You can't tell me...

...these aren't beautiful.

Azzedine Alaia, from the inestimable Browns website.

Bite the hand

I was in Singapore on Tuesday night to give a presentation to around 120 senior clients, or potential clients, who were, as usual, 95% male. Now, I always get hit on at these events – not, of course, because I’m any kind of goddess, but because certain sorts of men in Asia seem to think that western women are up for anything. My enthusiasm for my business and the promotion thereof has often been mistaken for interest of another kind. One old gimmer, who had once been someone very important in Australia, emailed me after one event to say he was going to throw caution to the wind and come to Hong Kong just to take me to dinner… Anyway, two Indian men came up to me after the talk with great enthusiasm. They both heartily shook my hand and said how good it was to meet me and how we can work together in India, etc etc. One of them shook my hand again, but this time he curled his middle finger on to his palm – an unmistakable signal of some sort which would still have looked to any observer like a legitimate handshake. When I told L (the general manager of our Singapore office) about it, she said it was a sexual overture. If this is true, and I can’t think of anything else he might have been trying to signal to me, that is really quite extraordinarily revolting.

Life on the water

During my visit to Singapore this week, a recent tragedy dominated coverage in the Straits Times: five members of Singapore’s national dragon boat squad, all in their early twenties, drowned last Friday when their boat overturned following a race on the Tonlé Sap river in Pnom Penh, Cambodia. A huge national outpouring of grief ensued in Singapore, understandably, but one of the outcomes was that from now on, all Singaporeans participating in watersports events either in Singapore or overseas are to be required to wear a lifejacket.

As a paddler, and somewhat inept swimmer, I have some sympathy with the emotional response, but looking at the facts, it appears that wearing a lifejacket would have done nothing to prevent the deaths and in fact would have made things worse. The paddlers were swept under a 45m by 12m pontoon. The Tonlé Sap, as I saw for myself on my last visit to Cambodia, is an extremely wide, muddy, and fast-flowing river with unpredictable and extremely strong currents. Anyone being swept underneath a pontoon would be unable to see a thing and unable to surface. A lifejacket would hamper any attempt to get out from under the pontoon and would have been worse than useless.

As usual, the official response to this sort of accident stems from a total lack of understanding of the conditions surrounding the accident and of the sport.

Stop making scents

From Cathay Pacific's inflight magazine, November 2007 (Hong Kong to Singapore):

Kelly Caleche (Hermes)
"The conniving encounter between the spirit of the Kelly Bag and the perfume. The unexpected caress of a leather floral scent".

Rarely, if ever, has the word "conniving" been so inappropriately employed. As for the unexpected caress of leather florals - I am beginning to feel quite nauseated. Unexpected? You bet! Get off me, you old git!

The mobile blues again

Oh, Mama, can this really be the end
To be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again...
Bob Dylan

As a twelve year old listening to this song I thought he was singing "stuck inside a mobile..." meaning a mobile home, meaning a trailer or caravan... Perhaps I ought to explain: it's not, or not just, that I led an unusually sheltered life; but because when I was twelve the mobile phone did not exist as a concept. Amazingly, for such a simple idea, and now so widespread, science fiction cinema of the 50s and 60s never posited that in the future, along with their Bacofoil suits, everyone in the world (or at least, Hong Kong) might be carrying a mobile means of communication. My word association with the word "mobile" as a twelve year old might also have had something to do with the gypsies who lived in a bus behind our house for a few months (AKA as "the Bussies"; and that's another story). Whatever the reason, being stuck inside a mobile was a genuinely sad prospect, and not just because of the way Bob whinged it. My friend Gordon once described a wild Highlands party which culminated in him waking up criminally hung over, "on the floor of someone's caravan, wrapped in a blanket, with my head on a welly". Amazingly, all those connections and that imagery spring unbidden to mind when I think of the word "mobile".

To the point, though: I will regularly, and have done so twice in the last couple of days, ask someone shouting in to a mobile phone to tone it down. I am, as my friend C, AKA La Grande Poobah says, assertive, or perhaps that's just disagreeable. In my view the mobile phone bawler lacks self-awareness and more importantly, consideration for others.

The reactions are varied: usually, and gratifyingly, they say sorry, and comply (I do ask nicely); but yesterday, I got a very aggressive response. There was a sign on the wall (in the spa, as it happens: a place where people go to relax), so I was within my rights; but this made no difference to madam, because she had to speak to her friend.

