The most expensive thing I ate in Penang, and indeed the most expensive thing I expect to eat on this entire trip, was this durian. Previously, I knew durian only as the fruit responsible for the rancid-sweet smell that pervades Chinese supermarkets in London. Many hotel lobbies in South East Asia have signs forbidding durian for the same reason. (I read about one of these signs and used it in Glow, thinking it was a humorous and evocative detail. I now realise that if you've spent any time in this part of the world it's as banal as 'No Smoking'.) Penang is famous for its durian farms, and in researching them I learned that a variety called the Musan King is regarded as the best of all durians – although Olexander Nechytaylo, the Ukrainian ambassador to Malaysia, recently declared, 'I don't like Musang King. My favourite is XO.' Scorning Nechytaylo and his hipster durian opinions, I decided to try the consensus pick.

I went to a shop on Dr Lim Chwee Leong Road called TNG Siang Hock Trading. There were no other customers, and the shelves were mostly empty, perhaps because it is not yet durian season. Two young assistants sat playing with their phones. However, a huge banner advertised the Musan King, and sure enough there was a display of about thirty of them at the front of the shop. One of the assistants came over and I asked him how much a Musan King was. “Fifty ringgit,” he said.

At that moment I couldn't summon the exchange rate to mind, but I knew that a bowl of noodles from a hawker stand was only four or five ringgit. Fifty was clearly an enormous sum for a piece of fruit. But how often, I thought, does one have the opportunity to try the very best of something? Never in my life, probably, will I taste the very best Iberico ham, or the very best white truffle, or the very best Japanese whisky. But this was the very best durian. Also, it had been an extremely cheap holiday up to this point. I agreed to the price.

He put the durian on the scale. At this point it dawned on me that the durian actually cost fifty ringgit per kilo. (And I wasn't being scammed – I've since confirmed that this is about the market rate when musan kings are scarce.) “A hundred and forty ringgit,” he said.

“Are there any smaller ones?” I asked. He put a different one on the scale. “A hundred and thirty-four ringgit,” he said. “OK!” I said, feeling that I'd shrewdly economised.

He hacked up the durian with a small cleaver and put it on a table for me. I sat down, pulled on a pair of the plastic gloves provided (to prevent the smell clinging to your hands), and began to eat. I should note that I'd already had a big lunch of beef rendang at a nasi padang stall. Fortunately, at 31°C with 80% humidity, it was just the kind of weather that stimulates a hearty appetite.

As advertised, the lobes of flesh inside had a remarkably smooth, melting texture, and a rich, custardy taste. However, they also had something of the durian's obnoxious bouquet. More than anything, I was reminded of the black sapote, the Mexican fruit with flesh uncannily like chocolate pudding. Black sapotes can be found in the markets of Oaxaca for as little as ten pesos (40p) per kilo, and as I ate this elite durian, I tried to work out how much it was costing me. I knew that I'd exchanged a Thai thousand-baht note at a money-changer for something in the range of 120 or 130 ringgit. I also knew it was forty-five baht to the pound, so that was... more than twenty pounds. This fruit – which, frankly, was not even as enjoyable as a ripe mango – was costing me more than twenty pounds. And I was already starting to feel pretty full.

However, I forced myself to continue eating until it at least looked superficially as if I'd got through it all. Then I counted out some notes and got up to give them to the assistant. “Take away?” he offered. Which I had not expected, but seemed reasonable, given that, at these prices, even the shreds of edible matter still clinging to the seeds were worth a little something. I shook my head. “Take away?” the assistant said again.

Why wouldn't he take no for an answer? I looked back at the durian, and realised for the first time that he'd only exposed part of the fruit with his cleaver. The other part was still intact. There was at least a tenner's worth of durian left inside. “You can give to friend,” suggested the assistant.

