible pets.

They were all too accessible, unfortunately, for a rotten, fat, yappy little Cairn terrier called Kirsty, with wiry grey pelt and mean button eyes, which belonged to some daft family friends: one terrible day I came into the bedroom where they were kept to discover the wire top of the gerbil cage askew and a smug Kirsty knocking back the last gerbil before licking her chops in a revoltingly satisfied fashion.

No matter how much any adult might subsequently explain that Kirsty was just following her instinct as a ratcatching kinda dog, I conceived there and then a powerful loathing for all yapping little terriers and their ilk which has endured to this day. I was more than pleased - I was triumphant when Kirsty subsequently got alopecia and her coat fell off.

Flight from reality

It's all too easy to affect a strong dislike for various designers and nano-celebrities, usually on the basis that a) there may be comic value to be gleaned; and b) they are undeserving aristocratic nonentities (qv "London's Coolest Teenagers" in VOGUE). Matthew Williamson (who's now "creative director" of Pucci, so he got what he deserved with their noxious prints), for instance, always struck me as someone who had, by judicious use of celebrity pals, parlayed his minimal talent into a successful career as a fashion designer in this endless merry-go-round of mutual appreciation and endorsement which the vacuous just gobble up.

Now I have confirmation that I was right to conceive a towering dislike of the man: in an inflight magazine I picked up recently, he was asked what he would be doing in 10 years' time and answered "I'll be flying in my private jet to all my favourite places and hoping they are still unspoiled".

Clearly this is sheer arrogance and stupidity of the worst kind.

Crouching tiger, hidden salmon

Roksanda Ilincic's clothes are always beautiful and simple with something nicely modern about them. This dress wouldn't suit me at all (the colour, described as rose, washes out anyone with pale colouring; a more accurate description would be salmon pink, which inexplicably is not favoured by designers) and what's more it's unjustifiably expensive and dry clean only, words to strike fear into any lazy/thrifty woman's heart; but the simplicity of this dress, and the way it's put together, and the precise way the fabric falls, and the addition of the baroque belt, are an admirable combination.

Hope and despair

Today's taxi driver, Ken, vehemently disagreed with yesterday's (Eric) about 70% of passengers being rude. Ken's verdict was that Eric must be unhappy inside, and projecting that onto his passengers; why, Ken greets his with a happy smile and wave and "then they will be gentle even if they are sad". This conversation also revealed the interesting fact that often people will tell Ken their secrets because he doesn't know his passengers' names.

Ken, the optimist, who learned his English from watching TV, had more reason than Eric to be cynical about human nature. Once he was attacked and robbed by an illegal immigrant while walking with his family in Shek O; and once, incredibly, a passenger he described as "a lunatic" poured sulphuric acid over his head. It was cold that day and he was wearing a hat and thick cream because of his eczema, so miraculously he was unscarred.

I learn so much from taxi drivers (including, again today, guidance on Cantonese pronunciation) that it's a source of some regret that there's such a massive price differential between the bus and a cab fare and no real advantage in terms of speed. I also get travel sick in cabs, especially on the winding and precipitous route back to Stanley, but today it was almost worth it.

The ride

Eric the cab driver drove me home this evening. He was in his twenties, had been driving for about a year, and was eager to practise his English as well as teach me how to use tones properly to give my address in Stanley (Chek Chu). Tones are the hardest part of learning Cantonese; westerners are usually too high-pitched, apparently, and you'll sometimes find yourself parroting a phrase you've learned, thinking it's correct, only to be met with blank incomprehension because the tones are all over the place.

The journey from Central to Stanley takes about 20 minutes in the evening, so he had time to tell me, rather sadly, that he felt that 70% of his passengers - even one bolshy four year old, in the example he gave - didn't respect him or treat him like a human being. In his view mainlanders were the worst. I suggested that he might want to fit an ejector seat for recalcitrant passengers, failing which a bucket of water might do the trick; but he pointed out not only that this would mean losing 70% of passengers prior to payment, but also that in Hong Kong, taxi drivers are legally obliged to accept all passengers, no matter how rude.

Sensoria

Continuing a recent theme of the evocative nature of scent, this website, I Hate Perfume, contains some intriguingly-named perfumes, the descriptions of which, while they often skate perilously close to laughable, are more interesting than, for instance, the revolting cheap knock-offs on sale in a chemist's shop near my flat in Byres Road, Glasgow, in the early 1990s: if you liked Christian Dior's POISON (a late 1980s, overpoweringly strong and cloyingly sweet scent which was unpleasant enough in itself), you could buy the charmingly titled KILL ME in a nasty purple bottle just differentiated enough to avoid a lawsuit; instead of Calvin Klein's OBSESSION, you could buy a classy amber coffret containing COMPULSION.

Christopher Brosius ("CB"), the "olfactory artist" behind I Hate Perfume, can create custom perfumes, but is currently not taking orders, so I'm afraid Childhood tantrum ends in woodshed is out for the moment; but I think Gathering apples may be an acceptable substitute. It's described as "Thousands of ripe red Mackintosh apples and a bit of old weathered wood from the bushel baskets".

