Rural dalek

I found this dalek lurking by the postbox at the bottom of a driveway in Lawson, a little town in the Blue Mountains north of Sydney. With his plunger on the right hand and egg whisk on the other, he seemed rather benign, but I didn't chance it by going any closer.

Flowers in the rain

A taste of history

Lasagne recipe from my mother's kitchen. c.1966 and still going strong. Recipe © Marg Hall 2009 (and Good Housekeeping? 1966?)

Showstoppers

Joanna Vanderpuije, a Central St Martin's graduate, has just produced her first collection and it's beautiful.


Perhaps it's the spare, elegant aesthetic of the photographs that contributes to the impact: these are clothes you'd be proud and excited to wear.


As Alber Elbaz says in a recent interview (and it's worth reading: he's such a likeable character, with his insecurity about his weight and his preference for sandwiches over avant garde cuisine): "A good shoe or a good dress does something to you. It's not just about fashion victims. It really does do something for all women".

All photos ©2009 Jaime de Almeida.

Hiatus

For the first time since my working life began in 1992, I have six weeks off. Six weeks to do nothing, or something. In the middle of the first week, I am still fighting off the urge to be doing something: get up, get out, tick things off, you'll run out of time... the shape of the day with nothing mandatory in it is strange and a little intimidating. I cycle to a cafe where I read the paper outside in Sydney's winter sunshine. I had my hair cut. I go to the gym. I play Scrabble on Facebook. I have felt oddly reluctant to write my blog. I took my camera (an excellent Nikon D80, kindly lent to me by one of my clients) to the park and took hundreds of close-ups of spiky birdlike flowers; I stalked the unwary on street corners to take pictures of the casual grace of pedestrians waiting for the green man. Other than brief conversations with the man who sells me coffee or those people who seem to like to stop and talk to me when I have my camera in front of my face, I hardly speak to anyone all day. It all adds up to not very much, but I think I will get used to it. When I come back, perhaps I won't be able to say what I did with my time, except that, trite though it sounds, I am learning how to relax about not having anything to do.

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

Photo credit mrcreighton.com

Summer nightmares

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



It says "SUMMER DREAMS".

Temple of heaven

Sado Island, Japan, April 2009: the most peaceful and beautiful temple, absolutely deserted, long abandoned, and slowly decaying. These ancient trees flanked the stone steps leading up to the temple. The temple itself was half hidden by trees and covered in moss. My dad's friend Johnny and his Japanese wife Chieko met us from the ferry and took us straight here; we went through Tokyo at rush hour to catch the shinkanzen from frenetic Tokyo Station to Niigata, where we raced to a taxi and finally embarked on a two hour ferry journey, changing pace at every step, slowing, until finally we arrived here.

Heel for heel and toe for toe

Shoes from the 1800s (fur-lined for warmth and, presumably, purple velvet for nobility). Sado Island, Japan, April 2009

Signs and wonders

In the garden at the potter Kawai Kanjiro's house, Kyoto. The wisteria on the trellis above had just produced its delicate lilac-coloured blooms and was packed with bumblebees. The house was beautiful and in keeping with the appealingly strict aesthetic we have seen everywhere; the pottery was a bit disappointing, although Kawai did have the biggest kiln I've ever seen.

Sanjo-dori, Kyoto. It all seems fair enough, really.

Fearsome, if somewhat bemused-looking dragon painted on the vast ceiling of a wooden temple at Kennin-ji, the oldest zen temple in Kyoto.

These are pretty humble photos taken by my Blackberry, owing to the fact that my camera is currently refusing to co-operate with any plan I draw up for it.

