It's just a passing shower

It's pissing it down and I am in my hotel room at 9.30pm on a Saturday night being a dullard. This is on account of the fact that I did a full-on Friday night with Tony and Frank from the office.

It all began with wait for it, an excellent meal at the Rui Fu Yuan restaurant on South Maoming Road. Shanghainese cuisine this time - said to be sweet and oily but to my uneducated and unsubtle palate just another example of great cooking of the freshest ingredients imaginable. Amongst many other dishes, I tried a local delicacy - the charmingly named stinky tofu. Apparently it's made by marinating tofu for ages in cabbage water. I know, you're salivating at the thought of it. Let me tell you that deep fried and with a dollop of chili sauce on top, it tastes like a kind of vegetabley smoked cheese. An acquired taste but delicious.

From there straight to Muse, the club where people go to see and be seen apparently. Great music, but as I mentioned before, no one really goes to dance. I got sucked into playing dice with Tony's entourage. It's basically spoof with dice and the penalty for losing a hand is taking a drink. Somewhere around the middle of the second communal bottle of Absolut, I realised that I wasn't very good at this game in comparison with anyone else round the table. As anyone who's ever looked at my bank statement will tell you, I'm not very good with numbers. Fortunately I am quite good at drinking.

We played out til very late so consequently a late start to Saturday. Isabella from the office took me to the snappily named Shanghai Shiliu Pu Hongqixiang Cloth Market on Dongmen Lu. Endless choices of fabric of every description and dozens of tailors who tend to specialise in shirts, or suits, or Chinese clothes. I picked one that had some really very sharp looking suits hanging on the mannequins and some natty looking shirts as well. This place is heaven for a fat fop like myself. You can specify every little detail you like, any style you want and nothing seems impossible although my chosen tailor did mutter the putonghua equivalent of "I'm a tailor, not a magician" when I told him I wanted a suit that will make me look thin.

I chose a very dark blue cashmere/wool superlightweight cloth for the suit. The suit, with a second pair of trousers, plus five pure cotton shirts will cost me 1200 RMB (expertly bargained down from 1500 through Isabella's fierce sounding negotiations). That's £80 in total. Who is being exploited? The people making these clothes for me for next to nothing (from my perspective) or me when I go into a shop in the UK and pay £50 for a shirt? Or is the person making the shirts the same person and he or she is being exploited in both cases? I don't know.

Assuming that the suit and the shirts - which will be ready in one week - look even vaguely like the ones on display, I shall look like I've borrowed one of Sean Connery's numbers from the early 60's. If it turns out that I've been duped by immaculately dressed dummies (the mannequins that is, not the tailors who all dressed like shit actually, come to think of it...) I will look like I've borrowed one from his less well-know brother, Vince Connery who had a hunchback and one leg shorter than the other.