Turn the wheel and look to windward

This is a photograph of my parents, Chris and Marg, taken on a trip from Esjberg in Denmark to Harwich in 1963 by, according to my dad, a psychologist from Albuquerque who Chris remembers for "his beautiful jade and silver rings". I love this photograph, which is nearly 50 years old but has a strangely modern quality.

Spring heeled gym

I first joined a gym in 2000, when I worked in Fleet Street in London. It was a Fitness First, with trademark anodyne slogans, apparently intended to inspire, stenciled on the lime green walls (so bland were they, I can't remember them now, but they would have been of the "power comes from within" variety). Since then I've been a member of a few.

Each gym is astonishingly similar to the next: brightly lit, garishly painted, and always pumping with execrable music (today, in Seasons Fitness in the Citibank Tower in Hong Kong: Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart to a pounding disco beat, and more Black Eyed Peas than anyone could possibly deserve: thus cementing my firm belief that My Humps is one of the single most vacuous, idly offensive, and stupid records ever made. "My lovely lady lumps!"). Generally speaking, though, and despite the urban myths, even the most expensive gyms tend not to be places where people show off. Absurdly, my current gym has a "Women only" section which is always empty. That's because everyone is studiously minding their own business and no one cares if you're sweating and grunting because they are too.

I've had a personal trainer, a Chinese guy called Peter, for the last few months. We've rarely done the same exercise twice and I often laugh out loud during our sessions because I'm enjoying it so much, despite the fact that he works me so hard. In a complete reversal of fortune from my 20s and early 30s, I need to exercise and get miserable if I don't. I'm always complaining about the music, though, to no avail - whether it's writing "No more Black Eyed Peas Please!" on the feedback form at Seasons Fitness yesterday, or suggesting to a blank-eyed creature, who was languidly arranged behind the counter and apparently in charge at Red gym in SoHo, that perhaps the self-indulgent faux-suicidal howlings of American goth rockers Evanescence might not be conducive to positive thinking, gym-style.

Those are pearls

Shoes, Chie Mihara, from Plümo.

This is the second pair of Chie Mihara shoes I've stumbled upon (weirdly, on her website - watch out for the noodling Spanish guitar, running water and birdsong - I couldn't find a single pair I liked). These are a little bit chunky, but have such a lovely mother of pearl detail that I can forgive them anything. They have a 1940s feel so at first I thought that a teadress might be a perfect match, but I think they are perhaps too complicated to compete with a pattern, so red it is, and what's more no jewellery is to be worn, or else.
Dress, Giambattista Valli, from Browns.

Tagine over the asylum

An excellent recipe for lamb tagine from Taste.com. I'm not the greatest cook, and I don't really like to follow recipes (too impatient), but I followed this one, the results were delicious, and I was inordinately pleased with myself as a result. I love the sweet and savoury combination of lamb and apricots. I was once told by a po-faced personal trainer, who fancied himself as a nutritionist, that I should never combine fruit and meat: I am frequently delighted to ignore that advice. If this doesn't make you feel hungry, here's some painstaking sausage-related research.

Ingredients (serves 4)
2 teaspoons sweet paprika
2 teaspoons ground coriander
2 teaspoons ground cumin
1 1/2 teaspoons ground ginger
1 teaspoon chilli powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon white pepper
1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom
1/2 teaspoon allspice
2 teaspoons salt
2 tablespoons olive oil
grated rind and juice of 2 lemons
1.2kg diced lamb
1 cup chicken stock
3/4 cup dried apricots
1/2 cup raisins
1 cup thick, Greek-style yoghurt
1/2 cup pistachio kernels, roughly chopped
couscous, to serve

Method
1. Combine spices and salt in a large bowl. Add oil, rind and half the juice and stir to form a paste. Add lamb and stir until well-coated in paste. Cover and refrigerate for 3 hours if time permits.
2. Preheat oven to 180°C. Put lamb mixture into a casserole dish with a tight-fitting lid. Add stock and remaining lemon juice. Stir until well-combined.
3. Cover and cook for 1 hour. Stir in dried apricot and raisins. Cook, covered for a further 40 minutes or until lamb is tender. Serve immediately with a dollop of yoghurt, sprinkling of pistachio kernels and couscous on the side.

This is what really happens

Maybe it's that deep marine blue on the living room wall. A house in Minneapolis, Minnesota, from Apartment Therapy.

