Absolute assurances

My mum has been on the phone twice tonight - when I hear the coins drop in the call box in the nursing home I know it will be her. She's seeking reassurance that the move to a new home we are planning in about ten days will go OK.

Not just reassurance though. She wants an absolute assurance. Total cast iron 100% guarantee that there is no risk whatsoever of anything possibly going wrong. Her whole existence seems to be focused on this move at the moment. Any answer that I give about it being 'fine' and that 'everything is going to plan' is of little help to her because where she is even the slightest hint of a possibility that the arrangement might unravel is like the Grand Canyon opening at her feet.

I care but I won't be pushed into saying more than I honestly can, who am I to give absolute guarantees? 'Let your ay be your ay and your nay be your nay' the old Quakers used to say and it is good advice. If I give her what she craves what then if it really does go wrong? Actually the biggest potential for it going wrong lies in her own fear, because if she worries herself intyo physical sickness it might not be possible. But this is all far beyond rationality, it's about who we are.

Last year when we traveled to Pu'to-shan a monk on the boat was threading small metal tubes onto red threads so that they could be worn arond the neck and he gave me some. Each tube contains a tiny copy of the 'Sutra for the Prevention of Disasters' for "protecting in all grief, in trouble, death disaster ..."

What this sutra is pointing to is the possibility of knowing a refuge beyond these but I couldn't help thinking tonight about the very practical lesson these talismans represent too. That piece of paper is packed in so tightly that if you try and take it out not only won't you be able to read the Chinese anyway but also you might never get it back in. Better just trust it is in there eh? Take it on trust. Once you start to look for lesser guarantees you 'aint ever going to find any that will satisfy your appetite

A curious way to spend Boxing Day

I just couldn't stop myself. It has been on my mind for months and the garage is so full now that I couldn't get on a plane and leave it that way. So I've spent most of Boxing Day re-hanging a heavy garage door.

Our garage doors here in Lancashire aren't the usual 'up and over' variety so common in Britain. The are more like barn doors, rather heavy and swinging to the side with big iron strap hinges. But since last summer they have been 'temporarily' screwed up with battens because one lower pillar rotted through and the hinge came away from the wall. Actually I suspect that the previous owner cunningly disguised the damage and I didn't spot it when we bought the house but there you go - caveat emptor eh?

Replacing that rotten pillar took much longer than I expected and much cussing and muttering too. And as the work progressed I discovered that I couldn't re-use the lower hinge, it was so rusted that it just collapsed when I tried to get it moving. I'll need to buy a new one tomorrow. This house has been up around thirty years and that doesn't seem a very long life for a heavy piece of ironwork.

Many years ago I had some distant and elderly relations who ran a blacksmithing business down in the south of Ireland and they wouldn't have made such poor quality stuff. Everything that came out of their village forge was built to last two hundred years at least, massively wrought to take all kinds of rough treatment. I once watched them spend a whole day rivetting up a sign for showing pilgrims how to circumambulate a local shrine and you could have safely moored a battleship to that piece of wrought iron.

Christmas Day

I wonder if I should eat anything else before bedtime. What do you think? Probably not eh? I'd forgotten just how much we eat in England on Christmas Day and I've spent much of this evening dozing in the chair with the dogs 'crashed out' on the mat in front of the fire at my feet. Dogs also know how to enjoy themselves at this time of the year too.

A busy day though - over to spend some time with my mum this morning and then later we took the dogs out along the river for some fresh air.

In Japan Christmas is an ordinary working day and the New Year and summer Obon Festivals are the big family events.Unlike England there is an emphasis on the 'continuity' of family from generation to generation - at Obon in particular ancestors are remembered and their spirits 'welcomed back' into the familiy circle.

