Sadly, it was. My attempts to make chapattis, dal and chicken curry for my landlord and landlady were politely accepted but they both decided unusually to have cheese and biscuits after the meal had been cleared up. Later attempts to make chicken curry and rice for a group of fellow students were no better (and the audience less hesitant to say so). On that occasion, I was not helped at all by an English friend who, driven by hunger perhaps, and seeing the grey, watery, greasy bubbling broth in the pan, suggested we put in a bit of everything there was in the shared student kitchenette, including instant coffee. The girl I was hoping to impress dove into the food when it finally appeared and said “Why does it like a cup of coffee?”. It could have been the milk we added when the coffee made the whole mess too dark.

But we were so desperate for familiar food that we tasted memories instead of what there was in front of us. Recipes from relations took me only so far because they assumed I had a fully stocked kitchen instead of a dwindling bank balance and tea, instant coffee and partly used bottles of milk of uncertain age. There was no refrigerator (think how much we saved in electricity bills) but the house was so damp and cold that as long as it was only for tea and coffee, the vintage of the milk could be ignored until it unhappily curdled into lumps.

The problem was that I thought about cooking as if it were a poor form of handicraft. I knew some carpentry and metal working and my efforts there usually ended with a sense of relief that there was nothing more anyone could possibly do with that tormented piece of wood or steel. I had a smilar sense of accomplishment from my cooking. One could no more take the instant coffee out of the curry than hide a crack along the length of the wood or a hole drilled in the wrong place.

Years later, when my young family relied on me to produce interesting food, I came across Madhur Jaffrey’s ‘Invitation to Indian Cooking’. The only book on Indian cooking I had read before that was by someone who suggested that spices were best fried in a silver pan and only half of what had been thus fried should be used. But Madhur Jaffrey talked to me through her books and that is a conversation I have with her each time I cook Indian food. (And one that, many decades later, is something she — bless her soul and her skills — is still unaware of.)

She tells me reproachfully as I rush through cooking, “If you start to take short cuts like turning the heat up because you’re in a hurry, of course the onions will get burned. Never mind now, everyone’s watiing for you to finish. Get the unburned bits out into something else and cook them gently with the spices.” And her reserved commendations: “I am glad you like the taste at the end. The recipe is hard to get wrong. But next time, remember to heat the oil before you put in the onions.”

My interest in following a recipe still depends on how it is written. The recipe I used today for ratatouille (http://www.beyond.fr/food/ratatouille.html) was convincing because the author started with two classical recipes that would have taken up all the pots in the kitchen and all day and then gave a simplified version that he or she said produced the same results with far less effort. And apparently, that is just what’s done in most French households.

I had been tempted to follow Delia’s Smith’s recipe (she started talking to me ever after I first saw her on television) but decided decided against salting the freshly cut aubergine and courgettes (“to get the bitterness out”). We like bitterness, especially the real bitterness in bitter gourd; a little bitterness from aubergive and courgette is not something to take out. And, yes, salt likes me a lot less than I would like it to.

Another island had a hill top pavilion from where we were promised a grand panoramic view of a large part of the bay. The wise ones enjoyed the view from the sandy beach. Because what neither Cheung nor the signs on the path said is that it takes a very stiff climb up a several hundred steps to get to the top.

There are of course unexpected rewards for the foolhardy. I got there heaving and panting to find a group of what looked like seven Vietnamese vestal virgins facing a photographer using a camera with a lens the size of a small mortar. One by one they posed languorously against the railings, letting the setting sun outline their slim bodies under the folds of their white gowns while their long black hair hung loose to be ruffled by the sea breeze.

They finished just after I had started on the return journey and walked past me on bare feet, holding their high heels in the air. I smiled at them and asked, was this shoot for a magazine? They looked at me uncomprehendingly. Magazine, I repeated more weakly.  ‘No Englis’ one said cautiously and turned away.

No-one speaks French either, in this former French colony, just 54 years after the decisive battle of Dien Bien Phu that left the French with no choice but to leave. A delayed response to the French banning the use of the traditional Nom script for Vietnamese in the 19th C? After all, Le Dun Tho, the brilliant Vietnamese negotiator was based in Paris and spoke fluent French, as did Ho Chi Minh.

The poster shops popular with tourists were lined with images of Ho Chi Minh and rousing messages from the time of the war with the US. But no posters on General Giap, the hero of Dien Bien Phu. When Vietnamese talk about ‘the war’ today, they mean the long war with the US. The war of independence from their former colonial power has gone into distant history.

Yet, many of the temples were built on weak foundations — quite literally, as they were built on sand with a thin layer of laterite blocks above. With plenty of water around at the time, often from a surrounding moat, this foundation was remarkably strong as wet sand can take enormous load. But, over centuries, in many places the water drained or dried out leaving the temple with a base like that of a sand castle. Restoration of the temples, now proceeding with a lot of international cooperation, requires first securing the foundation before anything can be done with the superstructure. As the French have shown in the Baphuon temple they are restoring, this can take years.

