Archive for December, 2009

This is a photo taken by my sister in law in the Worcestershire area. She reckons Father Christmas is worn out. Or perhaps it’s the lean years of the credit crunch?

It certainly makes a fun change from the usual kinds of Xmas decorations you see around that are all about schmaltz and sentimentality with fat, jolly Santas!

I’m on the look out for off the wall takes on the usual Xmas hype - like the Bhangra Jingle Bells video I posted up the other day - so if you see anything odd and quirky, please let me know!

Posted via web from Fusion View Lifestream

My cousin Joanne is CEO of the Clean Air Network (CAN) in Hong Kong, an independent NGO that encourages the public to speak out about the health impacts of air pollution. She sent me CAN video above via Facebook the other day. It doesn’t pull its punches and made me feel asthmatic even just watching it!

I blogged last week about the idyllic fake English town, Thames Town, being built outside Shanghai to recreate for the aspiring Chinese middle classes the loveliness of an English market town. The purpose seems to be to escape from “loud and dirty Shanghai” to this fantasy of an English way of life. The clean air issues for the congested island of Hong Kong are no doubt repeated in the megacity that is Shanghai, with its population of over 8 million people. In fact, clean air is a vital issue for all cities around the world, not just in China. It seems to me that the answer to the hustle and bustle and dirt of Asian cities is not escape to an idealised suburban sprawl (which actually adds to the problem by adding more cars and concrete to the setting) but to address the noise, congestion and dirt by implementing sustainable policies.

Here in the UK, the hot topics of the century (pun intended!) are climate change and sustainable communities. There is a huge public drive towards clean energy, recycling, minimising our carbon footprint and livable neighbourhoods and cities. We aspire towards walkable environments, pavement cafes (weather permitting!), neighbourliness and community, safety and good health for all - places that people want to live in and can thrive in. Sure, there’s a long way to go in many parts of the country but the journey has started and even dirty old London has electric buses, electric cars and campaigns to encourage more bicycling and walking; recycling schemes; windmills on top of some buildings; green roofs and more.

So for Hong Kong, Shanghai and any other city in the world whether it’s London, New York or my hometown of Kuala Lumpur, I hope very much that sustainability is or will become part of the DNA of their evolution. With people like my cousin Joanne (whom I’m very proud of, by the way) taking a lead in one such factor for sustainability in a major Asian city - and I am sure there are many other passionate advocates for livable cities around the world - I am optimistic for the future.

Following on from the film last week of diva Anna Russell summing up Wagner’s Ring Cycle in 30 minutes, I thought that we could continue our education in posh music with another film that digests All The Great Operas in 10 Minutes:

By the way, this film retells the story of the Ring Cycle in under a minute and even the second time around after last week’s masterclass, I still can’t follow the plot - can you?

Looking at the images in the slideshow above (taken by British documentary photographer Dave Wyatt), you’d think they were snaps of a quaint English market town or a Dutch or German village. And you’d be wrong. The photos were taken in China. Shanghai, in fact.

Shanghai?

But where are the pagodas and curly slate roofs, rounded doorways, bright red paint and lavish dragons of old Shanghai? Or even the imposing, megalithic skyscrapers and roaring highways of new Shanghai, proclaiming here is a modern city of the East?

Well, this is Thames Town China. Its website says, “Loud, dirty Shanghai seems a far cry from the yew and plane- lined avenues and cobbled pedestrian-friendly streets of ThamesTown. Here the broad sun-hats of the Chinese workers putting the finishing touches to the development are the only indication that you are on the outskirts of China’s biggest city. Not in a posh commuter town in the stockbroker belt of a British city.”

The blurb goes on: “Residents can sip their bitter in a traditional English pub, “The Thames Town”, as children scamper across the medieval market square to a bilingual school, while red-brick warehouses form a commercial area on the waterfront. Developers are targeting British companies such as Tesco and Sainsbury to add to the authentic high-street feel so the town’s expected 10,000 residents can shop in true British style. There are sporting facilities and everything a town of its size should have.”

This is apparently one of nine towns in this area modelled on European market towns, including Dutch Town, German New Town, Nordic Town and Italian Town (with Venetian style canals!). Unnervingly, the website declares proudly that German New Town, was designed by Albert Speer, the son of Hitler’s favourite architect….

