My name is Mz Kitty, and I'm addicted to fabric ...

It's true ... I can't help myself. Whenever I travel I have to collect fabric. And the mother lode is H. P. Singh, Nehru Place, Delhi (closely followed by Okadaya department store in Tokyo, and Habu Textiles in New York if you want to sacrifice your home or first born child).

On one trip to India I brought fabric from travels in Japan and China to get stitched. That's seven dresses worth of fabric. After a trip to the pre-Diwali hand loom fair at Dilli Haat I had enough for seven more long kurthas with left overs. This trip H. P. Singh provided fabric for three pants, two shorts, and two skirts (and I only went in for some grey wool for a skirt).  Lajpat Nagar market rounded the debauchery out with two punjabi suits (enough for kurtha, pants and dupatta).

I have had several tailors now who inevitably disappoint in their inability to turn what I'm seeing in my head into an actual piece of wearable fashion. Mr Noor has been with me the longest and can generally get a kurtha together as long as I'm okay with Chinese collars. He never bats an eyelid even when I turn up with saris and bed spreads to be converted into kurthas. Only once have I seen him stutter as I placed before him a Keralan cotton dupatta, hand painted with a winding lotus.

Master ji: 'Lining madam?'
Mz Kitty: 'No Master ji'
Raised eyebrow. Master ji places his hand underneath the fabric to show its transparency.
Mz Kitty: 'I promise I will only wear it in Europe'.
A sigh; eyebrow lowered.

So concerned is he with my respectability that for sleeveless kurthas he makes little loops on the shoulders to attach my bra straps to so I don't disgrace myself with slippage of lingerie.

Trousers, shirts and dresses can be trickier. My first attempt at getting a halterneck backless dress made took three attempts. The first rendition came back stitched into a version of skirted overalls that if I'd worn without a shirt underneath (defeating somewhat the purpose of a backless dress) would have created an outfit Ann Summers could display in her front window. The second and third tries added patchwork strips till eventually it resembled the original image. The last batch of dresses all had to be sent back at least twice as my hips had expanded in the tailor's imagination to encompass an awful lot of child bearing.

But I think Delhi's tailors are finally rebelling and blacklisting me having worked out that it is an impossible task to make 'madam ji' happy. I had to ask four tailors in Khan Market before I found one who would take on a job of two capris and converting a kurtha into a skirt. But
then maybe a total ban is the only cure.

Hail, the mighty sporkife ...

Making last minute preparations for the start of my GR10 trek I realised I was missing the all important spork.

What joy then to find in my favourite outdoor shop not only sporks in assorted colours BUT some clever bugger has now come up with a spork case to keep them clean and tidy in the backpack.

AND, these particular sporks also have a serrated edge, so in fact they are more of a knoroon or a sporkife.

I fecking love kit.

East London Life

Cheerfully pedalling to work this morning, enjoying a modest summer's day along the canals, I was slowed by a 'Divers at Work' sign in the middle of the towpath. As I passed I cheerfully waved at the divers and cheerfully asked:

'Hello lads, lovely day for it. What are you looking for?'.

They responded, somewhat lacking in cheer:

'Murder weapon'.

Not such a lovely day then for some poor bugger. And I cycled on.

Things about Switzerland ...

  Things that mystify us about Switzerland ...

1. Swiss German. It is the bastard child of romance elisions and Germanic umlauts.
2. Their love of cows and jokes like 'have a nice hay'.
3. Curried corn. It is just so wrong. Unless your chef has spent at least three years at the foot of a South Asian master, stay away from the spice rack. And it doesn't matter how precisely the rice is shaped, if it's not cooked it's still not going to taste nice.Stick to things you're good at Switzerland, like fondue, and hiding large sums of money for dubious people.

  
Things that we love about Switzerland ...

1. Raclette.
2. Rosti.
3. Raclette on rosti.
4. Bread. Fondue. Potatoes. Fat and carbs basically. 
5. Engineering. No messing about. Just put the train line right through the Alps. 
6. 4pm wake up calls, otherwise known as Jagertee, leading to at least another two hours of skiing. Black run anyone? Absolutely.
7. Night skiing with a full moon over an amphitheatre of big mountains.