Such great heights

I was searching for some wonderful shoes to justify the title of this email and nearly drew a blank: designers once again seem to have gone slightly bonkers. What happened to what Karl lagerfeld described as "the new modesty" in light of the global economic downturn? (In the same article he also said that he "throws money out of the window and it comes back in the door", and that "for me the bottom line is that there is no bottom line". Let's hope economic reality hits him between the eyes with all due dispatch.) Even normally sensible, even predictable designers like Louboutin have gone all Britney Spears.



Starting gently with some shoes from Gina: usually too frou-frou for me, but I wouldn't be ashamed to wear these: although I am still unsure about the deplorable über-wedge, compared to the first-year art projects masquerading as something wearable, viz. exhibits A, B and C below (which are tiny so I don't desecrate my blog too much) they are downright beautiful.

And then: the Deranged Collection, from Louboutin. Deliberately shrunken photographs so as to avoid offending the senses.





The problem with making red soles his trademark is that he'll never be able to deny that these monstrosities were his idea.

Hard core

Apple Martini
2 oz. vodka
1½ oz. Bols sour apple liqueur
½ oz. Lemon juice
Apple slice for garnish

Shake well with ice and strain into a chilled martini glass. Garnish with a slice of apple, serve, and drink in huge quantities.


Freshly served apple martini at the CitySpace bar, 70th floor, Swissotel the Stamford, Singapore, January 21, 2009.

Where there is darkness, light

Just before beginning his medical studies at Oxford, M suffered terrible brain injuries in a motorbike accident, from which he would never recover. He ended up, a few years later, living in the caravan behind our cottage and working on woodcarving in my dad’s workshop. Although I remember some massive lumpen figures, his passion and his nemesis was his Welsh love spoons, which he would spend hours carving: a single lump of wood produces two spoons, which are interlinked by a loop at the end, so the wood must remain unbroken, and time after time, as he painstakingly whittled away, the spoons would break at the weakest point and he would have to begin again.

M loved Bob Dylan and used to sit in his favourite patchwork chair in our living room, right by the blazing fire, reeking pipe in hand, listening to Stuck Inside of Mobile (With the Memphis Blues Again) and Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right , tapping his feet and gazing into the distance. He was a very tall man, with a large head, always crowned with a black beret, and a big beard; a gentle, dazed character, unable to retain memories of either the recent or the distant past. Of course we children were slightly frightened of him but also found him amusing, in our cruel and careless way; fond of a drink, he used to walk down to the local pub, the Winton Arms, and stumble back up the road completely trashed, swaying and smiling, as we followed mockingly in his wake. I know we used to upset and anger him sometimes.

From this distance M’s story is unutterably sad; I remember him coming home from the pub once and crying helplessly, repeating the words of Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart: “Once upon a time I was falling in love/Now I’m only falling apart…”, because it had been playing on the jukebox and something in the words suddenly hit him very hard. He sometimes seemed to be very aware of what he had lost in his accident; at other times there was a kind of happy innocence about him. He was almost sucked in, as a lot of my parents’ friends were, by the cult of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, but he came back from Poona, where Bagwhan had his ashram at the time, saying he “refused to be Bagwhashed”. He was half in love with my sister and wrote letters to her. He had a harrowing appearance at Haddington Sheriff Court: someone had been stealing money from the till at the pub and they set a trap which caught M, guilelessly leaning over the bar to take the cash while the barman’s back was turned.

M had The Mass of St Francis of Assisi (“where there is…let me bring”, forever besmirched by being presumptuously arrogated by Thatcher on her election day) and this quote pinned up in his caravan:

“The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls a butterfly”. (Richard Bach)

M now lives in Wales with his brother. He’s old and very frail and recently had a leg amputated because he had diabetes. My brother, who went through some troubles of his own, spent some time with him recently and said he seemed happy. I like to think of him still carving love spoons, though I doubt he does it any more, and listening to his favourite Dylan line: "Your debutante just knows what you need, but I know what you want".

Slouching towards Louis Vuitton

The most loathsome of dictator's wives, Grace Mugabe (who has to wear Salvatore Ferragamo shoes because her feet are too narrow for anything cheap), was in Hong Kong last week, shopping for luxury goods, and managed to get herself involved in a fracas with a photographer in Tsim Sha Tsui (naturally, she was staying at the nearby Kowloon Shangri-La), who was trying to get pictures of Grace shopping in the numerous luxury shops in the area. Her diamond rings double as knuckledusters and the South China had pictures of the poor man's face streaked with blood.

Apparently Grace and her villainous husband withdrew $92,000 from Zimbabwe's bank reserves to fund their holiday. Meanwhile, Zimbabwe is suffering from a cholera epidemic that has killed 2,200 people and an economic meltdown that has driven the rate of inflation to 231 million per cent.

Chrysalis

We found it on a bunch of grapes and put it
In cotton wool, in a matchbox partly open,
In a room in London in wintertime, and in
A safe place, and then forgot it.

Early in the cold spring we said "See this!
Where on earth did the butterfly come from?"
It looked so unnatural whisking about the curtain:
Then we remembered the chrysalis.

There was the broken shell with what was once
The head askew; and what was once the worm
Was away out of the window, out of the warm,
Out of the scene of the small violence.

Not strange, that the pretty creature formalized
The virtue of its dark unconscious wait
For pincers of light to come and pick it out.
But it was a bad business, our being surprised.

Muriel Spark, 1918-2004

Stirred

Lychee martini
3 ounces of premium vodka
1 ounce of lychee liqueur
1 lychee, peeled and pitted
ice

Shake together the vodka, liqueur and ice and strain into a chilled martini glass. Garnish with the peeled lychee and serve.



