So near, yet so feared: minding the store

There comes a time in every woman's life when her upper arms start to resemble some kind of battered Swiss cheese, and I am now there; welcoming every opportunity to wear a jacket. The solution for the melty months of Hong Kong is a singlet and some kind of arm-concealer made of chiffon or perforated material.

Lo Wu Shopping Mall is the place I would normally find these items but, this weekend, travelling to Hunan with E, who had come back from America to star in my new Cantonese music video "I Have To Go To The Toilet To Lay A Cable" (available on YouTube on the Cantocourse channel), it all unravelled.

In a matter of weeks, that beautiful shopping centre, paradise of cheap bags, holographic iPhone covers changing between the countenances of Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden has become ... I can barely bring myself to write it … gentrified.

Of course, the transformation didn't happen overnight. Over the past couple of years we have been noticing with dismay more and more shops with shoes I'd actually wear, readymade clothes of good design and a disturbing increase in hat shops.

But this time the shops - or rather, stalls - selling what I really needed: singlets (and T-shirts and long-sleeved jerseys in a really comfortable, no doubt 100 per cent man-made cotton) were gone. They had been gentrified out of existence by poncy little boutique-like rooms with doors.

I walked around for hours without finding a pair of rubber slippers, whereas before every other stall was a damned slipper shop. The shoes I finally found, 40 yuan (HK$50) last year, were now 80 yuan and no bloody pardon. And instead of thankfully accepting the price you decide, the shopkeepers have now become so blasé that they decide how much you pay for goods!