He looks at me

The Pokfulam riding school is a public riding academy near the Pokfulam country park, and a 10-minute walk from my flat. Lessons are HK$360 an hour for adults (about US$45) with one caveat: You must be 175lbs or less. Children pay HK$290 for a 45-minute session, and they must be below 105lbs. If that's not an incentive for budding equestrians to stay slender I don't know what is.

Waterlogged memories

Burano: crazy colorwheel of an island, situated just off Venice. Rows and rows of little houses looking as though they had been painted by a nutcase on an acid trip. Comedic, hallucinogenic. Cerise, salmon pink, acid yellow, lavender, aquamarine, ochre. A visual treat despite the rain that fell nonstop the day we visited.



History says that in the days when Burano was mainly a fishing community, the island women painted their houses in bright colors so their husbands could easily pick out their homes from the sea. These days, the residents are required to repaint their houses every year, and always in the same color.



We reached the island after a 40-minute ferry ride from Venice. Rain kept pelting the windows, and while we were mostly dry inside the boat, the occasional seaspray managed to get through. Ignoring the rising smells of damp denim and wet people, we entertained ourselves royally, collapsing in mirth at our own lurid Pinoy jokes, and frequently ogling our fellow passengers -- which included some of the most gorgeous Italian priests this side of the Rose Line. Mama mia!

You'd think it was the monsoon...

But no, it's just the spring rains, driven by gusty winds whipping the hillside opposite my building.

It is really, really pissing down -- rain has been falling in a steady downpour all day. But wrapped like suman in my trusty raincoat I went about my day quite enjoying the fresh dampness of the air: lunch with a friend, a stop at the tailor's to collect repaired trousers, and then on to pick up magazine proofs I am to read tonight.

Anyway. Someone sent through Raymond Carver's "Principles of a Story" -- a compelling essay for anyone who writes for public consumption. While the essay was addressed to short story writers, one passage in particular spoke to me:

That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones...If the words are heavy with the writer's own unbridled emotions, or if they are imprecise or inaccurate for some other reason--if the words are in any way blurred--the reader's eyes will slide right over them and nothing will be achieved. The reader's own artistic sense will simply not be engaged.

This is because for countless years I was an imprecise writer; bridles were a foreign country. I hurled words and feeling onto the page with very little craft involved. It is only lately that I started learning about the power of factuality, selectivity and precision. How to show, not tell. How to bank my emotion, thereby allowing the reader to call forth his.

In Texas they fry rattlesnakes

The Chinese are big on snake, both for its medicinal properties -- the bile is especially prized -- and as warming food during the winter months. Photo shows a typical Chinese shop on Shau Kei Wan Road on the eastern side of Hong Kong Island. The shop sells looseleaf tea in big glass jars, dried mushrooms (shown left), dried snake (middle) and dried frog (right), among other delicacies.

In Texas they fry rattlesnake, dredging it first in cornmeal. Among the Chinese the two most popular ways of preparing snake are stirfries or stews. (Here's a good article on snake preparation). Despite living in Hong Kong since 1997 I have not yet found the guts to try snake though.

As for dried frog, one of my Chinese friends says it helps boost the reproductive system -- I reckon this is badly needed in Hong Kong since birth rates here are falling -- and is good for the skin too. Ideally only the frog's reproductive organs should be consumed.

The mushrooms on the far left are variously called lion's mane, monkey head or bear's head mushroom. It's supposed to be a brain tonic and a digestive aid.

I'm visualising dumping all three ingredients into a stew and letting it bubble away in some wicked magical kawa somewhere...with perhaps a bit of toadstool, a smidgen of wolfsbane and fresh newt.

Conjugating the conditional

The new term starts at Alliance Francaise today - well actually, it started last week but I skipped the first day of class. Happily, I finished today's work ahead of time and was quite pleased with how it turned out too. It's a highly technical paper on manufacturing systems I wouldn't ordinarily touch, not having the expertise, but I can be quite stubborn: I was challenged by the very fact that I wasn't an expert.

The week starts well. An hour from now will find me conjugating the conditionnel - wish me luck!

What's playing: Catherine Tate - Lauren's French Oral

Return to Me - October Project

The problem with writing

The curse of perfectionism is perhaps the single biggest stumbling block as I put pen to paper. Every time I receive a writing assignment, I am initially excited, and set about lining up interviews, visiting places if required, doing Web research and jotting down words or phrases that I think will make the final product "pop" - that is, give it an extra oomph.

But then, when the deadline looms, I sit in front of the computer, dashing off one lead after another, agonisingly (notice how my spelling is erratically British; that's because the publications I write for now stick to British English) unable to commit to a single lead, a single approach.

This process will generally take at least an hour. More often, three hours have passed before I am happy with the way the article begins.

Which means that any single article, even if it is just 500 words, will take me the better part of the day.

It may be that for those of you who write for a living (or who just love to write) a lot of the work will already have been done by the time you type the first word to an essay, a short story, or magazine article. You'll have massaged your ideas into some semblance of shape. That wonderful alchemical process will already have taken place in your brain. And sometimes when I am lucky this happens to me also. But more frequently, for me the story becomes a story only in the very act of writing. Out of nowhere it seems, the words come, phrases arrange themselves, and new ways of saying things spill out of god knows what dark creative caves in my mind. But it only starts to happen when I am actually picking out the letters on the keyboard. It's a though I need the visual cues, the shape, the curves, the architecture of the letters themselves, the spaces and punctuation to give birth to thought.

This birthing, it is tedious. I come to it with dread. I delay it and delay it. I fix up the house, rearrange my closet, wash a few dishes before I can bring myself to sit down and write. And yet nothing, almost nothing else I do in my working life, gives me greater pleasure. I do not yet write fiction (although I feel there is at least a few essays and maybe a short story and a poem in me), but feature writing, journaling, and even the most mundane of blog posts keep something in me alive.

The yellow station

Many of the train stops of the Hong Kong subway system are color coded. One of my favorites is Wanchai Station, because the wall paint and mosaic tiles are an eyepopping lime green. In the past couple of days I've also come to know Sai Wan Ho Station, as I visited the district to do research for a commissioned article.



After a bleary half-hour on the train, the yellows, tangerines and mustards of Sai Wan Ho Station are guaranteed to stun you awake...

Easter boy

Photo taken Easter Sunday in the World Trade Center mall in Hong Kong which had the egg exhibit and a children's play area where the little tykes could draw their own designs on the eggs.

Happy Easter!

Spring has come. Color is returning to the landscape. The trees are shaking off the stupor of a startlingly short winter and starting to bud. The ground is carpeted with coral blooms. Spindly brown branches are thickly clustered with furled petals. Outside my window the birds are making a racket; they seem to be drunk on song. On the streets, few woollen coats and jackets to be seen; cotton is back, and pale colors and maybe a hint of linen, although no one is wearing white trousers just yet. Inside me, I feel myself thawing too. Time to leave winter's fug behind. I love this resurgence of the year.

Happy Easter everyone! Shall we agree to make it a year of marvels?