Animal magic

Animal Kingdom is a relentless, powerful and utterly compelling film - without a doubt the best thing I've seen all year. It's Shakespearean in its ambition and in the tragic arc of the story, featuring an incredible performance by first-time actor James Frecheville in the role of a young man dropped into the heart of a Melbourne criminal family which is about to be torn apart. The characters are beautifully, yet economically drawn; the cinematography is precise, the action evolves with intensity, there's humour and there's despair. Music is used sparingly but effectively, and the key actors' performances are often low key but always true. A quite incredible film which you must see at all costs.

Jolie laide

You can't tell me he wasn't a genius. This isn't beautiful, by any means - hence the title of this post - in fact it's quite disturbing; the pattern is hypnotic, you're looking into the belly of a beast; it draws you in, it rustles in the grass, it follows you stealthily... To be worn once, and then kept in a glass box.

Alexander McQueen, from Net-a-Porter. GBP3,300, and already sold out.

Burn baby burn

Every year for the last 6 years I've raced at Deep Water Bay dragonboat races. Every year, my team's kit has had tops with thin straps; and every year, the sun beats down and despite the apparently perspicacious, not to mention frequent, application of sunscreen of factor 30 and above, I get weird burn-then-tan marks around my shoulders in the shape of little straps. How old am I?

I'm ruined, then, for dresses like this one. But this year I decided enough was enough and though it didn't arrive in time for today's race, our kit has cap-sleeved t-shirts instead.



Dress, Alexander McQueen. Espadrilles, Chloé. Both from Matches.

To be a light

Not long ago I watched a documentary about the 7/7 bombings. At the end, there was a clip from one of the remembrance services and someone was singing a beautiful piece of music that I recognised. I use my mother as a MyPhone app: if a fragment of music has been haunting me, I'll phone her and sing it to her. Often she knows it straight away; if not, she writes it down (one of the advantages of being able to write musical notation) and asks someone in what I imagine to be a vast network of musical contacts: Paul the clarinettist, Mary the conductor, Alan the treble recorder player, Morag the composer...

This beautiful, elegiac piece of music was sung in Rosslyn Chapel in 1983, and recorded there, by my classmate J, sparsely accompanied by our class teacher on what I remembered as a clarinet. I remembered both words and music but not enough to find it on Youtube.

Marg didn't know what it was called, but amazingly, she found the cassette recording within minutes and played it to me as I sat enthralled on my sofa in HK. It wasn't a clarinet; it was a treble recorder (which Marg plays). J himself did the rest: I emailed him and of course he knew it. Here it is - it was used as the end credits for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979), this time accompanied by a trumpet.



In a peculiar coincidence, I bumped into my friend Claire at Pret a Manger this morning and was telling her about hearing J's voice from 1983 down the phone from East Lothian, and the story of how I'd come to be listening to this before leaving for work. She told me that she was at school with Paul Phoenix, whose voice you have just heard.

Charmless garments: 4

Let me introduce this latest contender in the pantheon of Charmless Garments by stating that in my view it should only ever be worn by children under the age of 5 or by people trying to ingratiate themselves with the same (children's TV presenters or paedophiles?). Yes, it's the dungaree. A boundlessly unflattering item, to be sure, proven to give the wearer absolutely no waist, to contain unnecessary accoutrements of straps and buckles and the like, and sad to report, now featuring, in leather and in a wholly unpleasant shade of brown, in a modern style yet still absolutely vile (see for yourself!), in the window of Chloé in the Mandarin Oriental building in Des Voeux Road.

I confess to owning a pair when I was old enough to know better: they were from the legendary What Every Woman Wants, and were pale purple, slightly shiny, and made from brushed cotton with a zip at the back. I must have been 14 and had just started at a new school where everyone was cooler than me. One day I picked up on a strange atmosphere of barely concealed hysteria during a morning lesson. I had no idea what was going on; it just seemed as though suppressed laughter was crackling in the room. It was only some months later that someone kindly enlightened me that the hysteria had been caused by my dungarees: the zip at the back had begun to creep down as soon as I sat in my chair. The person behind me spotted this and alerted everyone else within view; as I sat oblivious and innocent, the zip continued to descend, helped along by a ruler wielded, gently but presumably with much pantomime, by the person behind me. (Oh the cruelty! That this should have been the only person I had ever wanted to impress only added to the retrospective, woeful, mortification.)

But you don't need me to tell you that the dungaree is rotten to the core. Just look at the picture.

Play misty for me

The view out of the cab window on Tuesday morning as we left Stanley. I did feel like asking my taxi driver whether he might not be getting a bit too old for this sort of caper: we crept along as he squinted uncertainly out of the window and tentatively tapped the accelerator as though he had no idea how to drive. It has been cool and very misty for a few days: I was absent in Singapore for a week, during which time my beautiful healthy plant grew sticky white mould on its formerly glossy green leaves, the couch got strange patches on it, and everything feels damp to the touch. I've had the dehumidifier running (I recycle the water into the cistern, never fear) and it fills in a day while I'm out at work.

