Drills

Over the weekend I've been busy getting some basics right in our new house. Something tells me that a lot of my entries over the next few weeks are going to be about DIY.

I'm using tools that I last used more than five years ago, and as I've done a lot of DIY work in Japan now it's interesting to notice the differences. For example on Friday I was fixing a new curtain rail in Julia's room. It's a job I did in our house in leafy Chiba-ken only last October.

In Japan fixing a new curtain rail is quite straightforward and takes about ten minutes. You just spread the brackets out along the rail and drill some pilot holes in the plywood wall and then screw the rail up.

In England the same job took me an hour. Here the walls aren't made of plywood but brick or breeze block and have a hard plaster. So the electric drill has to be much 'meatier' - my old Bosch drill here weighs more than twice as much as my Japanese drill. And here the drill has a 'hammer' action where the chuck vibrates as well as rotates so that the hard tungsten bit can eat into the masonry. It's hard work - after five holes I needed a rest!

And then we have to insert a plastic plug in the new hole so that the screw has something to 'bite' into. By the time you have that rail up you know that you've been working hard!

Interesting that different styles of housing result in such different forms and sizes of the same basic tool. Which one do I prefer? Well, the rail here will probably still be up long after our house in Japan has been demolished, but these days the easier job is the one I like best!

Goodbye Houghton Regis

Today three of us headed south again with a hired van - although most of my stuff came up to Lancashire at the start of the week I had a desk and a sideboard and lots of boxes and smaller things left down in Bedfordshire.

It's quite a long journey from here - a 'round trip'of around 600 kilometres. But it's motorway almost the whole way and a fast drive.

My last visit to Houghton Regis! I bought my house down there in 2000 while I was working in Luton. It was an area I never expected to live in and which I didn't like much before I moved there but you just can't judge places like that. When my life was based there I came to enjoy it and make friends. And as it turned out I had the best neighbours I've ever had - at a time when I really needed them.

Over the years maybe I've learned to let go of places more easily. And now for the first time in a log time all my belongings left in England are around me. I've got just a few weeks now to get this lot in some kind of order before I fly back to Japan. I'd forgotten that I had so many things here.

Well, all that can wait util tomorrow! Tonight there's a good movie on TV and I'm going to learn how to sit here and watch it and relax for a chance. It's been a hopelessly busy fortnight.

Coming up for air ...

Oh dear! It feels like a century at least since I last wrote a 'blog' and leafy Chiba-ken feels a million miles away too. But tonight I've found some time to get on a friend's laptop and hopefully I'll be able to start writing regularly again. Thanks to everyone that has written to me asking how things are going and tonight I can fill in some of the last week for you.

I arrived back in England ten days ago and after two nights up here in our new house in Lancashire I headed south to the house I was living in when I was working down in Bedfordshire. These last few years I've had a tenant living there but it's time now to sort out my affairs and the house needed to be sold.

All my stuff - furniture, books and belongings - has been stored in the garage there and it needed a lot of work to get it 'in order'. So for five days I worked pretty hard down there throwing out the things I didn't need and putting the stuff I wanted to keep into boxes. Then on Monday we loaded up a large van and brought it North. Now I've got a few weeks to get everything in order here before I fly back to Narita.

I find I'm quite good at throwing myself into tasks like this, but it takes a lot of energy eh? Both physical and emotional. Lugging those heavy boxes every day has certainly improved my biceps! But perhaps the hardest part for a natural 'hoarder' like me is letting go of things.

Some things - old stuff from work for example - was very easy to 'bin'. I feel that my time at work was in some ways 'wasted' time for all kinds of reasons. Other stuff was more painful to throw a way but not too bad. And other things just weren't needed any more. For example I'd got some copies of descriptions of Alpine climbs that I'd thought of making twenty years ago but I think that I can safely assume now that I'm not likely to be hanging off ropes on the Matterhorn in the future.

Oh well! This is just to keep in touch - I'll be back with something meatier tomorrow!

Note for 'regulars'

"Little House in the Paddy" will be published as usual during my visit to England but it probably won't be possible to publish between 15th and 21st February as I'll be moving over those days.

