Rebecca, Hugo and Tyler celebrate Chinese Moon Festival

This is my friend Rebecca (Ho Chi Wai) and her two beautiful sons Hugo and Tyler as they set off to celebrate the mid-Autumn festival or Moon festival. This is the traditional Chinese harvest festival and it is linked to the autumn equinox - the time when the moon is at it's fullest and roundest.

"We took paper lanterns to Norwood Park and floated them up into the night - but it was too windy and they blew into the only tree around. I was quite scared watching them burn there and the boys got scared too, so we came home."

"I love my boys in these clothes - they look so sweet, but I'm not such a traditional person. I've been raised more in a Western tradition and I married an English man."

"Personally, I feel that the price we have paid for Chinese culture is too high. In China, we have a saying - 'We're proud of our past, ashamed of our present and unsure about our future.'

Rebecca gave me a red silk purse to sew onto my map of patterns. It was given to her son, Tyler when he was born by his grandmother, Pak See. Inside was a tiny silver ankle bracelet with delicate silver bells on it.

Map of patterns - why do dictators hate patterns?

It's been a good week for my map of patterns...a generous mum at my son's school gave me one of her veils or 'niqabs' (destined for the Middle East part of my map or maybe just Thornton Heath), my friend Deborah came back from Serbia and brought me some crochet...a beautiful kanga cloth arrived in the post from Kenya and I spent a wonderful evening with old family friends Sipareth and Nepal Sam hearing their stories about cloth in Cambodia.

Sipareth and Nepal came from Cambodia in the late 1970's, fleeing with their young son from the regime of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. When the regime came to power in the 1975, they declared the return back to Year Zero - basically to a peasant society with no money, eduction, industry or western influence: colour and pattern were strictly forbidden.

Banished from Phnom Phnen to the countryside to work as a peasant, Sipareth described to me how she took her clothes into the fields to dye them black with the bitter berries of the 'macloouer' tree, stamping them underfoot in the mud and leaving them to bake in the sun. Once dry, she would repeat the process over and over again, until her clothes were as black as could be and there was no danger of standing out from the other peasant labourers or being picked out in a crowd.

In 1978, Sipareth and Nepal fled to a refugee camp in the Thai border, where their son Nemonique was born. When I went to see them last week in Croydon, they were preparing for a big family wedding in France, and Sipareth was putting together beautiful silks and woven costumes for all the family. She explained to me the difference between the different kinds of ikat patterns and silks and let me have some precious samples. I left that evening, re-assured that - in this case - colour and pattern had triumphed over evil, but only in the end and at a most terrible price.