Recipe from the admirable Lychees Online; side elevation of freshly delivered martini, Aqua, Hong Kong, Friday January 16, 2009.

Something in the woodshed

As a child, whenever I was upset about something I would "run away" and hide in the woodshed behind our cottage. The wood was delivered from the local sawmill in roughly hewn, chunky logs which were fragrant, slightly damp, and still covered in bark and moss; I had to climb up over a huge pile to get to my favourite spot, right at the back, where I would make myself a little nest amongst the logs and sit sobbing until I felt better, with my only friends the little spiders and beasties who were attracted to my torch (which I always had the presence of mind to bring). It could be cosy and surprisingly warm; if it was windy and I could hear the rain hitting the corrugated roof, it was a satisfyingly melodramatic gesture yet very comforting. I always felt better when I emerged (usually to find that no one had even noticed I was gone).

The woodshed has moved location now but for old times' sake, when I was home at Christmas I tried climbing in to the back, over the piles of logs. The cold and the smell were incredibly evocative. It might only sell to the likes of me but it occurred to me that someone should bottle it.

Strange Meeting

It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.

Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall, -
By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.

With a thousand pains that vision's face was grained;
Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
'Strange friend,' I said, 'here is no cause to mourn.'
'None,' said that other, 'save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour,
And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.
For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something had been left,
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
Now men will go content with what we spoiled,
Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress.
None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.
Courage was mine, and I had mystery,
Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery:
To miss the march of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not walled.
Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels,
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.
I would have poured my spirit without stint
But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.

I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now...'

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

Oblique midwinter

I grew up in an extraordinarily cold house, where getting dressed under the bedclothes in winter was essential, there was frost on the insides of the window panes, and we used to put the gas oven on with the door open to get a little heat in the kitchen. Probably as a result I am miserable in cold weather and have a powerful addiction to the moment when you step out of the cold into a warm room.

I walked to the end of the road this morning, my last day in London, to pick up the newspaper. It was that kind of bone-chillingly cold day I'd forgotten all about, where your ears and face start to hurt with it just walking along; like any visceral pain it's impossible to remember it properly when you're not experiencing it, and it made me appreciate once again the fact that I live in a climate where it never gets colder than 10 degrees.

Every day there's some sharp reminder of how lucky I am to live in a bubble; today on the front of The Guardian, a picture of a man in Gaza with greyed and bloodied face, reaching for help from the hole he's buried in. The Daily Mail, meanwhile, focuses on something much more important; the headline shrieks about benefit claimants PAID 20,000 NOT TO WORK and you have to wait till page 6 to read anything about Israel.

I hate to sound trite, but this seems to be a time to work out what really matters: the people you love, little things that make life better, being positive even if there's uncertainty ahead. To quote Harold Pinter (1930-2008) out of context: what else is there?

A love of nature keeps no factories busy

I went shopping in Edinburgh today amidst huge discount signs; everything is on sale already. Something about the abundance of clothes on the racks gives the shops an almost jumble sale feel, which I must admit fills me with torpor. I particularly resent the implication that consumers are somehow expected to spend our way out of the recession. Why is no one suggesting that it might be no bad thing for us to stop consuming? Before the crisis started to become inexorable Ben Bernanke said that "the main source of imbalance in the global economy was not excess spending at home but, rather, excess saving in China and other developing countries, where consumption was artificially low". This sort of self-deluding myopia is what caused all the trouble; and I am definitely liking neither the idea nor the reality of consumption at the moment. But nonetheless, in the kind of contradictory gesture I'm often guilty of, here are some more ideas for my trenchant critics to get their teeth into:


Alexander McQueen, from Net-a-Porter: sky high heels to make anyone feel good;


Issa, from Matches (something about the casual way they display the clothes is accessible and at the same time a bit downbeat); and


Vivienne Westwood from Net-a-Porter.

Um meiner Zähren willen

Ghosts of Christmas past

After my parents divorced in the 1980s, a new, mostly amicable family tradition emerged, which is that every Boxing Day, the whole extended family (my mum (Marg) and her partner, my dad (Chris) and his wife, plus half-sisters, siblings, aunts, and anyone else who's around) spend Boxing Day together, alternating between Chris's house and Marg's. Particularly in the early years, and also particularly when it was Chris's turn to be host, this was a rather fraught event, for a number of reasons as well as the usual toxic festive mix of everyone being hungry, and having had too much to drink instead, and the usual family fortunes.

Twenty years ago, at Chris's, I had a furious row with Marg which ended in crying and screaming. Flight PanAm 103 had just been blown up over Lockerbie and Marg's then boyfriend, Rob, had gone to Lockerbie in his car, because he worked nearby, and had wandered about the hillside where the debris was scattered. I didn't like Rob much anyway, but when I heard the story being told in hushed tones about how traumatised he'd been by what he'd seen there, I forcefully pointed out that given that the emergency services apparently couldn't get to the scene because of cars packed with sightseers blocking the roads, and even if what drew him there was just human nature, I didn't think that he deserved any sympathy. A plane exploded in the sky and 270 people died; of course it was going to be bad.