I think this problem may be particularly common in Hong Kong, where there's an obsession with answering, or being on, the phone come what may. People will routinely answer their phones in the cinema. Sadly, the Trigger Happy TV sketch where Dom Joly answers an enormous phone during a film screening and shouts into it "HELLO! I'M IN THE CINEMA! YES, IT'S SHIT!" is not that funny in Hong Kong: it's the normal state of affairs.

The opium of the people

Although my mum was brought up a Catholic and went to a convent school, and my dad was Church of England, my brother, sister and I weren’t baptized and from an early age I had a healthy distrust for any form of religion, as epitomised by the tedious assemblies at school where we were pressganged into the tuneless singing of modern hymns such as “You in Your Small Corner” and “Morning Is Broken”, as well as more traditional favourites like the frankly scary “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory” and “The Lord of the Dance” (“I danced in the morning till the sky turned black/It’s hard to dance with the devil on your back” was a particularly nightmarish line).

However, my sister and I, for a brief period, regularly went with the Carlins to attend mass at the Catholic church in Ormiston, a village a few miles from home. It took place in what seemed like someone’s living room and there was a definite air of the undercover about it. We stifled a smirk as the eldest Carlin boy shook the smoking samovar and rang a bell, silly in his surplice; and counted the moments till it was over so we could get out of there. The only reason for going through this? The chance to spend our pocket money at the best sweetshop for miles around, with jars and jars of sherbet lemons, and chocolate éclairs, and cola bottles, and pineapple cubes, and pear drops, all available by the quarter pound in little white paper bags.

Television, the drug of the nation

Our next door neighbours in the 1970s were called the Carlins, and we were endlessly fascinated by how different they were from us. There were three children of around our age, all with solidly Scottish names. They were a traditional, Catholic family, and they had a proper dad, and a proper mum, unlike our own parents who seemed to be unalterably other. One of the differences was the fact that they had a TV, and the three of us learned that if you turned up at their door and at a certain time of day and asked “are you coming out?” the answer would be no, because they were watching Children’s TV. “Can I come in?” was the next question, and Morag, Douglas or Eric would disappear inside to ask the great arbiter while the supplicant waited on the doorstep hoping for the right answer.

It must have been a source of, at best, amusement and at worst annoyance to the Carlins that they would often end up with all three Hall children in their living room, having to be left there when their tea was ready; and when the children’s programmes were over and the six o’clock news came on, this was the cue to leave and we would politely lean around their kitchen door, where they all sat at the kitchen table, to say “Thank you”.

Returning to our own house after being at the Carlins’ was always a slightly dispiriting experience . What I remember most was the smell of our house compared to theirs. Their house smelt of chips, and washing powder; ours of wholemeal bread and clay; and it always seemed a bit cold, and dingy, and dinner was never ready.

Into the blue

Having just obtained a PADI Open Water diving certification, in the less-than-clear waters of Clearwater Bay in Hong Kong, my first series of “real” dives was in Palau, in Micronesia. We were there for the Micronesia Cup and the following weekend were heading to Guam for the Heineken Cup (where, incidentally, my crew won gold in the Women’s 16K). During the week inbetween, we did 11 dives in total in the most heart-stoppingly amazing conditions: clear blue skies, beautiful water, sunshine, and incredible locations such as Blue Corner, Blue Hole, German Channel, as well as a wreck dive on a sunken Japanese warship, where I peered through a darkened porthole almost expecting a face to come up to meet me. We saw giant manta rays moving langourously through the water like stealth planes; turtles carrying their ancient burden and protection; black tip and grey sharks; wicked schools of black barracuda; my favourite, the noble, sad-looking Napoleon wrasse; and cute little matt black fish with blue sickle-shaped tails and pouty blue lips.

The technicalities of diving are quite straightforward: panic is the only enemy as long as you remember to keep breathing. There was one moment at Blue Corner when we swam alongside a massive wall and I looked down into unimaginable darkness below as the wall went on and on, falling away beneath us, and I had to look round quickly for someone else nearby to reassure myself I wasn’t alone. I also had a “Lost in Space” moment when we hooked into the reef at German Channel: against the current, if you don’t hook in, you can float away, and when my hook came free I was saved by one of the others, as if in slow motion, reaching out to grab my string as though I were an errant pet.

On the boat on the way back, in the sunshine, speeding between muffin-shaped islands in the clear evening, I was thinking that I must be the luckiest person alive.

Transports of delight

One thing Hong Kong does well, in an unheralded sort of way, is public transport. But people still drive, even from where I live, with a bus stop right outside the door, to where I work, which is less than ten minutes on the bus. You have to conclude that people just love to drive. Ownership is already expensive but making it even more prohibitive will just appeal to that great HK addiction, one-upmanship.