Why did I still refuse? Partly because, like many insecure males, once I've stated a decision in public it's almost impossible for me to bring myself to reverse it, even when I know reversing it would be in my best interests. But also I just didn't want the rest of the durian! I could imagine myself sitting there in my hotel room the next morning, gnawing grimly through the rest of this fruit for no reason other than that I'd inadvertently spent so much on it. During durian season in May and June, TNG Siang Hock Trading has an all-you-can-eat durian deal, and the thought of an endlessly replenishing supply struck me as a form of luxury torture, like being waterboarded with Napoleon brandy. I was so eager to avoid this that I felt considerable relief when I remembered the 'No Durians' sign in the lobby of my hotel, because it gave me an excuse not to take the durian back there. (But was I seriously suggesting I couldn't have smuggled it up in a plastic bag? Also, what kind of proto-fascist cur feels grateful that he's not allowed to do something because there's a regulation about it?)

But the assistant was now looking at me in disbelief. Subsequent research reveals that 134 ringgit is actually £24. (To put that figure in terms a layman would understand, it's almost 40% more than the projected RRP for the hardback edition of my forthcoming novel Madness Is Better Than Defeat.) And the minimum wage in Malaysia is 4.8 ringgit an hour. So a Malaysian working a menial job – such as these teenage assistants at the durian shop, perhaps – would have to work about 28 hours to afford this durian. And they would have to work for at least fourteen hours to afford the amount of durian I was simply going to leave behind as if it was kitchen waste. I knew that would be loathsome gesture, like some bow-tied colonialist languidly dousing his cheroot in the champagne he's decided he doesn't want any more. I tried to reassure myself that perhaps the assistant could take the leftover durian home to his family, but then it occurred to me that if there's one thing that the family of an assistant at a durian shop are definitely sick of, it's free durian. What would the maximally ethical course of action be, I wondered? Somehow sell the half-eaten durian on the streets of Penang and remit the proceeds to a mosquito-nets charity?

While I was in New York I went to two Michelin-starred restaurants with lengthy 'modernist' tasting menus – Momofuku Ko and Corton – and both times I found them less enjoyable than much cheaper meals. The amount of money I was paying for each fussy little mouthful was a calculation that weighed on me too heavily as I tried and failed to wring from it the quantity of pleasure that I felt I was owed. So what hope did I ever have of whole-heartedly appreciating this durian? Even before the economic awkwardness around the leftovers, the price was just too high.

But then, as I left, the assistant gave me 10 ringgit change back from the 140 ringgit I gave him. He'd only charged me 130 ringgit for the durian. I'd clawed back another 4 ringgit from the purchase! Enough to buy a plate of char kwey teow better than anything I ate at Corton. In fact, if I ate enough hawker food, it would be almost like I was amortising the cost of the durian across the savings I was making on my other meals. Which is what I spent the rest of my time in Penang attempting to do. But by day 4 my appetite buckled under the pressure, and I was only able to eat three meals yesterday instead of my normal six to seven. They included a serving of Kek Seng Café's famous home-made durian ice cream, which I can recommend, if you ever come to Penang, as a considerably cheaper way of finding out whether you like durian or not.

This summer I'm hoping to get a dog, and once I do it will be harder for me to travel, so I decided I had better take the Trip of a Lifetime beforehand. This was supposed to slide neatly in between deadlines for my new novel, although that didn't quite work and I ended up having to submit the latest draft from a guesthouse in Mae Hong Son. I've just arrived in Penang after nine days in northern Thailand.

The best thing I ate in Thailand, out of 79 separate dishes, was nam prik ong at Sorn Chai in Chiang Mai. I heard about Sorn Chai from the EatingAsia blog, who evoke it better than I can. I was emotionally shaken by this nam prik ong.