Red hair got me into brawls

Aside from a period of around 8 years' duration when I dyed my hair black (although I emphatically wasn't a goth, I favoured pale skin and red lips, as well as black clothes, and consequently earned myself a cheerful greeting from a stranger in a Glasgow street: "Hello Morticia!"), I have been hennaing my hair since 1983.

I started at a new school at the age of 13, having been experimentally educated "at home" for the preceding four years. I was out of practice at being normal, and every day I was taunted by the sophistication of my new classmates: barely into their teens they might have been, but they knew things, they smoked cigarettes, they went to parties, they drank too much and they had lovebites bestowed upon them. Every day was terrifying to me.

With the money from my Saturday job I'd saved up and bought new clothes from the dirt-cheap fashion store on South Bridge, Edinburgh, What Every Woman Wants ("What Everys" for short), and emboldened I giddily acquiesced to my sister's suggestion one Sunday night that we should henna my hair. We mixed up the henna with a fork as instructed and piled the hot, stinking, red-brown vegetable matter onto my head. It stayed on for a long time, much longer than instructed because we had no idea what we were dealing with, and when we washed it off, in an astonishing transformation my hair was bright, shiny, and suddenly very red.

As bad luck would have it, I was late for school the next day. As I crept to my desk to sit down, I felt eyes on me in the silence. Then someone hissed loudly, nastily: "What's she done to her hair?"

"Probably dyed it", came the contemptuous answer. I shrank into my seat.

Early over-enthusiastic disasters behind me, I still henna my hair from time to time. The side-effects are always the same: it creates a terrible mess, with glops of muddy matter dropped everywhere by my careless hands; it's very strong and can dye your scalp if you let it; and it has a powerful smell, which doesn't wash off for a few days. But henna leaves my hair feeling soft and looking healthy, in pleasant shades of red which shine in the sun enough to gladden my shallow little heart.

[Picture from Tim Burton's fashion shoot for Harper's Bazaar]

Dulce et decorum est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen (18 March 1893 – 4 November 1918)

Rankle

There are so many things wrong with this, why, I don't even know where to begin. The man (nominally) responsible for this deplorable quarterboot suedette sandal (this is my name for it, but I welcome other attempts to describe it) is Michael Kors. Kors - hang your head in shame! The worst offence is the sheer pointlessness of it: the excess fabric that some poor animal died to provide, uselessly adorning the unlucky wearer's upper ankle, and the insolence of that gold-look buckle, coupled with an entirely petty heel... it's the cankle (a condition whereby your ankles and your calves merge into one) made all too real. This unspeakable item can be yours for US$295. As an ex-colleague of mine from a best-forgotten summer job at Edinburgh University Registry was fond of remarking: "I could scream!"

Damned lies

(Photograph Tyrone Siu/Reuters)

Not long after I arrived in Hong Kong, a lavish, shiny brochure came through the door for an incredible-looking new development, "Bel-Air on the Peak". In the pictures, graceful landscaped gardens wound down to a pier where a white boat awaited. Chandeliers glistered and Old Masters glimmered from the walls of high ceilinged French-style apartments. A woman in a couture gown darted barefoot along soft grass; beyond lay a building resembling the Palace of Versailles.

Closer scrutiny revealed the following: the building was not "on the Peak" (the most expensive place in Hong Kong and a prestigious address); it was in a new development, built on reclaimed land and therefore much closer to sea level, called Cyberport which had been handed by the government to the wealthy princeling son of one of Asia's richest men without going to competitive tender. There was no access to the waterfront, and there would therefore be no elegant boats waiting to whisk the residents to the Riviera. There were tiny gardens with no grass. The pictures were of a French palace - in France.

It turns out that this entirely fraudulent depiction, which would not be permitted in other jurisdictions, is quite commonplace in Hong Kong. The adverts often follow the same pattern: featuring beautiful couples (often of Western appearance), the women in extravagant dresses, the man in a suit, comporting themselves smugly/elegantly before a generously laid table with champagne glasses in hand, an incredible view out of their window. Blue skies, expansive space, greenery everywhere.

I was reminded of this trickery this morning on glimpsing another risible, aspirational ad: a man playing chess with a genius child in front of their floor-to-ceiling picture window with, again, clear skies and twinkling lights just like diamonds. Compare and contrast this with what is really outside every window in Hong Kong: in the last couple of days, pollution levels well over even the piss-poor, forgiving Hong Kong scale. Tonight's paddle was cancelled due to pollution - a first. But I suppose Hong Kongers will continue to convince themselves, as they drive to work in their Mercedes, encouraged by deceitful advertising and the government blaming sandstorms in Beijing, that they aren't part of the problem.

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.