Archive for the 'UK' Category

Here’s another strange sport - cheese rolling. This is an annual event that takes place at Cooper’s Hill in Gloucester in the UK. The participants use real cheese - the Double Gloucester, weighing in at 7-8 lbs.

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Anyone can take part so if you fancy rolling down a hill with your big cheese, go to Cheese Rolling in Gloucestershire.

Cousin Pey came to visit today from Bath and arrived to torrential rain and flooding. When she called me on her mobile, I was watching the sheets of rain storming down to the drama of thunder and lightning in the dark sky. Rivers of water poured down the street. She was drenched by torrents of water streaming through the roof of Victoria Station and the concourse was awash. Trains were being cancelled all around her.

But miraculously, she found the one train that got her to my suburban station in South London and the rain eased.

By the time we finished lunch, the sun was shining. We went for a walk in the park in our T-shirts, squinting in the bright light. In all respects, it was a pleasant, sunny summer’s afternoon.

It was only this evening when Pey spoke to her husband on the phone that we realised that the rest of London and the rest of the country had not had such a normal afternoon. We rushed online to see the floods that had brought large parts of the rest of London to a standstill (click on the photo for a link to the BBC site with loads more pics of flooding):

The question is: with all trains cancelled between London and Bath, how is she going to get home tomorrow?

Photos: from bbc.co.uk/london

This is a beautiful and moving project. The Wilfrid Owen Multimedia Digital Archive has been created by Oxford University in conjunction with The Imperial War Museum. Wilfrid Owen was one of the poets of the the First World War, alongside Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke. This project is particularly timely as the last remaining few of that generation of young men will soon be all lost to us - there are only three surviving First World War veterans now in the UK, all over 100 years old.

The Wilfrid Owen Digital Archive puts online a vast collection of Wilfrid Owen’s poetry, including fascimiles of his original hand written manuscripts - in some cases, you can follow the drafts as he amended them and tinkered with the wording. You can see how The Anthem for Doomed Youth, for example, was developed from the original piece which he named Anthem for Dead Youth .

There is also an archive of contemporary film footage taken at the time - there are numerous clips from the infamous Battle of the Somme, such as one showing the young soldiers fixing their bayonets.

What is especially interesting is the examples of publications circulating at the time. The Hydra was published by patients of the Craiglockhart Military Hospital, to which Owen contributed when he arrived there after being wounded at the front. There are also a number of mazazines published by the soldiers such as Poison Gas, the unofficial ‘Organ of 3rd Battalion Queen Victoria’s Rifles’. The last century and our present one both opened with wars. In today’s wars, soldiers blog from Iraq. Back then the urge to communicate was just as strong and these magazines are the blogs of their day - satirical, critical and also moving.

The memory of the Great War is a particularly Western/ European cultural memory. There isn’t a similar mythology and ritual around the Second World War in Asia. I think, though, that the First World War has shaped the sensibilities, culture and anxieties of the 20th century across cultural boundries. It was horrendous and brutal and affected millions of people. It happened to nations that were supposedly civilised. And it had a group of young men and women who could articulate the personal horrors in moving and powerful prose, poetry and symbolism that has lasted through the generations. The Great War was the war to end all wars. It was the war that created the two minute silence every November 11th and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. We will remember them, we promised, we who lived in the 20th century, repeating the mournful and beautiful words of another war poet Laurence Binyon.

And yet, wars have ravaged the last century and will continue into the next. As those who lived through it finally leave us, it becomes more important than ever to remember - even though wars still explode around us, remembering means that we do not become immune to the horrors and the human tragedy that they bring in their wake.

Photo: thanks to oucs.ox.ac.uk

Whenever the wind blows incessantly, it starts to drive us all a bit mad. The grit flies up into our eyes. The blustering and rattling becomes irritating. The flutter of air on our skin invades our personal space. Or maybe that’s just me…?!

Anyway, when the wind persists this way as it has done recently with the wild weather we’ve been having, it always makes me think of the wind in the film Black Narcissus that eventually drives the nuns over the edge - literally.

It’s one of my favourite movies in its wonderfully melodramatic handling of claustrophobia, repressed passion, longing and madness - all done on a painted set somewhere in Ealing or Pinewood to represent the Himalayas. Deborah Kerr does her best “rigid and brittle on the outside but wild and passionate if only you ripped that habit of her” performances. Kathleen Byron is fab as the lusty nun who hankers after David Farrar (in the shortest hottest pants ever to be worn by a man on screen), whose madness is evoked by her slashing gash of red lipstick at the end. And a young Jean Simmons exudes innocent sexuality as the young Indian girl in contrast to the uptight nuns.