Fragments

The following, imperfectly remembered, is the poem that appeared in my English "A" Level exam paper in 1987, in my favourite part of the exam: the "unseen poem". In past papers, it had been a 16th century or Romantic poet; so I was delighted to find something as contemporary as this and committed it to memory there and then during the exam. I sat my exam alone, at formidable Miss Kiniger's austere Marchmont house, being the only person in my year taking English "A" Level - this had meant the rare luxury of one-to-one tutoring. I have never seen the poem since, nor have I been able to find it on the internet, so this is all I have of it. Miss Kiniger brought me a cup of strong sweet tea.

Angels
A lacy mobile changing lazily
Its animals, unstable faces, until
I imagine an angel, its vapours trailing
Asleep at different speeds. My failing:
To see images, clouds as something other.

Are all inspirations correspondences?
I want to be theological, stare through
Raw white angel fabric at holy bits of blue.

And truly, if one shining angel existed
What better than the camouflage of a cloud?
Machinery of cloud and angel, both are silent
Both insubstantial. Neither violent.

Let sunlight fade on walls and a huge blind
Be drawn faster than a horse across this field.
There's deranged wind up there. God, its power!
Let me believe in angels for an hour.

An angel drifts to the east, its edges burning;
Sunny sunlight on stony stone returning.

Al Alvarez

Death from above

From one loathsome insect to another: I'm back in Hong Kong, where it's so damp and humid that the floor tiles in my housing block are wet and the walls beside the lift are running with water. I opened the front door on my return from work on Tuesday and immediately caught sight, through the open bathroom door, of a large, fat, brown cockroach sitting, as BOLD AS BRASS (bold caps to illustrate the horror, though mere typography is not equal to the task), plum on top of the soap on the bathroom sink.

I raced around trying to find a weapon with which to do battle and in a panic grabbed the bottle of Ecover washing up liquid and aimed a thick gout at the beast. Instead of doing the decent thing and passing out in a pool of liquid, it had the temerity to stagger to the edge of the sink before sliding slowly and horrifyingly down the pedestal, its tentacles still waving insolently. All reason gone, I battered it repeatedly with the base of a bottle of suntan lotion until it was long past dead.

Do I need to explain that I can't stand cockroaches? I had one in my hair once, during a dragonboat sinking drama round the back of Middle Island; it had flown from the island and alighted (to catch its rasping little breath) on an attractive looking, smallish bobbing island which turned out to be my head. In a fugue state brought on by terror, I smacked it to death with my dragon boat paddle. Since then my hatred and fear has known no bounds.

Hungry ghosts

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

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

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

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

McQueen is dead

Alexander McQueen (16 March 1969 – 11 February 2010). A designer of genius, and a man who once wrote "I am a c*nt" in the lining of a suit intended for Prince Charles. Both pictures, above, are from his last, deep sea monster-themed show at Paris Fashion Week in 2009.

The art of seeing

Disparate connections: a few years ago, in the National Portrait Gallery in London, I saw some amazing portraits by Don Bachardy, including one of Aldous Huxley accompanied by a quote from Bachardy's partner, Christopher Isherwood, which I was very taken with:

"How kind, how shy he is - searching painfully through the darkness of this world's ignorance with his blind, mild, deep-sea eye. He has a pained, bewildered smile of despair at all human activity. 'It's inconceivable,' he repeatedly begins, 'how anyone in their senses could possibly imagine...' But they do imagine - and Aldous is very, very sorry." (Diaries, 1939)

I saw a clip today on the BBC website of a giant oarfish (excitedly described as a "giant bizarre deep sea fish"). The oarfish lives at depths of up to 1,000 metres and can grow to 17 metres in length. Sightings of "sea serpents" originated in Norse mythology but are believed more likely to have been encounters with varieties of oarfish, including the majestic "King of Herrings", the world's longest bony fish. Even after the sharks have gone, the oarfish is likely to remain safe in its solitary depths - Wikipedia thoughtfully describes oarfish flesh as "not well regarded due to its gelatinous consistency".

Huxley died on the same day as JFK and C.S. Lewis - November 22, 1963.

Let's do the time warp again

Beautiful, frivolous, Mihara shoes from Plümo. To be worn with a structured 1940s style dress from Alexander McQueen or Roland Mouret (in that order, below, both from Net-a-Porter).

The air that I breathe

Civic Exchange - 2009 The Air We Breathe Conference - Patterns of Respiratory Illness in Hong Kong, presented by Dr WM Chan (Hong Kong Thoracic Society)

View more presentations from Civic Exchange.

