Archive for the 'Lifestyle' Category

I’m not reading books anymore - I’m trying to “go shelfless”. With the technology available these days, it seemed to us likely that you could abandon all shelving with the consequential enlargement of your living space. That’s an attractive idea, especially if, like me, your home is already jam-packed with books, CDS and papers that have taken up all the shelving space available already - what do you do as you buy new items?

One friend is very efficient at monetizing her acquisitions - once she’s finished reading her books, she sells them off again on Ebay. She used to rip the music of CDS and then sell the discs on Ebay too. She also gets rid of old clothes and other items the same way.

I’ve been wondering if one could minimise the clutter at an earlier point ie at the acquisition point - by going virtual or electronic.

A few weeks ago, I blogged about taking virtual notes using Evernote, which has so far been a great way to cut back on the bits of paper and physical notebooks that I would normally use. I “write” notes on my mobile phone-PDA using the letter recognizer function so it feels just like scribbling in a physical notebook or on the back of an envelope and zap it across to my online account.

I’ve recently discovered audiobooks via Audible.co.uk, which is a subsidiary of the US-based company Audible.com. So I’m not reading books but I’m listening to them. With Audible, you pay for each book you download just like you might if you bought a physical book from Amazon. But you can also sign up an account and pay a monthly fee of around £8 - each month you can download one title. The latter option is good value as you can download a book that otherwise costs more at that £8 price. Once you’ve downloaded it, the audiobook is yours forever and you can stream it from the online site or download it as many times as you like. The only limitation is that you can only play it on up to 4 computers/ devices that you register with your account - this is to stop you sending an e-version to all your friends and doing Audible out of business.

I’m really enjoying my first two audiobooks. I can listen to them while gardening or sitting on the bus. It’s so much more time efficient being able to listen to a book and do something else at the same time. And activities that used to be boring and painful to do are now quite pleasurable. Also, lying in the garden staring up at the blue sky while someone reads to me in my ears is just delightful - I don’t have to strain my arms lifting the book to read it as I lie down or crick my neck to get the reading angle right. And the books don’t take up any physical space - although you can burn CD versions of them if you want to.

My only complaint about Audible UK is that they have only 18,000 titles compared to the US company which has 40,000 titles. Many of the UK titles are older titles and / or of the WH Smith variety ie non-intellectual easy reading (though there are a few exceptions). I tend to prefer Waterstones or Blackwells which have more academic selections - or Amazon where you can get the most obscure books so long as they are in print. I was very excited when I first discovered Audible.com, the US site, as it had loads of books I wanted. For example, the US company has Naomi Klein’s latest book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Stephen Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature and Sudhir Venkatesh’s Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets. My excitement fizzled out when I came to the UK site - where none of these books are available. The UK site has lots on Churchill, how to make a million, chick lit and the latest popular non-fiction, which is fine if your tastes are limited to those topics.

So why don’t I just sign up for the US site? The frustrating thing is that if you try that from the UK, it refuses to allow you to do that and shoots you over to the UK site. Their support team explained to me, “The availability of certain book titles is linked the geographic digital download rights set by the publishers. A title can have different publishers in different countries and the rights are set on a country by country basis. Where possible, we try and secure rights on a world wide basis (for our US, UK, French and German sites) but there are times when this is either not possible or discussions are currently ongoing to secure the rights.” So I have to keep checking back to the UK site in the hope that the UK publishers will at some point issue the UK version of the audiobook.

Still, I have found a few books on the UK site that will keep me going for the next few months - hopefully as time passes more of the kinds of books that interest me will find their way onto the UK site and I won’t have to terminate my experiment with virtual books anytime soon.

Illustration: thanks to Drylcon from Flickr.com (CCL)

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These days I usually buy a coffee on my way into work - and that means most days. It feels very extravagant to spend £1.50 most mornings on a drink I could so easily make myself at home or once I got into the office. But it feels invigorating to walk up to my desk with the steaming ‘tall’ paper cup and the aroma of fresh coffee wafting up to wake me up. It also makes me smile to exchange inconsequential banter with the baristas at the local café who are now familiar with my regular morning stop-off on my way in from the suburbs.