I find it curious that the aspirations of the rising Chinese middle classes would be to live in a mock-European setting rather than in surroundings inspired by their own heritage and perhaps re-modelled for the 21st century. I could understand the desire to live in modern houses with all modern comforts and facilities but it’s the recreation of Victorian or Tudor houses that are then modernized with fake modernized medieval streets that is odd in my mind. There is also the fantasy of what England is - or perhaps should be - like that seems straight out of an Enid Blyton book: lovely local colour down at the pub while The Famous Five and Secret Seven scamper safely in the market square.

Meanwhile, in the real England, Victorian terraced houses are pokey and dark, Tudor houses are impossible to upkeep because of Grade II listing, youths are knived outside pubs, others vomit and piss in the street on a Saturday night, the homeless sleep in the streets and cars clog up the market square and medieval streets.

Hmm, maybe we in the UK should all move over to China to the sanitized version of our towns…!

And perhaps that’s the point of these fake places. People can live the idyllic lives they imagine in “exotic” surroundings, without ever leaving home and without ever having to deal with the real natives of those “exotic” settings. Who needs reality when these days, money can buy you your dreams…

But having said all that from the cynical Brit part of me, being an Enid Blyton fan, there’s a part of me that fancies living in a fantasy version of Old Blighty! What about you? Would you like to live in Thames Town or Italian Town? Or what about if an Old Shanghai Town were to be built next to Surbiton just outside the real London?

Slideshow photos: thanks to DaveWyatt on flickr.com

Fabulacious!

I’m traumatised. I feel as if I’ve just discovered that a sweet little old auntie who used to tell me bedtime stories when I was a child had been a crazed children-devouring witch all along, hiding her fiendish cackle behind tales of jolly adventures and lashings of ginger beer.

I adored Enid Blyton as a child, like several million other kids around the world for many generations. It was because of her books that I longed to come to England and have spiffing adventures. It was her books that made me want to become a writer. I loved the spy-like antics of The Secret Seven and the jolly decent gang that was The Famous Five (though, not being an animal lover, I could never figure out why Timmy the dog counted as one of the five…). I think the Five is the series that most people remember fondly, identifying as one or other of the kids. For me it was a toss up between being Julian - oldest and in charge (read bossy) - and George, the tomboy. Dick was a bit nothingy. And never, ever, in a million years, ever girly, frilly, femmy Anne! There was also that series of books that had titles like The Something of Adventure - what’s interesting about my memory of this series is that I don’t really remember the children in it but it was the relationship between the mother and the adult male figure that caught my attention. Hmm, I wonder what that’s all about!

OK, I know, I know. Enid Blyton did not at any time devour children. But the other week, as I was watching the BBC 4 biopic of her life, Enid, I was horrified and traumatised by how casually cruel she was to her own two children - and maliciously vindictive to her first husband Hugh - while appearing in her books and in public as a charming author who was in touch with all little children all over the world.

Helena Bonham Carter plays the author with just the right mixture of childlike fragility and hard hearted coldness. Her cut glass accent sends chills down your spine as she lashes out at her poor Hugh and dismisses her children. At the same time, there is a tragic, lonely aspect to her portrayal, drawn out in close up shots of her haunted eyes.

The theme of the biopic was Enid’s almost pathological need to escape real life - and that it is this escapism that connects with her kiddy readership while at the same time destroying her ability to connect with the real people in her life. And I guess that’s why we all used to read her as kids and now as adults read other kinds of fiction - as escapes into adventure, love, comedy and so on. I know that feeling of escaping into an inner world to create fiction, too - when I was writing my two novels, I would have a sense of drifting between reality and my made-up world in my head. Sometimes, I’d be physically present and doing things and even chatting to my partner or friends but I’d be somewhere else completely. My partner, as you’d expect, didn’t like that at all.

Nor ultimately, did I. It’s disorienting and strange and it struck me that perhaps, this is how one might go mad - if the inner world became too strong or too attractive and you just gave in to it, disappeared inward altogether. All that would be left on the outside would be a body - functioning perfunctorily for awhile and then just sitting or lying and staring into nothing, while inside the dramas, the tears, the joy, the laughter, the thrills and spills would be filling your mind and soul.

So at some level, I think I gave up on writing fiction after my second book. Sure, on the face of it, I tried to keep the writing going, working on several synopses and draft third novels over a few years. But my heart - and my mind - wasn’t in it. I wanted to be here in the real world, living my real life and not a life of fiction in my head.

At the end of Enid Blyton’s life, she slipped into dementia. In the biopic, this was expressed as part of the spectrum of her need to escape and we are left with a poignant image of her sitting on a small kiddy’s chair after a book reading, happily leafing through one of her own books, laughing softly to herself.

Photo: of Helena Bonham Carter as Enid Blyton, thanks to The Life of Wylie