Clothes; that was easy. Books; there's no way I'll be able to bring along even ten percent of what I want to, so I settled for a desert-island, personal canon, my...key texts: Nabokov, Woolf, Borges, Brillat-Savarin/Fisher/David, Montaigne's Complete Essays, some more essays, and T.S. Eliot. Stray bits: Calvino's Winter's Night, Queneau's Exercises in Style, Harry Potter Vol. 1 (from J) and C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity (from T). All of which I fully intend to read/reread. Weight (including fat load of Harvard mailings and handbooks): 12.7 kg.

However, with music; each additional CD is a negligible burden, but each CD omitted or forgotten is going to make me incomplete. So in goes all the jazz which I can't live without, Ella, Billie, Django, Chet, ACJ, the SNZ extended family and bands of non-key members (excluding the Zippers themselves of course). In goes all the corny chansons francaises, the squeaks and scratches. In goes Mado and J's Pons-Contes-Edda, Ariodante, Galli-Curci (who looks like an embalmed ostrich on the cover), Cecilia's sotto voce Se tu m'ami. In goes the Chen Xiao Dong box set from WK and HY. And what of the music of my adolescence? From that period I'm taking only

The Bends
OK Computer
Stone Roses, self-titled
Joni Mitchell's Hits
Portishead live

Where are my female singer-songwriters? Where's all the Blur? This is telling. I can't listen to Tori anymore without a severe sense of disorientation (except for her novelty B-sides: Frog On My Toe, Purple People, Merman). And so I ferreted around for a compilation, dread word, that crystalline essence of chart action and commercial appeal, and I found CRUSH, "40 sweet and sour tracks", circa 1997. A sample:

Saturday Night, Suede
Champagne Supernova, Oasis
Oh Yeah, Ash
Lovefool, Cardigans
There She Goes (the original)
Something Changed, Pulp

So I'm taking this; my token gesture, to preserve something of the complete ebb and flow of my musical inclinations. Of course, there's lots more embarrassing stuff in mp3s on my laptop.

After a night of macerating in their own fluids in the refrigerator:
Mozzarella has acquired rigor mortis
Rocket still abloom with greenness
Avocado is undiscoloured
Mushrooms have boosted flavour
Potato salad has self-dessicated

Honey dijon crisps
Devilled pei dan (celery, ma you, la you, mirin, sesame seeds)
Portobello, white button, shitake, anchovies, parsley, pinenuts, Kalamata olives, Grana Padano shavings
Mozzarella, avocado, roasted peppers, basil, rocket, pinenuts
Grilled chorizo, potato shallot-parsley-dijon salad
Roasted pumpkin, eggplant, oregano
Steamed prawns, botched coriander-garlic aioli
Coriander egg white omelette
Simmered lao huang gua, black moss, dried oyster, dried scallop, mushroom
Untitled artisanal dairy product from the Pyrenees (sheepish Gouda)
Cheshire made in Shropshire
Grapes
Orange macadamia cheesecake
Chocolate truffle cake
Passion fruit-bitter lemon (supply restricted)
San Pellegrino Aranciata Amara
G&T
Limoncino, absolutely vile

Guests unwittingly subjected to a brain cleansing, not once but twice, by Mado's shrilly-shattery B flat from Spargi and Les oiseaux. Colliding circles do little to dampen conviviality. But as is usual with any group larger than two, I never get in the desired amount of get-togetherness with each individual person. And never the proper...closure. I go to bed, sufficiently nostalgic to be unable to sleep, wondering if I would have been better served by keeping my selves discrete.

This week's compendium edition. Life is revving up into a higher gear, idleness is ebbing away, where is the time for contemplation and composition?

Wed 21.8. Lunch at Hu Cui. The most magical Chinese dessert ever. Black pearls in osmanthus soup; nuances of starfruit and sugarcane.

Thurs 22.8. Back to school for the last time. And then to Alliance Francaise for the free placement test. "Ce n'est pas mal!" Really? I "have" "one year" of French, 180 hours of tuition. Is that all? After drilling myself on Edith Piaf and certain airy arias. What about my extensive menu vocabulary? Dinner with Y at mezza9, I have really run out of things to eat. The same seven desserts again.

Fri 23.8. Had my bad horror fix. There is something essentially very silly about cursed dolls, possessed puppets. And Thai cinema is absolutely fixated on voodooed effigies, petty revenge plots set in rural locales, preferably with large swamps for the hapless to fall into and drown in. But the last of the trio, the Hongkong one, was quite excellent. Dinner at Singa Inn seafood, with "ASEAN cultural performances" and lots of Eighties phenomena. Dessert at Tamade, where D "trains up" his intoxicant capacity.