The worst thing I ate in Thailand was nam phia at Laap Chiang Mai which is not in Chiang Mai but in Mae Hong Son. This is an algae-green condiment drawn from the rumen of a cow. It was the most unpleasant thing I've ever been served in a restaurant context, worse than the boiled silkworm pupae soup I once had at Han Shin Pocha in Queens, worse even than Fernet Branca. However, I would still recommend Laap Chiang Mai! You don't have to eat the nam phia, and it came as part of a pretty memorable meal: raw laap, nam phrik kha, and pork intestines straight from the barbecue (which was placed out in front of the shop, practically in the road, like an attractive hitchhiker trying to wave down drivers).

I don't have much else of value to offer, because the best places I ate fell into one of two categories: either 1. I heard about it from EatingAsia, Austin Bush, or Eating Thai Food, who are all much more knowledgeable than I am; or 2. I took a punt on a place and loved the food but had no way of finding out the name because I don't read or speak Thai.

Among the latter I would count many of the best som tams (papaya salads) I had, such as the one pictured below, from a place on Thanon Panglor Nikom in Mae Hong Son. I like my som tam like I like my Scotch – flabbergastingly pungent – and these did not disappoint. It was only in the cab to the airport at the end of my time in Thailand that I learned how to request that style – "som tam pu pla ra" – but I was generally able to accomplish the same thing by gesturing frantically at the jar of salted black crabs.

from Funeral Customs by Bertram S. Puckle (1926)

An amusing dispute arose in Paris (1913), where the croque-morts [undertaker] is still of some importance in municipal service. It appeared that the City Fathers had received many complaints as to the unshaven and unkempt appearance of these officials supplied by the Department; the matter was solemnly debated, when it was realized that on their slender stipend such relatively expensive matters as hair-cutting and shaving could hardly be insisted on with any show of justice. On the other hand, it was decided that there was reason for the complaints of the citizens, whose petition was suitably acknowledged; forthwith it was decreed that these functionaries should be trimmed into respectability at the City's expense. That their dishevelled locks, a recognized sign of grief, should be thus trimmed off them, showed a want of knowledge of the history of funeral practices, for the Romans much prized such tokens of the abandonment of despair, and even Biblical injunctions are not wanting.

Certain barber establishments in the city were commissioned to tend the croque-morts free of charge – then the storm broke! That one citizen should be thus favoured with municipal patronage whilst others were neglected cut at the most cherished traditions on which the Republic is based. The neglected barbers rose to a man and demanded a fair share of the trade. "Give tickets to the croque-morts," they demanded, "that they may extend their patronage to whom they will, rather than encourage a pampered minority." And so the matter was settled.

Even this equitable arrangement was found to have its drawbacks in practice, owing to a regrettable tendency on the part of the croque-morts to sell their tickets and go unshaven as before.

Favourite new films of 2016

1. Green Room
2. American Honey
3. 10 Cloverfield Lane
4. The Hateful 8
5. Anomalisa
6. Weiner
7. Spotlight
8. City of Gold
9. Embrace of the Serpent
10. Rams

Favourite non-2016 films I saw for the first time in 2016

1. All Is Lost (2013)
2. Wake In Fright (1971)
3. Margaret (2011)
4. Antichrist (2009)
5. Brief Encounter (1945)
6. They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969)
7. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966)
8. House of Tolerance (2011)
9. To Be Or Not To Be (1942)
10. Fail-Safe (1964)
11. The Lost Weekend (1945)
12. The Human Condition (1959-61)
13. Hud (1963)
14. Short Term 12 (2013)
15. Paris Is Burning (1990)
16. Possession (1981)
17. Red Road (2006)
18. The Getaway (1972)
19. Taking Off (1971)
20. Deliverance (1972)

Disfigured by smallpox, Cherokee men resort to suicide:

"A great many killed themselves; for being naturally proud, they are always peeping into their looking glasses, and are never genteelly drest, according to their mode, without carrying one hung over their shoulders: by which means, seeing themselves disfigured, with hope of regaining their former beauty, some shot themselves, others cut their throats, some stabbed themselves with knives, and others with sharp-point canes; many threw themselves with sullen madness into the fire, and there slowly expired, as if they had been utterly divested of the native power of feeling pain."

