The last Tamil in Budapest

The last time I was in Budapest I was arrested. It was early in 1990, a few months after the Berlin wall had come down. Hungary had already had its uprising and I watched the red star being taken down from above the parliament building, a slow, painstaking business undertaken by workmen, not the result of a surge of popular sentiment. I wasn’t arrested because I was associated with the fight for freedom. I was arrested coming out of church after mass on a Sunday morning. The church was a rococo spectacular of gold cherubim and seraphim and the mass, though Roman Catholic, had many touches of the Eastern orthodox: incense, chanting and old ladies in black bowing repeatedly.

Outside in the bright sunlight in the square in front of the church were many Tamil young men, presumably having escaped from war-torn Sri Lanka. I was assumed, I guess, to be one of them. I am indeed of Tamil origin, so in a way the two burly policemen in grey and navy blue were right. I was taken firmly by the upper arm, a policeman at either side, put in the back of a police car and taken to a police station in a dingy suburb. There they put me against the wall and demanded my passport, which I didn’t have with me. It was in the hotel. I explained this in my best schoolboy German, which only served to incense them further. In their minds there was clearly something frustrating and unacceptable about the difficulties of locating who I was and where I came from. They laughed at the suggestion I was British. They searched my wallet, examining each credit card and looking particularly derisively at the BMW rescue card. They made me remove my shoes and pulled the inner soles of them out. I was baffled by it all and they were increasingly irritated. Then they left me on my own in a grey, windowless corridor for twenty minutes or so. After that a more senior, but smaller, police officer appeared in civvies and told them to release me. He had confirmed my identity with the hotel and had clearly angrily denounced the hotel staff for not registering all foreigners with the police station. The old Soviet practices were not yet extinguished.

Budapest is still the same beautiful Austro-Hungarian city it was then, now much cleaned up and restored. If Berlin is a miracle, Budapest is a fantasy. It is a city of castles and palaces; of dogs hunting outside the classical museum, angels poised to fly down from the Pest hillside across the city and lions guarding access to the bridge. The city that looked to Austria, but also to Transylvania is once more evident and points the mind to the fairy tale and fantasy traditions, of magical castles and terrifying wolves, that emanates from central Europe.

The churches are brightly lit at nights, their illuminated tracery like filigree. And through it all runs the broad, curving, river Danube, looking almost organic as it sways through the city. The metro is something like the New York subway and something like the Paris Metro. It is older than both. The wood panelled funicular still climbs the hill to Pest. Hungarian wine is much improved and Zara and H&M have replaced the old shops selling Austrian hunting jackets and pipes made from deer horn. Amazingly the Luxus department store, though re-located, remains and still has a certain drab GDR-chic. It doesn’t look like the window dressers have been made redundant.

No sign yet of Gucci and the other top end brands. Hungary is the least successful of the accession economies. Unlike the Czech Republic, the growth rate is pathetic and the Government unpopular. Nor have a million people left to seek their fortunes elsewhere, as in Poland. The old Magyar aristocracy have returned from Vienna and other European cities and reclaimed their place in Hungarian society, arranging congenial jobs for their children in the Brussels bureaucracy. They are, according to more ordinary middle class Hungarians, staggeringly sentimental, becoming dewy-eyed at the mere utterance of the word Mozart or Sachertorte. They are also un-self-critical and incompetent. The Budapest Sun says Ferenc Gyursany, the Hungarian Prime Minister, has ‘become synonymous with lies and disliked reforms in Hungary…He is, without doubt, more popular everywhere else than at home…the majority of a non-Hungarian audience (at the London School of Economics) is simply more optimistic, gullible or just not affected nor interested’. Freedom of the press, in Hungary as elsewhere, has evidently been worth fighting for. Irony and sarcasm are the beneficiaries.

There is nothing here for Tamils now. I am the only Tamil in Budapest now.