But please keep checking back. I hope to be writing as usual!

Catching trains

Well, is that everything packed that needs to be I wonder? I've made the return trip back to Europe from here a lot of times - I think this is the eighteenth! - but I still get a bit nervous about making some awful mistake with passports or tickets. It's the getting there on time and with the right things that makes me feel stressed - once my case is checked in and I'm in the departure lounge I usually feel pretty relaxed about the rest of it.

When I was twenty one I studied in Denmark for a year, and travelled over from England with just one suitcase. In those days planes weren't even an option for poor students - I had to take the ferry from Harwich to the Hook of Holland and then the train across Holland and Germany to Hamburg. There I could change for the 'Nordpilen' - the express north into Denmark and to Aarhus. Happy days! Most of the journey was still by steam locomotive.

But that first trip didn't go smoothly. The cabin purser on the overnight boat never bothered to give me a call and my alarm didn't go off and the next thing was I was running half-dressed down the gang plank to see my train pulling away from the quayside.

Luckily a passing railwayman grabbed me and pushed me onto another train and shouted instructions to 'change at Rotterdam'. We pulled up there at the next platform to the Hamburg express and I just had time to sprint over and thow my case up the coach stairs as it started to roll.

No wonder my daughter Julia loves travelling around Europe so much in her work. It must be in her genes eh?

Plane Tickets

I've just been on the phone to Manchester for half an hour trying to buy a plane ticket back to Japan for the 26th March. Well, I eventually got it sorted out but not quite the dates that I wanted and the fare was a bit more than I'd hoped too. It's seldom the other way around eh? I can't remember the last time I protested against something being too cheap, can you? "No, no! Please! Take another hundred quid! - I insist!"

It seems that everyone has already rushed to take advantage of a Turkish Airlines promotion I'd heard of. I have to be here by the 27th March to look after the animals for a few days while Edera and the girls head down to Hiroshima for a few days.

Booking the next ride from Europe to Asia also means looking far ahead and putting a date on the next return ride from Asia to Europe. That's the bit I don't like. Do I even want or need to go to England in the autumn? At the moment I'm now scheduled to go back to to Lancashire on the 26th September, but there always seems to be something a bit surreal booking tickets for return trips six months ahead. Who knows what will be happening in their lives in six months time?

I always remember a character in a Garrison Keillor short story complaining to the doctor in her dying moments that she couldn't expire this week because she had to go to Seattle next Tuesday. Maybe I'll end up saying the same thing to somebody, a half-used plane ticket on my mind. But let's hope that I get to make many more boring trips across Siberia before that day arrives!

What's on your meishi

I collected my new box of meishi (business cards) today. I'd run out of the old ones and I need to have a stash to give to new faces I meet in England - I suppose. Last night after my meeting in Tokyo I didn't have any and I felt positively undressed, nervous that someone would proffer me theirs. People just laugh here if you don't have one to return and have to write your name down for them.

I needn't have worried, the place seemed to be crowded out with European academics interested in talking only about themselves. Even I was shocked. One I met was a 'visiting professor' doing research in subject similar to mine. But when I mentioned what I was doing he just said "Oh really!" as he reached for another beer, somehow not aware he'd just met the only European in Kanto that could have told him much about what he was studying.

Sorry if you are an academic yourself but there you go, I'm really starting to notice that stuff as being a part of the scene. I always think that if you are interested in the same things it's fun to talk them over but a lot of others seem to worry that you might rush off and publish before them.

On my new meishi it describes me on the English side as "reseach postgraduate" and on the Japanese side as "diagaku-in kenkyuusei", a suitably vague but safe and wholesome sounding label for an ugly guy like me.

When I worked at the brewery I was a "research manager" which was suitably vague too. I always wanted to be a 'consultant' and never was so perhaps I'll have some more cards done soon if I ever get that "Dr." in front of my name. "I work as a consultant" It's a contradiction in terms eh? But pretending to be omniscient and getting paid to tell people what they already know sounds good to me.