Zen and the art of gravel maintenance

Ginkaku-ji Shrine, Kyoto, April 16, 2009

Life in Kyoto

We're in Kyoto, visiting temples filled with maples and cherry trees, admiring zen landscaping and wandering along tiny streets filled with houses with wooden gates hiding secret gardens. It's my Dad's birthday, so he was allowed to read me one of his own poems at lunchtime, in a tiny deserted restaurant decorated in a worryingly kitsch English country garden style and called "My Favorite". The food was excellent: stir fried pork, beautifully moist rice, miso soup and delicately flavoured tofu. He also wanted a rickshaw ride so we were carried by Yoshi, who'd been pulling tourists around the narrow streets for 11 years and had legs of steel. Yoshi taught us the Japanese word for maple and how to say "thank you" in Kyoto dialect.

I am the egg man

This man (smouldering fag in hand) was cooking eggs at a handsome egg station in Ueno Park (home of the National Museum of Japan). He's also tossing handfuls of unappetising strips of bacon carelessly on to the cooking eggs. I am fond of eggs in all their guises but there was something about the insouciance with which he handled his egg duties, and his filthy red apron, that made for a happy egg station, although if you had any sense, the clues all being there if you cared to look for them, I don't think you'd be sampling his wares.

Prints of darkness

I'm in Tokyo, on a family fortunes trip with my father (two days in, and he has already introduced me to someone as his sister; analyse that!) where, to be sure, there is worse to be seen than this (Charlotte Olympia, Browns, GBP380), but not much worse: there is nothing attractive about this shoe. Its only redeeming feature is that it's a lot less expensive than the risible Chanel cage shoe. Do designers think women have no brains when it comes to buying shoes? (Don't answer that.)

Teach us to care and not to care

A few years ago there was an advertising campaign in the UK attempting to make the teaching profession more attractive on the premise that everyone remembers a good teacher. This is true, of course, although I remember a few bad ones too.

Mr Campbell was in his 60s when he taught me, a tall, rather ugly man with a bulbous nose and threadbare white hair, who was given to wearing tweed suits; he was known throughout the school as "Dirty Donald" for his predilection for rubbing his hand up and down the table leg while he spoke and a rumoured, although never substantiated, over-solicitous interest in the young women in his classes. Mr Campbell was a Cambridge scholar who spoke and read Latin and Greek; he had once commanded a much higher salary in a conventional private school, but he became enamoured of the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner and ended up teaching English to wise-cracking smartmouths at my school (on my school copy of Othello, which I still have in an attic somewhere, someone had written across a solemn picture of Othello strangling Desdemona, "My God they make these dolls tighter these days").

I was the only person taking English A Level in my year, so I had the rare privilege of one to one lessons with Mr Campbell. Although he liked to close the curtains in the library when we were in there (cue countless impromptu "visits" for the duration of the lesson from studious pupils urgently requiring a copy of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch), he never made any inappropriate overtures.

Mr Campbell's lessons were so erudite that they were a joy. We read and laughed at Chaucer; we discussed Pride and Prejudice, and The Importance of Being Earnest, and marvelled at Paradise Lost, and Othello, and The Waste Land; and the excitement of the language, and the sense of discovery, and the thrill of learning, still stays with me. Mr Campbell understood what words can do, and knew how to bring out my ideas and responses to what I was reading, and gave me the confidence to think aloud.

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

A distorted reality

Sometimes I find that I like the idea of fashion so much more than the reality. Lanvin is a good example of this: the clothes are so touchable, the colours beautiful, satin and grosgrain in jewel colours and my favourite shade of slate grey. But they are particularly expensive and extravagant; dreams, destined to remain unworn, no doubt, and as these pictures from Paris Fashion Week show, wholly unsuited to anyone fatter than a stick (so many folds of material would look ridiculous covering curves; and satin is a very unforgiving fabric).

Looking through photos of the Autumn/Winter 2009-2010 season from the Paris shows on French Vogue (where these photos came from), there are definitely some regrettable things going on: dresses with only one sleeve, for no discernible reason; fur adorning everything, despoiling some otherwise perfect 1940s silhouettes; the aforementioned wayward folds of fabric (beautifully seamed and sewn, often, but peculiar nonetheless); and Alber Elbaz will make his models wear rats' nests in their hair. Once again, what silly Karl Lagerfeld termed "the new modesty" is nowhere in evidence.