Marg was understandably defensive and I was adamant and probably not particularly nice about it, so this discussion was never going to come to a happy accord; pictures taken afterwards show me red-eyed and puffy-faced, and I still remember that sense of dismay at an argument gone too far, with everyone else looking on helplessly.

Shiny shiny

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

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

Family fortunes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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".

Just have to thole it

For St Andrew's Day: my favourite Burns poem.

To a Mouse

Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim'rous beastie,
O, what panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi' bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee,
Wi' murd'ring pattle!

I'm truly sorry Man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle,
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An' fellow-mortal!

I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen-icker in a thrave
'S a sma' request:
I'll get a blessin wi' the lave,
An' never miss't!

Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
Its silly wa's the win's are strewin!
An' naething, now, to big a new ane,
O' foggage green!
An' bleak December's winds ensuin,
Baith snell an' keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an' wast,
An' weary Winter comin fast,
An' cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro' thy cell.

That wee-bit heap o' leaves an' stibble,
Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!
Now thou's turn'd out, for a' thy trouble,
But house or hald.
To thole the Winter's sleety dribble,
An' cranreuch cauld!

But Mousie, thou are no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men,
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

Still, thou art blest, compar'd wi' me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e'e,
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!

Robert Burns (1759-1796)

Celebrity squares

I had two empty celebrity experiences for the price of one this week: first Kylie at the Hong Kong Expo site near the airport; and secondly Roger Moore at the Discovery Bay Dymock's. In their way each was as unengaging as the other: Kylie victim of the large, alienating arena with a vacuum where an atmosphere should be, gamely kicking her way through the hits; Roger's frozen face and that of his wife and their bodyguard, lined up politely behind a table to sign the risibly-titled "My Word Is My Bond" ("Roger Moore with Gareth Owen", it says discreetly on the title page). I asked him what he thought of Discovery Bay and he said it was beautiful (today, to be fair, it is: the skies blue and the air cool), to which I replied that I advised him to get out as soon as possible, only belatedly realising that this could have been construed as some sort of threat and I was damn lucky not to be taken down.

Since my motivation for going along to both events could best be described as kitsch-experience seeking, I richly deserved what I got, which wasn't much.

My castle is my home

I had a brief, inglorious period in charge of the Australian division of the company I work for, prior to a big acquisition which increased the size of the business from 10 employees to 200 and required a full-time manager to be stationed there. While I was in charge I found it something of a struggle to get anything done, not being Australian, and being female and relatively young compared to staff who had been in the industry for 25 years and had no compunction about actively, passively and/or aggressively resisting any ideas I came up with, usually on the logic that this is the way we’ve always done things.

The nadir of the entire business, but the jewel in the crown to its denizens, was the office in Castlereagh Street in Sydney. It was about twice the size of the office in Hong Kong, but inhabited by a third of the staff, each person located (in splendid isolation and king of all they surveyed) behind a mega-desk which seemed to be consist of its own idiosyncratic add-ons, extensions, shelves and cubbyholes salvaged triumphantly from office renovations over the years; the walls were painted a revolting shade of green reminiscent of municipal sewage works or pre-glasnost Polish supermarkets; the anterooms were stuffed with receipts and invoices all clearly labelled with dates ranging from 1978 to 1992, long beyond their useful life; and piled up in mounds, everywhere, the stock in trade of our business, now long obsolete: ancient tape recorders, spare parts and audio equipment from manufacturers whose factories closed their doors in 1964. At the back, a grubby kitchen with a damaged kettle and lopsided tables which always seemed to be hosting half-eaten pipes of stale Pringles and the remains of someone’s birthday cake. The only thing the office needed to complete the look was a large sign saying ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE.

I hope I am not maligning them too much by suggesting that the eyes of the staff stationed there were habitually dull; they certainly gleamed with native cunning when I made suggestions: “Let’s paint the walls white!” was met with the retort “But we chose this colour”. Unbelievably, despite the gargantuan desks, their chief complaint was lack of space.

I got an email this morning from N, who now looks after the business in Sydney, saying that the office is closing and staff are being relocated elsewhere. In my own small way I am feeling extremely happy about this; but presumably a whole new set of problems will present themselves as they try to find a removal agency willing to transport 14 garganto-desks with associated accessories to their new location.

Back in the real world

A depressing report from Afghanistan about the continuing erosion of women's rights as the Taliban become more powerful in the vacuum of the worsening security situation. The Afghan MP Shukria Barakzai receives death threats but says "there is no choice. I would rather die for the dignity of women than die for nothing. Should I stop my work because there is a chance I might be killed? I must go on, and if it happens it happens".

The author of the gung-ho website Come Back Alive has a different perspective: he says "Somehow in [international, usually female, journalists'] zeal to create women's rights in a country staggering to its knees, they forget to mention the complete lack of jobs, housing, medical care, health services and education for men". I'm not sure I buy the argument, though; what justification is there for acid attacks on schoolgirls?

The lone sands stretch far away

It's been a while since there was any poetry here. For St Andrew's Day (November 30), I'm choosing my favourite Burns poem (see if you can guess which one it is; I can tell you that although of course I love Scotland's national dish, that's not it). In the meantime, here is something I memorised a long time ago because I thought it was beautiful. Call me pretentious: if I ever have to type anything as a test, this is what I type (it's either this or "I met a traveller in an antique land"); from Byron's The Destruction of Sennacherib):

The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee...

