Jet-lag again

Good grief! Here we are again ... sleeping all day and lying awake all night and feeling like I've just drunk a whole bottle of whisky but without the benefit of having felt happy for an hour. Yes, it's jet-lag time again.

Edera says it affects her more flying east to west but for me it's definitely far worse west to east, maybe because it's usually aggrevated by missing most of two nights' sleep at the same time.

And of course however much people feel they have to say "take it easy for a few days" we always end up feeling so guilty about not being our usual thrusting and socially active selves. No longer do we effortlessly take care of every situation and always lend a helping hand in every one of life's little crises. Snoring through the afternoon attracts neither praise nor affirmation from anyone however good your excuse is. No-one will ever stick a blue plaque on the wall of your house noting that it was once your dwelling simply on the basis of your ability to sleep singlemindedly. "Iain Robinson (1947-20XX) noted sonambulist and idler, slept here." Hmm ... I don't think so.

But it's an ill wind ... our cats are delighted at all the unscheduled human activity going on. At last someone with executive access to the cookie jar shares their feline rhythms of cat-napping all day and prowling around in the dark. When I stumble downstairs in search of a coffee at 3:00 am they can't wait to beat me up for an extra bowl of food and then to settle down on my knee while I read a book. It's a fair deal - they keep me warm.

Interesting to notice all the other rhythms of Japanese nightlife in progress too. The 3:30 am motorbike delivering newspapers and the last few hardy frogs croaking in the damp autumn air. In my research I've been doing a lot of reading and thinking about 'rhythms' and I'm coming to realise how incredibly important they are to the whole business of being alive, from our heartbeats to all the seasonal and annual cycles we experience.

But for now it's those basic diurnal ones that are grabbing my attention - how to get back in tune with the flow of night and day when my biological clock is eight hours adrift. I'm working on it.

Do not waste time...

As I was using their search engine this afternoon I noticed this gentle admonition on the MSN UK Homepage. It's a piece of advice sure to catch the attention of anyone involved with our tradition of meditation. The last two lines of one of our regular scriptures - the Sandokai - runs

"This I offer to the seeker of great truth -
Do not waste time ..."

It was 'clocks back' in England today - everyone got an extra hour thanks to the changeover from British Summer Time to Greenwich Mean Time. We don't do this in Japan - thank goodness! It looked like MSN had some hot advice for me on how I could use that extra hour. "Don't waste time! Six things to do with that extra hour!" Well, as I've always used it to sleep a bit longer I just had to read on

But the internet never fulfils it's promises eh? By the next screen we'd somehow landed on "Six quick money fixes for today's extra hour". Money fixes? It seemed that all the author could imagine doing with this time bonus was checking out his insurance policy, the interest rate on his credit cards, reading the fine print on his electricity contract and setting up a Child Trust Fund.

Huh? A Child Trust Fund?? How does that fit in?

Well, I have no particular prescriptions for making good use of these extra sixty minutes but I like to think of myself as a 'do-gooder' so here are a few alternative suggestions anyway whether you need them or not. Go for a walk with the dog, he needs one and so do you. Read a book with a cat on your lap. Make something nice for breakfast but watch the chloresterol. Weed the garden a bit. Listen to a nice CD. OH! Or you could just settle for that good old Sunday morning standby - sleep a bit longer. But if you want to check out your pension policy and shop around for a better deal don't let me stop you. You can borrow my calculator if you like.

It's not a problem for me this year in any case - I didn't gain an hour at all, I lost eight travelling east on the journey home to Japan!

There's a lot of Siberia

Well, home again. I arrived back at Narita this morning after the long trip from Lancashire and so I'm rather tired. I must search out my spreadsheet and see how many times I've made the return trip between Europe and Japan now - I think that this is the sixteenth time. If so I've flown more than half the distance to the moon already - but backwards and forwards across Russia and the Baltic.

