  I'm in sartorial lust again. I was just reminded of a beautiful pair of shoes I saw and tried on with Justin Soo 2 years back in London: urlLink urlLink Red House , they call it.
No patterns, no stitching, no broguing - just one single piece of leather for the upper. They looked gorgeous on me and felt like heaven. Now imagine them in this sort of Burnished Tan colour: urlLink But alas, they're over £200 a pair - £220 for the simpler model and £297 for the best ones.
The rest of the urlLink site 's stunning too - I love their shoes! Keep on drooling, Ed. ( That's a hint for you readers to pool some money together to buy me a pair! ) Tried finding a new toothbrush today. All the shops had were Soft and Medium. Doesn't anyone use Hard toothbrushes anymore? There will be no jokes about putting hard things in my mouth. ( Anthony, this means you! ) Had a brunch appointment with Remí today, and thanks to his usual punctuality, it turned into a lunch appointment. I was glad to see him again - he's doing alright in National Service, almost nearing the end of his BMT (Basic Military Training). He's deeply tanned, has no hair, but has kept his sense of humour. He loves the humanities deeply, and cannot imagine life without music, books and beautiful things.
He also wants me to run a sort of intense crash-course in high-culture for him when he has his week of leave after finishing BMT, before he gets posted to a unit. We'll see about that. He's such a sweet little goof. The quite-good and conveniently-located Bellagio's Gelato in Holland Village in Singapore has closed. I only realised this when Cheryl and I went down for a spot of Gelato after lunch today and found, to our horror, the place empty and a "For Rent" sign up.
A pity, they weren't bad and not too expensive either. Ye shall be missed. The blazing tropical heat seemed a lot hotter after that. It seems that the Turks are now claiming Homer was Turkish, and that he was actually named Omar. Ha. Speaking of Omars... Omar Sharif, the venerable actor, now aged 71, is learning ancient Greek: Fluent in several languages, the elder Sharif said he has taken up the study of ancient Greek. "One of two things will happen: I will have died learning something useless but beautiful, or I shall die having read Homer in the original.
It may seem stupid but you have to have a beautiful mission in life. " Good for him! Reading my friend urlLink Alfian's blog , I have new respect for the Malay tongue, which I had hitherto considered a primitive and savage language: Malay is a subtle and complex language, and its many modes of pronoun address are enough to give me a headache. Take, for example the word 'we'. In Malay, two versions of 'we' exist: one, 'kami', excludes the person addressed to, and 'kita', includes this person.
If I take such examples of exclusion and inclusion further, then it is possible to conclude that Malay society is extremely stratified, going back to its early feudal roots, where separation was enforced between the court and the rakyat, the formal and colloquial. I'm surprised that the distinction exists in Malay - it certainly doesn't exist in any language that I know, and I recall asking my teachers of ancient tongues at King's College whether there were different sorts of the pronoun "we/us" that included or excluded the person to whom it was addressed. 