My tag for poetry posts is from Wilfred Owen, who said "My subject is war, and the pity of war. The poetry is in the pity".

In pastures green he leadeth me

A welcome (for me) relapse into the trivial: I love Alexander McQueen shoes (as much as I currently like green, green anything), though I don't own any (I balk at paying US$1,000 for a pair of shoes I'll wreck in days on Hong Kong pavements, which are peppered with holes and have soft crevices between the cracks just made for heels to sink into). I do, on the other hand, own a pair of Marni shoes; but surely these are just wellies with heels?

Both from Browns, as is this: Roland Mouret dress with a detail far more slyly appealing than any number of cliched red-soled Louboutins (although Browns' model is wearing a pair: they went for the obvious match there).

Television, the drug of the nation

Martin B was a troubled character from a wealthy East Lothian family, with the sort of pursed-lipped mother (her name was, distinctively, Mauville) who was bound to be disappointed. Martin had suffered from psychiatric problems (he said it was "LSD psychosis"), but had become a nurse, and used to horrify and fascinate us as children with tales of his experiences: decapitated pillion passengers, the wrong limbs sewn on in the mortuary; death in the ward, the body lying unnoticed for hours; making up the faces of dead bodies for family viewings, trying to cover the terrible injuries to protect their sensibilities; drug mishaps; and gruesome accidents of all kinds.

It was around the time that Elvis died (1977), and the 17-year-old brother of one of my classmates died the same year in a motorbike accident; all those images are bound up together in my memory. Many of his stories were, on reflection, probably exaggerated, but the temptation to elaborate for his wide-eyed audience must have been intense. He bought us sweets and gave us silly nicknames. We knew there was something not quite right, and teased him for the way he ate ("like a washing machine"), but his fiendish stories were plentiful and he was incredibly generous.

We never had a TV at home and longed for one. Things got worse for Martin and he lost his job, but the obvious thing for him to do with his disability money was to buy a TV for his favourite kids; and for a glorious few days we had a tiny TV, with poor reception because our cottage didn't have an aerial, until his mother insisted he return it to the shop. It seems callous, but we had no idea of his personal circumstances, so we were hugely disappointed, having no inkling that he was penniless.

Martin died 16 years ago, of an accidental drug overdose (or deliberate; no one seems to know). He's another of those oddly charismatic people from my childhood whom I can never quite believe is gone.

In the wind

Ignore the fact that this is an advert: there is something beautiful and comical here. In the film Silent Running (1972), robots tend the world's last plants in greenhouse spaceships for eternity; I imagine Theo Jansen's creations still pacing the beaches when everything and everyone else is dust.

Ignorance isn't bliss

This story is so appalling it can't be given an adequate frame. The stoning scene in The Life of Brian mocked ignorance and stupidity, but the joke seems hollow in the face of the real thing.

Dressed for success

I have early memories of my parents dressing up in fancy dress for parties in the 1970s: there's a particularly strong image of my mum in a rather disturbing Miss Havisham outfit, a tattered wedding dress with veils of cobwebs; I remember waiting with the babysitter to kiss goodnight to transformed beings, seeing my parents in a new guise. When I was about six, I was fascinated by a polaroid picture of my uncle Leo's then girlfriend, who, to add to her glamour, had to have a kitchen knife confiscated from her by my granny as she tried to creep into the bathroom with it, and later threw herself under a train. She was dressed in black, and was slathered in witchy green eye make-up. I took the photograph to school and showed it to my teacher, Mrs Osborne, much to her bemusement.

Although I loved dressing up - and my brother and sister and I used to parade around in our finery at every opportunity, making up plays for our parents' visitors, and donning cloaks and scarves for Guy Fawkes' Night - fancy dress, and even the name's still enough to make me cringe, was never of much interest to me as I got older, and became more protective of my dignity. Until I came to Hong Kong I would dress up in the most half-hearted way - as long as I could still look like me. But Hong Kong, for some reason, is a fancy dress paradise: there's an entire street (Pottinger) stuffed with shops selling cheap tat: swords, bats, masks and wigs, and the vendors astutely stock for themes. As always in Hong Kong, you can also do this on the cheap and extremely easily. Accordingly, I confess to having succumbed on a few occasions now, and have discovered the liberating power of the wig; the value of not taking yourself too seriously; and the sheer fun of arriving incognito, everyone peering under the veil, through the mask or over the bandages to try to work out who these strangers are.

Perhaps I just hadn't noticed this before, or perhaps this has suddenly happened: when did Halloween get so huge? Pottinger Street, a narrow, precipitous, awkwardly paved slope, was a riot of eager shoppers at lunchtime yesterday, clutching cloaks and pumpkins and bargaining half-heartedly. On the way to a Halloween birthday party last night, the streets around Lan Kwai Fong were packed with nurses and mummies and draculas and devils and tarty policewomen and schoolgirls and angels and Spanish senoritas and Harvey Dent lookalikes unabashedly drinking and waving their plastic tridents and broomsticks in the air like they just didn't care.

I was attempting to look like a witch, with long purple hair, dramatic green eye make up that aged me by about 30 years, a pointy hat and a rather fine cloak with a statement collar. It was hotter than hell under that hat and most of the accessories were gradually discarded as the evening wore on and we danced to defiantly 1980s tunes in a sweaty basement nightclub (I wish to inform you that girls they wanna - wanna have fun - girls, wanna have fun - oh girls, girls just wanna have fun). I was wearing vertiginous heels and kicked myself in the foot several times, drawing blood.