This time I flew with SAS - the third trip I've made with them in the last couple of years. For a long time I enjoyed flying Lufthansa but then they got a bit too Teutonically efficient for my liking and they also put their fares up. SAS are just a bit laid back, not actively disorganised and careless like us Brits but there's a hint of Danish love of informality and comfort about their operation. Danes like creamcakes and cold beer and there's an echo of that in the way they run airlines. The facilities on their planes are good too. Oh! And there's a brilliant cheese shop in Copenhagen Airport, you can get a really strong Samsoe there. A thick slice of it is stinking out our fridge this evening.

Best of all on the SAS 340 Airbus is that they have two cameras, one looking forward and one looking down. I'm glued to it the whole trip, I have to admit it. Well, the dayight hours anyway - travelling west that's the entire journey but coming this way the trip between Helsinki and the Patom Plateau in Eastern Siberia is all in darkness. But it's nice to watch the sunrise flying east over the Stanovy Mountains and then follow the flow of the country down to Kabharovsk and the Amur River and to the Sea of Japan coast. There's an awful lot of Siberia isn't there? It amazes me that men ever crossed it. But in the nineteenth century traders used to regularly travel from Europe to Japan on horseback in a couple of months. No in-flight entertainment for them.

Winter has already arrived in Siberia - this morning all the smaller rivers were frozen bands of ice and there was thick snow on the mountain ranges.

And so down to Narita, the short hop across the sea to the Japanese coast at Niigata and the descent over Ibaraki Prefecture. As we crossed the Tonegawa the country suddenly felt like home, a great big quilt of tanbo, hatake and cedar forests under the plane and I started to get excited.

That's enough for tonight - maybe I should take an early one and try and shake off some of this jet-lag.

Those genitives

OK – this is a silly one I know, but time for something light hearted for a change. The hospital my mum is in at St. Anne’s is at Clifton, just across the road from the old King Edward Grammar School building. Walking away from the place tonight I noticed that the long empty avenue down to the sea there is called King Edward Avenue.

Now, when I was a kid at primary (elementary) school this kind of thing used to worry me a lot. If I saw a name like this I’d wonder at once “Did King Edward come here then?” I’d look down an empty road like this and imagine the crowds cheering and the soldiers lining the pavements as the royal coach brought King Edward to King Edward Avenue. Maybe he would unveil a plaque reading “King Edward Was Here” and make a speech to the crowd about their special street.

Innocent enough eh? If only it had stopped there! But that genitive ‘s’ on the end of names would raise so many conceptual issues for me. Already I was on my way to my first Ph.D. Questions about the number of angels you could get on the head of a pin have always been important to me.

Now this might make you smile but I was always puzzled by the names of Christian churches - which are usually called after saints. For example “St. Helen’s, Bilsborrow”. When they built that 100 years ago how did they know that – that it belonged to St. Helen? As a child I wondered a bit of God had sent a message in a bottle somehow, or a piece of paper drifted down from the clouds. Maybe the Archbishop of Canterbury had a special purple phone. He’d kneel down, pick it up and phone God and humbly ask “Who does this church belong to Lord?” and then he would put the phone down and say “He says it belongs to St. Helen.” Job done!

Well, if you are so smart – you tell me how they know!

The other one that haunted me for years was coming across ‘ibid’ in footnotes in books. As is “see ibid, p.368”. I’ve looked for that bloomin’ book for years in every library I visit but I haven’t found it yet. Dunno why – it must have a heck of a lot of interesting stuff inside though.

We bought it

Well – that’s it – I hope! The offer that Julia and I made for a house in the Garstang area was accepted this morning and our solicitor has been briefed to start preparing the documents we need. You would have thought I’ve done this before I so often that I wouldn’t feel nervous, but I still found myself pacing the floor waiting for the final call from the estate agency.

It’s a nice property – a house built about 35 years ago which is very similar to the one we lived in a few miles away back in the 1990’s. But it’s semi-detached and a little smaller. Now we have to get our furniture back up from a garage in Bedfordshire and the house I have down there sold as soon as possible. I’m planning to come back to England in February to do all that.

