Sorry for the Group Email

The two Vietnamese women bent down and peered anxiously at my crotch. There was a distinct bunching sensation, I explained. It didn’t look like much, but it just felt a bit wrong.

They straightened up. No problem, no problem. The trousers were whisked off and taken for adjustment.

Waiting for a custom-tailored suit is a bit like being taken by a nurse to see someone who’s just had elective plastic surgery. Sure, there’s every chance that everything will be fine, but there’s a possibility that the bandages will be taken off and you’ll need to stifle a laugh and suggest they get their money back.

No-one wants a suit that looks like a started cat, after all.

My first fitting with my new suits was not far from a catastrophe. The trousers didn’t fit and both jackets had a rather pronounced hunch, making it look rather as though I was smuggling a small animal under my clothes.

Things went considerably worse for Mendy, who had gone forearmed with explicit instructions as to exactly what kind of clothes she wanted. (I had wandered in and said, exactly verbatim, “I need some suits. And some shirts. No polyester.”)

Their first go at her dress looked, she said, like the kind of dress a cruel bride makes small girls where at weddings. Her first trousers had been ridiculously mis-measured, and her tailor had demonstrated their inadequacy by repeatedly hitting her in the crotch as a demonstration for the woman who had done the measuring.

There are happy stories and horror stories in almost equal measure about getting clothes made in Hoi An. Of course, most people don’t bother to write anything if they have a good experience, and many of the bad stories I read struck me as unfair. Having clothes tailored is, if you’ll forgive me the cliché, a two-way street. It’s no good tsking at the quality of your clothes at the first fitting and then accepting them anyway. It’s your job – responsibility, I think – to be communicative, and to send your clothes back to the tailor as many times as it takes to get them right. Otherwise you may as well save your money for TopShop.

After we left the tailors the second day (we went to a total of about five fittings each), I was sick. I mention this as a by-the-by example of the kind of gastro-intenstinal pyrotechnics we occasionally face. I’d been feeling, well, funny for about twenty minutes while we went over a few of my shirts, and once we were back in the 42-degree heat (about 104 Fahrenheit), things got worse. My stomach didn’t hurt, as much as it felt like it was being gripped at both sides by giant hands. It steadily got worse, and I sat down with a thump on the nearest kerb. I sweated profusely. With my head in my hands I possibly looked like I was very deep in thought, although a few minutes later I disabused passers-by of that notion with what, I feel, was a little aplomb. Everything I’d eaten that day came up, reproduced in horribly graphic detail. Mendy, the trooper that she is, talked the shop whose pavement I was busy defacing, into letting me take my chances with their toilet.

As Mark Renton says in Trainspotting, it would have been nice to have had a white-tiled, palatial bathroom complete with a man handing me white sheets of silk toilet paper, but given the circumstances, this would have to do. After fifteen minutes cleaning myself up (that, by the way, is perhaps the biggest euphemism-cum-lie I’ve ever told), I was better. Not better, perhaps, but well enough to find a taxi. Sweetly, the shop we were in refused any money, despite their port in a storm being worth ten times what I offered them.

It was a blitzkrieg of vomit. I sat, dazed and dehydrated in our hotel room for an hour.

Then it was time to go back to the tailors.

Eventually, I think, our clothes came together. There’s every chance, I suppose, that I’ll be laughed out of job interviews when we get back to the UK and dry cleaners will stifle snorts of derision when I get it all cleaned for the first time, but to my untrained eye it looked fine. I could hear Mendy and her tailor (who was so impressed she tried it on herself) exclaiming over the salvaged dress next door. Pictures, naturally, in the Flickr set.

While you’re in Hoi An, by the way, you’d be an idiot to miss the Cargo Club. It might look like the kind of upper-class place riff-raff like me shouldn’t be eating in, but we had the best tuna melts on the planet, plus lasagne, positively drowning under quarter of an inch of cheddar. It wasn’t that that I threw up, by the way.

Dave thinks everyone should visit Vietnam. Try not to vomit on the pavements.