We’d bought quite a nice one, actually.  It had made sense because we were only the second people ever to have lived in that apartment. Everything was very modern and sleek in there, though it was also restrictively small.  We’d previously satisfied ourselves with cheap water dispensers, usually in the ghastly blue and white of those tracksuit high school uniforms (when will these trends end?).  This time, we’d plumped for something black and dark gold, something like real furniture. Tall, free-standing. Space for paper cups down there. When we moved again, it came...

Des Esseintes is a man with sick fancies. He is the dissipated aristocrat at the centre of Joris-Karl Huysmans’ novel, “À Rebours” . He is the collector of house plants which somehow look fake but aren’t. He owns a tortoise shell encrusted with gem stones. He didn’t want the tortoise to die from contamination. But so be it. Together with figures like Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, he represents the Fin-de-Siecle End-of-19th-Century spirit of jaded pleasure seeking.  Something of this appealed to me as a young man confronting a new century of...

By coincidence, I was recently drinking Yunnan Green tea anyway. My favourite market-stall had been selling some. Yeah, it was cheap. And, despite the unpromising smell and ashen grey appearance, I was curious. I had not bought any of this stuff while in Yunnan itself. I remember seeing it piled high in the market there, dusty, no effort towards preservation. “That’s not the way to treat green tea”, I thought. Moreover, the Yunnan sellers themselves told us not to buy it! Buy the pu er, they said; this can only by...

“Thank you for your tea.” “I just tried it.” “It has a very good taste and smell.” As a proper tea nut, this is the kind of WeChat message I’m used to sending and receiving.  But this was odd. I hadn’t given any tea to my colleague’s girlfriend. So her message made no sense. Then I remembered. Yes, I had given them some curry leaves earlier in the week.  With the huge minimum order of curry leaves purchasable on Taobao, I had given half to the only other person I know nearby who loves Indian...