Breathing

This was the view from my office window on Hong Kong Island today (as a reminder, this is what it's like when it's clear). The very faint shadowy shape which you can, just barely, see through the murk (and you probably have to double click on the photo to make it out), is the International Commerce Centre (ICC) on Kowloon side. My friend A works in there and we communicated by email this afternoon: "I know you're out there somewhere...?" This is what we currently accept as normal. And no, it's not fog - it's respirable suspended particulates. I've been coughing, and there's a metallic taste in my mouth. Here in Asia, the recession has been over for some time.

Death and taxes

[Photo credit mrcreighton.com]

They're building another casino in Singapore - a three-towered monstrosity, improbably modelled on card decks, apparently, and built to feng shui principles (earth, wind and fire) near the Singapore Flyer, precisely positioned so that the Flyer ("the world's largest observation wheel - a moving experience at every turn": who writes this stuff?) will, accordingly, deliver good fortune to all who gamble there.

This evening I attended the closing dinner for a week of conferences and events which we were sponsoring. It was held at the Marina Barrage, an enormous, rather unappealing building which features a long, swooping roof walk, a big spiral leading you up to the roof and amazing views back to Singapore's financial district, past the Singapore Flyer's glittering lights and across to the sepulchural three towers of the almost-finished casino.

All this development - and a huge swathe of this part of Singapore is a building site, with thousands of workers from India, Sri Lanka and Myanmar housed in rows of temporary dorms - is impressive, and certainly the scale of it is astonishing and the sheer size of the buildings, if nothing else, is a marvel; but there's an emptiness there that reminds me of my least favourite place on earth, Las Vegas.

The difficult part once the developments are complete is bringing buildings to life. I walked to the top to see people on the roof of the Marina Barrage flying kites, taking photographs and jumping in the grass; appreciating the new view, as I did, and enjoying their new building.

Photo credit mrcreighton.com

A necklace of raindrops

At a glance it looks like a little dragon's head - and I wish it were - but it actually appears to be enmeshed leaves. From Need Supply. But I think I like this one better:

Just like honey

Chilli hot chocolate
Heat a large coffee cup by filling it with hot water. Pour out the hot water. Take two generous pieces of Lindt chilli chocolate and put them in the bottom of the cup with just enough hot water to melt them. Froth a cupful of milk. Pour hot milk into coffee cup, stirring slowly until chocolate is melted. Top with froth. Drink. Enjoy. Repeat.

If you go down to Cramond...

...you'll never come back. Cramond, Edinburgh, by the shore and in the snow, December 23, 2009.

Con toda palabra

Lhasa de Sela (September 27, 1972 – January 1, 2010).

Charmless garments: 3

Strictly speaking this next item is not a garment, but since it completes the charmless outfit when teamed with items 1 and 2 below, and it is a particularly loathsome thing altogether, it seems only (ill-)fitting to write about it.

My dad was always hopeless at picking clothes as gifts and every year of the 1970s, Christmas was marked, or marred, by whatever hideous gift he'd dreamed up to give to my mum, with a constant absence of success. Probably the most egregious excess, though, on an income that could ill afford frivolity, was a pair of handmade leather and wood lace-up clogs. They looked awful and uncomfortable, and wearing them (which I'm not sure my mum ever did) must have felt as though she were carrying around her own small, but burdensome, wooden cargo on each foot.

The word "clog" is appropriate because the sight and thought of them thoroughly clogs the pathways of the brain. And to add to the ignominy, clogs have gone boldly on to spawn one of the worst inventions in recent footwear history: the Croc.

Yes, the clog richly deserves all the opprobrium that can be heaped upon it: for it is clumpy, lumpy and frumpy all at the same time.

95 reasons

For years my family always owned the same car, in different iterations: a Saab 95. It was never a new car; often rusty, sometimes featuring rustproof paint along the side in a different colour; usually in an an unlovely hue of orange or green. At the school gates or pulling up alongside a satirical queue of couples outside the ABC Cinema in Lothian Road (yes, that's a real memory), it was an embarrassment; shamefully, in conversation with a school friend I once made it (by a slip of the tongue, of course) into a Saab 99; but on journeys it was our car, and there was a peculiar warmth and cameraderie about it. Saab 95 owners would wave to each other: acknowledging, perhaps, the joy and suffering associated with owning a car prone to rust and impossible breakdowns.

Its peculiar design meant that you could sit in the back seat facing backwards, and as a child I used to love being in the back, until I began to develop chronic travel sickness and a directly connected and instinctive loathing of watching the road running away behind me.