Stumbling out for a taxi later on, the street scenes were even more Bacchanalian with people spilling out of pubs onto the streets, traffic completely gridlocked, a tumult of voices and the bawling of drunken conversations. It would be trite to conclude, although I'm going to do so anyway (hence the naff title of this post) that the current uncertainty hovering over the world's financial markets is making it more compelling for the expats of Hong Kong to dress up in cheap tat and party like it was 1999.

The best possible taste

I don't often write about food, which is surprising given how much I love it (and accordingly, I'm no sylph). For some reason I was feeling very hungry on the bus today, on the way home from work, and this made me think about the fact that actually it sometimes doesn't even matter what you're eating: the environment, the company you're keeping, the weather, the music, something unpredictable and unique or even just how stupidly hungry you are can make the following list of things, for instance, taste better than anything you've ever tasted:

a cup of tea in a plastic mug outside my just-pitched tent;
fish and chips from Joe's Fish Bar in Tranent, straight out of the packet;
a bowl of Doll instant noodles (probably chicken flavour);
fish fingers and tomato sauce, eaten with my fingers;
cold baked beans from a tin with a bent fork;
a spoonful of crunchy peanut butter from the jar; or
a slightly burnt sausage in a bap at a badly organised barbeque.

Our velocity

Terry was one of the founders of the "little school" which my sister and brother and I attended. We were taken out of state school in 1979 and started at Woodhall, as it was known, a large cottage set in the hillside near our village, with a walled garden and outhouses. Due to local authority requirements, the school had to have a set, approved curriculum and was regularly inspected.

Terry and his then-girlfriend, Mary, were teachers and they created the environment around which the school, and the other teachers, coalesced. Terry was a maths teacher and enthusiast and had a powerful presence which had a strong impact on my sister and I as pre-adolescents - so much so that we professed to "hate" Terry and formed the "Terry's Rotten Apples Club" (a cipher for "Terry's Rotten") which met in a cupboard under the stairs. We teased him and Mary mercilessly - I remember my sister saying boldly, to shocked silence, "Terry and Mary are going lick the cream bowl in bed!", for their relationship, which they had clearly agreed was not to be acknowledged in the school environment (and justifiably so: it was none of our business), and for the fact that they were both vegetarians (I once hoodwinked Mary into eating a beef crisp which I'd cunningly disguised by placing it in a bag of cheese and onion crisps). We really behaved quite appallingly.

Terry taught me probability using thousands of throws of the dice, the results meticulously logged; he taught me calculus, and we drew beautiful pie charts. I loved my maths lessons, although I behaved as though I hated them; I loved Terry too. After I left when I was 13, to go to a "normal" school (which turned out to be Steiner school, so not that normal), I'd see him from time to time and always felt as though we had a special connection, not least because of my faint guilt at the way we had behaved; but also because I felt that no matter what I had done, I was forgiven.

Terry went on to become a counsellor, drawing on the infinite reserves of patience and good humour he used with us. He died three years ago, in his early fifties, of a brain tumour. For a few years before he died he suffered operations, and bloating from drugs, and periods where he was vague and slow; but he was still recognisably Terry, even though he was no longer the powerful, vital man he used to be. Even now he still seems so alive to me that I can't quite register that he isn't.

When my sister called to tell me he had died, I stood and cried on the platform of the train station in Singapore where I was waiting for a train to take me to the airport.

The last time I saw him was at my dad's birthday party. Terry held court in the corner, clearly very ill, but smiling; and in a slightly tipsy state I went over and talked to him and hugged him for a while and then said "You made me what I am". He replied "You made me what I am".

Liability

Joan Didion writes succinctly on Salon about the real issues obscured by the farrago of misinformation surrounding the US election.

Finding Number 1 of the recent report into whether Palin abused her power in having a state trooper fired: "For reasons explained in Section IV of this report, I find that Governor Sarah Palin abused her power by violating Alaska Statute".

Sarah Palin's reaction? "I'm very, very pleased to be cleared of any legal wrongdoing ... any hint of any kind of unethical activity there."

No wonder the rest of the world is observing this election with a mixture of apprehension and astonishment.

Levi Stubbs' tears run down his face

Levi Stubbs, 1936-2008

Oh music come and light my heart's dark places

When I was a kid I used to share a room with my younger brother (happy birthday, Robin). I had the top bunk on the bunkbed, which was against the wall. Directly on the other side of the wall, my mum's piano stood in the living room; I used to lie in bed at night listening to her play, the chords resonating through the wall. She often played my favourite piece of music, Beethoven's Sonata No. 8, Pathetique, 2nd Movement (here, and this is the best version on YouTube, played by wonderboy Freddy Kempf), and even now when I hear it I'm instantly transported back to what seems to be, for me, a rare moment of peace and tranquillity. My mum put together a series of photographs for my 40th birthday recently and looking at the earlier ones, I look so sad (there's one particularly piercing one which I clearly remember being taken: me and my sorry little face, standing with a group of people on the doorstep of our cottage, about to go to school, dreading it, my little plastic bag of belongings in my hand).

People ask me what it's like to be 40 and I tell them, without exaggeration, that the older I get, and even though there are lovely memories in there too (Beethoven through the wall), the further away I get from my childhood, the happier I am.