Sat 24.8. I spend a good hour consoling a friend (clearly suicidal, drinking to Portishead) before I am rescued by SL, and am then displaced, stuck with two Germans and a very statuesque stewardess. He's OK now, I think. (Don't look back in anger.) That bitch! That flame-retardant witch! The bonfire bombed. Night dwindles alarmingly into inanities, 7-up, Bigfish Smallfish Who What Har. But still the most fun I've had in awhile. I wish KY best of luck with C.

Sun 25.8. Family day. Singsong session at home after lunch, my grandmother the retired chanteuse, my baby cousin the piano prodigy who failed her sight-reading. And yes, I did Chen Xiao Dong. But this I swear is the last time. No, really.

Silk Road, 12.8.02.
Arraigned for premeditated illegitimate book-buying at lunch. Never have I heard such baseless speculation, circular arguments, sensational fabrication. I sat, like St. Sebastian, an innocent martyr, being pelted hexalaterally by so many "arrows of truth", fervently shot by a round table of jurors and Justices. Of course, the crime is far more heinous than this. It is in fact a theft perpetrated against the entire global readership, a desecration of a shrine of learning, a detraction from a communal treasury. The proceedings drag, even more than typical legal tussles, until the Court realises that they have forgotten to pay for the duck noodles. And thus commences a further dialectic on the merits of playing Robin Hood and being agents of income redistribution from management to service staff by leaving a "tip" of the value of the omitted item. What lunacy to reward the waitress for her auditing blunder, though! In the end (although of course the Court was nowhere approaching a cogent verdict on either of the mooted malfeasances), foundering in indecision and ill-focus, waitress attendant and anxious to shoo the overstayed guests away, our quixotic do-goodiness was countered by their more spontaneous and munificent "suan le, suan le".

* * *
A fairly large crowd turns up to see Huang Huang the panda on his last self-exhibition in this part of the world before returning to his native Berkeley, but everyone is quite satisfied with just knowing where he went to school and what he majored in.

"What a stupid woman you are, Lydia...Intelligence would take the bloom off your carnality...We are a perfect couple. She needs a patronising man, and I need a patronisable woman...The perfect murder is one in which the victim did it."

* * *
Thrilling, mortifying, tantalising, stupefying. Conversation was surprisingly fluid for a group which gathers (maybe) once a year. Whether this was merely glossy garrulousness, the freemasonry of the victorious, whose self-possession stems from a nominal kinship or titular association with excellence, was of course at the back of my mind throughout. There were unbelievable coincidences (what a publicity fillip it must be for R(A) to be able to bill their first three pioneering/consecutive editors as Harvard admits), enticing half-advice (who would want the giving to famish the craving?), a suspiciously comfortable ease...but that's just me, the cautious asocialite always wary of fast friends. And V's a Singaporean art history student! Encouraged me to "do something fun...like VES!" What a whiff of originality, glorious disregard for pragmatism.

In time, in time. Now - the horrid task of clearing up here. Two weeks to departure and still in a mess in as many ways as you care to name.

Why don’t I do this more often. Circling and loitering around malls, a hideous reprise of secondary-school desultoriness. Scrabbling for congenial topics and failing, trotting out dull civilities and common-places. “Out upon such half-faced fellowship.” This curious compulsion to sustain derelict relationships, to protract an association whose founding circumstances have ceased to exist. Woody Allen in Annie Hall says something like, “a relationship is like a shark. It has to keep moving forward, or else it dies. And I think what we’ve got on our hands is a dead shark.”

Having become habituated to the company of dexterous interlocutors, sharp wits, mellow temperaments, engaging raconteurship, empathy and commiseration, the slightest departure from these conditions is enough to put me into a sullen, stoical mood. I can feign considerable concern for indifferent matters with some effort, but evincing even a wan interest in tiresome topics is almost onerous work (among sham emotions, I am most tight-fisted about dispensing false enthusiasm. Insincere sympathy is fairly easy to come up with, don’t you think?).

This year's priceless spectacle of smurfery: ministers attired in antiseptic white, waving multi-tiered Ultraman lightstick-popsicles (the spiffiest party-favour ever!) AND nimbly gavotting at the same time. Elsewhere, anal Alice-in-Wonderland allegory wrenched out of perfectly pretty displays. Stirring symbols of racial diversity. Dick Lee adrift high above the crowd in a "Heliosphere". A man scaling an inflatable Everest, vicarious pinnacle-attainment for us all. The dignity of marches-past and military regalia cheapened by tawdry playthings and harlequin glitter.