I clearly remember travelling along Ferry Road in Edinburgh, having just crossed the Forth Road Bridge on the way back from, possibly, a trip to Fife to pick up clay for the pottery. We were waving at the car behind. The woman in the passenger's seat (and in the 1970s that's where they almost always were) stared stonily back. "Superfluous Doris" we immediately nicknamed her in retaliation (with the emphasis on the "flu" - as a reader, I never had any idea how to pronounce anything, but the word must have stuck in my mind), and we howled with laughter and stuck our tongues out like the little urchins we were. Good memories of this car, then. I still remember the registrations of two of those cars: KNU 459J and GGB 886N. And in the picture above, it now looks like a surprisingly attractive, homely but shapely car.

Fin to finning

The Shark Savers organisation has a simple but effective idea to combat the revolting practice of shark finning for the ever-popular, though tasteless, shark's fin soup. The shark fin trade, which by the kilo can be more lucrative than selling cocaine, exists to service the demand; changing people's minds is the only way to tackle the demand, which is perpetuated at the moment by the sick cycle of "it's expensive therefore it's desirable/It's desirable therefore it's getting more scarce/It's getting more scarce therefore it's more expensive/It's desirable therefore it's expensive".

Yao Ming, who's a hero in mainland China, is appearing in a Shark Savers campaign against eating shark's fin. For US$100, you can sponsor a billboard advert featuring Yao at a bus stop in Beijing or Shanghai - this includes production, installation, maintenance, and lighting for a year. There are incredible statistics on the site showing that these billboards do actually change people's minds about eating shark's fin. Sadly, Hong Kong's billboards are nothing like as inexpensive as this, although as the hub of the shark's fin trade (and Hong Kong diners consume 3 million kilos of shark's fin a year), such a campaign is sorely needed here too.

If you sign up now, one of Shark Savers' sponsors has pledged to provide another billboard to match yours. What are you waiting for?

Charmless garments: 2

I have more than one good reason to loathe the second item in the series, but I confess that what seals their fate from my unbalanced perspective is their strong association with a certain marketing person of my acquaintance: a bleached blonde harpy ("as I came up to Mathers Inn/Three hellish witches drinking gin..."), a colleague in the early days of my career whose favourite smart-casual work look was a pair of black ski-pants, or stirrup pants, teamed with a blouse, high-heeled pumps and loads of gold jewellery.


Awful memories from my early working life aside, just look at them: is there a single redeeming feature? High waisted, and therefore unflattering to anyone fatter than a stick (ie everyone); tight where it's unmerciful and loose where it's unwise; and capped off (or bottomed out) by the wholly unnecessary feature of the stirrup. Truly vile.

Christmas bizarre

Walking through Stanley on Saturday morning I saw a large sign proudly advertising CHRISTMAS TREES FROM THE USA. Yes, that's right: someone is flying Christmas trees thousands of miles (from Oregon, or Wisconsin, to Hong Kong) so that buyers can say that their trees are American. There is something so completely wrong about this that I was tempted to stick a note on the sign. Stanley houses a fair few American expat families, especially along Tai Tam Road and around the American Club, and no doubt many of them, and other numpties, will be gleefully ordering their American Christmas trees without a second thought. To satisfy someone's desire to have an American Christmas, a tree will be chopped down and shipped by air or sea to Hong Kong along with thousands of other trees. How does this make sense?

Predictably enough, the trade goes the other way too: 85% of artificial Christmas trees sold in the US are manufactured in China.

Fake bake

There's something a bit unsettling about the recent resurgence of cupcakes. I declare an interest, or rather the lack of it: the cupcake promises much but doesn't deliver, and I don't really like them anyway. But I instinctively distrust the way we're all supposed to be cupcake eaters now: sold the ersatz promise of reliving some halcyon time which never actually existed, in the drawing rooms of 1950s America, where the only thing close to a job description any woman was permitted to have was "cook". Commercially produced cupcakes always taste slightly oily, the "frosting" is too sweet, and the disappointment is palpable.

I read in the FT today that women in the British Diplomatic Service were not permitted to marry until 1973. Cupcakes, to me, epitomise that reactionary era. Give me a Laduree macaron any day of the week. Or, more simply, a coffee and two pieces of Lindt chilli chocolate (see above as freshly made by me).

They do things differently there

Mark T was slightly younger than me and attended posh boys' school the Edinburgh Academy (the uniform, tweedy green, often with brown leather elbow patches, epitomised the school). I met him at a party in the year when the record du jour was Sade, Diamond Life (1985). I was 16 and had already had my heart broken twice. Mark affected the shabby chic of rich kids in the 1980s: his jumpers were cashmere but they had holes in them and he wore battered, pointy suede boots which excited the rude attention of the neds in my village when he arrived on the bus to see me, getting off two stops early by mistake and walking in his innocent fashion through the heart of the lion's den. Mark came from an extremely wealthy family whose house, overlooking the Botanic Gardens, was rented by Elizabeth Taylor one year during the Edinburgh Festival. His pretty blonde sister, 14, had an account card at Benetton. Mark had the entire top floor to himself; he had a juke box, and a pool table, and huge groups of us used to sit around listening to Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground.

