Never skimp on food

Allow me to slip on my form-fitting gold vinyl bunny suit and wish you Happy Easter! Not everyone is a fan of Christianity but there's no denying Jesus performed the ultimate act of heroism by dying for our sins, bequeathing us a really long weekend in the process. So much of the quality of this festival depends on the quality of the food that gets churned out every year - the hot cross buns, the chocolate, the candy, the cakes..and because it's a HOLIDAY I don't have to eat them hunched over my workdesk like a wizened ape trying to stop crumbs from spilling all over the keyboard. All I have to do is pop the top button on my jeans and spend the next four days on the couch in a continual snack loop, moving only for bowel and bladder reasons.

As the very wealthy will tell you, never skimp on food. Caviar? Only the very best. Truffles? Let's see what the pigs dragged in today. Foie gras? Use it in place of butter. If you're not already living a life of shameless excess then you probably need to take a step back and reassess your lifestyle. Some suggestions, gleaned from recent offerings, follow.



The Macdonald sandwich costs $148 making it the world's most expensive sandwich. Sold at Selfridges in London, it contains Wagyu beef, fresh lobe foie gras, black truffle mayonnaise, brie de meaux, rocket, red pepper and mustard confit and English plum tomatoes. However it is not as high class as you would think because there are no diamonds embedded in the bread. It is essentially a fancy-sounding beef salad sammich without the free fries and drink. Sandwiches that aren't sold by the end of the day will be distributed to homeless people who have developed a taste for succulent Japanese cattle.



That's more like it, the Diamond Stella Egg is covered with 100 half-carat diamonds and valued at $87,500. Instead of being glued on, chocolate artisans dropped a bunch of diamonds into the melting vat and hoped for the best. The resulting egg is bigger than my head but contains much much more like peach and apricot chocolates and pralines. I'm not one to talk but some say it can even be used as a fake pregnant belly.



Wash your meal down with the $1000 mint julep (found on the FTOTZ). Mint from Morocco, ice from the Arctic Circle and sugar from the South Pacific...how charmingly diverse, even more so than the Jolie-Pitt family! The souvenir gold cup and silver straw make a valuable addition to, or a good starting point for accumulating, the family silver. Proceeds go to help retired racehorses, a far more deserving group than say retired celebrities who come out of retirement whenever the coke money runs out.

Finally, if you're preparing for the arrival of the Easter Rabbit this year, make sure that your ladder is amply stocked with festive treats. Don't hold out on him because I hear he has a tendency to treat people's gardens as his personal buffet table.

In which Pooh has the awesomest birthday party ever

Congratulations Pooh Bear! I don't know what you did to earn a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame but then again Godzilla and Kermit the Frog managed to achieve the same honour and I haven't seen them in anything decent for ages. Not to mention the last time Godzilla appeared on the big screen, he was severely outacted and outclassed by Jean Reno!



It was also good of Pooh's good buddies to come out and support him (all except Piglet that is, who had stormed off in a huff after finding out that Pooh would be in the centre of every photo) because this is probably the only time they'll get close to a red carpet. Personally I think Eeyore deserves props for delivering such a brilliantly understated and unrestrained performance throughout the series but unfortunately the personal life of a morose donkey doesn't generate enough heat to warrant tabloid coverage.

The dedication ceremony coincided with Pooh's 80th birthday meaning there was lots to celebrate. Once they reached the birthday venue Pooh and his friends clambered out of their itchy polyester costumes and that's when the party really got started.


Suddenly it all made sense. Why there's a redwood forest in the Playboy Mansion, why they're called HEFFalumps, why Pooh always has three companions, what Pooh really means when says "Oh, stuff and fluff", why that apology letter to Jessica Alba (star of Honey) took so long to write and was punctuated with lots of "Oh bothers".....


I gotta say that Tigger sure knows how to bounce out of a cake. But the best birthday present of all was the news that the wise and gentle Christopher Robin would be replaced with a girl for the next animated series. Even through the depths of 80-year-old brain fog, Pooh had a very clear idea of which girl he wanted share in his unusual adventures in the enchanted part of the forest.