See the photos of Budapest at www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets

Where to buy a tweed jacket in Dublin

If you’re cool, when you visit Dublin you’ll stay at Morrison’s Hotel. It’s on the other side of the Liffey opposite Temple Bar. The staff are all handsome men and women under 30, dressed in black and universally not Irish. The interior is all white stone floors, horizontal dark wood panelling and low sepulchral lighting. Over the curved dinning room hangs a gigantic sculpture of a male athlete, with a mildly Soviet air about him. The lifts are black outside and in. In the rooms are TVs which are also computers, with a personal welcome message on the screen. There is also a stereo system with an LCD display of the names of Irish radio stations. If you are the sort of person whose sleep is disturbed by too many winking lights the only solution is to unplug the lot. That probably destroys the finely balanced computer programme. Let’s hope so.

You can get into the heart of historic Dublin in a moment or two. Walk along Ormand Quay, past the lovely Winding Stair bookshop, cross the river and into the narrow cobbled streets of Temple Bar. Trinity and the Bank of Ireland are just up the road to the left. They are your first brush with neo-classical and Georgian Dublin.

Head down Grafton Street for the shops. The first stop in search of the Donegal tweed jacket is Brown Thomas. The department store is full of the coolest, cutting edge global fashion brands, Prada, Y3, Gucci etc. Some of the fashion brands are only available in their home towns and, of course, New York, such as the Hong Kong brand, Vera Wang. Hong Kong, New York, Dublin. No tweed jackets here.

Angela says that she remembers her first visit to Dublin. There were no restaurants. Priests and nuns were everywhere. Everyone was small, pale and looked miserable. The centre of Dublin is now one of the most diverse places in the world. Women wearing the hijab, origin not obvious, sit drinking coffee and talking to their friends in Starbucks, gently pushing a baby buggy back and forth in the hope of the child staying asleep a little longer. The buggy is festooned with carrier bags like a Christmas tree. On Grafton Road a Roma woman stands holding her child on her hip next to a big flower stall, not begging, just watching. Young men of various non-white ethnic origins stand with billboards pointing you to Timberland, Guess and other shops just off Grafton Road, lest you don’t spot them. They are busy talking and laughing together and don’t look like they care much whether you see their signs or not. From time to time they give their signs to each other to hold while they answer their mobile phones. So one young man is holding signs pointing to two different shops in opposite directions.

The only nun visible is black and looks like she comes from Africa. No priests are evident on the street, but they are still a part of Irish life. Father Brian D’Arcy told the Irish Times of his concern (apparently shared by many other priests) that the shortage of priests mean that they now have to say several masses a day. As a result their increased consumption of communion wine may take them over the legal limit for alcohol consumption when driving. “I don’t like to use the word wine, as it is the precious blood in the Eucharist, it still has all the characteristics of wine when in the blood stream”. Apparently the Vatican bans the use of non-alcoholic wine even if the priests have confessed to being alcoholics.

The great influx of migrants to Ireland (now ten per cent of Ireland's population, mostly arriving in the last decade) from all over the world has left the authorities scrambling to work out the ways and means of identity and integration. The subject is hotly debated. NGOs have sprung up to research, campaign and lobby. Academics are busily researching. Officials in local authorities and the Civil Service have started drawing up plans and strategies to promote anti-racism and equality. They look for ideas and a compass from universities and from other countries. Should they be accepting the new arrivals as new Irish citizens, here to stay, or are they travellers in a global labour market, here today, gone tomorrow? Politicians are wary of the issue, speaking with forked tongue, pointing to economic benefits, talking about the need for fairness and tolerance but also seeking to assuage the fears of more traditional Irish people. They may feel that, whilst much has been gained by economic growth in the Celtic Tiger, something else - durable and significant traditions and certainties - has been lost. Something of the Irish identity is going, perhaps gone. And the loss has been unplanned; a casual destruction. Or perhaps their anxieties and fears are less clearly defined than that, just a feeling that things have changed and the consequences will be unfamiliar and maybe unwelcome. The fear is of the unknown, the different; the feeling that they may become outsiders in Ireland's ill-defined post-modern future. Bertie Ahern's says that immigrants must be 'Irish first'.