I liked Mark, and he said I was beautiful, but he was a bit timid, and I was more interested in Simon D who had a dangerous edge to him (it all seems absurd now); so I dumped Mark and snogged Simon in front of him, in Mark's own bedroom. I don't think about it very often but when I do, I still feel guilty about being so callous.

I was talking to my friend Peter recently about how you can be haunted by hurt you think you've caused someone else; in the meantime they get on with their lives without, probably, a second thought about it. We were imagining what it might be like to be able to go back and say sorry and how delighted, or more likely astonished, the recipient would be.

Simon D aged badly and became something of a joke. I have no idea what happened to Mark. He is probably a lawyer somewhere. I still remember the hurt that someone else caused me in 1985 (clearly "I bear more grudges/Than lonely High Court judges"), of which more some other time - repent, Dougie, damn you! - though despite my exaggeration here for the sake of a story, it doesn't bother me at all anymore. But I can't swear that a little piece of me would not be rather gratified if Dougie came back to apologise. I wish I could do the same for Mark.

Charmless garments: 1

This is the first of an occasional series on charmless garments. Toweringly high on the list? The spandex poloneck. A garment that suits no one and besmirches everyone. Why would any woman with more than a completely flat chest ever squeeze herself into such a mockery? The neck segment clings to the neck, the rest cleaves unflatteringly to the body (if you have breasts, a huge expanse opens up, as per this picture, making you look like some sort of monster), and the spandex... glistens.

I once knew a man (let's call him "Reptile", for so he was dubbed by me and my friend Fiona) who was fond of sporting one of these monstrous items in pale blue: immediately marking himself out as someone who could not be trusted. (And so it came to pass, but that's another story.) He is now an MP; what does that tell you? And a woman I know, a very very nice person, wears a white, shiny, especially tight one, and it's all I can do not to say something to her or attempt to stage some sort of intervention.

Signs and wonders

Yesterday morning I jumped into a cab outside my flat, having missed the bus. It was only as we arrived at my office that I realised I didn't have my wallet with me. Chastened, I told the taxi driver I had no money (to be precise, HK$102 was the amount owing), whereupon he immediately suggested that I could transfer it to his bank account and wrote down the number for me, from memory. This morning I got an email from him: "Thanks for your payment. Jimmy Yip (Taxi Driver)".

I quake at the thought of trying the same stunt with a spectacularly bad-tempered, know-it-all London cabbie - or indeed with any cab driver, anywhere else in the world. Perhaps it was patronising of me to imagine that a cab driver in his fifties would not be using the internet? It was lucky for me that my driver turned out to be Jimmy Yip.

Put a sock in it

There seems to be a fairly uncritical acceptance of the assertions in the (astonishingly long) Wikipedia article about Beyoncé's single "Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)", which are epitomised by the statement that the song is "empowering". Aside from the fact that history will not judge the use of that word kindly, if someone could outline just one example of how that song could be regarded as "empowering" I'd be happy to hear it. Don't get me wrong, I think it's a catchy song and Beyoncé and her sexy acolytes look great in the video; but how is stamping around in a leotard insisting that a man gives you a ring to prove he loves you (with the glaring implication that what all women want is to get married) in any way "empowering" for women?

If you were to ask the women in Afghan Hands whether this is "empowering" I get the feeling they would laugh in astonishment.

Room to read

One of the shortlisted businesses in World Challenge 2009 is Afghan Hands, run by Matin Maulawizada, whose family escaped to the USA during the Soviet invasion in the 1980s. It employs women who have been widowed by the last few years of conflict and gives them an income embroidering designs for an American fashion house, as well as teaching them literacy and numeracy.

The joy and excitement on these women's faces, as they look at pictures from western magazines showing what they've embroidered, with their names sewn into every piece, and the pride they take in their work, is truly moving. One of them talks of hearing of her husband being taken into the desert by the Taliban, never to return. This is a wonderful project; if it wins World Challenge (and you can help by voting for it), Matin plans to buy permanent premises in Kabul and to offer more women the chance to learn to read, use their skills and earn some money.