I would never have bought a cup of coffee so easily or so readily in England 10 years ago. Back then, the UK was still a staunchly tea drinking nation and it was a rare thing to be able to get a good cup of coffee anywhere. You would be served instant or some semblance of filter coffee that was stewed too long and sour or so weak that it was tasteless. Either way it was disgusting. One time, I ordered a coffee in Hay-on-Wye, booklovers capital of the UK, in a wannabe trendy café-bookshop which had one of those fancy Italian cappuccino-making machines. The coffee here should be good, I thought.

But here is how they served me: they poured some thick cold coffee ’stock’ which they had boiled down in a coffee filter pot into a cup and added hot water from a kettle. It was the most hideous concoction I had ever tasted. And they were a bit miffed when I demanded my money back.

And then along came the Seattle Coffee Company that made fresh coffee, latte, cappuccino and all the other varieties that we’ve become familiar with. It was bliss, walking into their slick, clean, minimalist outlets and ordering coffee exactly how you want it, with all the associated lingo: skinny, wet, dry… The company was soon taken over by Starbucks, which then proliferated all London and eventually throughout the UK. I hope there’s now one in Hay-on-Wye.

Many people complain that Starbucks, as a global chain, destroys the local economy and makes every high street look the same and have the same shops. For me the significance of Starbucks in the UK is that it has raised the standards of coffee everywhere. For awhile after they arrived, you still could not get a decent coffee in restaurants and cafes - they would stare at you blankly if you asked for an Americano or bring you a weak cafetiere coffee or slop some thick filter into a cup for you. But it wasn’t long before most places realised that they had to keep up with the times and invest in the big Italian coffee machine contraption that hisses and spurts steaming water and milk into freshly ground coffee. Nowadays, you can usually be assured of good coffee wherever you are in the UK - and it’s a delight.

Photo: thanks to Roberat on Flickr.com (CCL)

I’ve just spent a week in Barcelona, partly attending the IABC EuroComm Conference 2008 where I chaired a panel discussion on social media and partly for a holiday. I’ll be blogging about the conference and the issues that came out of the panel discussion separately. But being a foodie, my first post about the trip has to be about the food we had there!

They call it tapas, the tid-bits of food that the Spanish serve in the early evening before the main meal. It’s very civilised compared to the UK where you generally gobble a packet of crisps and some peanuts with your pint at the pub. The Spanish lay out fried potatoes, spicy morsels of chorizo, sliced octopus, fried calamari and cuttlefish, fried aubergines - the list goes on. Over a long drink and great conversation, it’s just the best way to unwind after a hard day’s sightseeing or shopping. But I have to say, it makes me think of dim sum, the Chinese tid-bits that you generally have for Sunday lunch - in Australia, they call it “yum chah”, I think. My contention is that the Spanish got the idea from the Asia-Pacific region via the likes of Marco Polo, Vasco de Gama etc.

And it’s not just tapas. In Barcelona, there’s a speciality dish which is stir-fried seafood vermicelli - which looks and tastes exactly like the Chinese “chow mai fan” that you get in Malaysia. We would eat it with chilli sauce but they serve it with a daub of garlic butter - equally yummy!

We also came across a fried springroll thing but instead of veg and pork, it is stuffed with chorizo and onions.

And we were struck by the word for butter “mantega”, which is the same word for butter used in Malay. Staying with linguistics, the Spanish word “nona” means woman - I wonder if it is related to the Malaysian word “nonya” which refers to a Straits Chinese woman?

I’m pretty sure these are not merely fanciful connections on my part. Malacca and the Straits of Malacca were critical in the spice trade between West and East during the 1400s so I’m sure words, food and ideas travelled with the sailing ships between the Spanish ports and Malaya. In particular, I was struck by the Arabic influence in Spanish due to the many centuries of Moorish occupation and of course, Arabic continues to be a strong influence in Malay language and culture.

