I really want to see Marie Antoinette. I wish they were showing it here in Kuala Lumpur. It's raining here too, battering the city as the monsoon shifts, deflating the intense heat a little and washing away the smell of rubbish and shit from the back alleys near my guesthouse. I don't like it here much and though I know I'm only passing through, I’m missing Manchester; my friends and preoccupations. Brian Jonestown on the ipod gave me a pang earlier. I was on my way to book an overnight ticket to Thailand. I looked out from the monorail and hated the city.

The Malay, Chinese and Indian communities here appear to coexist peacably enough, unlike in the past. But the country is only fifty years old. Perhaps partly as a result the nation's binding glue seems to involve the wholehearted adoption of crass global consumer culture. Crap aspects of life in the west like Versace, TGI Fridays, KFC and Paris Hilton drape ugly concrete architecture with the shiny livery of modernity. Which, combined with a lack of obvious alternatives and kicks, Malaysia being a fairly conservative, predominantly Islamic state, is a bit boring and depressing. I'm fighting my inner cultural snob here, knowing that to get any real measure of a city one needs to live it, know its people, not simply take the tourist's digi-eye view.