Car trouble

AP reports that, following a 55% surge in growth in the first nine months of the year helped by tax cuts and subsidies for small, fuel-efficient cars, General Motors expects its sales in China this year to exceed 1.6 million vehicles. As a result China is now the world's leading auto market: 9.66 million vehicles were sold in the first nine months of 2009, up 34% year-on-year, and sales are forecast to rise to 12.6 million units this year, up 35% from 2008.

This amounts to a mind-boggling number of new cars on the roads in China this year alone. The major cities are already grid-locked and horribly polluted; rural roads are falling apart. Where are all the new cars going to go?

Rather than see this as an encouraging sign of China's economic resurgence, I find the news thoroughly depressing. This, surely, is a situation where questions need to be asked about sustainability instead of the tacit approval of the mainland's headlong rush towards becoming a car culture.

Modern sensibility

The tragic ballerina Tanaquil LeClercq, photographed in 1948 by Irving Penn (June 16, 1917 – October 7, 2009).

Salute

Another beautiful bunch of flowers from Tenny's flower stall, Stanley Market, Hong Kong, on China National Day 2009. It's a special one this year, celebrating 60 years of communist rule in China. Sadly, I didn't have my camera with me walking down Stanley Main Street: there was a parade of dragon dancers accompanied by banging drums, followed by a procession of little kids with intricately painted faces in Chinese opera (Yuèjù) style, young women in traditonal Chinese shoes, and incredibly dignified old ladies with beautiful gowns and brightly coloured paper parasols. These flowers remind me of fireworks: in some small way a gesture for National Day, not forgetting that there were also human rights protesters in the streets of Hong Kong today, something that will definitely not be happening on the mainland.

October revolution

Brilliant pictures from Tim Burton's fashion shoot for the October issue of Harper's Bazaar: above, Nina Ricci; below, Alexander McQueen. I love the way that although the clothes look absolutely weird, impossible, and unwearable, as high fashion often is, for once this is echoed by the scenario in which they are displayed and it makes them beautiful.

You'd better run, you'd better take cover

Cape Road, Stanley, Hong Kong. September 23, 2009

This picture of the road leading back to the block of flats where I live was taken this morning as I stood in a slightly disheveled state at the bus stop in the sunshine, waiting in vain for the bus which I already knew I'd missed on account of having procrastinated for too long on waking. I ended up getting a taxi. The driver, Mr Chen, was playing 80s tunes on his little CD player and I asked him to turn up the volume; for the next 40 minutes the two of us happily, although perhaps a little self-consciously at first, sang along with "Tainted Love", "Don't You Want Me?", "Enola Gay", and "Let's Dance" all the way to Central (out of sympathy for Sydney, whose usually blue skies, in a reversal of fortune, were obscured by an onslaught of clouds of red dust, I refrained from singing along to "Down Under").

As we sped through the Aberdeen tunnel I looked out the window at grim-faced Porsche drivers gripping their leather-clad steering wheels thinking how supernaturally lucky I was to have happened upon this serendipitous, silly, cheerful journey to work.

Dark age

I just stumbled across a really excellent feature in The Guardian called Fashion for All Ages. It's so nice to see women in their fifties and sixties wearing beautiful clothes and looking great. Isn't it extraordinary that this is such an unusual sight?

Antarctica

"I am just going outside and may be some time."
The others nod, pretending not to know.
At the heart of the ridiculous, the sublime.

He leaves them reading and begins to climb,
Goading his ghost into the howling snow;
He is just going outside and may be some time.

The tent recedes beneath its crust of rime
And frostbite is replaced by vertigo:
At the heart of the ridiculous, the sublime.

Need we consider it some sort of crime,
This numb self-sacrifice of the weakest? No,
He is just going outside and may be some time

In fact, for ever. Solitary enzyme,
Though the night yield no glimmer there will glow,
At the heart of the ridiculous, the sublime.

Derek Mahon

This rough magic

A clutch made from Japanese kimono material by Hong Kong based designer Mischa. And an even more beautiful dress by William Tempest. His name sounds like a nom de plume; Shakespeare's first name and his best play.