Most of the temples are built of blocks of laterite and limestone (of the relatively soft kind available in the region). Images were carved after the temple was built and not on separate stone panels that are mounted over the structure (as in many temples in India). This meant that as the foundation weakened and the structure itself was stressed, the stone blocks could move or fall out of place. Successive wars added to the depredations and many temples were reduced to scattered heaps of stone blocks. Tracing the right block to be put back in place for each image is like solving a jig-saw puzzle; there are mounds of blocks with bits of carving on them that still need to find their original location.

The soft sandstone was easy to carve but weathered badly. Vast friezes and panels with episodes from Hindu mythology are now so worn and pockmarked that it is hard to guess which story they represent. One set can be found in the terrace of the ‘leper’ king, so-called because of the way the sculpture has been corroded by the elements.

Some temples seem to be held together by the grasping roots of trees that have grown into and around the structure. The temple of Ta Prohm, made famous by the Lara Croft films, is one example. The tree roots there crawl along ledges, turn corners and flow down walls. Vegetation or malevolent animal?

Ta Prohm is being restored by a team of  archeological engineers from India who spent a year studying the plans and working out what they would do and now, after a year on site, say the will need another 3-4 years.

There are no quick solutions in Angkor and restoration of the temples may take decades longer.

Yet in protected places (as in Banteay Srei) where the structure is largely intact, the carvings show an amazing richness of detail. You get a sense for what each temple had to offer at the height of its fame.

There are money changers sitting on pavements who change dollars to Riel for tourists and locals.

Control of currency is one of the strongest economic levers available to a government. I am not sure how this is done in Cambodia since much of the dollar trade will be unaccounted for. Perhaps that matters less than putting enough money into the hands of the people for them to survive.

Our guide, Cheung, who took us around Halong Bay told us he was paid 300,000 Dong a day by his agency, from which he also had to pay for his food during a trip. He paid 80,000 Dong for the room he used when he had no assignments. This left him with very little. But once he was qualified, he would not have to pay for food and would be able to save a little to send to his family in rural Vietnam. We were glad that immediately after showing us to the bus that would take us back to Hanoi, he was welcoming another small group of tourists. Cheung has to work hard but he has plans to move into specialist tourism with longer trips. But first he must improve his English and learn more about Vietnamese history.

There are currencies that are even less countable than the Dong (leaving aside the sad story of the Zimbabwean dollar of which 1,500,000 make up a US dollar today) but not many.

Better off, some people would say! But a dwindling number of them.

Somehow, the natural sciences have never lived happily with computing. One looks at natural phenomena and the other at man-made phenonmena, but both have their foundations deeply rooted in mathematics. True, computing is scientifically no more necessary than integrated circuits or satellites, but while we can talk about natural limits to both of these, we are far from understanding even part of the world of ideas that computing has opened up. Turing has never been a hero of science but computing, as he saw it in the 1930′s before the first computer was even built, is still governed by the basic principles he postulated.

If a prophet like Turing is not honoured in the world of science, we must still intellectually be in the pre-computing era.

Well, this has been a year when a lot has happened, especially in India in November. It’s been the year when America’s contorted political system provided that country and the world with what will remain one of the big surprises of the century, the election to general acclaim of Barack Obama as the next US President. The realm of the possible just gets bigger even as the world’s financial systems get smaller.

So, there have been surprises all round, not just good and bad but incredible and terrible. Next year may be quieter but the wheels are rolling towards India’s next general election and it’s hard to believe that there won’t be more surprises there.

Like the coffee we drank 10 days ago in Hanoi. We’d had a big lunch sitting next to the lake and a long walk through the Old Quarter. Feet started to get weary and the sights and sounds crowded in my mind. Walking along a relatively quiet road, we found a woman running a small pavement stall with large, square plastic labelled bins of coffee beans: Arabica, Robusta, Mocca (the Vietnamese take their coffee seriously). We could choose and she would make us each a fresh cup of coffee. She went off into the ‘kitchen’ which was a stove in the entrance of the building and came back with perfectly black coffee. The first sip told me this was a totally new experience. It was not bitter but it was about as concentrated a cup of Arabica coffee as one could imagine, with the kind of taste on the tongue that stiffens you. The woman pointed at an open tin of sweetened condensed milk and a spoon of this easily vanished into the blackness. Surprisingly, there was no taste left of condensed milk but the coffee had mellowed and the flavours seemed to emerge unaffected.

Just one cup of coffee and we felt charged enough to keep wandering, even through the busier streets (and busy in Hanoi means you could have two-wheelers going around you in both directions, even on the pavement). There was a wonderful shop with lithographed copies of revolutionary posters from war time days, very like Cuban posters of the same period. Solid colours, firm images, simple messages. Many of Ho Chi Minh (without the familiar cigarette between his fingers), none at all of General Giap. Dien Bien Phu had become distant and all the posters were of  the long, last war.  The girls in the shop looked at them with indulgence and some humour.

Are there still enough people to buy these posters? The shop was privately run, large and seemed to be doing well. So there are people who are not just tempted, as I was, but willing to buy them. Would they stay, as mine would have, rolled up in a cupboard and looked at once a year?

Let me sign off now. Join me again.