So, if you fancy a night out with the nuns, the film club at the Dulwich Picture Gallery is showing Black Narcissus next Monday. See details below.

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GalleryFilm

A Story to Storm Your Heart! Drama at the top of the world.

Two-time Oscar winner from one of the great screen partnerships of all-time – director Michael Powell and writer Emeric Pressburger.

Five young British nuns move to the convent of the St.Faith Order - based in the Himalayan foothills. Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr) is assigned as the superior sister, and her liaison with civilization is the government agent Mr. Dean (David Farrar). This lonely and exotic place and the presence of Mr. Dean awaken the innermost desires of the sisters, and Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron) descends into the madness of temptation!

Starring Deborah Kerr, Flora Robson, David Farrar, Sabu, Kathleen Byron and Jean Simmons.

Ticket includes: refreshments and a draw for 2 tickets for entry to the August evening screening of GREASE (on August 16, 2007)

£8; Friends £6

Tickets from galleryfilm@yahoo.co.uk or 020 8299 1859

Getting to Dulwich Picture Gallery

Photo: thanks to cfyn.ifas.ufl.edu

Continuing a three part series on my experiences of food in England. In Part 1, my horror and tears at English school food. This week, curry and spice and everything nice at Uni…

When I went to university, it was like a liberation after prison. I lived in a shared house down Cowley Road in Oxford during my second and third years, thriving in the joy of being free from the institutionalised halls of residence. My housemates and I threw parties and gave dinners, dressing up to fit the themes we devised. It was the early 80s and we were playing at being the cool, sleek grown-ups of the ’40s and ’50s - Bogie and Bacall were our models, Grace Kelly and Frank Sinatra in “High Society”. At candle-lit dinners in our shared living room, our men wore black tie and cummerbunds and we girls shimmered in cocktail dresses and high heels. We ate parma ham with melon, smoked salmon mousse, roast duck in blackcurrant sauce, drank champagne. With coffee, we puffed on cigarillos and nibbled at blue-streaked gorgonzolla, sipping port.

But nothing compared with my Malaysian dinner parties. I had brought a wok back in my suitcase after one holiday back home. In the cupboards were an endless stock of sambal belacan, stinky dried fish, dry-fried shrimp, thick gooey soy sauce, crispy ikan bilis, fragrant pandan leaves, curry powder, chilli powder, turmeric, five spice cloves, blocks of coconut concentrate - you name it, I had it. They came with me back to Oxford either stowed away in my suitcase triple-wrapped in plastic bags and towels or hunted down from London’s Chinatown. Back then, before mass cheap travel and globalisation, my English friends had never seen - or smelt - anything like it. Most of them had never travelled beyond the boundaries of Europe and some had never left their little island at all. I fried up prawn chilli and flavoured rice with coconut and pandan for nasi lemak; sizzled up bright yellow turmeric pork with caramelised onions; cooked sesame chicken with nasi goreng. My friends watched me as if hypnotised, amazed that I did everything in the wok - even bacon and eggs on some Sunday mornings. “Why not?” I would say, “It’s just a cooking implement.”

To come to my Malaysian dinner parties, my friends had to dress up. In the winter, I would turn up the heating in the living room, pull back the dining table and chairs against the wall and lay out a large woven mat I had brought back from KL. Sometimes, I even managed crepe paper palm trees sellotaped to the walls with green fronds hanging from the ceiling. In the summer we would sit out in the overgrown garden, the tall weeds and unkempt grass adding to the fiction of the tropics in suburbia. The theme was tropical Malaysia so everyone had to come in tropical clothing - Hawaiian shirts and shorts, flip-flops, sarongs. We would all sit cross-legged on the mat and eat nasi lemak or curry with our hands. Once, Siva, a Malaysian PhD student brought a coconut and a parang and chopped it open Malaysian style, spinning the fruit in one had as the other expertly hacked the husk away while my English friends watched in awe.

It was in the summer vacations of those years at university that my English friends would take long trips to India and South East Asia. They would be the generation that would seek out exotic restaurants with tasty, spicy food once they were back in the UK and settled down to their jobs. They would be the ones finding new and cheaper ways to travel around the globe and to look outside of their home island for work and business opportunities. It seems to me that from the ’80s onwards, the British began to evolve from seeing the world as an empire they owned and imposed their will on to a place of interest and wonder to explore and exchange with. Looking back, I wonder how many other Malaysian students in the last few decades played their part in introducing their British friends to the wonders of another culture, through our delicious, unique food and our warmth and hospitality.