Myopia

The headline on CNN this morning: "Many Iraqis not focused on vice-presidential debate". That may be because they are focused, inexplicably, on surviving.

Hypocrisy is the greatest luxury

In the South China Morning Post this week, news that the Hong Kong government is considering promoting Hong Kong as an environmentally aware city, and redesigning the dragon, Hong Kong's current logo, to reflect that (they will presumably engage a team of consultants at great expense over several months to come up with the innovative conclusion that the red dragon should be green, and perhaps have a plastic bag wrapped around one of its claws). This is, with unassailable logic, due to the high level of environmental awareness amongst the population due to the fact that, er, we live in an increasingly and unbelievably polluted city (see photographic evidence below) which the government is, also er, doing nothing about.

Silhouettes and alcohol

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

Not a lot of money these days

Thank God the US Treasury, in charge of resolving the financial meltdown, are using appropriate reference to the extent of the problem, cold hard logic and statistical analysis to identify the appropriate extent of the bailout:

In fact, some of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure
Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy.

'It’s not based on any particular data point,' a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com [on] Tuesday. 'We just wanted to
choose a really large number'.

Dr Evil couldn't have put it any better.

Cleft palate

Admittedly, competition is fierce, but surely these are hot contenders for the most revolting shoe ever designed? Shoe-boots for goblins.

Look on the light side

Yesterday was a really long day, completely swallowed up by paddling: I was up at 7am to register for a 21K race from Stanley to Po Toi and back again, and the women’s race set off at 8.30. It was already too hot by that time and 21K is a hell of a long way by any standards (2 and a half hours of effort). I was steering my first distance race, which made me feel pretty nervous: it’s a lot of responsibility. I don’t mind taking responsibility at work (and I have to), but opting for it out of work is a different matter. It was, in any event, an object lesson in what can go wrong: having been right behind the leaders (our club’s main Hong Kong rivals) for much of the race and battling with a much more experienced women’s crew for second place, I made a mistake, we went in the wrong direction and I had to correct our course substantially to get back to the yellow buoy we were supposed to go around, which cost us three places. I was really gutted, but had to continue to project a positive outlook to the crew so that we didn’t lose out even further due to sheer demoralisation. The paddle back across the bay seemed to last for aeons and everyone was struggling, but we somehow kept going and the boats behind us couldn’t catch us.

Despite everything, I thought I steered a pretty good race: I kept the boat straight and managed to paddle a lot instead of just "poking" (sticking the steering blade in the water to change direction) all the time. I felt pretty upset immediately afterwards though: as steersperson it’s my responsibility to take the right course. Lesson learned – pay attention during the race briefing. And I was amazed by the magnanimity of my crew, who’d seen their hard-fought second place disappear due to my error. They were so nice to me about it that it was humbling.

Later on the club held a barbeque for everyone who raced and I spent a happy hour or two slaving over a hot grill looking after an excess of meat – the grace under pressure and camaraderie of my fellow barbeque operatives, not to mention the absurdity of trying to cook 100 sausages on a tiny grill, being much more enjoyable than standing dourly around with a can of beer talking about paddling. We had so many sausages that one of the barbeque chain gang, James, ended up going down to Deep Water Bay beach that evening, after we’d finished clearing up, and handing them out to the legions of Filipina helpers who gather there under the trees on their day off. I've already told him that next week there will be a rapidly growing crowd. Word will have got out that there are free sausages on a Sunday - it will be just like Life of Brian, except that they'll be worshipping sausages instead of a gourd.

Back to black

It's been somewhat po-faced round here of late. Definitely time for some frivolity: Roland Mouret Pigalle dress, from Net-A-Porter. Part, apparently, of the new minimalism.

Aural testimony

When I was 7, in the summer of 1976, I had post-aural lymphadenitis (this is what it said on the plastic tag around my wrist, and I memorised it, much to the annoyance of anyone who subsequently asked me why I'd been in hospital). I remember blinding pain in my ear, which started when we were at the beach, 1976 having been a long hot summer; and I ended up in "the Sick Kids", Edinburgh's children's hospital, crying with pain and fear at being separated from my mum.

Piercing little memories from that time come back to me. I remember them in much the same way as I can recall, as a three year old, not being able to read and looking uncomprehendingly at street signs (much like being in a foreign country). I had a room of my own, and it was the first time I had ever seen, much less eaten, liver, which wobbled alarmingly on the plate and which I comprehensively rejected; a neighbour brought me "Five Children and It" to read - I'm still, even now, unsure what or who "It" was, although I remember he/she/It could grant wishes which somehow had a Monkey's Paw-like tendency to backfire; I watched the diving in the Olympics on a tiny TV perched high in the corner, and really didn't comprehend that it was a sport; I cried hysterically when I was told that I had to stay in hospital for three more days; I fell in love with my nurse and insisted on giving her a mawkish plastic rose when I left, which has forever haunted me since as having been quite possibly nicked from someone's graveside tableau; and being transported, for one horrible night, to the general children's ward and lying awake, terrified, to the sound of others' breathing and moaning.

Afterwards, of course, as a manipulative little sod I turned the experience to my advantage as a badge of courage and source of stories, including an entirely made up tale of a child dying in the bed next to me and being taken away in the night. The thrilling story retold never, for some reason, included a description of a terrified 7 year old crying abjectly at being abandoned.