We once had an 'IT Consultant' (another common but profound contradiction in terms for sure) working for us whose business was called Akhbar Enterprises . I'm changing names slightly here to protect the innocent of course. He had loads of staff to come and check you over in a minute and in our company at least his business used to be known as "Ali Akhbar and the Forty Consultants". But that wasn't what it said on his meishi of course

German evening

Late, late tonight! Can I post this before midnight or will I turn into a pumpkin?

I went to a lecture at the German Institute in Ichigaya this evening and it was very enjoyable. A French professor was presenting some research he had been doing on Japanese health and lifestyle since the Tokogawa-era. He was one of the 'quantitiative' school - loved statistics - and it was the kind of subject that needed careful presentation.

Some of his results were very interesting - he had lots of new information about how the Japanese were getting taller. But maybe the most interesting thing to me was what he had to say about sleep.

It seems that, although hours worked have declined over the last two decades, people here are sleeping less and less. Now the average teenager in Chiba-ken for example sleeps just seven hours and nine minutes - that's down 29 minutes in only ten years. And you average leafy Chiba-ken teenager sleeps less than any other Japanese - if you want to hear some real snoring head for Akita-ken, they never get out of bed up there. Who can blame them?

He couldn't offer any real explanation for his results but his guess was that it was excessive addiction to video games and keitai (mobile phones) on our side of the Bay that was causing it. As a keen observer of Chiba-ken daily life myself I think he'd probably right!

Japanese houses

I'm just galloping to finish some work for Durham. How come I always leave everything until the last minute? I'm bad at it. And of course when I do I always get caught out by getting sick or some other crisis.

It's an interesting research question inside my head at the moment though. I've been writing up my notes on 'typical' Japanese houses - not condominiums or apartments but straightforward wooden detached 'family' homes.

If you look back on how these have changed in the last century in some ways you have to say 'a lot' and in other ways 'not much at all'. A lot in that they are now usually two floors, the rooms are bigger and most rooms have wooden floors. These are changes that have happened because a new style of 'family' lives here - no grandparents and fewer kids. Also some Western habits have become the norm - we don't all sleep in the same room on futon any more, kids have their own 'study' (ho!ho!) bedrooms and we like big Western furniture. Also as consumers we need bigger places to keep the junk we buy.

But it's the things that haven't changed that are interesting. Shoes still get taken off in the genkan, some rooms at least are tatami where everyone except me sits on the floor and the domestic bathing and toilet arrangements are always separate places.

Why do some things change easily, other things not at all? Well, I'd like to hear what others think about that one. Personally I think it has a lot to do with what we learn earliest and most deeply in life, the experiences of early childhood and even infancy, that in the end define what we find hardest to give up later.

Seeing him off

I was lying in bed with a temperature and a runny nose most of today. Lately I've been finding that with my academic work ideas sometimes can just crowd into my head at quiet times and I have to work deliberately and carefully not to 'give in' to thinking about it. Otherwise I get very 'anxious' - thoughts are there like the sludge at the bottom of a harbour.

But one thing did pop up for me which was a nice memory. It was a day when my daughter was perhaps a year old and I took my two kids and my little cocker spaniel down to the beach at Ogmore in South Wales.

I put Julia in her push chair and leaned back into the car to get something - probably my camera. The dog's lead was tethered to the car and she was bouncing around in excitement at the idea of a swim in the sea.

Just perhaps two seconds later there was a noise of snarling and yelping behind me. I spun around to see a young Alsatian dog trying to escape. Crackers had her teeth firmly fixed in his leg and wouldn't let go of the terrified interloper.

She must have been worried that this strange dog might have harmed the baby of course, and she had 'got her retaliation in first ...' as the saying goes. I'm sure the other dog was harmless enough but Crackers was taking no chances.

It was a real demonstration of just how much that dog loved the baby and thought of her as 'her own child'. The other dog must have been three times bigger than her but she never paused for a moment to think over the consequences.

The friendship and love of animals is very important eh? Also it's amazing what you can do if you really 'go for it'.

Both sick

Edera and I are both swooning around the place with heavy colds today (she says 'flu' but that's a word best avoided with international air travel in prospect don't you think?)