We take our fashion very seriously

Forgive me little ones! In trying to keep up with the devastating onslaught of fashion week after fashion week around the world, I allowed my attention to stray from home. Had I known that Vogue was going to do a piece about Haute Hong Kong I would have helped them along a little bit. It's like Fashion Roadkill with designer name-dropping! As it is, the resulting piece belies the spirit of what it means to be fabulously wealthy in Hong Kong. I don't need Vogue to tell me that we take our fashion seriously. Clothes were described inaccurately. People were misquoted. Liberties were taken. But with some skilful editing I've managed to make the world right again.


Fashion lover Mira Yeh explained, "All my life I wanted to own a deranged poodle but the ones in Hong Kong are creepily sane", so she chose to stylistically commemorate the pet that never was. The unique lace effect was created by the jaws of an overeager rottweiler.


Swimwear designer Wendy Hotung had a young Manila cake decorator set his icing gun to Traditional Wedding Cake and work his magic. Her bag is an "Original Sacher-Torte" and her shoes are those dainty petit fours they serve you right at the end of the meal when you are so stuffed and can't positively eat anything more. But the thought that they are factored in the price of your meal somehow forces your stomach to open up a teeny bit so you manage to cram a fistful down like painkillers during a morning hangover and empty the rest into your handbag. Wendy says, "I had five minutes to whisk my outfit together. There was no time for sprinkles".


Actress Josie Ho declared, "Watch out for those foot grills, I nearly burnt my toes off. Do you think if I stand like this Karl Lagerfeld will notice that one leg is shorter than the other? Although I come from money I am trying to act like I don't really belong here and that I find wearing Chanel to be a somewhat awkward experience because I'm an actress and that's what actresses do. Act and wear Chanel."


Fanny Sieh, known as the "ball queen of Hong Kong" chose a dress that has been worn several times over but with a wider slit to expose that most klassy of cleavages, côté cleavage (or side cleavage to laymen):

"To go to a Chanel show, one must err on the side of Drew Barrymore."


For the Alexander McQueen fashion show at the legendary Joyce boutique, starlet Hilary Tsui eschewed her hairbrush. Her shoes are expensive and too big for her but she likes to think it's because she lost a lot of weight through doing that krumping thing Madonna does in her music videos.


Joyce shopper Venice Chan spent a lot of money on shiny stuff from Dior but didn't actually try any of it on beforehand, hence what you see above. Her daughter Orange is loathful of her name and equally loathful of being made to wear an orange tank top but no matter how hard she tries, can't resent the fact that she can use "Michael Kors", "Chloe" and "Pucci" in the same sentence to describe the rest of her outfit.

Fashion Roadkill of the Day: Vol 49

Lately I've been wonderful to be around. Everybody's been trying to guess what's come over me. Is it because I've stopped taking medication? Started new medication? Or just a new haircut? Why no silly, it's because I've finally made peace with leggings.



Like anyone else I thought they were harbingers of death and destruction to street fashion. Slowly they would work their way into everyone's attire until we would all be transformed into the lycra-bound walking undead. But the more I saw the more I began to understand them. Yes they are ugly and they serve no real purpose and 99.99% of people don't have the ankles for them, but they're part of our history. It's not up to us to selectively decide what to ignore and what to celebrate. If we turn our backs on leggings, we might as well erase from our collective memories the entire catalogue of 80s fashion. Let's just pretend shoulderpads, side ponytails and double t-shirts in pastel colours never existed! Absurd!

I tell you I was making such good progress, I'd even stopped gagging at the sight of lace leggings (see above right)! Then BAM! Out of nowhere, it all came undone by a woman who didn't know the meaning of middle-aged.



Flesh-coloured leggings. A formidable adversary indeed. They lull you into thinking that you're going to be treated to an impromptu show of a stranger's ladybits and then you take a closer look against your better judgment and it turns out to be much much worse. So now I'm back to hating leggings, and not to mention flesh-coloured sleeves too.

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