from The History of the American Indians (1775) by James Adair

Ned's Holiday Gift Guide for Writers (And Non-Writers With Certain Writer-Like Tendencies) 2016

Foald laptop stand

This raises your laptop to eye level, so you don't have to hunch over it all day. And it's made of a lightweight cardboard which folds up flat for portability. (You will need a separate keyboard and mouse, though.) As a further point of interest, it was designed by the avant-garde Icelandic fashion designer Sruli Recht, famous for his thorned shark-skin gloves that you can put on but you can't take off.

IISE slimpack

But how to lug your laptop around? I bring one of these Korean-made bags with me to the library or occasionally to meetings. IISE are having a 50% off sale at the moment, and the design and construction and materials are tough to beat at that price. (Although perhaps the very idea of spending £150+ on a leather accessory will find a more sympathetic audience among women than among men.) I should note that mine is in black, which is out of stock right now, so I'm afraid you can't look exactly like me, your idol. (I also love the larger côte&ciel Isar I've been travelling with since 2009.)

kSafe

I wrote about this in more detail here, but, in short, I lock my phone in here when I'm working and I can't get to it until the timer runs out. if you work from home in any capacity you are lying to yourself if you think you couldn't benefit from one of these. This is one of the most crucial objects I've ever owned.

Travelcard charger

This is a cheap reserve battery for your phone that fits in your wallet and doesn't need any extra cables. I suppose it doesn't have any special pertinence for writers, except in that I've found it useful on book tours and at literary festivals, when you generally don't have a chance to hang around near an electrical socket. And you can imagine what a nightmare it is for me when my phone dies, given my famously exuberant 24/7 social media presence.

Master & Dynamic MH40 headphones

I realise that to a lot of people it might sound crazy to spend £369 on a pair of headphones, but to me it's no crazier than spending that much on a stereo or a TV or a smartphone – I listen to music while I'm working, which means I have headphones on several hours a day, and they're more important to me than any of those other things. I'm not by any stretch an audiophile, but the first time you try listening to the music you love through a really good pair of headphones, you will be astonished. Plus, they're so comfortable and robust that I would happily commit to wearing them for years at a time like orthodontic headgear.

Cinema Paradiso subscription

Remember how, before Netflix, there was Lovefilm, which would send you DVDs in the post? And absolutely nobody does that any more? Well, I still do that! But nowadays the best service is Cinema Paradiso. They have a catalogue of 90,000 films and TV series, a huge proportion of which you will never find on a streaming service. This year, my life has been enriched by watching Margaret, They Shoot Horses Don't They, The Human Condition, The Getaway, Taking Off etc., none of which are available online (at least in the UK). If the only films you watch at home are films whose copyright holders happen to have negotiated a rights deal with some technology company, you are missing out on the best of cinema.

Rick Owens shearling T-shirt

I've anxiously tried to justify the prices of some of the other items here because I don't want this to be my "out-of-touch Theresa May in £995 leather trousers" moment, but I think we can all agree that in this case £4,180 is a small price to pay for style. And it's still available in S (my size). If you care for me at all you will buy me this.

Death & Co cocktail book

Out of all the cocktail books I've ever used, this is the best by a mile. It's marvellously information-dense (unlike certain other books I could name which are more like scrolling through an Instagram feed punctuated by the occasional recipe). Perhaps you'll learn to make, for instance, the Drunken Dodo, one of my favourites: 2 ounces dark rum, ¾ ounce sweet vermouth, ¼ ounce allspice dram, 2 dash Angostura bitters (those ingredients might sound complicated but they're all available online and it's the most grown-up-tasting cocktail I've ever made, in the sense that the first sip is a bit thorny but after that it makes you feel like the worldly and sophisticated person you've always wanted to be.)