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".

Hard news

I've remarked before that it's almost impossible to get proper news of any description while in the rural US. International newspapers are non-existent; I found a single copy of the exotic New York Times in Honololu, and after the first day avoided the vacuous local press, but TV news is worse than useless. The focus of every "news" channel? Tracking the path of Hurricane Gustav (CNN, ludicrously, was billing itself as "Your Hurricane Headquarters") and the evacuation of New Orleans which, while undoubtedly important for those involved, is less pressing than any of the other multitude of things that happened while we were in Hawaii, such as the political crisis in Thailand or Fukuda's resignation, which I didn't know about till I got back.

Even more saturation coverage, however, was afforded to the arrest of "Casey" Anthony, the mother of "Caylee", a missing 5-year old girl from Florida, on unrelated chequebook charges. Speculation, the principle of sub judice clearly not being an issue here, was running riot. The nadir of this prurient coverage was surely reached by a dessicated harpy, eponymous star of the current affairs show "Nancy Grace", who asked a reporter broadcasting live outside Casey and Caylee's apartment: "Did they make this arrest at this time because they knew Nancy Grace would be live on air?" To which the hapless reporter replied, bravely: "Uh, no, I don't think that was a consideration". Presumably Nancy's next words to her offline were "You're fired!"

On the other hand, the local paper, West Hawaii Today, reported every race we were in on the front page of the following day's issue. And you could buy a copy of something called "Da Jesus Book" at the airport.

Where the clouds are far behind me

View from Waimea Canyon, Kauai, Hawaii, September 2008 (© Simon Zeng Hao)

Although we did redeem ourselves by coming 8th in a double hull, 12-person race the following day, our anti-climactic start in the 18-mile race took the shine off the racing experience; the better part of the trip for me was the camaraderie amongst the team, the way that obscure catchphrases always develop and take a life of their own ("I haven't had a moustache since 1972!"), the sheer pleasure of new landscapes and experiences, with nothing more pressing to do than read books, talk, sit peacefully by the sea, or lie on your back in the sand looking up at the astonishing array of stars.

On the first day of the race I dropped my Blackberry in the water in the bottom of a canoe we were removing from the water. This wasn't deliberate - I also managed to wreck a camera one of my fellow crew-members had given me for safekeeping - but it did mean that I could no longer check work emails and was reprieved of technology-induced anxiety and the sense that my time is not my own, even on holiday.

We spent a few days on the island of Kauai (where, of course, Elvis filmed the incomparable masterpiece Blue Hawaii, and other incomparable masterpieces such as Jurassic... Raiders of... and South Pacific were also filmed), home to the entirely benign Pacific Missile Range facility. Five of us shared an old sugar plantation cottage in Waimea, where James Cook first came ashore from the HMS Resolution in 1778 (although he appears rather imperiously to have sent William Bligh ahead first to make sure the natives were friendly) right by the black volcanic sands of a tumultuous shoreline. We explored Waimea Canyon in our unwieldy hire car.

On our last day we took a catamaran trip along the Na Pali coastline. Nonchalant goats tripped along precarious ledges high above, dolphins swam with the boat, and Israel Kamakawiwo'ole's ukulele version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow/Wonderful World played on the PA system as they served us mai-tais and we returned home through a gap in the raincloud.

Smoked on the water

I've just spent a week in Hawaii racing in the Queen Lili'Uokalani Long Distance Canoe Race. The women's course runs from Kailua-Kona town to Honaunau Bay. As always at these events, the women go out first, at the crack of dawn. The start is often the best part of the race: over 100 canoes tightly packed along the start line waiting for the gun in a maelstrom of incredible energy and excitement. Unfortunately our canoe missed the gun; at that point we were about 50 meters behind the line and rather than powering off the start galvanised by the boats around us, we were forced to set off somewhat bathetically on our lonely 18 mile course, already behind.

The water itself is not particularly exciting: nothing like the 4 meter swells we encountered at Hamilton Island; but once we had shed our frustration, we began to pull back against the other boats and enjoy the race, particularly when the 9-member change race crews, who started 15 minutes behind, began to catch us: when the top women's crew steamed past us, we caught the wake from their support boat and some of their power and started to feel better again.

Our time was 2 hours 42 minutes, a good 30 minutes behind the winners but better than the 3 hour marathon we'd been training for. Huge turtles surfaced in the bay as we brought our boat to shore beside Danny Ching's crew who were preparing for the men's race, returning all the boats to Kona. The area where we landed is sacred in Hawaiian mythology as a place where you could seek refuge for any number of transgressions: if you were a woman who made the sacreligious error of eating with a man, or even worse, eating a banana, or a man who crossed the shadow of a great chief, you could find sanctuary there.

Eye of the storm

I am at home, and was waiting for the Typhoon No. 8 signal to be issued at 8am as promised on the Hong Kong Observatory's website, at which point I could declare the office closed; it has now been issued, but in the meantime I was rather taken with the Typhoon No. 10 warning, which is unreasonably poetic:

Remember
that if the eye of the typhoon
passes directly over Hong Kong,
there may be a temporary
lull
lasting a few minutes to several hours.

Do not relax
your guard, as there will be
a sudden resumption
of violent winds
from a different direction. Remain
where you are if protected
and be prepared for
destructive winds.