Hello, friends. It's been a pretty unhealthy few weeks in my household. Nick is going into his 5th straight week of viral bleurgh (three separate viruses one after the other, we're pretty sure) for which his lungs are taking a beating, and I strained my back last week before promptly coming down with a cold. Basically, he can't breathe and I can't move. We're like the dangling punchline of a bad … [Read more...]
Fatberg!
Hello, friends! Did you hear about the "fatberg"? It was a 15-ton conglomeration of solid fat found in a London sewer. (This NPR blog post has a photo. If you're the queasy type, don't click; just take my word for it.) This thing was 15 tons of congealed fat mixed with disposable wipes. Sewage workers spent 3 weeks hacking it into chunks which were then taken away in "heavy-duty lorries". They … [Read more...]
A coffee and “two thin”
Hello, friends. At the grocery store recently, I was overwhelmed by the idea of how much energy goes into producing and packaging the food I eat. I bought a bunch of cilantro that was grown in California, with all the ground preparation, seeding, watering, weeding, and pest-deterring that farming entails. It was picked (hopefully by legal labour, not migrant children), washed, roots lopped off … [Read more...]
The Berners Street Hoax
Hello, friends. Many of you know that I love Judith Flanders's work. She writes marvellously detailed social histories and her special area interest is the Victorian period. I highly recommend both The Victorian House and Consuming Passions for anyone interested in Victorian daily life, and The Invention of Murder is irresistible for those, like me, who love mysteries and detective fiction. … [Read more...]
Faster, Higher, Stronger
So, the Olympics. As cynical as we've become about doping, fiscal and political scandals in host cities, and the sheer pomp of the Games, the athletic performances themselves are truly stirring, skin-prickling stuff. And the Olympics hold a special kind of interest in my family because my uncle, Cheah Tong Kim, represented his country, Malaysia, in swimming at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Over the … [Read more...]
La Detective
My Italian publisher, Mondadori, just sent me the cover for their edition of Spy, which will be published in March. Its title is La Detective. Note how artificially calm I sound, in these few sentences. Here's the full dust jacket: And now, the truth: I screamed like a girly-girl when I saw this. I can’t get over it. I love the use of period photographs, the wrought-iron … [Read more...]