What do you think? If you have any other examples of linguistic or culinary connections between East and West, please do share your thoughts!

Photo: thanks to Gbworx from flickr.com (CCL)

One of my favourite radio podcasts is Thinking Allowed on the BBC, hosted by sociologist Laurie Taylor. A recent programme discussed the sociological implications of the British Sandwich - whether cutting it in triangles shows middle class pretensions whereas cutting it into oblongs demonstrates working class earthiness. I had no idea there was so much that could be read into a couple of slices of bread.

I’ve never been keen on sandwiches. I tend to prefer the Asian way of eating - Asian meals do not involve much wheat or gluten or cold food so the sandwich is a strange concoction from that perspective. But in the UK for many years, the sandwich has been the staple of quick lunches so I tolerate it and have had my fair share of lunchtime sarnies. I’m glad to see, though, that more and more Asian style fast food lunching is becoming available - you can buy a nice hot meal with spicy chicken and rice for around £5 and take it away to eat back at the office, just like in Kuala Lumpur (though the price is probably 3 times more than Asian prices!).

The one kind of sandwich that I did love as a kid in Malaysia was a chicken sandwich with lots of butter and white pepper on soft white bread. Chicken sandwiches were a treat that we had when we went “out station” - meant to sustain us on the long drive to my grandparents’ in Taiping, but often devoured within the first hour or so of getting into the car! Their novelty lay in their being, well, Western but they also tasted great because the chicken was prepared with Chinese style ingredients and included the dark meat and the crunchy skin. (In the UK, shop bought chicken sandwiches are made from the bland skinless white meat so can be dry and tasteless, unfortunately.)

For pure evil indulgence, we tried a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich once - said to be Elvis Presley’s favourite. You butter the white bread on the outside and pile the inside high with the squishy ingredients, then deep fry the oozing slab. Yummy and gruesome all at the same time. I’m not sure what the sociological implications of this type of sandwich would be….

Photo: thanks to sheilaz413 from flickr.com (CCL)

I’ve never appreciated roast turkey with all the trimmings. I find it bland and lacking in celebratory festiveness. I am especially not fond of brussel sprouts! So the traditional Christmas meal is a bit of an ordeal for me. Which is not to say I don’t like turkey as such. We often eat turkey steak or turkey escalope or diced turkey throughout the year - but cooked with wine Italian-style or soy sauce or curry Asian-style.

The problem with the traditional roast turkey meal for me is that when I was a child in Malaysia, Christmas food was just so much more - more tasty, more spicy, more varied, more exciting. We would spend Christmas with my grandparents in Taiping and the preparations would start weeks in advance. As a child, I never was aware of all the effort and hard work that Grandma put into it - with the help of all the aunties, great-aunties, cousins and second cousins all over Taiping. But everyone in the large extended family would have got involved in the vast cooking marathon that would have been needed to lay on the feast that fed over a hundred people.

In the heat of the tropics, we would have a full-blown Christian Christmas, complete with tree, Santa and carols.

The kids’ job was to decorate the house. The older second cousins would be in charge - tall, good-looking Paul who seemed so grown up to us and broad-shouldered, grinning Jason. They would be the ones up the ladders stringing the paper chains, placing the balls on the higher reaches of the Christmas tree. We younger kids would drape tinsel on the lower branches of the tree, balance cards on shelves.

On the day of the big party itself, the living room would be cleared and chairs set out for the carol service. There would be a churchful of people in there, singing our hearts out. One of the fat great-uncles would always dress up as Santa in the red suit and jolly mask, arriving at the end of the service when the lights went out. He would have a sack full of presents and ho-ho-ho his way round the room, scaring the babies with the strange staring mask.