Today's prize for hubris goes to the driver of a huge, shiny black Range Rover turning in to a gated residence on Garden Road. The numberplate? ALTRUIST.

Fit for a dog

I was a very hungry (or rather greedy) little girl, who used to sneak flapjacks out of the heart-covered tin in the kitchen when no one was looking and stuff them up my jumper so I could steal back to my room and eat them in peace. I used to eat whole tins of cream and condensed milk by removing the lid with a tin-opener and sticking in a spoon (as a result, even now the simple act of opening a tin, even a tin of beans, is freighted with the promise of delight), and even tried eating dried dogfood in furtive handfuls. It will surprise no one that I was somewhat tubby as a child.

Now, a million miles and years away (although still, arguably, somewhat tubby), I have the same breakfast every morning, from the ubiquitous Pret a Manger, which consists of the following: a skimmed latte, a banana, and an apple & raspberry yogurt pot. Once I get to the office I pour some dried muesli in to the top of the pot to make it seem healthy. The muesli looks, and tastes, exactly like the dog food I once tried to eat, which my mum still, rather cruelly, feeds to her cat.

Marni A/W 2007

From the inestimable French Vogue. See what I mean?

Oh music come and light my heart's dark places

An article in yesterday's Guardian music blog bemoans the lack of exciting, wonderful records this year (the comments are worth reading if only for the extraordinary litany of names of obscure bands that their defenders are championing). I wrote a comment about Maximo Park, of course, who inexplicably hadn't been mentioned except in a faintly derogatory context, but then I began to wonder whether I was really entitled to comment. I don't mean that in a macro sense, but more in the context of my age and experience (as wizened and hoary as I am). Maybe the only people who can really comment are 16-year-olds, for whom every sound is as exciting as the last.

Then again, if it were left up to 16 year olds, there would be nothing to listen to except Enter Shikari (accidentally illustrated in the Times with a photo of Shakira) and My Chemical Romance. In which case, heaven help us all.

24 hours from Tampa

It's funny how strange coincidences happen wherever you are, utterly at random of course, but perplexing nonetheless. I'm in unlovely Tampa, Florida. The day started unsuccessfully - after a 24 hour journey to get here from Hong Kong, and a restless sleep on the wrong side of the world (12 hours behind) - with a visit to an area of Tampa called Ybor City, which held out the promise of "boutique shopping", but actually resembled a ghost town so closely you could almost see the tumbleweed in Urban Outfitters. Everywhere I asked for what I needed (amongst other things, an iPod nano, as a prize draw gift for the stand at the exhibition we're here for, and a place to have a manicure), I was told to go to a mall. So I finally ended up at a faceless place called the International Mall, and walked in to Neiman Marcus only to hear Annie Lennox singing a song written by my sister's ex-boyfriend, the (infinitely better) original of which I first heard on the M8 between Glasgow and Edinburgh, while being driven, in his old black Mercedes, by the guy who'd co-written the music.

Then I went to have my nails done in a huge, but hitherto completely empty nail bar, which smelled strongly of air freshener and whose walls were adorned with slightly suspect plastic flowers. Five disconsolate Vietnamese girls sat waiting for customers. As "Tina" scrubbed my nails and painted them neutral pink, on a huge screen over her shoulder I was lucky enough to be able to watch a completely preposterous film, entitled "DOA" and purportedly set in Hong Kong.

The shoe's over

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months. Oscar Wilde

I know this will open me up to accusations of fickleness, but wandering round Lane Crawford’s shoe department (shiny, shiny, shiny boots of leather), I was struck by the sense that Christian Louboutin shoes suddenly seem somehow a little bit vulgar – even (gasp!) trashy. Maybe it’s overkill, or maybe it’s the fact that every cheap shoe-copying designer is now employing red soles, but the once-coveted shoes have lost their sheen for me.

I’ve also gone right off spindly heels, which are wholly impractical for Hong Kong’s hazardous pavements, and Louboutin’s range does seem to offer either verging-on-the-transvestite platform hoofers, or dainty little flimsy things with toothpick heels (even if they are in modish patinaed silver), and nothing inbetween. Give me a nice chunky Marni heel any day of the week. If it passes La Grande Poobah’s “biffer test” (Q. Is this a biffer shoe? – “biffer” meaning, I think, some incredibly easily overstepped line between superb and what can only be described as a transvestite/remedial combo, although perhaps she can clarify) then I couldn’t be happier.