We’ll have to complete all the paperwork around the deal in the next few days because I’ve just confirmed my flight back to Japan. I’ll be ‘home’ there a week on Saturday. Two homes 6,000 miles apart, shared with those nearest and dearest to me. It’s been difficult not having a home in England to come back to; from now on perhaps I’ll always have one in the East and one in the West. “Limestone Brae East” and “Limestone Brae West”.

As many of you know, I came back here at the start of the month because my mum was very seriously ill in hospital, and my days here have been mainly focused on visiting her. Touch wood she seems to be making a surprisingly good recovery now, she’s out of the medical ward and into a smaller convalescent hospital. With help from the physiotherapy team she’s even been walking today. There’s a lot to resolve there too before I catch that plane at Manchester.

Another epitaph

Writing about Ezra Pound’s epitaph last night has set me thinking about Venice. Ever been there? I only went once years ago - and it was about now, just in time for the last of the serious autumn sunshine. But after dark the mist soon thickened up and covered the canals. It has to be one of the best times to be there, Venice is amazing in a fog

I have lots of memories of that week. One afternoon I took the stairs to the top of the bell tower of one of the biggest churches and watched a massive ferry from the other end of the Adriatic pulling in to the quay just yards away as the bells swung and clanged just above my head. And there was a trip over to the island in the lagoon where Venetian glass is made – back in the sixteenth century the most skilled glassblowers were well paid but forbidden ever to leave so that the manufacturing secrets of the Doge’s furnaces would be preserved.

The trip across to San Michele was one of the most interesting days for me. San Michele is the island which serves as the city cemetery, no-one lives there. The little vaporetto quay leads directly into the chapel, and the last boat is at dusk. Because space is limited and all Venetians get buried there a plot in San Michele is only temporary – after a certain time (was it 12 or 20 years?) your bones are dug up and interred in a stone box in a kind of masonry mini-skyscraper. Perhaps funereal filing cabinet would be a better description.

Walking around one area of San Michele I noticed a widow and widower tending their respective stone boxes. Her husband’s bones were filed away in level eight, his wife’s remains were in level five and two towers to the right. What a wonderful start to a novel I thought – two people meeting like this with their nearest and dearest stowed away so close to each other. It might have made a perfect romance eh? The love of their autumn years.

During O-bon I visited our family graves in Kure and it rather reminded me of that visit to San Michele. In England we usually have individual tombs, but in Japan the bones of a whole generation of a family usually gets interred in one memorial. The inscription on the stone there reads “All together in one place”

Resting Place

Another afternoon of house hunting with Julia, this time in north Preston. That part of town has changed so much since I lived in Lancashire – the inevitable acres of new build houses where we used to drive past fields full of Friesian dairy cows.

In Japan most smaller building projects grow up in a rather organic way. As long as it’s not more than a tenth of a hectare at one time you can build more or less what you want, where you want. Also plots only get built on occasionally as land changes hands; it might take an area fifty years to be slowly transformed from farmland into city. In Britain on the other hand we love tight planning restrictions – in some places these are so strict that you can’t even replace wooden window frames in older houses with plastic or metal ones. But if a piece of land has permission for building some construction company will buy the lot and put up houses over it all, we don’t like chequerboard progress.

It was a beautiful sunny autumn day and after a pub lunch it was fun tramping around other people’s houses and gardens. Most of the houses might have been nice to live in, I found myself daydreaming about the possibilities of setting up home there, deciding what I would do with the garden and what colour I’d paint the lounge. In our case maybe it was more a matter of ‘the house not taken’ rather than ‘the path not taken’.

At the end of the day we’ve decided to put in a bid on the property we first saw near Garstang – it has a nice sunny lounge and conservatory and plenty of space in rooms for older furniture. I’ve a lot of this accumulated over the years from my grandparents and great-aunts. It is big by modern standards but I want to keep it in the family if I can. Normally people who can afford that sort of stuff these days have the money to buy big houses too, but I think this one will work well and it’s just within our budget.