Of course getting it at the same time as each other we can't resist making the obvious comparison. Who is sickest then? Who gets first turn at TLC? Well, she seems slightly in the lead at the moment - a high temperature last night gave her the competitive edge. Me, I just have a streaming cold and a bad cough and feel exhausted.

I'm much better than her at sneezing and blowing my nose though. When it comes to making a big noise you need a tidy-sized Western 'hooter', not one of these miniature Asian jobs. Our students always laugh whenever I blow my nose, they never heard so a big noise before.

At least this gives me a chance to play the big guy and thoughful husband eh? In addition to braving the icy weather to walk Kuu (and just how long canines can take over that job!) I've also been shopping so that we don't starve and even put a bowl of rice in the microwave.

The cats are very good at spotting sickness in humans too. "Heh! heh! He'sleepy and coughing, let's start demanding freeflow twenty four hour access to the food bag and a cat flap so that we can come and go as we please!"

It could have been worse. Snow was forecast again for Kanto today but so far it hasn't turned up.

Let's hope I can write something more cheerful tomorrow!

Thunderbirds are 'Go'!

This afternoon was our third concert in three weeks! And today it was singing with 'the band'. Actually, although we are now a quite separate operation days and have been for years we are still in name the Brass Band's Choir! That's how it started off and there are still strong links between us - like today when we sang with the band in their annual concert.

And it was fun too. First four pieces in the foyer before the main event began ('Karasu' and 'Shi-poppo' and two English madrigals) and then three pieces in the main performance, the Japanese pop-song 'Believe', the theme music from 'Yamato' and the nostalgic song 'Sato no Aki' which was singalong time for everyone.



Singing with the band is always a challenge. It's the only time we ever use microphones and to be honest when you are up against a forty piece wind ensemble you sing your guts out even if the music is marked 'pianissimo' As we are spread over about an acre of stage you have no idea what the whole thing sounds like, you just have to stay in time and keep in tune and hope for the best. In fact you have to trust the conductor - if he needs something different from you you'll soon know.

Maybe we had the most fun with 'Yamato'. I was a bit in the dark with this one as I only had the words for the bass part. I was trying to work out if it was a very patriotic song or maybe from some movie about the battleship (which Tetsu would approve of!) But no! It seems that this theme tune was from an old TV animation of a kind of Japanese 'Star Trek'. Somehow I was reminded of Lady Penelope and the puppets on the long vanished and much lamented English TV equivalent 'Thunderbirds'

Of course N-sensei sang the solo and just couldn't resist dressing up in a silly outfit for the big moment. That's the sort of bunch we are I'm afraid. But we all had a good laugh!

Religious buildings

Sometimes when I drive over to Togane I notice a modern concrete building set back from the main road near the Cainz DIY Superstore. It has a spire and looks like it might be a new church.

It isn't of course. it's a garden centre and that's the area where they sell half-hardy shrubs and trees.

The absence of churches is one of the things I really notice here coming from England. In our English cities there are churches and chapels to be spotted with their stone spires and clocks on almost every main road. These days the clock almost certainly won't be working any more and most likely the building isn't a church anymore either. It might be a Chinese restaurant, an antiques shop or just a builder's store. Perhaps less than 20% will be active churches - over the last two generations the congregations have simply died off and churches that once saw a couple of hundred people arriving for evensong might only get half a dozen now.

The church will almost certainly be locked too. When I was young no church was ever locked during the day but now with vandalism and theft it's usually essential to protect the buildings and contents from possible attack. Sad.

I only know the location of two Christian churches in Chiba. In Japanese cities religious buildings are scarcer and quite differently placed. If you look carefully you will soon find many tiny local shines dotted around everywhere - usually very simple and hardly comprising more than the traditional tori arch and a small shrine hut. At crossroads I often come across small Jizo statues hidden away.

Buddhist temples here are usually clustered around the outskirts of towns rather than in central streets and they don't have the same public function as churches in Europe at all. Often they seem to have little more community use other than as places to hold funerals and memorials. I can only think of one new temple built by the 'traditional' Buddhist sects in the whole of Chiba, though there are many buildings associated with 'new' sects and 'religions'.