Marni’s autumn/winter collection (I’ll be adding some pictures from French Vogue) is actually quite wonderful. The chunky stuff has in the past been a bit whimsical and childlike but this season it really seems to work.

They're after my body

There’s a solicitors’ firm on the same floor as my office, named after the senior partner, a woman who is apparently very wealthy – and the reason we know this, apart from her general reputation, is that she has a bodyguard, a Gurkha. When she’s in the office he is usually stationed in reception, where there is nothing whatsoever to do, staring disconsolately out at passers-by; and he doesn’t get any activity unless she leaves the office or goes to the toilets on the same floor, at which point he follows her and stands outside. There is a ladies’ toilet and an “executive toilet”, for which only “executives” (including me) have the key; if she’s gone to the ladies, you can expect a stand-off outside as you try to get in while insisting to the embarrassed looking bodyguard that he can’t prevent entry to a public toilet, even if there may, in an extremely unlikely twist of fate, be armed-to-the-teeth mainlanders waiting inside to seize his employer. Standing outside, how can he protect her anyway?

This may seem an absurd over-reaction to an unlikely threat, but since poor old Teddy Wang was whacked in the eighties in an apparent kidnap-attempt-gone-wrong, the denizens of Hong Kong’s wealthier families have all been paranoid about being kidnapped for ransom and bodyguards are de rigeur. It’s also a very effective status symbol, signifying as it does both wealth and importance. I feel very sorry for the poor man, who has obviously never had to combat anything more dangerous than our meek and frankly puny office manager (albeit unusually irate on this occasion) trying to wash her hands.

I can read you like a book - and not a very good one

My first real job was with a legal publisher in Edinburgh, where I was employed as a legal editor writing law reports for an illustrious law journal (and managed as a result to learn a lot more about Scots law than I ever did at university). Plenty of things stay with me from that time, not least the cast of characters who were employed there – a constant turnover of malcontented law graduates, a lacklustre yet arrogant marketing department who used to produce leaflets littered with spelling mistakes (“an ideal book for practicioners”), and a tyrannical Managing Editor who always smelled faintly of TCP.

Duncan was one of my favourite colleagues because he was so determinedly himself in any situation. He was from the Black Isle, near Inverness, had been a prison officer and consequently played the bagpipes in the Inverness Prison Officers’ Pipe Band, and once uncompromisingly described our Managing Director as “a fat oaf, and a balloon” (you really need sound here to appreciate the full majesty of this remark when pronounced in the inimitable Black Isle accent). His catchphrase was “you can’t go wrong with a brass dog!” – his unerring advice to anyone looking to buy a special gift for someone.

These were the very first days of email and partly because of the novelty of it, Duncan and I used to exchange increasingly sarcastic messages with each other about the third occupant of the editors’ room. A thin, gaunt man, with a passion for Sarah Michelle Gellar, he became known to us as “Bravo Two Zero” or “BTZ” for short, due to his propensity to make up increasingly outlandish stories about himself. BTZ told me that he’d murdered someone once, with precise details of how he’d covered the floor of his bathroom with plastic binbags beforehand, surprised the victim with a chop to the throat, and disposed of the body by chopping it up and dropping small, bloody pieces from his car window a handful at a time as he sped through the Scottish countryside. He told Duncan he’d had to leave the west coast of Scotland (to come and hide in a small legal publishing office in the west end of Edinburgh) because of a Paisley drug deal gone wrong; and he told me that he’d had to flee Glasgow at the dead of night after the execution of Joe “Bananas” Hanlon and Bobby Glover (two notorious gangland figures who were shot in the head and dumped in a car boot in Barlanark) because he’d been involved in the “hit”.

Bravo’s finest hour was falling in love with, and subsequently stalking, a new, pretty editor. As I approached her desk one day I noticed that there was a huge bunch of roses shoved in her bin which she was kicking vengefully. I asked her what was going on and she broke down in tears and spilled the beans about her creepy suitor, who’d been following her home from the pub where she worked and loitering outside her bedroom window late into the night.

I left the company to work in London and Duncan went to Inverness to join the Procurator Fiscal Service. BTZ was discovered to have been running a record sales business from his desk instead of working for the company which was paying his salary. Now if he’d told us that, we certainly wouldn’t have believed it.

