Happy Vietnamese New Year and apologies to my Vietnamese friends for the lack of diacritical marks in the title of this post – my western keyboard isn’t up to the job.

If this post seems a little early to those of you here in the UK with Monday the 23rd in mind, take into account that Vietnam is seven hours ahead of us. And in Quang Nam province, where our lanterns originate, plans will have been in preparation for months. New Year’s Lunar events got under way in earnest on the 17th January with the Spring Flower Festival.

The Banh Tet (traditional sticky rice cake) Festival, for which thousands of cakes are made to donate to poor families in the region, continued the opening celebrations on the 19th January.

The Hoi An Lantern Festival will start this evening, New Year’s Eve, at around 9pm local time and be accompanied by fireworks and a lot of noisy bells and drum beating throughout the town on a circuit that takes in all the religious monuments and schools.

New Year’s celebrations, including poetry readings, kung fu displays, gymnastics, folk song performances and boat races, continue through until the 6th February.

Makes our New Year’s celebrations sound a little short and dull by comparison. Wish I was there right now.

We were delighted to be invited by the creative team at Ralph Lauren to provide bespoke lanterns for their New Bond St. flagship store. They had carefully worked out exacting dimensions for the lanterns to make maximum use of the tall window| display areas. Although the colours and shapes came from our stock range the dimensions were anything but.

Once the windows were unveiled they kindly sent us these pictures showing the lanterns in situ.

We’ve just found a new delivery service for our Asian Lanterns : Interparcel.

Our lanterns pack up pretty compactly but nowhere near small enough to squeeze into a postbox. So a trip to the post office has always been a necessity. A long wait in a slow moving queue and hefty price tag at the end – they’re light but bulky even in their collapsed state. Interparcel saves us queuing up for hours at the post office counter and allows us to compare best value across the board so that we can achieve a good balance between time, cost and service to our customers both in the UK and elsewhere. Their online service makes the whole process a breeze – from entering consignment details through to printing off packing labels it’s all very straightforward.

So now we can be sure of getting all our asian lanterns out the door without waiting for ages and save everyone some money at the same time.

I was delighted to hear from GDC Events, not just because they placed an order for a quantity of Turquoise hanging lanterns but because their offices turned out to be somewhat surprisingly just behind a playground that I used to take my 4 year old son to play in – he’s now 5 and we’ve since moved out of the area. It’s daft that serendipity of that sort should make a difference but it does. It doesn’t take much.

 I still live only about 40 minutes away so took the opportunity to deliver the lanterns in person. When I got there I had another surprise. Co-located at Wellington Works is another company that I’m familiar with but had never ‘tagged’ geographically – Outmere a direct mail business. It’s funny how one co-incidence can sometimes leads to another.

A selection of hanging lanterns in time for an event in Dublin at the weekend – that’s what Dierdre Hynes of Ruby and Bloom needed. Given that the request came in at close of play on Wednesday and they were wanted in Dublin by Friday, our initial response was that we couldn’t guarantee delivery. However it didn’t stop us thinking about how we might be able to help. In the end the lanterns, a mixture of diamond, balloon and round lanterns in crimson, oyster and mandarin, were all packed and ready for the freight company to pick up Thursday morning and made it to Ruby and Bloom in good time for the event. Photos have been promised. It’s our first order from Dublin but Dierdre’s already been spreading the word. So hopefully it won’t be our last.

Last Supper, the specialist event catering company, chose a selection of Indochine diamond lanterns for an event they organised last week. It’s the second time they have ordered lanterns from Indochine so we must be doing something right.

And clearly, when it comes to event catering, they are doing something right; great food and drink for starters. Add to this stylish venues, attentive staff and a large and growing list of discerning clients and they obviously have a recipe for success.

We’re delighted that they’ve added our lanterns to their ingredients list. In this particular instance we were able to supply everything Last Supper needed from stock we hold here in the UK. With more notice, event organisers can choose from a much wider range of colours, shapes and sizes and we will make to order.