Whenever my British friends come across another Malaysian, they would always tell me. And I would always hear how friendly and generous this Malaysian is, how interesting and funny and talented. And how this Malaysian is really into their food. How they cooked for my friend and what an amazingly tasty meal they had together. And how much there was to eat. “Yup, that’s definitely a Malaysian,” I would laugh. Even if their passport might say some other nationality because they have migrated for career reasons, a Malaysian’s heart - and stomach - will always be Malaysian.

In two weeks time (Friday 20 July 2007): what happens when my English friends visit my family in Malaysia

Photos: from my photo album c. 1983/ 1984

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This is a cross-post from my communications and social media blog ZenGuide.

The British Library is building a collection of blogs. This collection will form part of the UK Web Archiving Consortium (UKWAC) initiative to archive websites of research interest. The archiving of blogs is part of a wider project to archive UK websites for future generations. The UKWAC website explains:

For many, the web has become the information source of first resort. From keeping abreast of latest news and accessing online journals and datasets, through to finding information about travel and sport, the web has become the information tool of choice.

However, despite our apparent dependence on this medium very little attention has been paid to the long-term preservation of websites. Indeed, with the life of an average website estimated to be around 44 days (about the same lifespan as a housefly) there is a danger that invaluable scholarly, cultural and scientific resources will be lost to future generations.

To address this problem, a consortium of six leading UK institutions is working collaboratively on a project to develop a test-bed for selective archiving of UK websites.

The six institutions are The British Library as lead partner, The National Archives, The National Library of Wales, JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee), The Wellcome Trust and The National Library of Scotland. The project began in June 2004 - a news report from ZDNet at the time wrote: “Each member of the consortium will choose content relevant to its subject. All types of Web content will be included, from government documents to blogs.”

To me, this is a clear indicator that blogs are now moving into their prime. From the public perception of their being the personal journals of misfit geeks or kids a few years ago, blogs have come a long way in a very short period of time. They have evolved into business communications used by an increasing number of top notch businesses as well as by solo professionals and small enterprises - including GlaxoSmithKline (Alliconnect blog), Johnson & Johnson (JNJ BTW blog) and Avis (We Try Harder blog). And now, they are being taken seriously by researchers, academics, scientists and the guardians of the UK’s intellectual heritage.

I wonder if it’s only a question of time now before blogs and other social media are studied at university level as art forms in their own right? After all, these days you can take degrees in English Literature, Film Studies, Photography, Visual Arts, Design etc - considered by previous generations as not sufficiently serious to be subjects of study. When the first novel appeared two hundred years ago, it was greeted with derision and even horror by the intellectuals of the day who viewed poetry - and in particular classical poetry - as the greatest form of literature. Look at things now, with the novelists now the literary heavyweights and poets, sadly, much less high-profile. So, who knows, we may soon be able to apply to study an MA in Blogging…?

Disclosure: I am also delighted to say that I was recently invited to submit my writing and culture blog Fusion View for archiving as part of this project. The email from the British Library’s Web Archivist said: “We would like to invite you to have your site included in this important collection for Internet research. We will be selecting some 150 key sites to form the basis of the blog’s collection until August 2007 but archiving will continue into the future.”

Photo: of the British Library Reading Room thanks to imagesonline.bl.uk

DSC00063.JPG, originally uploaded by MacOoi.

We passed Haymarket this morning on our way to the Mac shop in Regent Street and I took this photo with my cameraphone. The ranks of cameras and journalists were clustered at the edge of the police cordon, shooting footage of Haymarket - which was cleared of traffic and strangely silent and still. There were lots of tourists milling around with the reporters shooting the empty street, too, with their digital cameras and handycams.

As you may know, Haymarket was the site where the unexploded car bomb was found early this morning and a potential bomb attack in Central London was foiled.

We were approached by a Canadian reporter, Trista Kelly, who writes for Bloomberg News (online) wanting our reaction to this event. My response was that this was bound to happen at some time - we are always being warned that London is a target for attack that sooner or later, it is not so surprising that something will happen. London has always been a target for attack for as long as I’ve been in the UK - since the 1970s. At that time, it was the IRA and now it’s Al-Qaeda.