I wonder is this is the place where I’ll eventually end my own days. Surely there can’t be many more houses left for me to buy. But whether I will I end up in sunny Lancashire or leafy Chiba-ken is anyone’s guess. When I find out I’ll write a good epitaph for myself, something with a bit of humour and a subtle allusion to. Like the one Ezra Pound wrote. He spent his last days in Venice and when he realised he’d probably be planted there in the San Michele cemetery he left instructions that the following should be on his tombstone …

Ezra Pound
Got Around
He was born in Hayley
And ended up in San Michele.

A trip to the Abbey

It’s been another long day out for me today. I had to travel up to Throssel Hole Buddhist Abbey in Northumberland, and I saw a lot of old friends while I was about my errands there. If you’ve never been yourself you can take a look at it if you click on the link a little bit lower down on the right of this page.

I think that my first trip up to Throssel was in 1983, so I’ve been going up there regularly for more than 20 years now. Back then there was just the original farmhouse and barn. In the farmhouse was a small kitchen that we used to prepare all meals for the whole monastic and lay community. It was so mall that if you were washing up you had to look sharp to avoid monk’s mops. Downstairs in the barn was the common room with some pretty spartan wooden benches and a wood burning stove. Upstairs was our meditation place which also ‘doubled up’ – or actually ‘trebled up’ – as the place where we recited scriptures and slept.

Us THBA ‘old timers’ love to bore newcomers with tales of those chilly morning meditations of yesteryear, when blizzards rattled the slates and the snow drifted under the door. The floor wasn’t too level either. But what a special room that was for anyone who wanted to sit, and how fortunate we were to have found such a place at last. In those days there were still sheep grazing on the hillside above the buildings and in that pure pre-dawn moment you could hear them chewing the grass maybe 200 metres away. It was that still.

Amazing how we have collectively changed the place so much since then. Monks and laymen together built three substantial new buildings and we bought the farm next door and converted many of the buildings there. Over the years it has become quite a large, comfortable and warm temple. We’ve also planted thousands of trees on the hillside which are now substantial woodland providing a refuge for all kinds of wildlife – I once saw a stag crossing the path to our sange shrine. But it’s still the most peaceful and welcoming place I know, and the voices of sheep are still what I hear as I sit down for meditation there.

In Japan the temple I visit is not so peaceful. There’s always the sound of announcements over an intercom and the bustle of monks and visitors hurrying along the corridor beside the shuryo as we settle down for Sunday zazenkai. But it’s still the calls of animals that I notice, although in busy Yokohama it’s the cawing of crows in the big trees around our meditation place.

Western Paradise

Over to Durham today for a meeting with my supervisors. It’s about a hundred miles from here across country so I was up and away early, well before dawn. But it’s a nice ride across the Pennines – the ‘Backbone of England’ - and through some of my favourite country too. Places I’ve known my whole life.

It was a quick drive today too despite the drizzle and I was there in good time to begin a busy morning in the library copying a stack of academic papers I need to read. My lunchtime meeting went well. I wondered if I’d find enough to tell them but to be honest once I start on my subject I could be Chief Jaw in the the Olympic Catatonic team. I can plunge on for hours without drawing breath. Maybe I would put you to sleep in five minutes but at least I’m safer than medication and cheaper too.

By the time I eventually left the library at six a downpour was in progress and I scuttled from doorway to doorway heading up the hill to the car park. It was so gloomy I thought it was dark already, but heading west back towards Barnard Castle the rain stopped and somewhere near Staindrop a glimmer of sunset opened up along the horizon in front of me. This is the village where I was conceived and born –my parents rented a cottage near the church. I have powerful childhood recollections of similar evening skies walking home from school in the autumn – that same thin line of soft rose pink light below the dark damp clouds of evening and above the black outline of the Pennine fells. Whenever I read descriptions in the sutras of Amida Buddha’s western paradise I always imagine that this is how it must look from a great distance. Maybe for the child inside me it is somewhere out there over the hills and far away above the Solway Firth.

Hunting for houses

I was out with Julia today looking at some houses around Garstang. We are planning to buy something jointly – for her to live in and for me to use as a base here. I haven’t had a home here for some years and I’m getting fed up of flitting from billet to billet.