Images from the Last Supper event catering web site showing samples of their exquisite catering

Belisa Silva was this month’s winner of our facebook prizedraw and plumped for a large diamond shaped mandarin silk lantern. It’s now winging it’s way to New York courtesy of Parcel Force.

Hang Son Doong (meaning Mountain River Cave) is the worlds largest underground cavern. First discovered in 1991 by a local man, Ho-Khanh, it was more recently surveyed in 2009 by a British team of scientists from the Cave Research Association led by Howard and Deb Limbert. It was only then that its true scale became clear. The cave holds a river and a mini jungle a quarter of a mile below the surface. This is lit by a collapsed doline leaving a hole in the ceiling more than 300ft across. There are even clouds down there.

Hidden in the rugged Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park in the Annamite Mountains near the border with Laos, the cave is part of a network of 150 or so caves, many still not surveyed.

A friend sent me a powerpoint presentation of slides put together by Edward Longstreet. Amazing but fairly poor quality. National Geographic magazine did a pictorial survey of Hang Son Doong and inevitably their pictures taken by Carsten Peter are stunning. They were featured in the January 2011 issue of National Geographic.

I remember visiting several caves in Halong Bay and impressive though they were this new discovery is in another league. All it needs is a few lanterns down there to complete the picture.

Carsten Peter's shot of a cavern in Hang Son Doong with a view through to the subterranean jungle

It was only a matter of time before I stumbled across this. Inevitably, given the band’s name, they frequently turn up in Google alongside Indo-chine. I probably wouldn’t have heard of them otherwise in spite of them being the biggest selling band in France. I was naturally drawn to this live album based on a performance in the Hanoi Opera House with the Hanoi Opera Symphonic Orchestra in June 2006. It’s probably not definitive Indochine given that by 2006 only one of the three founding members, Nicola Sirkis, remained; Dmitri Bodianski having left in 1989 and Stéphane Sirkis having died in 1999.

Unfortunately, for me, the best thing about the album is the cover art. And that goes for the single Salombo as well. I’m sure Indochine fans consider it a classic. Maybe you just had to be there.

Below are a couple of YouTube clips. The first is of the opening track from the Hanoi concert, ‘Le Peril Jaune’. I’ve also included another clip from the album: ‘Pink Water’ because it includes a few atmospheric shots of Hanoi. The quality’s not great but better than any others I’ve been able to find. The only thing I couldn’t find that I would have liked to track down was a version of Gitane -smoking bad boy Serge Gainsbourg’s treatment of another track from the album: ‘Tes Yeux Noirs’.

In celebration of 25 years of Cockpit Arts Liz Emtage is joining forces with Angie Boothroyd to create a one-off piece of porcelain lighting inspired by Angie’s jewellery. This special piece of lighting will be exhibited in Angie’s studio (E2G) during the Cockpit Arts 25th Anniversary Summer Open Studios. Details of the Open Studio event which starts on June10th can be found on Cockpit Arts web site and on their LinkedIn Event Listing.

It may not look much like a lantern but it’s our QR code that links to this web site. All anyone needs is a smart phone equipped with a free Quick Code reader and it will automatically bring them to the site.

But “I’m already here” I can hear you say.

Hmm… it’s working even better than I expected.

I’m wildly excited about the arrival of my first few seedlings of Rau Muong (Morning Glory). I was doubtful the seeds would germinate despite assurances from Vietnamese friends that there would be no problem. I now have twenty plants on the go and a football-sized bag of seeds from which to grow more. Two months from now I could be enjoying home grown Rau Muong Xao Toi. Alongside the Rau Muong it looks like my attempts to grow red and green Perilla might also be successful. Less certain are the three bitter melon seedlings that seemed to be making a promising start but have now gone into terminal decline before getting beyond their second leaves. It may yet be too cold for them.