From the other perspective, Ireland has at last become a cosmopolitan place, not only because of migration, at peace with freedom, individuality and diversity. The theocratic reactionary past has been discredited and shaken off, and not a moment before time. On this wing of the debate they think that too little has yet changed and too late. The referendum on divorce was divisive. The forthcoming referendum to legalise gay and lesbian civil partnerships promise to make the debate about divorce look like a well-mannered discussion over tea in Bewley’s. And on migration and diversity, they look for leadership which clearly states that diversity is an irreversible benefit, fairness a requirement. Intolerance is unacceptable and will be punished. From both perspectives change has been so rapid that consequences are confusing; destination unknown.

The lovely Bewley’s Oriental Cafe is still there unchanged on Grafton Street, with its beautiful art deco gold mosaics. In the window behind the grinning pumpkins (today being Halloween) are three elderly ladies having tea and a glass of sherry. Why not, even if its’s only 3pm? Behind them are a group of Chinese people having tea. No sign of any tweed jackets for sale anywhere on Grafton Road.

St Stephens Green looks magical with the last of the red and golden autumn trees losing their leaves and taking on the skeletal air of winter. If you come out by the Shelbourne, you can walk down Kildare Street and have a look through the windows at the sleek diners in the Shelbourne’s restaurant. Down Kildare Street are some of the most distinctive Georgian buildings in Dublin. The National Museum and the National Library and the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland. All are elegant unadorned statements of clarity and symmetry

At the bottom of Kildare Street you come out on Nassau Street, opposite Trinity again. Here there are some Irish souvenir shops. None of them sell Donegal tweed. And then - at last - I spot Kevin&Howland Ltd, an old-fashioned shop containing every imaginable pattern of tweed for men and women. Mostly it’s brown. The outside is painted brown; the furniture is brown and most of the items for sale are brown. The suits and coats are in long rows. Not for this shop is the modern retailing habit of hanging just a few identical black clothes a respectful distance apart from each other and bathing them in sharp white down light. The selection of tweed fabrics is enormous though the styles are rather more standard. The staff are formal and friendly. A trendy, bespectacled, overweight, bald young man is encouraged to think that a pillar box red tweed waistcoat is not too ‘shouty’. Another young male customer is reassured that the floppy ‘Great Gatsby’ cap will return to its original shape after a soaking of Irish rain if you squash up plastic carrier bags and stuff the cap with them until it dries. The fabric I especially like is not available in my size. It appears that virtually every item is unique. I settle on one quite like my original choice, but the pattern is ‘herringbone’ not ‘window pane’. The middle aged man who serves me has a tiny pair of scissors in his pocket to cut away the threads keeping the pockets stitched. If you want a lovely tweed jacket go to Kevin&Howland, but you’d best go soon.

In the National Library is an exhibition about the life of William Butler Yeats. The photo of the poet shows a romantic young man, fine hair flying, with a firm jaw line, a serious expression and a romantic look, his far-sighted eyes behind wire-rimmed lorgnettes. The exhibition has a mock up of his library and the backstage area at the Abbey Theatre, displays of his manuscripts under glass, first editions of programmes for his plays, portraits of Maud Gonne and large backlit photos of the Lake Isle of Innisfree and Coole House. There is also a dark moody photo of his mossy gravestone and his famous epitaph.

Cast a cold Eye
On Life, on Death.
Horseman, pass by!

A recording of WHAuden’s In Memory of WBYeats, read by the author, is playing softly in the background. Then a recording of Sinead O’Connor reading Easter 1916.

All changed, changed utterly, a terrible beauty is born.

see the photos of Dublin at www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets

How to open a shopping mall in Hong Kong

1. Find a piece of real estate which you already own in a central location, such as an airport or an underground station

2. If it is an underground station you will need planning permission to build on top of it. You will have to compensate all those who hold low value ransom strips and leases at ground level.