This corner of Lancashire was ‘home’ for fifteen years so looking at houses here feels like history repeating itself. Back in 1982 Julia was hardly walking but today she was driving me down the same lanes looking out for the ‘for sale’ boards. Time moves on.

I’ve bought houses now in both the UK and Japan I can tell you that there’s almost nothing in common between them. In fact, thinking about it, there’s not even much in common between the houses themselves, except than they all have doors, windows and a roof.

We buy and sell houses in England on the assumption that they will last for ever, and that their value will increase. Apart from the risk of subsidence in some old mining areas houses stay in one place and are built of brick or stone. When we want to sell one we advertise it to make sure everyone knows, putting a big ‘FOR SALE’ board outside the house. The Estate Agent prepares details of the property that are legendary for their ‘imaginative’ and flowery descriptions. Buyers arrange for surveys to check there are no problems with the structure and hire a solicitor to make sure that the title is properly transferred to them. They pay for the house with a mortgage – a special loan from a Building Society.

In Japan houses are bought and sold on the basis that they will last about thirty years. So a ten year old property is already ‘second-hand’ and the price is lower. Minor earthquake tremors will rattle it a few times every year, so it will be a wood framed building. Nobody thinks twice about structural cracks that in England would make a house completely unsaleable. In country areas like ours if you are selling a house you keep it as quiet as you can – there’s still something vaguely shifty about moving and anyway, you certainly don’t want the neighbours helping you to pack and rummaging through your stuff. Nobody even knows what a property surveyor is and you don’t use lawyers to register the transfer of title. If you need a loan it might be from a bank but it’s as likely to come from within your wider family.

But one thing is sure – wherever you live moving home is hard work in any language.

Animal likenesses

Many people think that dog owners often get to look like their dogs – or maybe it’s the dogs that get to look like their owners eh? One of the classic English cartoonists – I think Thelwell – once did a series of very convincing series of sketches on this theme. In one of them a tall angular woman wearing a long fluffy scarf was walking a borzoi, and in another a sad looking Englishman is a deerstalker hat was sitting next to an equally sad looking Labrador.

I can certainly think of a few of my friends – who had better remain nameless – who also look like the dogs they love. One in particular who loves all bulldogs is so like them in character that in the dark you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart.

I wonder if this rule applies to me. The only dog I ever had was a very gentle and loving cocker spaniel. Well, I haven’t got long ears for sure, but I guess my hair is equally unkempt. And of course I have such lovely soft doe-like deep brown eyes as those of you who know me in person will surely confirm. I’d like to think I sometimes manage the same optimistic outlook on life that all cocker spaniels have, but I don’t sniff trees unless they have blossom on. Oh! That just reminded me – Crackers actually did that too, she sstood on her back legs to enjoy the scent of blossom on damson trees in Spring.

I mention all this because recently I’ve realised that I’m becoming more and more like a bear. Honestly guv’nor! Not your dangerous Grizzy or scary polar variety but maybe your average brown or honey bear. For a start I seem to walk more and more like one, briskly but slightly stooping. I weigh about the same and I’m happy to stand and stare or mess about in rivers just so long as I’m not hungry. I can get very angry when provoked, but usually only when I’ve just emerged from hibernation or I see a man with a gun, otherwise I’m rather solitary but generally good natured. Yes, recently I’ve realised that bears and I have lots in common, I must study up some more on them. People are afraid of them for what they can do, as humans we don’t like not being at the top of the food chain eh? But bears were around before we were, live and let live I say.

Utopias

There’s a long drive in prospect today. I’ve just had some work completed on my house down in Bedfordshire and I need to take a look at it before I pay the builder. I’m sure it will be fine but it will also give me a chance to check over the rest of the place and see how my tenant there is getting on.

I was chuckling in the car last night driving back from Preston. There was a comedy programme on Radio 4 – the plot doesn’t matter but at one stage someone was doing a fair impersonation of our Prime Minister, Tony Blair. He’d phoned up a local radio station advertising department to buy some air time to promote some ‘Action Man’ style dolls of himself. But what really made me laugh was that these dolls had a ‘voice card’ – when you pressed their buttons they came out with stuff like “Give us some more time and we’ll finish the job …”

Well, I’ve yet to hear a politician say “Sorry folks – got this wrong and we seem to have run out of ideas. Why don’t you let someone else have a turn for a bit?”