Calle 23 Blanco

Talking of ingredients, this is the bottle of booze I would get for someone if I had no idea what kind of booze they liked. When I tell people I love sipping fine tequilas at home, I know it makes me sound pretentious – but this is under thirty quid and it is genuinely delicious, like apple juice. It's also good in a margarita (I encourage you to use this recipe, with no orange liqueur – personally I don't even bother with salt). I realise at this point we've wandered quite a long way away from anything with direct relevance to the craft of fiction but, between you and me, even writers like a drink once in a while.

One of my books
No, I'm not going to demean us all by putting a cover image of one of my books here. But they are available.

Two events

October 11th: moderator for Transhumanism, London Literature Festival, Southbank Centre
November 1st: White Review event, Kabinett Wine Bar, Liverpool

My story "Lay Not Thine Hand Upon the Lad" will be broadcast on Radio 4 at 10:45pm tonight and available here thereafter. If you listen to it and you want to know more, this was the inspiration.

Supposedly, half-way through a screening of Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974), Pauline Kael got up, announced "I'm going to the movies," and left.

Supposedly, half-way through a screening of Bergman's Autumn Sonata (1978), Alfred Hitchcock got up, announced "I'm going to the movies," and left.

If I had to guess, I'd say the Kael incident really happened and was later misattributed to Hitchcock, but there's no way to know for sure.

In 2010 I joined Twitter, rapidly ascertained that it wasn't for me, and then quit. However, last week I rejoined. This is because I am very close to handing in my lengthy fourth novel, meaning that 1. I will soon have all the time in the world to waste and 2. I want to give that novel the best possible chances in life when it comes out next autumn. Hence, a new account. So feel free to follow me (a phrase I can only use with the greatest ambivalence) at @nedbeauman.

A farcical incident deep in the Honduran rainforest, from Peter Keenagh's travelogue The Mosquito Coast (1938):

Trapp had brought two large canoes full of fresh supplies for us – food and ammunition – with three Zambu boys from Brewer's Lagoon, who had since gone back in one canoe leaving tie other for him. He took us proudly to the hut and showed us the pile of things he had brought. There was flour and rice, sugar, salt and coffee; tinned milk and even butter, and a lot of quinine. In a separate pile, in neat packages, was the ammunition. He probably had great trouble in protecting it lower down the river, for the Honduran Government is very strict about importing ammunition into Mosquitia. For the people who live there it is hard to get and expensive, and here we had a supply probably amounting to more than all the rest of the ammunition in the territory. It had been sent by air from the capital to La Ceiba, from there to the Lagoon by schooner, and now it had been laboriously brought up the Patuca by Robert Trapp. I picked up a large square package that was covered with oilskin wrapping. It was so heavy that I thought it must be .38 revolver ammunition. Nigel had two cartridges left in his belt and I had only one, so I tore away the wrapping to get out a fresh supply before we forgot. The oilskin came away easily, then there was a layer of heavy cartridge paper and wire, and finally two thicknesses of brown paper done up with stout cord. At last the covering was off.

I could not believe my eyes; instead of neat boxes there were books, a large pile of enormous fat volumes. Incredulously I picked them up. Salmond on the Law of Torts by W. T. S. Stallybrass; The Institutes of Justinian; Cheshire's Modern Real Property ; and so on. We looked at each other without a word. There was no adequate remark to make. Instead of valuable ammunition we had been sent law books, as unsuitable a form of literature for the banks of the Patuca river as one can well imagine. Frantically we searched the rest of the cases. There were plenty of shot-gun shells, a box (for some reason) of signal rockets, and finally, at the very bottom, a small box of .38 bullets. It was a relief to find them, but there were very few, and we were disappointed that the first case had not been full of them.

