Shirty tricks

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

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

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

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

Melting moments

In other news, from Popbitch:

Burn baby burn: Iraq to get the Goodbye
Effect

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

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

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

More

For the price of a cup of tea

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

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

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

Cape of good hope

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

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

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

Cape from www.maneaterthreads.com

Rise and shine

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

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

Let's go round again

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

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

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

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

Not my bag

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

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

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

Find the Gap

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

Mind the gap

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

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

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

Holiday in Cambodia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chan meeting

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

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

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

Chain of fools

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

Shock of the new

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

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

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

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

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

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

*Philip Larkin

Thick as mince

A very Scottish story.

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

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

Soled out

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

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

Dollars in the heavens

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

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

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

Singapore slung

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

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

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

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

You can't hide your love forever

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

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

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

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

The deceitful face of hope and of despair

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

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

That last fact puts my own silly preoccupations into perspective.