I’ve also had my nose in a copy of the “Da Vinci Code” this week too, with it’s many references to the ‘millenium’ and the coming of the ‘Age of Aquarius’, so the idea of utopias, whether implicit or explicit, seems to be in the air for me.

Utopias. Back in 1968 I was a postgraduate student in Aarhus in Denmark and one way I survived the cold grey winter months there was to read science fiction. A friend had a whole shelf full of this genre and I read it from end to end, mainly in long reading sessions during the night down in my basement room. I read a lot of the ‘classics’ – work by authors like John Wyndham. Looking back on it, it was an important formative experience somehow, although those same books would bore me rigid now.

Most of these books featured ‘utopias’ of one kind or another, some more perfect lifestyle or place to live found only in the future or some distant place. The idea is so much a part of Western culture we don’t even think of it as strange. I suppose ultimately it comes from Judeo-Christian beliefs about the ‘second coming’ and the ‘Kingdom of God’. "Next year in Jerusalem ..." is the Jewish toast. All of our ideas about ‘progress’ have their source here, and of course every politcian and sales director is also full of visions of where we will be soon “if we only put our shoulders to the wheel”.

I think at some level I saw through this fantasy even as a small child, although sadly I worked in Sales so long that there are still aspects of it that grab me. How many times did I hear that speech that all senior managers make to rally the troops. You know the one! "It seems that we’ve done well, but we need to do better, work harder, because it’s an increasingly competitive world out there so if we want to win the race we have to run even faster". I used to say to my boss “maybe we should all be less competitive instead ” but he just laughed.

Perhaps fundamentally we get into a twist about this because we think we lack something, so we had better get it quick. In Buddhism there’s teaching about dukkha, a Sanskrit word often translated as ‘suffering’ or ‘unsatisfactoriness’ but I often think ‘sense of lacking something’ is much better. Feeling that we don’t have any ‘roots’ – any real sense of ‘self’ - we can’t wait to get our buckets and spades out and start building sandcastles in the air, not noticing the tide sweeping in behind us.

I always liked the old Latin motto ‘carpe diem’ – ‘seize the day’. But it all depends what plans you have in mind for it eh? A little gentle gardening or a major civil engineering project? I wonder what the Latin for ‘Be the Day’ is – that might make more sense to me.

Back in Blighty

Back in Blighty. These days I hesitate to use the word ‘home’ quite so easily. A few years ago I wouldn’t even have thought about it but I now have a house, wife and family on the other side of the world and ‘home’ as become a more complicated term than it used to be. But England is always ‘roots’ of course even though I seem to feel more of a stranger here day by day. Over the years not only has ‘family’ shrunk but also ‘friends’ is a smaller and smaller circle. Now it's mostly people that have similar links to Throssel Hole Abbey to mine, and actually they are really 'family' of a different kind. But ‘friends’ elsewhere has grown into a much wider circle.

I got back on Monday evening after the usual long and tedious - but uneventful - flight. Julia picked me up at Manchester Airport and drove me up to the Fylde area of Lancashire why my mum and stepfather live. My mum is in hospital at the moment, and this trip is very much about getting to see her and also give what help I can at a difficult time. I’m not used to having such an ‘open agenda’ and the trip is making me realise how much I usually ‘plan’ my life unconsciously. As the days have gone by I’ve found myself mentally pencilling in a few things I want to do – a trip up to the Abbey to leave and collect something and a quick visit to Durham to talk with my supervisors. But it’s really a case of taking it day by day, seeing how things go.

One element of this increasing ‘distance’ between England and me is that I seem to see it with new eyes every time I come back here. Walking around town this week I’ve been astonished how different it is to the sights and sounds of Japan. That sounds almost silly to say – did I expect them to be similar? – and yet there are so many fundamental differences that just never get written about. As someone whose life is becoming focused on writing about Geography this deeply interests me. If your idea of research is that everything worth commenting on can be reduced to numbers this line of thinking isn’t for you, but it feels to me (Uh! The ‘f’ word!) Like most of the important differences you only glimpse out of the corner of your eye and they don’t register on meters or in questionnaire responses.