Fortunately, this time, the attack was stopped in time and no one was hurt. In this light, the incident became another one of those inconveniences that Londoners always have to put up with - like tube strikes and road works. For me, it felt like something annoying that I had to work around in the busy day that I had planned.

It seemed that most Londoners had a similar approach, judging from the traffic chaos. Everyone was trying to get to work or wherever they had to get to. No-one was staying home because of fear or anxiety.

And as if to prove this, just round the corner - literally - in Trafalgar Square, the Canada Day celebrations were in full swing a bit later on today. There were maple leaf flags and balloons, Canadians playing hockey, marquees with stalls promoting all things Canadian. People were strolling along, laughing, taking photos. Wandering around, you would not know that just a few streets away there had been a car packed with explosives.

We were all getting on with our business. London always does.

PS. To all my Canadian readers: Happy Canada Day!

The following series of three posts is taken from an essay I wrote for a collection of essays by various Malaysian-connected writers coming out in Malaysia sometime soon to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Malaysian Independence from British rule.

Part 1 - The meal that made me cry

I stared down at my plate. There was one soggy piece of toast on it, drowned in a pool of orangey-brown baked beans. I looked around me at the crowded dining hall. The girls were all taller and bigger and heavier and stronger than me, all tucking in to their lunch of baked beans on toast, all laughing and chatting. There were a few black faces but otherwise, they were all Caucasian, pale skinned and robust. I was the only South East Asian, skinny and small and caramel-toned. It was my first day at boarding school in the UK. It was 1975 and I was twelve.

The morning had been a tumble of classes and new friends as I trailed behind my new classmates to change rooms for each new lesson. In Malaysia, we had the same teacher for most subjects and any specialist teacher who taught us came to our classroom while we stayed put. This new pattern of packing up my pencils and books after each class and fighting my way through the chaotic corridors to find the next lesson confused me. Several times, I got lost, like a new recruit left behind by her platoon, and stood bewildered as girls hurried past me.

By lunchtime, I was exhausted and disorientated. My legs felt cold in the navy school kilt and my arms felt tightly constrained in a long-sleeved sweater. My knee-high socks prickled my shins. Lunch would help me feel better, I thought. I always liked break-time at school in Kuala Lumpur. My friends and I bought curry laksa at the canteen, the spicy soup ladled out of huge steaming vats into a bowl of noodles, beansprouts, soya and chicken. Sometimes, I brought in fried rice and would eat it lukewarm from the tupperware. Friends would bring in soy sauce noodles and vegetables. But here in this rowdy English place, lunch had not turned out how I had expected. I stared down at the baked beans and toast on my plate.

I looked up at the clock on the wall. It was just after 1pm. I looked at the strange, noisy, pale girls around me. It struck me that I had five years here. Five long years of baked beans on toast. Five years without curry laksa. Or stir-fried vegetables. Or soy sauce chicken or grilled satay or beef rendang or nasi lemak. Or anything that I knew as food. Real food. I burst into tears. The girls sitting at my table fell silent, staring at me uncomfortably. A sixth-former said, “She’s just homesick. She’ll be all right.” And they left me alone to sob despairingly over my baked beans.

Later, when I was older, I realised that this was probably not an uncommon experience for Malaysians going to study abroad - especially back in the ’70s and ’80s. These days, in the 21st century, even the remotest part of the UK will probably have a Malaysian restaurant or at least an eatery that can do a decent curry. Back then, England was still emerging uncomfortably from its post-war troubles and coming to grips with the loss of its empire. It had been used to exporting its culture and habits and food across the world and it would be some decades yet before a new generation would return from the hippy trail with bottles of fish sauce and chilli belacan and recipes for Thai green curry and satay. Back then, curry was a strange concoction involving a plain curry sauce, pineapple and raisins. To my horror, they also mixed curry powder with sweet salad cream to make a weird cold dish called Coronation Chicken.

For five years, I learnt to eat potatoes with everything. Roast potatoes, boiled potatoes, buttered potatoes, jacket potatoes, sauteed potatoes, chips, mash, potato salad. The were lots of interesting things you could do with potatoes. But none of them turned the spud into rice. Every now and then, though, we would have rice. Aaah, rice. Those were my favourite meals. Except that the rice would come with that pineapply-raisiny curry and I’d have to spend ages picking out the bits of fruit. Or with chicken fricassee, a mix of shredded chicken in what tasted like Campbell’s cream of chicken condensed soup - which was marginally better than pineapply curry in that I could pretend it was chicken a la king.

When I went to university, it was like a liberation after prison….