In fury we turned to the books. There was no sense in keeping them, a useless dead weight, if we were going across country to the Guarunta. Disgustedly we hurled them into the river. They floated clumsily down stream, and before they were far from us we saw a ripple on the water and an alligator'ss jaws snapping at the Law of Torts. He must have been as disappointed as we were. As Justinian floated away Nigel in a fit of spite put a bullet through it. Cheshire ran aground on some rocks, where it remained in safety to mock us for several days. The others were whirled away by the current, to find their way into the Lagoons or possibly out to sea. They must have proved a source of enormous enlightenment to the Zambus. Robert Trapp watched us with delight, pleased at the sight of people who apparently shared his own opinion of books.

It took us a long time to find out how those books had reached us. At the end of the summer term in Oxford I had ordered them from Blackwell's ; they had followed me to Tegucigalpa, where someone had put them on an aeroplane going to La Ceiba ; and from there they had made their dogged legal way into the middle of Mosquitia by schooner and canoe. There is no getting away from the law.

“I think it cannot be denied that the tendency of the Eton system is to make a boy generous and firm-minded, to exercise his common sense early, to make him habitually feel a moral responsibility, to act not under the impulse of fear, but of generous shame and generous emulation, to be willing and determined to keep trust because he is trusted; – in a word, to make him a manly boy and a gentleman.” – John Taylor Coleridge, 1861

An interesting etymology I found today: to say that something had been "spirited away" didn't originally mean, as you might assume, that something had been whisked away as if by magical spirits. In fact, "spirits" was a slang term for kidnappers who took poor children from the streets of London and shipped them off to work on plantations in the West Indies. The outcry against this led Parliament in 1645 to pass an ordnance against kidnapping children, although the earliest relevant citations in the OED are from decades later:

1666   London Gaz. No. 107/1   Several persons escaped from the Vessel, who pretend they were spirited (as they term it) and invited upon several pretences aboard them, and then..carried away.

a1675   B. Whitelocke Memorials Eng. Affairs (1682) anno 1645 140/1   An Ordinance agains such who are called Spirits, and use to steal away, and take up children.

Finally, in the nineteenth century, the connotation of the phrase began to converge with the non-slang meaning of the word:

c. Said of the action of spirits.

1825   J. Neal Brother Jonathan I. 253   Peters had been..spirited away in a thunderstorm.

1855   W. Irving Chron. Wolfert's Roost 179   Others jocosely hinted that old Pluto..had spirited away the boy to the nether regions.

1889   J. M. Barrie Window in Thrums 102   It was thocht next mornin' 'at the ghost had spirited them awa.

That first citation is a bit ambiguous but fortunately the context can be confirmed on Google Books. "Nay; it soon came to be whispered about, confidentially, in the great chimney corners; among the very old, and very young people, that Peters had been carried off, in a whirlwind; cottage and all; spirited away, in a thunderstorm, such as never was heard of, before – by his Master – the Evil One; or Old One."

I looked up John Neal, the author of Brother Jonathan, on Wikipedia, and found that he sometimes took only a week to write a novel. This productivity earned him the nickname Jehu O'Cataract. "I shall write, as others drink, for exhilaration," he once declared. After three years in London (lodging part of the time with Jeremy Bentham), he returned to his birthplace of Portland, Maine to visit his mother. He hadn't planned to move back there for good, but the local reaction to his writing had been so bad that he was told he wouldn't be allowed to stay even if he wanted to – which made him decide he did want to, and indeed he did stay, for the rest of his life. "He maintained a solid physique into old age, which he demonstrated when he threw a stubborn cigar-smoker off a non-smoking street car at the age of 79." Edgar Allen Poe called him "among our men of indisputable genius" but none of his books are now in print.

My story "It Takes More Muscles to Frown", originally from the MIT Technology Review's special issue Twelve Tomorrows, has been included in an anthology published this week as The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Third Annual Collection in the US and The Mammoth Book of Best New SF: 29 in the UK. This is a series I read for years before I became a writer so it's exciting to be part of it.