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?