I love the 80's remix of We Will Get There.

Excellent antipasti to be had at Bologna (pulverised peppers, chlorinated Caprese, floral salmon carpaccio, fruity beef carpaccio, prosciutto with pallid figs and sunny dandelion petals, cod foo yong...and oysters which I can actually savour squirmlessly before swallowing) plus the best espresso I've had since France. Spaghetti vongole fortified by ardent sting of fresh and dried chillies, broth bracing and robust.

J's indigestion is obviously due to his insufficient Kalamata/Gaeta (?...dark purple, tender and emaciated variety) olive intake. But he insists on maligning the asparagus.

* * *
We are too late to catch Effi Briest without rushing our repast, so G and I resign ourselves to grazing languorously for three hours on crab cakes, yakitori, quarter-dozen oysters, lamb shank (braised duck-adobo) and the colourful cavalcade of confections (passionfruit pavlova and lime souffle are first-rate, although that's probably because they were the only things I could properly relish at that stage of satiety). All at half price.

Y insists that I abjure my nascent literary pretensions and become a counter-tenor. A natural flutter, he says.

I have outgrown the airy, effete Les oiseaux phase, the gooseheaded French waltzes, and perhaps momentarily disengaged myself from the sprawling and soaring, the whooping and looping of Martern, Periglio and Sembiante. And now I'm trying to get a grip on Handel. His music is floreated but not flagrant, buoyed by (and yet at the same time, serenely afloat on) a ceaseless current. The tender, nubile capering of Volate, amori and Con l'ali di costanza, the stately sorrow of Scherza infida, the softly radiant ebb and flow and sotto voce grandeur of Dopo notte. Refrains of lambent beauty, making their reflux with a blushing da capo flourish and variation. Then of course there are the wings and flying, the gaudy gambol of Preparati and Dover.

Nadaman has the most wondrously tremulous chawanmushi.

I've lost it, my capacity for novels has been hugely diminished after a recent forced diet of essays and belles-lettres: beloved Hazlitt, Lamb, Chesterton. Owing to what I desperately hope is a temporary dwindle in my attention span, I now need to interpolate spurts of surfing the Net, absently trawling stray articles, picking at the Economist which I took 2.5 years' leave from, conjugating the 10 French verbs I know in preparation for the Alliance diagnostic test (can't wait can't wait), wheedling along like a crippled giraffe through the fan ti foreword to my Qi Baishi monograph.

Been chuckling with tender indulgence at the "decontextualised debris" (YQ) of my Modern Art. For any piece of twiddled-with junk there will always be a corresponding community of credulous loons who will acclaim it as groundbreaking and paradigm-shifting. For the dogged and inveterate semioticist there are golden principles and radiant ideas to be extracted from anything. And in the end all we have is this: on one side, the bandying about of insolent, slenderly tenable slogans; on the other, affronted counter-electioneering for the vacuity of all this modern rubbish. Thus has the artistic dialectic of our age become fiercely partisan, fractured along strands of belief which are as fickle as fashion. But it generates discourse and colourful opposition. The pseudo-mystic passionately broadcasting his singular vision, the pursuant legion of reverential disciples, the outraged traditionalists upholding a dead aesthetic: what is this but the endlessly recurring, age-old wrangle between the establishment and the evangelists?

The first feeble trickle of writing in awhile, a post-afternoon-nap, hasty half-hour verbal etch-a-sketch of an apology for Pale Fire; garbled, maddeningly scatterbrained and tangential, temperamental subjunctive clauses and runaway parentheses freestyling across the page, my Art Nouveau writing pad ("pension house for Australians"). Fishing for mermaids in salmon-rich waters. Drilling for drivel. Will-o'-the-wisp exegeses. A pathos special to gauche knight-errants, vagrants askew and attuned to a faraway, quavering music. N's scattered benediction conferred on disenfranchised, dispossessed, self-dislocated mongrels. Assiduous beguilement, illogical impulsion. K fortifying self with fabulation. Brittle valour. Tattered mythology. Cosmic magic of coincidence. Scintillae of erudite association buried under prosaic topsoil. This is the closest I've got to writing while in an altered state, and what a blooming tendrilled mess it is. But I think I've hit a rare note, chanced upon a warped locution. For that period I had an enhanced affinity for purple patches and startling liaisons; momentarily sharpened instincts at the fruit-machine game.