ARIEL: All hail, great master! grave sir, hail! I come
To answer thy best pleasure; be't to fly,
To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride
On the curl'd clouds, to thy strong bidding task
Ariel and all his quality.
The Tempest, Act I, Scene I

Working wardrobe

Promenade in green: RM by Roland Mouret


Fade to grey: the deceitfully named Cheap'N' Chic by Moschino


Drapes of wrath: Diane von Furstenburg

Three very different dresses (all from Net-a-Porter) which could conceivably be worn to work. And all you need now is a great pair of shoes.
Come to heel: Rupert Sanderson from Browns Fashion

And finally a dress that could never be worn to work (but which would go nicely with the shoes; for people who like everything to match, of whom I'm not sure I'm one, that's the kind of match they like):


Hips, lips, power: William Tempest from Browns Fashion

Hat in the city

On recent visits to Sydney I've noticed a surprising number of people wearing hats. Proper hats: fedoras and panamas, cloches and gatsbys, and even what could possibly have been a homburg. My friend Davey has been photographing people in London wearing stovepipe hats. I am very fond of hats - certainly of the idea of them and, I suppose, of that romantic connection with the era when it was a social requirement to wear a hat.


Sadly, the reality of Hong Kong (not least the heat - August was the hottest on record and it's been at least 32 degrees every day) is that I am more likely to be seen wearing that most awful and unflattering form of headgear, the baseball cap, albeit only in direct connection with watersports and never, repeat never, at any other time. What I would really prefer, of course, is to be nonchalantly sporting an attractive fedora at all times, even in the canoe.


Attractive fedora from La Cerise Sur Le Chapeau at Net-a-Porter.

Back to basics

A bride-to-be was having her pre-wedding wedding shots done at the end of Stanley Main Street. With the groom nowhere to be seen, she twitched uncomfortably as a busybody attendant slicked extra make-up (wholly unhelpfully) onto her face. She looked altogether rather uncomfortable with the whole thing. I stood on a wall behind her to get the shot of her back.

Jude the Obscure

From the window of a taxi in Happy Valley: poor old Jude Law in a very uncomfortable-looking pair of "slacks", the latest in a highly risible campaign by Dunhill starring the man looking more ill at ease in every one. Look closely; he's perched on a canister, "reading" a "script", with, for no apparent reason, a pair of headphones at his feet.

Take it to the bank

Further evidence of infantilism in Hong Kong culture: the Hello Kitty credit card, brought to you by Dah Sing Bank. Hello Kitty, it appears, also has a towheaded boy friend, Dear Daniel. Wouldn't it be cute if couples were to have one each? Why look, if you put the two cards together the oversized hearts toted by each of them are perfectly aligned. Incongruously enough, the platinum version of the Hello Kitty/Dear Daniel credit card appears to be as black as pitch, albeit with a freakish outline of the pair of them emblazoned upon it, so that's something.

It would be my opinion that anyone immature enough to want a credit card which sports images of Hello Kitty is too immature to be extended a line of credit.

Dear catastrophe waitress

In the year I finished my degree and before I went back to Glasgow to do the postgraduate Diploma in Legal Practice, I spent a miserable summer back in East Lothian. I'd split up with my boyfriend just before graduating; I didn't want to sign on; home was only the place I'd always longed to get away from and seemed cold and damp; I wasn't getting on well with my Mum; I thought I wasn't going to get a grant for my course, and so on and so self-pitying. I took a job as a waitress in Musselburgh ("The Honest Toun"), in a place called Medaci's. Near Musselburgh's one bright spot, Luca's, it was a "Mediterranean Restaurant", which was really just a big room at the back of the kebab shop which the tubby owner had fancied might make a good place for fine dining. The locals viewed it with amusement: as they waited for their kebabs they'd poke their heads through the bead curtain and mock me as I stood there waiting for customers that rarely came.

The chef was a foul-mouthed, ex-Merchant Navy chef, an ancient, wiry little man called Tommy; in the absence of any customers, I used to spend most of my time in the kitchen eating delicious spaghetti arabbiata freshly cooked by Tommy as he regaled me with his stories of shagging on the high seas and knocked back whisky. There I learned the waitress's conundrum: you don't want it to be quiet because it's mind-numbingly boring waiting for customers; but when customers do arrive, you loathe and despise them for choosing your restaurant and wish them gone with all due dispatch.

For a while there was a Greek waiter there, who used to stand uncomfortably close to me behind my little counter. The boss told me to re-heat the cold coffee from the day before to offer to customers. I couldn't work the cappuccino machine. I had to invent a banana split from scratch as I had no idea what was supposed to go into one. We had the Gypsy Kings on continuous loop. The boss's nasty little son, an equally tubby 11 year old with a lightning bolt shaved on the side of his round little head, used to sneak in behind my back into the fridge and spray canned cream from the tin straight into his mouth. Tommy became an unlikely ally; he hated the boss as much as I did and even began offering me a drink of his whisky. The summer seemed to last an eternity. At its end, I returned to Glasgow, having received a grant to do my course, and it was no surprise that Medaci's closed not long after that.