Interesting; I'll come back and say more about this.

Alea jacta est

You can tell I went to a 'proper school' eh? When I was a teenager in England and we had old fashioned 'Grammar Schools' it was Latin grammar they were referring to. OK, I have to admit it though, I was really awful at Latin. In fact in my first end of term exam I got 16%, a record for awful-ness so far unbeaten I think

'Alea jacta est'. "The die is cast". It's what Caesar is supposed to have said as he crossed the Rubicon River when he marched on Rome in 49BC.

Well, I wasn't thinking of leading an army anywhere but this afternoon I did confirm my plane ticket for England. I'm off a week on Monday. So much to do before then and so much to do after I arrive there too. But at least the dice are rolling now - let's hope that everything works out OK.

After I'd finished my call with the airline I took Kuu out for a walk and there was a real spring in my step and his too. He had an extra-bossy bark at all his canine enemies!

It's been a good day so far - I was out in Kamatori again and at last at lunchtime I finished all my survey work in Midori-ku. That's one ward of the city completed and most of Chuo-ku is also 'ticked off' on my plan too!

A lot of the Latin quotes that I picked up later in life have come from the Asterix books. Have you read them?? Wonderful! They are some of the wittest books I ever read. Well, eating lunch I looked out over the sunny square in Kamatori I thought to myself "Veni, vide and bloomin' well vici" If you don't know what that means you can check it for yourself on the internet!

Those Lawyers

I'm late tonight. I seem to have been wrestling in mud with crocodiles the whole evening, an endless procession of minor but intractable problems. And I can still get so cross eh? I thought I was getting better and then ... but at least I didn't yell at anyone. So far.

The worst one was selling the house in England. The buyer (who I know quite well - he's the son of my next door neighbour) has a lawyer in Liverpool. I think this lawyer must be fresh out of college and also hasn't much work about at the moment because no matter how many times I answer soemthing there's always another question.

Can I confirm that all stipulations and covenants in the original 1975 deeds have always been honoured? Huh? Oh! THOSE - I keep a list of those behind the kitchen door. No keeping of pigs on the property, No radioactive toxic products and no medlar trees forward of the building line. Honest guv'nor, never had a tin of uranium near the old place! I always done good!

Can I provide a copy of the latest water account? Nope. Do I have a certificate of completion for the 1976 garage extension? Nope, but it's there. Even the documents that I do have are all old-fashioned foolscap sizes that don't fit Japanese fax machines and they all have large plans coloured in crayons attached which makes them impossible to copy.

But tonight he really excelled himself. Do I have a copy of the 1971 deed relating to the original purchase of the grassy field that the ten neighbouring houses were built on? Well no I bloomin' don't! Now for goodness sake can we please get on with this sale!

Very rainy night

Raining hard down here in leafy Chiba-ken again. Nothing ever seems to happen by halves in Japan does it? It's as if you have to go for the 'Guinness Book of Records' entry on everything.

I was waiting to see if it eased off at sunset but if anything it got even worse - it was 'set in' as we say in northern England. So I went and got my wellies and my biggest umbrella and took Kuu for his walk. Paddle would have been a better word, and it was a 'two handed corkscrew' grip to yank him out of that kennel. In weather like this he comes out with a 'pop' like a champagne cork. He's not keen on rain.

In England it's the English Lake District that gets all the wet stuff. There they say "If you can see the tops of the fells (mountains) it's going to rain and if you can't it's raining already". The top of Borrowdale is supposed to get the most rain of all but actually they are amateurs compared with parts of Japan. What they get in a year some parts of Kyuushu probably get in a day in the typhoon season.

And now we have to go out to choir practice. Maybe we'll just never get home again - the bridges will be washed out and there will be landslides and the like. Let's hope that our car floats. We can sit inside it by the romantic light of a candle and drink sparking apple juice and eat caviar on small but extremely expensive biscuits and sail away on a voyage of discovery. Fancy a cruise with us? Ho hmm ...