But when it came to the food, we celebrated Malaysian-style - with curries and spicy fried dishes, rice and satay: and enough to feed an army. Memories of delicious Asia will always be associated with festivities and celebration for me so a pallid turkey for Christmas, no matter how moist you might claim it is or how Christmas-y just does not do it for me at all.

What are your memories of childhood Christmases? Please add a comment and let me know!

Photo: thanks to Mr_Woo from flickr.com (CCL)

This is a cross-post from my social media blog, ZenGuide.co.uk

The ZenGuide Network has a new member - window display company PLANarama, with whom we’ve been working to develop and write their blog magazine. The design of PLANarama’s website and blog was developed by their designer Guy Boyle and we’ve been creating the content for the blog, working closeley with Managing Director Neil Ellis and his team of visual merchandising experts. We’re pleased to add PLANarama’s blog to our ZenGuide Network, which is a compilation of business blogs produced by our clients, associates and colleagues.

Our role is to bring out the stories behind PLANarama’s window displays, drawing out from their creators the inspiration and challenges that went into the making of the windows. It’s been fascinating learning about the skilled techniques that go into the design and building of the flagship windows for stores like Jaeger on Oxford Street. And it’s also been eye-opening to think about the work and project management that goes into rolling out of multiple windows across the country for a chain store like Carphone Warehouse - it’s a mini-military operation in itself, as project manager, Sabina Roberts explains in the article Christmas Warehouse on the PLANarama blog.

Neil Ellis and his team talk each week on the PLANarama blog about the secrets of creating great window displays. Neil, in particular, shares his in-depth experience of creating visual merchandising for London’s top retail stores like Ted Baker, Cartier and Marks and Spencers. For us, writing the blog has made us look at shop windows with new eyes, stopping to look at the detail of each display and stepping back to view the overall effect, asking ourselves what the intention of the creator was and noticing the themes and cohesion in the design. It’s like going to an art gallery and appreciating a sculpture or a painting or other great work of art - only we’re out on the street and trying not to get in the way of passers-by. We hope that when you read the blog posts, you’ll enjoy the behind-the-scenes look into a hidden high street art and perhaps pause awhile the next time you walk down your local shopping street and stroll through the mall.

Photo: thanks to PLANarama.com

Here’s a clever but simple viral marketing flyer from Selfridges I received by email a moment ago from blogging massage therapist Melanie Crowe. Click on the links to download your web voucher to enjoy the discount and/ or forward the flyer on to friends.

By placing the voucher online on its own webpage as well being forwardable by email, Selfridges have also enabled bloggers like me to publicise their offer online on our blogs.

Enjoy - and if you do buy something using your voucher, why not come back and let me know what you got?

We would like you to have a special pre-Christmas gift. Just show this voucher at the till, before you pay, every time you make a purchase from Friday 30th to Sunday 2nd December 2007 and you will receive 20% off* your Christmas shopping, including our festive Christmas Hampers, with 10% off* our unequalled range of fragrance and beauty. So get your Christmas list ready. To qualify for your discount: 1. Simply click on the link below and fill in your details. 2. Print off the voucher. 3. Show the voucher at the till point before you pay to receive your discount.
	For store locations and opening times visit www.selfridges.com or call 0800 123 400.
	Enjoy your Christmas shopping!

This post also appears on my social media blog, ZenGuide

I blogged about comfort food last week. This week, I got to thinking about comfort drinks. You know, those hot, comforting drinks that just make you feel cosy and safe.

Here’s my list of top comfort drinks:

# hot milk with honey - especially when coming home cold and late on a winter’s evening and you need something soothing to wind you down, ready for bed

# creamy hot chocolate - I tend to prefer this earlier in the evening as it’s usually too rich and makes me feel a bit too full to be going to bed right after drinking it

# hot Milo - mmm, this reminds me of my childhood in Malaysia

# hot Ribena - another childhood reminder. We used to have this in Malaysia if we were sick and in bed.

# hot toddy ie hot water, whisky, lemon and honey - great for colds and flu in winter. I enjoyed a big mug of this every evening for a week recently when I was down with flu - until we ran out of the cheap whisky and found a 40 year old Johnnie Walker at the back of the cupboard, which was too good to mix. That was when we turned to neat vintage whisky instead…. which worked pretty well, too!