Musselburgh's being recommended by The Guardian as a place to visit to get away from the hubbub of the Edinburgh Festival. When I read that, I was instantly transported back to being paid £2.50 an hour at a failing restaurant; and I just can't see anything attractive in the idea of visiting the place. Even now, though the kebab shop is long gone too, I shoot a bad glance in its direction whenever I'm unlucky enough to pass by.

Completely barking

Net-a-porter is currently selling up leather slippers called NewbarKs. The irritating, pretentious and unnecessary capital K aside, there is something quite nauseating about the tone of the puff that's written about them: "Stay ahead of trend ... Take a style tip from off-duty models and wear these achingly hip alternatives to ballet pumps in between appointments ... Go from lounge to plane in magnificent style ... They go with everything! Diamonds, candlelight, Chloé and delicious cuisine... ". This torrent of aspirational flimflam fails to disguise the fact that, made out of buttersoft Moroccan leather though they might be, these look like old man's slippers. And I am not paying £300 to look like an old man in his baffies.

A thing of beauty

Big Bill lives in Jurong Bird Park in Singapore. He is a bird with a great deal of dignity, despite, or perhaps because of, his massive beak. Humiliatingly, Bill is sometimes called a "whalehead", but not by his friends. Bill is a shoebill; there are 5,000-8,000 left in his habitat of tropical east Africa and he is classified as Vulnerable. However, he can eat a baby crocodile, although it seems unlikely that he ever gets the chance in the civilised confines of Jurong Bird Park. Shoebills are magnificent in flight, appearing almost prehistoric, but it is not clear whether Bill ever gets to fly.

The cuckoo's nest

Tom Jefferson, a British epidemiologist working for the Cochrane Collaboration, says in an interview with Der Spiegel that whilst swine flu is undoubtedly a pandemic, there has been a near-hysterical desire on the part of many vested interests (pharmaceutical companies, governments, and the media, as well as certain sectors of the scientific community) to turn it into some kind of killer threat. It might sound like a vast conspiracy theory, but this definitely has the ring of truth about it. The article is worth reading in full, not least for his comments about the SARS outbreak and the relative ineffectiveness of Tamiflu.

Apparently Hong Kong has the world's lowest rates of transmission of swine flu, in theory because we learned the lessons of hygiene during the SARS outbreak. Jefferson thinks the best protection against flu is just washing your hands.

Down the dip

"Squeggs". Reproduced with the permission of designer Dominic Wilcox.

Ground control

There's a fascinating article on the NASA website about the approach to food on space missions in the 1960s. Apparently "On Christmas day, 1968, during the first lunar orbital mission, the Apollo 8 astronauts opened packages of thermostabilized turkey and gravy and ate with spoons". One of the biggest challenges was the astronauts' constant weight loss - not necessarily due to calorie expenditure (Buzz Aldrin used 300 calories an hour walking on the moon), but possibly because of stress, and how unappetising early food options were. "Inflight food consumption proved inadequate to maintain nutritional balance and body weight" and crews experienced nausea, anorexia, and "undesirable physiological responses".

I was laughing the other day thinking about Ali G's interview with Buzz Aldrin. Buzz reacts with appropriate dignity when the mugging Ali G keeps referring to him as "Buzz Lightyear" and asks him if he was jealous of Louis Armstrong for being the first man on the moon.

(Photo via NASA)

Song to the siren

Call me grossly sentimental (I'm grossly sentimental): I find the fact that drivers pull aside when a siren sounds behind them peculiarly moving. Drivers, and I am sometimes one of them, are generally pretty self-absorbed and set on their goals. Lemmings in their cars, part of the problem and not part of the solution, I mutter bitterly to myself as I wait for my bus in Admiralty with the passing traffic kicking up pollution and every car seeming to contain only one person, who's always gazing blindly, mutely ahead. But when a siren sounds, the lemmings wake up to be reminded, and then to demonstrate, that there is such a thing as public-spiritedness.

I was quite shocked to discover that, in fact, in Hong Kong it's not customary to try to move off the road to allow a path for an ambulance, fire engine or police car with sirens howling. Instead, Hong Kong's selfish commuters sit there determined to hold onto their hard won place in the traffic jam. My office looks directly down on a highway and I've never yet seen anyone pull aside; the emergency vehicle waits impotently with lights flashing and siren sounding.

Perhaps this can partly be explained by the fact that Hong Kong's narrow roads, often bounded by concrete walls, and countless loops of flyovers, don't allow for anyone to pull to one side. But the fact that no one so much as makes an effort to move is astonishing.

Station to station

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