Travels with my ants

I awoke at 6am this morning in my Singapore hotel room with a strange crawling sensation on my skin. After lying immobile and sleep-dazed for a few minutes, I switched on the light to discover that my pillow, and a swathe of the bed, was part of the highway infrastructure for a colony of tiny ants which was making its way purposefully and undaunted directly across the room, and accordingly across my body, which happened to be en route. I must have been doing battle with them in the night, because crushed bodies lay far and wide.

I called reception and asked if I could change the room; presumably they'll give it a brisk sweep, change the sheets, scoosh some insect killer around the place, and put some other unsuspecting guest in the room to become an ant landscape in the night.

Over the hump

A humpbacked whale has wandered into the vicinity of Hong Kong island (no whale in its right mind would choose to live here: for one thing there's practically nothing left to eat in Hong Kong waters) and is currently hanging out at Cape D'Aguilar. This morning, I was steering a crew that had fallen behind the other OC6 we were racing. As we came back around Beaufort Island and into Stanley Bay, in completely calm conditions, we saw the whale was right in front of us. Suddenly winning didn't seem so important anymore: we watched the whale surface lazily, rolling in the water, and then jump fully into the air no more than 50 metres away as we gasped like overawed children at a fireworks display.

The government isn't stopping anyone from coming in to the area, even though any noise louder than 160 decibels may damage the whale's hearing and cause further disorientation. I felt conscious enough of this in our little boat but all around us speedboats and police launches sent rumbles through the water that we could feel. The channel behind Beaufort Island and Po Toi is one of the busiest in the world; at night I can hear the mournful sounds of ships' horns, the noise and traffic is constant, and it's got to be a matter of concern whether the whale can actually get out of there to continue its migratory journey.

Our paddle home was considerably more calm; I got everyone to paddle with their eyes closed for four sets, and talked about being in harmony with the boat and each other as we paddle. The timing issues we'd been having seemed to iron themselves out and we ended up racing home, everyone paddling hard. It sounds cheesy but I think we all felt we'd experienced something special together and it seemed to make a difference.

Photo © REUTERS/Hong Kong Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department

Practical magic

From a flat in a rarefied gated community full of expats, who go from house to car to office without ever setting foot in the street, I've moved to Ma Hang in Stanley; a public housing estate, where there's mah jong tables out the back, shaded areas, a big stone dragon, waterfalls, an auditorium where people do tai chi, and, at the bus stop, a row of chairs donated by locals for the old folk.

Cargoes

Quinquereme of Nineveh from distant Ophir
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedar wood, and sweet white wine.

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amethysts,
Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, ironware, and cheap tin trays.

John Masefield (1878-1967)

On the rocks

Chloé's latest ad campaign, as seen on a huge billboard in Happy Valley which I passed on the bus this morning, shows two waiflike models walking across some rocks in vertiginous heels (heels not included in picture below, but those are some rocks). I'm not necessarily known for my appropriate footwear, and I love wearing heels, for my own, (probably) highly suspect, reasons; but this surely illustrates the utter departure from practicality of current women's footwear. Go into any shoe shop and you'll notice that heels have got dramatically higher (a vacuous video by a "high heels expert" on the Guardian website purports to show you how to walk in heels, but I can save you the burden of watching it: it does nothing of the sort), viz. the six-inch heels by Louboutin that various celebrity no-marks have been sporting. Sometimes it seems as though this is all part of a vast conspiracy; and really it's akin to the binding which Chinese women used to undergo to make their feet look smaller.


I once went on a hike in the fjords of Norway, south of Stavanger (a pretty, and pretty dull, town where I walked disconsolately round the supermarket poking at the whale meat, and where I learned that rural Norwegians shoot feral cats for sport). For once I was sensibly shod, but I remember watching a woman clambering across Pulpit Rock (which was by no means small and was covered in ice) in heels. She was clearly blazing a trail for just this sort of nonsense.

Accessory after the fact

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

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.