To be continued next Friday (06 July 2007)…

Photo: thanks to Johnnie Shannon on flickr.com

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My interview with Rob Mackenzie has been picked up by poet Andrew Philip on his blog TongueFire in a post called “What is Scottish Poetry?”. There is a lively discussion in the comments to that post about Scottish identity, which I’ve added to, asking what would the identity of a Chinese poet writing in Scotland be.

Andrew has responded with some interesting points:

There’s a poem called “Young, Chinese and Scottish” written in the voice of a young, Chinese-Scottish woman by Kevin Macneil, an obviously male Gaelic and English-language writer. How’s that for complex identity politics!

Googling the poem (which I can’t find online), I’ve just come across an online essay “Infinite Diversity in New Scottish Writing”, by the Scottish-Pakistani writer Suhayl Saadi, who was born in Yorkshire. I’ve not read it, but it might well be enlightening.

Thanks to Andrew, we have some really juicy diversity writing to go and explore!

I am reminded of the early days when I first came to the UK. Back then, I clumped all white people from the UK together as “the English”. When speaking to an Irish/ Scottish/ Welsh person, I sometimes referred to them as “English” - imagine their outrage! It was then that I started to see the differences between the various tribes that make up the UK. It still fascinates me and I feel I have a lot to learn.

While in Slovenia, I was chatting to one of the other IABC (International Association of Business Communicators) delegates who was from Doncaster. She has a mild but noticeable northern accent. She recounted a rather disturbing story that shows the boundaries that exist even between the tribes of England, let alone between the English and Welsh/ Scottish etc.

At Uni, she heard about a party that a group of friends was going to. “Great,” she said to the host, “Where is it?” He replied in stiff, Southern tones, “You don’t have the right accent to come.”

Wow.

But to end on a lighter note, my colleague told another more amusing story of the North-South divide. She was setting up a meeting room in her company’s sleek offices in Soho recently. The technical assistant was an East End bloke who asked her if she wanted “sand” for the meeting.

“Sand?” She couldn’t work out why she’d need sand in the room.

“Yeah, d’you want me to set up the sand system?”

“Ah, sound!” She cried, understanding at last….

Photo: thanks to Hamed Sabir from flickr.com

Wellbeing of Women is a UK charity dedicated to solving health problems solely affecting women. They are about to launch a campaign to find the most inspirational woman in the UK (in association with the UK newspaper The Daily Mail). The Inspirational Women of the Year Awards will be launched this coming Tuesday 15 May and are sponsored by Marks & Spencer.

You’re hearing about this first here on Fusion View because I met the Director of Wellbeing of Women, Liz Campbell, last week as we sipped cocktails at a City Women’s Network event in London. She told us about the campaign and asked us to tell as many people as we could. Wellbeing of Women are keen to receive nominations for ordinary women that you and I might know, rather than celebrities, so we can celebrate the outstanding and special achievements of real women who are getting on with their lives every day away from the limelight.

Anyone can make a nomination (you don’t have to be a woman to nominate!). The woman you nominate, however, needs to be resident in the UK (ie not necessarily a UK citizen but resident in the UK) as this is a UK-based award.

To make your nomination you can email them at wellbeingofwomen [at] rcog.org.uk or write to them at their mailing address:

Wellbeing of Women
27 Sussex Place
Regents Park
London NW1 4SP

You need to name your nominated inspirational woman, describe in your own words their inspiring story and why you think they deserve to win. The closing deadline is 5.30pm on Friday 1st June.

You can find out more by going to the Wellbeing of Women website and clicking through to their page on The Inspirational Women of the Year.

I can think of a number of women who have been inspiring to me in different ways. There’s my friend Alex, who changed her life dramatically and went on to help many people in her work as psychotherapist, and along the way helped me as a friend through a difficult period in my life. There’s Angie, my partner, who gave me the courage to give up my job and write my novels all those years ago and who continues to inspire me every day. There’s Silvia, a talented business communicator, who is championing all the myriad of blogging and social media activities that I am involved in, while building a brilliant career of her own. There’s Lucy who is juggling her meteoric academic career with her creative talent as a photographer and always takes the time to be a great friend. There’s the other Alex who has always been a dear friend to me, a supportive pal to everyone who knows her, a great mum to her delightful children, a terrific wife to her talented husband and a lawyer to be reckoned with. The list goes on!

My problem is going to be trying to choose only one of them! Or maybe I can nominate all of them…?

Photo: thanks to womenshealthsolutions.co.uk