Three times in the past three years I have received a spontaneous gift in the form of a scarf. The gifts came from three different people, on three different continents. Two of the givers had only just met me. None of them knew about my secret addiction: an inability to walk past a scarf stall without buying at least one of them.
There's a shelf in my bedroom cupboard stacked with neatly folded scarves and wraps in rainbow hues. Every last one of them has a story to tell.
There's the blue and coral pink-checked krama made at a Jesuit centre in Cambodia by people living with disabilities. In a village near Battambang, a local woman had taken it from around my neck and knotted it atop my head Khmer-style; appropriately clad, I had continued peeling pumpkins and stirring them into great cauldrons of soup beside her for a group of hungry children.
On my shelf is an elongated stole made from orange stretch fabric and imprinted with a work by Ecuadorian artist Oswaldo Guayasamín. It reminds me of my last day in Quito: I'd taken a taxi up narrow, winding streets to the top of a hill where the late master's house, now the Casa Museo Guayasamín, commands sweeping views of the city below. Inside, I'd relished the mishmash of works on display — the representation of a long life that began in a poor, native Ecuadorian family and ended in the bosom of acclaim and great wealth.
At the bottom of the shelf's pile is the chocolate alpaca shawl brought home by my late father over 30 years ago after his own trip to Ecuador. He'd bought it from a roadside stall and gifted it along with the thrilling story of his week-long journey by dugout and mule through the wilds to reach a remote mine site. The boatman had gotten so drunk at one of their riverside overnight stops, my mining engineer father and his colleagues had had to leave him behind next day and make their way blindly upriver.
My own alpaca purchase — a steel-grey scarf I bought from nomadic herders on a mountain pass in Bhutan — testifies to this innate sense of adventure (and habit of collecting utilitarian mementoes) passed on from my father to me.
Peeking out from the fabric mille-feuille is a silver-grey wrap sprinkled with diamante, a gift from my Indian friend during her wedding in Hua