What’s on your list of top comfort drinks?

Photo: thanks to wingyipstore.co.uk

Now that it’s cold and wet, and the night seems to encroach steadily on the day, my body is yearning for comfort food. It doesn’t help that the central heating at home seems to be on the blink and the air-conditioning at work thinks it’s still summer and I seem to have spent most of the last ten days scrunched up in a physical huddle, feeling cold and miserable. All I want to eat is everything that is stodgy and unhealthy:

# Deep fried fish in thick batter with greasy chips, reeking of salt and vinegar - preferably in newsprint paper held in both cold hands as the grease oozes through the paper. And with that distinct greasy paper smell.

# Hot bangers and mash, in a pool of steaming gravy

# Steamed sponge pudding in a pool of treacle, drenched in hot yellow custard

# Juicy minced beef baked into lasagne, moussaka, cottage pie or shepherd’s pie

# Apple stewed with dates and cinnamon and then baked in the oven with a thick, sugary, crunchy crumble on top and enveloped in double cream or more hot yellow custard

# The ultimate English/ American breakfast and/ or mixed grill - bacon, egg, sausages, chips, toast dripping with butter, baked beans, mushrooms, tomatoes, hash browns, steak, grilled lamb chops, grilled pork chops, all washed down with a strong cup of milky, sweet tea

Funny, isn’t it, how the list is made up of primarily English food? Imagine being faced with any of that in the tropical heat, while you’re drenched in sweat and panting. In contrast, this icy, rainy November weather is perfect - especially if you’ve been out in the cold and wet doing something spiffingly British like going for a brisk walk in the rain up a hill or gardening!

What’s your favourite comfort food? Do you try and justify it first like doing some random exercise in the rain? Or do you just eat it anyway, to hell with guilt?

Photo: thanks to ukmari from flickr.com (CCL)

I was in a business meeting last week in the City of London discussing social media with colleagues and clients. As the meeting wound down, we chatted about personal matters, sitting back in our chairs and packing away our papers.

As we looked round the table, we realised that none of us was a native Englander. There was a Sudanese, a German, an Italian, a South African and a Malaysian-born Chinese. We laughed at how we were all speaking English and how we were so comfortable with each other.

The Sudanese marvelled at how in his father’s day in Sudan, the local people could not own businesses and were truly second-class citizens under the British Empire. And here he was running a thriving business in the City, with clients from all over the world, including the British who had once ruled his home country.

I shared the story that my father and his brothers had told us - of how they were not allowed to enter the gentleman’s club in Kuala Lumpur during colonial rule because they were not white. There have been other stories across the Empire of how even sultans and kings had not been allowed entry to such places because they were natives. And just earlier this year, I had walked into a gentleman’s club - a woman and a non-white - on Pall Mall and I had been treated with respect and even deference by the English staff.

The South African had an ancestor who was closely associated with the creation of apartheid, to her shame and embarrassment, and yet she herself had marched against apartheid in her youth and makes friends based on a person’s character, not their colour.

For many of our generation living in today’s Western, cosmopolitan cultures, it’s pretty much a given that we take each person for who they are and it’s not about colour or gender or orientation or whatever. It’s difficult to imagine what it must have been like for our parents and grandparents - to have experienced blanket unquestioned prejudice, or to hold such prejudices as if they were the unswerving truth. There are still people and places where racism, sexism and all kinds of other “isms” still rule the day, unfortunately - so I’m not saying we live in a perfect world. There is still much to be done to remove inequality. It was just that on that particular afternoon last week, we looked at each other and delighted in our differences and the freedom we had to enjoy those differences here in London.

Photo: from freestockphotos.com