4. Conduct a global search for architects. The best architects are likely to be international and have done big shopping malls before, in the USA or Japan perhaps. The newest shopping mall in Hong Kong, above the Jordan MTR station, called Elements was designed by the architects of Bluewater, built on an old quarry, south of London

5. Work out your concept; develop a brand and a brand identity. Elements wanted a more contemporary, less conventional feel than the other top end mall in Hong Kong, Pacific Place. In Pacific Place, the identity is rigidly controlled. All the shops have to do their fascias in white and chrome. The only latitude they have is over the choice of font. This gives the whole place a uniform white-ness and chrome-ness.

6. In Elements, along with global brands like Gucci (the biggest Gucci store in the world is in Elements), they also persuaded funky and less well known Japanese brands to take out leases, such as the design shop BALS Tokyo. Many of these have no other outlets in Hong Kong. British fashion brands, some of which do have a quirky alternative appeal, at least to foreigners are notoriously parochial and almost impossible to persuade. Hence you rarely see a Paul Smith or a Kilgour or even a Top Shop. Meanwhile Zara (Spanish) and H&M (Swedish), along with all the French and Italian luxury brands are absolutely everywhere in Hong Kong and everywhere else. The only British brands in Elements are Kent&Curwen and Karen Millen. Karen Millen is now owned by Philip Green who was reluctant to expand in Hong Kong and the store in Elements is a franchise. Fewer restrictions were placed on visuals.

7. Build the space, Elements is more than a million square feet, not including a huge open air 'civic space' on the roof.

8. Hire an international art consultant from New York or London to buy and install cutting edge contemporary art, particularly large sculptures, in the public areas of the mall.

8. Make sure there are plenty of nice places to eat with cutting edge fusion cuisine and the best European chocolate and patisserie. That will re-energise your customers for another bout of wandering and spending.

9. Make the loos fabulous and build luxurious baby changing facilities. They should be like a first class airport lounge, not just a fold down plastic table falling off the wall of the loo. There is almost nowhere to go in Hong Kong with a small baby. A mall is perfect, air-conditioned and plenty of places to sit, eat, drink and talk whilst the baby sleeps. Then a nice lounge for baby feeding, changing and chatting to other mothers.

10. Use your launch marketing to get yourself on the front page of the newspaper. Elements had aerial acrobats acting as flying advertisements. That got them the photo slot on the front page of the South China Morning Post.

11. When you open make sure you have loads of handsome, well-dressed, knowledgeable staff everywhere to point people in the right direction.

12. Watch the queues form with quiet pleasure on the opening day.

13. On the opening weekend check that all the restaurants and cafes have queues and stop at a bar incognito and enjoy a glass of champagne and a bowl of noodles (a little known but wonderful combination). Sit on your own, savouring the taste of your own success.

14. Don't go near the place for another two or three years, just check the rentals on-line, while keeping an eye on commercial rents generally.

15. Pay off the debt in three years.

16. Build another one.

Source: Betty Leong over an espresso and a chocolate cake on the opening Saturday in Elements, with my own additional suggestions

How to make the perfect cup of green tea

1. Warm the pot, both inside and outside. First pour some hot water into the pot and leave it to warm. Then pour hot water over the outside of the pot, including over the spout. Pour away the water in the pot.

2. Put the tea leaves in the pot, a little more than a teaspoon of leaves per cup.

3. Wet the green tea leaves with water at room temperature (not too cold). Green tea tastes bitter if made with boiling water. The perfect temperature is 90 degrees.

4. Boil the kettle. Once it has boiled wait for a moment and then pour hot water on to wet leaves.

5. Leave to stand for a few seconds. This is to cleanse the tea leaves.

6. Pour the first pot of tea away. It will be too bitter.

7. Wet the leaves again with water at room temperature.

8. Add hot water and leave to stand for 2-3 minutes. If you leave to stand for longer, the first pouring will steal all the taste and the second pourings and those thereafter will be weak and uninteresting.

9. Enjoy the perfect cup of green tea

10. When the tea is finished keep the leaves and use them again later (following steps 3 - 9).

11. Tomorrow start again with some new leaves.


Source: Tea house in Hong Kong park, with suggested improvements in search of perfection from Ann Wong