I love this. Val, you have to finish yours up, girl! And Indy, I love all those details SO MUCH. (Totally with you on the phone thing.) I'm too shy to pester you with questions -- oh my god, I have so many -- so reading that was an unalloyed delight. One of these days I'm going to gather up my courage and ask you about why you moved to the Netherlands, but I might have to have a large glass of wine before I feel brave enough. Is that literally Dutch courage?
Totally unsurprisingly, I got MASSIVELY INSANELY WORDY, so please forgive me. For Christmas, I would like the gift of being succinct. I can't edit for toffee. Anyway, here we go:
1) I was born in Singapore. My family had just moved to Malaysia where healthcare wasnâ€™t particularly fantastic, and my mum had had a very tricky birth with my older brother (the idiot had somehow managed to get the cord wrapped around his neck several times, and had flipped upside down). Singapore has superb hospitals, and as I ended up being a c-section baby, it was a smart choice. My mum laughs about how she knows I wasnâ€™t switched at birth because I was the only tiny pink non-Chinese baby in the nursery.
2) I have three passports: Canadian, American and British. The Canadian is from my mum, who grew up in Toronto. The American is from Dad, whoâ€™s from Boston. The British one I earned for myself by living here in the UK for long enough. If I had to keep only one, itâ€™d be the British â€“ extremely useful and, patriotically speaking, the one I feel most attached to.
3) I really love the colour red. Not fire engine red or brick red or burgundy red, but a true crimson, scarlet, ruby red. It makes me so happy. I love wearing my basic London black clothes, but with a wine red scarf tied around my throat, or a pair of cherry red ballet flats: just a flash of colour amid the drab.
4) Like Indy, I too am an atheist. But Iâ€™m not particularly attached to the word atheist
. Itâ€™s always struck me as entirely inadequate to express my utter joy and wonder at how the universe works. Atheism is often perceived as a kind of empty box that delineates only an absence of belief, whereas for me, science is a thing of unending beauty and mystery. I love the idea that our existence is so improbable, that we are unbearably lucky to be alive and to be conscious
of that life. I love that the molecules that make me up will one day go on to be something else â€“ a blade of grass, a comet, a breath of air, a star, or even another human being. Our lives are incredibly precious and unlikely. They are, in their own way, miracle enough.
5) I love Chinese food. I love to cook it, I love to eat it, I love to think about it. I love it all. From shiny mahogany-laquered Cantonese roast duck, to plump, bouncy prawn cheung fun dim sum, to numbing, fiery Sichuan fish-fragrant aubergine â€“ oh, itâ€™s all magical to me. My current favourite cookbook is Fuchsia Dunlopâ€™s Sichuan Cookery
, and even if you never make a single thing from it, itâ€™s still a wonderful, delicious read.
6) About ten years ago, I became seriously clinically depressed. It came on quite suddenly, and so severely that I had to leave high school for a year to get well. I still get ill from time to time, but Iâ€™m so incredibly lucky to have the very finest doctors in the world taking care of me, as well as parents who are as loving and supportive as it is possible to be. In the last couple of years I have been re-diagnosed as being bi-polar, although not with the more commonly-known manic depression. I am, somewhat amusingly, a hypo
manic depressive, which means that although I get the suicidally bad lows, I only get little baby highs, and not the WHEEEEEEEEEEEE! LETâ€™S HAVE SEX AND SPEND ALL MY MONEY mania that others are plagued with. Itâ€™s really, really important for me to be open about this because when I was first diagnosed, I knew of no one who had gone through anything like it, and I was deeply, desperately ashamed of myself for succumbing to it. I am a fierce
advocate for talking about my experiences because there is nothing
as soul-rackingly lonely as believing that you are alone in your illness.
7) I love tea. I could give up everything for tea.
8 ) My favourite place on earth is my paternal grandparentsâ€™ summer cottage on the coast of Maine. Although, technically, it now belongs to my parents, my brother, and I as my grandfather died at the ripe old age of 95 this time last year. The cottage isnâ€™t big or fancy, but itâ€™s wonderful
. Itâ€™s set right on the water, peeking through pine trees at the sparkling, sail boat-dotted sea, and it is as close to heaven as Iâ€™ll ever get:
9) I donâ€™t have my driverâ€™s licence. What? Stop looking at me like that. I know, I know
! But Iâ€™m a city girl! I grew up in London where driving is a bloody nightmare and public transportation is brilliant, and getting your licence just isnâ€™t a rite of passage for kids here the way it is in North America. But maybe this is the year Iâ€™ll do it. Maybe
10) Iâ€™d really like to go to Bhutan. There are yetis there! YETIS!