On lacking imagination and other political faults ....

Yesterday was a very depressing news day. Not only the ongoing stories of war and suffering but now we have George Osborne announcing that his vision for the UK is that we become the richest country in the world. Not the fairest, the most green, the most creative, the most skilled, the most critically thinking country in the world. No, we must become the richest. I don't mind a bit of wealth but if that is all we're aiming for with our collective talent and imagination then I imagine we're going to be one of the poorest countries in the world on many counts.

To top it off we then had London Mayor Boris Johnson on the BBC London news (10 July 2015) announcing his support for a 'loosening' of local planning laws that gives the government more compulsory purchase powers and the mayor more power to override local government planning decisions. According to Boris, the lack of home building in the capital is 'essentially because of democracy, because of restrictions that planning committees place, that councils place'.

Ah yes, that pesky thing called democracy hampering developers in their desire to run a steam roller over every council estate in the city, and constraining the entrepreneurial spirit of the good home owner who wants to add a floor without planning permission that they can then rent out for at least the £1200 per month you would pay for one bedroom in West Ealing. Let's not even look at renting in Zones 1-2, and forget about buying. Boris has yet to explain how this helps the lack of social and affordable housing in the city.

I don't get angry with developers. It is their nature to obfuscate and manipulate in order to make the most profit. It's the Scorpion and the Frog scenario (go watch The Crying Game if you don't know the reference but basically if you're a frog never give a scorpion a free ride across a pond because eventually it will sting you and you'll both drown - it cannot overcome its nature).  I do, however, get angry with government because it is the role of government to mediate, on our behalf, the excesses of developers, not get into bed with them.

So no, Boris, democracy is not the problem. A lack of it is the problem.

Gird your loins, the gloves are off - and other mixed metaphors

Being a firm believer that democracy does not begin and end with elections that happen every few years I'm not so despondent about the new /old government we have here in the UK, or perhaps I'm just getting old and have lived through so many of them now that they all just merge into mediocre blancmange.

I remember a few years ago seeing statistics from the global pew survey on attitudes to democracy. While more and more countries become 'democratic', measured by the fact that they have elections, more and more people are increasingly dissatisfied with it. And this makes sense. Over the years, we seem to have collectively forgotten that power is transferred from we the people to our representatives and that we can withdraw our legitimacy at any time should enough of us say 'sorry to bother you but would you mind terribly not doing that' (as we would say in Britain). Even in the face of a necrotic political-economic elite propped up by scared men inflated into the status of media barons, we have power. We don't actually have to politely wait for another election.

So, pick your battle! Electoral reform seems like a good place to start - from UKIP to the Greens, the periphery needs to march up on the big boys, while they're squabbling in the centre sandpit over whose blancmange is best, and nick all their toys. I am fascinated however whenever I tub thump about electoral reform how many people say 'but that will mean UKIP will get more seats'. Yes, it might or even worse, the BNP. And that's democracy. Those voices need to be heard. It would also mean that Greens, and other socialist oriented parties, even independents, could get more seats and balance would be restored to the universe. It would mean that parties would be forced to put forward actual policies and debate them with dissenting voices - rather than the increasingly stage managed manifesto launches and meet-the-party-faithful gatherings we saw in this election. It would mean that the executive government would have to present policies to a reinvigorated parliament, not the whipped puppy we see before us today, and convince that parliament with sound argument and evidence that what they are proposing is at least necessary. It will mean that politicians could not assume that being our representatives was a job for life.

It will not be perfect. It never will be. But it will be better than the soul destroying option of being told that the only decision we have to make in this country is putting an X next to blue or red every five years. We deserve a bit more choice than that.

Electoral Reform Society
Unlock Democracy

The Cats of Dubrovnik

Commanding the steps, the higher and lower ground, the alley and piazza, from positions of imperious distain, the cats of Dubrovnik do not mewl and they do not beg, but rather deign to be occasionally stroked. Clinging to the sides, they live in shadowlands of walls and wars, avoiding the bright reflections made by souvenir shops on smooth stones when storms pass over and over again. Rebuilt, remade, renewed as medieval imagination, photographs of martyrs fade to white, disappearing like rubble and holes and cats.