Japan to Japan

I saw my first live band in 1982 at the Edinburgh Playhouse – Japan. Some of the lyrics have dated badly, especially in my current context of living in Hong Kong (from the faintly embarrassing “Cantonese boy/Bang your tin drum” to the unnecessarily mystical: “We walk backwards/Say nothing”), but it’s hard to describe the excitement I remember feeling on going to see them at the age of 14 – the hush and then the roar as the lights went down as the band came on stage; the vision of David Sylvian, who was clearly some sort of god, singing on stage, with Ryuchi Sakamoto dancing on tiptoe beside him; the drum solo in “Visions of China”. Sylvian is playing in Hong Kong in a few weeks’ time and I was quite chastened to realise it would be 25 years since I last saw him live.

My excitement about music hasn’t really diminished in that time. My boyfriend at university said to me “One day you’ll meet someone who is as passionate about music as you are”. Even though I sometimes wonder what 20 year olds think of people like me abrogating “their” music (much the same attitude, I would think, as I would have taken as a 20 year old towards people in their late thirties trying to pretend they knew about music – see below under The Klaxons – They’re Shite), I still buy CDs, and listen to the radio when I’m in the UK, and the way I felt when Maximo Park came on to the stage at Summersonic didn’t feel any less intense to me than 25 years ago.

The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day

I know it’s futile to get worked up about music prizes, governed as they seem to be solely by considerations other than music, but it really is a travesty that the Klaxons should have won the Mercury Music Prize. Why, they’re terrible! I know this from personal experience at Summersonic in Tokyo. By unhappy coincidence, they were on the dance stage before Maximo Park. My sister and I had fought our way to very near the front in anticipation of "the Park" coming on, only to be completely blindsided by hordes of Japanese kids moshing like demons to the crass sound of the Klaxons. Their only half-decent song was a cover ("It's Not Over Yet" - a song title just begging for the response "But We Wish It Was"). Their lead singer, for some reason, was in a wheelchair. Their between-song banter was a joke. So we discreetly moved backwards and geared up for another forward surge.

Inexplicably, once the Klaxons finished, the crowd rapidly dispersed (perhaps because US mouthy shouters Sum41 were on next door) and there were relatively few people staying to see Maximo Park, although they were headlining. So Claire and I got right to the front, hanging on to the railings and gazing up in awe like star-struck teenagers.

I'm in two minds as to whether I really care that Maximo Park weren't as popular as the Klaxons. It's always a shame to see true genius (and I am not exaggerating, I think) go unacknowledged; but on the other hand we got to be right at the front, and I get to keep my sense of being part of something special which not everyone can truly appreciate.

Besides, any fatuous nonsense-peddler can win the Mercury Music Prize, and frequently does: M People, anyone?

Walk out to winter

I am not ashamed to say that I am really excited about the new season (which I might even be persuaded to call “Fall” – that’s how far gone I am, although I do find myself pretentiously fond of the conjunction “A/W” for “Autumn/Winter”). The shops are full of jewel colours and beautiful fabrics, the shoes are shiny, and gone are the unwearable shapes of summer, to be replaced by only slightly more wearable shapes; but that’s not the point, because this season is all about what are fatuously called “key pieces” and my favourites are all there, it seems, ie pencil skirts, peep-toe patent heels, and fitted jackets, though I’m not racing to acquire any pussycat bow blouses (frankly I don’t have the neck for it).

We’ve definitely been here before, but I am happy with anything 1940s-inspired, and thankfully there's a lot of it about. So easy to wear! So chic! And as ever the usual panoply of outrageous fashion in-jokes are being pitched at the unsuspecting, the predictably disastrous results of which which I am looking forward to seeing on the streets of Hong Kong. I can reveal that I haven’t seen any jodhpurs yet, even the Balenciaga ones which reputedly sold out everywhere to women who really want to add inches to their hips, but today I saw someone wearing patent leather knee high riding boots, AKA wellies (a nod to the jodhpurs perhaps). Given that it is still 30 degrees and 68% humidity here, this shows a dedication to fashion that is truly awe-inspiring.

Anything remotely welly-like always reminds me of Fireworks Night, circa 1974, when I spent an entire evening wondering why something felt funny inside my wellies, only to discover on returning home that our cat, Tigger, had the previous evening thoughtfully dumped a dead mouse in my boot as a gift, or as leftovers, and the crunching underfoot was of little bones.

How Chinese is it?

After the recent crash of the China Airlines plane at Nagoya Airport, in a fantastically revisionist gesture worthy of Stalinist Russia, the airline painted their logo out in a hamfisted attempt to avoid bad publicity. Since, as with all airline crashes since the dawn of airlines, the crash will henceforth be known as “the China Airlines Nagoya crash”, it’s hard to think of a more futile gesture. It’s now also likely to be known as “the China Airlines Nagoya crash where China Airlines painted out their logo”.