For example even things like quality of light. A painter would spot it at once. The size of people (aren’t we big here!) and the way they walk down the street, they way they talk (loudly!) as they go. Edera once said that us Brits all looked rather angry to her and now I can see why, there’s none of that softness and deference in the way we move, we all have ‘purpose’ here.

Perhaps the strangest thing about Cleveleys to me this time is the mixture of people on the street. This is a retirement town, and also (incomprehensibly to me!) a seaside resort not for main holidays but for beery middle-aged weekends away, especially for people from the west of Scotland in search of shopping ‘bargains’ of doubtful quality – jeans, china dolls, pork pies. So there are lots of elderly people pushing into the crowded 'charity shops', smoking in the street on benches, wearing awful baseball caps and giving friends and neighbours an update on their health. I can’t begin to imagine where you might find a similar crowd in Japan; maybe older people keep off the streets in Japanese towns. Plenty around our village of course but how many do you see in the city in a crowd? And yet the percentage must be the same.

Anyway, nice to be back here writing after a few days. And if your hair is as grey a mine, stand out a bit more on the sidewalk please!

Nelson

On the wall in our teaching room I have a limited edition print of a picture called "Eden Valley Standard". The title is a pun and has nothing to do with flags - it's a lovely painting of two British Rail 'Standard' Class 4 steam locos pulling out of Kirkby Stephen station. This is the Eden Valley in Cumbria back in some snowy winter in the 1950's. It is a scene straight out of my childhood, I can actually smell the locomotive oil and coal sulphur when I look at this picture my memory is so vivid. Perhaps my grandfather is in the West signal box on this day, already heading down the snowy steps with the single line 'tablet' to hand up to the driver as the lead locomotive passes

On the right is a snow clearing gang. I guess they are brewing up a big pot of tea inside that snow plough to have with their morning 'bait'. The plough is one of two built specially to cope with snow drifts on the Stainmore Line across the Pennines - the 'roof of England'. Behind the plough is an old North Eastern Railway J21 simmering in the cold morning and you can see another J21 'on shed' in the background. The train is made up of Gresley 61'6" bow-ended coaches, and is a Saturday 'special' taking miners from Durham down to the trade union convalescent home in Ulverston

Actually the artist, John Wigston, used an old photograph to develop the painting from. It's a good likeness of the original scene.

When I look at the picture I wonder if the man leaning on his shovel near the front of the plough watching the locomotives pass is Nelson. I don't know what his real name was but he was nicknamed 'Nelson' because he'd fought in the British Navy at the Battle of Jutland during the 1914 - 1918 War. He was incredibly red-faced and cheerful and usually wore a beret.

I always envied Nelson his job. Every morning he'd catch the 7:20 train from Bowes to Barras over the summit of the line and then with his sledge hammer over his shoulder he would set off back along the line towards home checking the track carefully for problems and doing any maintenance required. Rain, snow, sunshine, he did his twelve mile walk across the moors every day.

Once in December, he stopped in for his morning cup of tea with my grandfather in the Summit signal box and chatted to us both. "What a wonderful morning it was Iain" he told me, "Walking up from Barras the moon was still up and shining on the snow and I thought I'd gone to heaven"

All my life I've wanted to write a book about Nelson and maybe I still will.

Sorry if certain Japanese readers out there thought that battleships might make an appearance today! Better luck next time Tetsu ...!

[Japanese Mixi readers please note. My mother is in poor health and I'm returning to the UK on Monday for some time. I won't be able to publish on Mixi from England but I am hoping to be able to publish occasionally on my mirror 'blog' site.

Please take a look regularly on http://www.littlehouseinthepaddy.blogspot.com ]

[Copies of this print can be bought from the Eden Valley Railway Trust or 76084 Society. If you would like one e-mail me for details.]