Roots of Coincidence

I ordered a second-hand copy today from Amazon of a book I've been meaning to read for years. It's by Arthur Koestler and the title is "Roots of Coincidence". I'm not even sure what this book is about but I have an impression that I had a copy in my hand long ago and never quite settled down to read it.

'Coincidences' are something I've always been very aware of. We use the word without thinking but I'm never sure where they starts and end or what they might be. There have been events in my life where these questions have really come up for me in a big way. Probably it's the same for everyone.

The time that the profundity of the experience of 'coincidence' first really dawned on me was when my son was born in 1976. There were serious, life-threatening complications for him and he needed surgery quickly . He was whisked away by ambulance to a specialist hospital about thirty miles away from our town and close to the city where my 'in-laws' lived.

I didn't even know where it was and I suppose I was in shock but I realised after I'd walked home from our local maternity unit that I had to get in touch with my mother-in-law quickly and that we needed to get to this place fast. My wife had been kept in the local hospital to recover so it was down to us to act.

The problem was that they had no phone.

But there was a social club nearby that my father-in-law sometimes visited and on the back of our phone book I noticed amongst lots of other scrawls a Swansea area number scribbled in pencil. Perhaps that was it! So I rang the number and after a few rings a voice answered. "Is that the SCS Club?" I asked.

A voice on the other end of the phone said "Iain? Is that you??"

It was my young brother in law. He'd just been cycling past a local telephone box at the end of the road, heard the phone ring and thought 'I have to answer that'. He went home, got my mother-in-law to ring me back and we were soon on our way to the hospital just in time to sign the consent paperts for an urgently needed operation.

I have no idea what 'coincidence' is, but I do know for sure that 'coincidences happen'.

Unfriendly countryside?

I've just been reading a couple of chapters of Don Mitchell's "Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction" and I came across a section and three photographs lifted from a book called "Pastoral Interludes" by Ingrid Pollard. I must get a copy and take a good look when I get back to England this week.

In this section she writes " ... feeling I don't belong. Walks through leafy glades with a baseball bat by my side ..." .. "It's as if the black experience is only lived within an urban environment. I thought I liked the LAKE DISTRICT where I wandered lonely as a Black face in a sea of white. A visit to the countryside is always accompanied by a feeling of unease, dread ..."

Oddly the photgraphs included of the writer in a country lane don't tie in with the text somehow. Call me pedantic but it doesn't look like the Lake District at all, it looks like the moors of North Yorkshire. Detail like that matters to me.

But there's something more subtle for me here. This kind of stuff is easy to say, hard to dispute. Wherever you go you take your own attitudes and outlooks with you. It's true that most black people in the UK live in cities, but it's also true that 'townies' of all ethnicities feel out of place in the countryside. A place often inhabited these days by dreaded middle class retired bank managers and telecommuters and computer programmers rather than sons-of-toil shepherds and dairy farmers.

I have a heck of a lot of experience of walking around in an ethnically and culturally totally alien environments every day of my life now and speaking for myself I don't have feelings of unease or dread. It might be because I'm a white middle class male, because I grew up in the country or that because of other reasons, like being married to one, that I feel at ease around Japanese people. I don't know. Certainly I don't find the countryside here any more threatening than the cities; in fact people are much more likely to say 'hello' even if they do look at you twice.

Interesting eh?

Taking a bath

My case is already half packed on the bedroom floor for my trip to England next week, and in a few more days my blog will start arriving from sunny Lancashire. I get very restless, almost 'disturbed' in the few days before I fly. I've done the trip often enough and flying doesn't worry me - it's more the anticipation of the change of culture I think. I have to remember not to bow to people in shops.

So I've been enjoying soaking in the nice deep ofuro of course, that's a luxury I won't have for a few weeks. Japanese baths are better than their British counterparts.

Actually if you are Japanese this will shock you but in the house we bought last year in Lancashire we don't have a bath at all. It's not the 'norm' for Birtain either but it's also not that unusual - if the builder wants to save on cost they will normally just install a shower cubicle.

The last two houses I owned in England had baths but in fact I didn't use either of them very often, we seem to have become a shower society. British baths use stored hot water from the hot water tank, you have to think ahead if you need one. In Japan the hot water comes from a gas geyser so it's always available. Also of course we don't live in such a sweaty climate so we tend to shower in the morning before work rather than bathe at night like here.

Oh! There must be a whole social history to research thinking about baths in houses. But I'll get a good soak before I get on the plane.

Some Positive Thinking

Edera and I were having a good belly laugh at lunch time about my 'gaijin seat' complex. Easy to think of things that might clear the entire coach of passengers I guess. For example I could wear a bowler hat and recite Victorian poetry in a loud clear voice, that should do the trick. But how about 'ice-breakers' that will make them actually forget I'm a foreigner?

My favorite little scheme so far is to do a few impromptu magic tricks. As soon as the train gets rolling out come all the silk scarves, black cardboard tubes that you can see through (or so you think) and those rings that get joined up together. Oh! And a pack of cards. What's Japanese for "pick one, any one but don't show it to me"? It's 'kill or cure' I suppose, I might end up with an entire carraige full of passengers checking that their shoe laces are tied and their wallets are still in their pockets. And you couldn't take it too far, white doves appearing out of jacket sleeves would be excessive.

But at least everyone's alarm at having a gaijin for company might be relieved by having a magician for company. What do you think?

I have to say I don't think this would work well on the London Underground. We hate all forms of entertainers there, we've had too many people with mouth organs and guitars demanding money with menaces over the years. And if you pulled a black cardboard tube out of your pocket you'd get jumped on by a dozen plain-clothes policemen I'm sure.