Pillow Talk: Tastings & adjectives

Pillow talk is a series of short ponderings - those little thoughts you have just as you are going to sleep at night, waking up in the morning, or after an afternoon nap.

#PillowForYourThoughts

Tastings and Adjectives - Sunday afternoon reflection on how you approach writing about things when you're trying to communicate what the experience is like, in particular, cocktails.

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Understanding Malaysia: part one of ?

‘The (Malay)Asian Friend’ I think this will be a series of essays, a disgruntled thread that may take a lifetime to untangle. The continued misunderstanding of a complex nation, where borders and boundaries come from flux, where the jungle makes lines in the earth an impossibility and yet politics, nationalism, colonial lens and the exotic touristic eye compete to limit and define a nation built on migration and the movement of people. (and I realise that this could refer to not just Malaysia!) My original gripe comes from the limitation of how Malaysia food, and therefore Malaysians, gets represented in London. I write in my book (out in a year’s time) that we are boiled down to a few dishes - “roti canai, beef rendang, nasi lemak, nasi goreng, maybe sambal, and now laksa.” The request for these dishes is like a checklist of if a restaurant is ‘authentically’ Malaysia, or someone is authentically Malaysian if they know/like/eat them. You don’t crave nasi lemak, are you really Mal...

Intentions: feeling for the borders

I feel like so much of my life is reaching out and trying to feel for the boundaries and borders of myself. My place in the world, the ‘where’ I am situated. Borders are things that exist only when being policed, they are violent because of this. Am I policing myself if I look for the edges? There is security in knowing what keeps me bound in, what binds me, but in all this seeking I keep finding myself without boundaries - what do I do , is a question my loved ones never know how to respond to, for example. At my sister’s birthday recently her and a few friends explained how they had described me recently and asked how I describe myself - we all had different answers, all of them the truth. Can the borders of myself shift, and is the current world able to allow for this flexibility? This idea of borders and boundaries seems to be a physical pursuit, I am picturing my fingers wiggling into the darkness, searching for a soft surface to caress. I never want to write a memoir, ...

JANUARY 2015: nostalgia and the here and now of London (and riesling)

I got a little annoyed with January and everyone wanting to have a ‘dry January’. I had worked all through December and I wanted to have fun for the beginning of the year. Luckily I had a few trusted friends who were equally unimpressed with the dry Jan concept. But of course, everyone was broke (including myself) so I decided that it was going to be a month of drinking good wine at home. That’s the thing with London, there is always something good to do, there is always somewhere great to be; it’s a tricky city to be in, when broke. And January is such a sad month, that you want to brighten it up with fun, but you don’t have the money to do so. When I went back to uni to do my PhD I used up all my savings and really didn’t have time to pick up extra work, so even though I graduated six months ago, I’m still playing catch up and living pay check to pay check. Therefore despite the December work slog, I was back to being broke by January. And I know that I’m not alone in this...

TALKING ABOUT FOOD

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