We don't have quite that aspect in our celebration of Christmas in England but at some level I sense the importance of the remembrance of 'Chrismases past' around the festival for many people here. I certainly found myself at lunchtime today revisiting other Christmases with my grandparents and beloved great aunts, sitting around a warm fire full of our Christmas dinners and pulling crackers and listening to the Queen's Speech on the radio and later on TV. Perhaps an important aspect of Christmas Day for many is this recollection of a steam of love flowing on and through our 'extended family' from generation to generation.

How slowly we change

I was asked out to an 'open house' get together yesterday evening. It was at the home of a local friend (hello Margaret!) and about thirty people dropped in to enjoy some Christmas hospitality.

It was the first party that I've been to in this part of Lancashire in perhaps seven or eight years and the nicest thing for me was that many of my former friends and neighbours were there. So we had plenty to catch up on for sure and I was rather chatty. Often at this kind of event I find I'm not a big talker - my boss once had me down in an assessment as a 'natural introvert' and it's a fair description. I can chat happily in most company but I get my real energy from being alone, or with one or two particular people that are close to me

What really interested me about meeting up with this crowd was just how little most of them had changed in nearly a decade. The same interests, same mannerisms, same dynamics. I've experienced that many times before - once I met up at a funeral with relatives that I'd not seen in thirty years and yet most of them were pretty well as I'd remembered them from childhood.

Change really interests me these days, both its universality and omnipresence. In my studies I have a kind of professional interest in the topic but actually its meaning for me runs much deeper than that.

This persistence in nature is not a universal rule. Sometimes life can change people almost out of recognition and occasionally change comes for no visble reason. But generally there's seemingly a very enduring aspect to people that persists from early adulthood to the theshold of serious old age.

Nothing of us 'really' endures through life, even our bodies are wholly physically renewed in a few months. So what is going on here seems to be more a matter of how accurately we manage to 'reproduce ourselves' though habit energy from moment to moment.

One thousand and one

I was rooting in the cupboards under the sink in the house I'm emptying at Cleveleys today and came acoss a bottle of '1001' cleaner. I didn't know that the brand still existed, but then I don't buy cleaning materials in Britain often these days.

As everyone in Britain over the age of about fifty will know,

"One thousand and one, one thousand and one
Gets rid of those workaday frowns!
One thousand and one cleans a big, big carpet
For less than half a crown!"

'Half a crown' was a coin in our pre-decimal currency before 1971 and was worth twelve and a half pence. This doggerel featured on one of our earliest TV adverts in the UK back in the 1950's.

There seemed to be a lot of very memorable TV adverts back in the 1950s and 1960s or maybe we just had simpler minds then eh? Where are those other brands of yesteryear now? One was for cheap drip-dry white nylon shirts for example which was supposed to enjoy many sartorial advantages which combined to "All add up to a Double-Two"

Perhaps my favourite as a 'curious' teenager was the advertisment for a brand of beer called Trophy Bitter which featured a smilling large-bosomed barmaid 'pulling' a pint and singing enthusiastically about "the body, the body that satisfies". Phew! Where is she now? A granny at least I'd guess. As luck would have it I ended up working for the brewery that produced this cheap and gassy ale but it's a many a year since someone last downed a pint of that stuff.

Some Christmas wrapping

On the way back this afternoon I called in at the Morrison's store at the roundabout outside Cleveleys. I needed some lightbulbs and something for my tea and also some Christmas wrapping paper. It doesn't take long to get sucked back into the manic seasonal routines eh?

It is years since I've been here in December and I'd forgotten just how awful some aspects of Christmas can be in England. Call me a miserable old codger - and many do - but what possible fun do people find in the whole wretched business. "Savage amusement" as my old grandad used to say ...

Moving around the supermarkets here these days seems to me to be like wading in molasses at the best of times, and today wasn't one of those. It must be something to do with changing demographic profiles but at least ten percent of shoppers seemed to be in wheelchairs or pushing them. Most of the rest were standing around leaning on their trolleys experiencing 'senior moments', blocking the aisles as they tried to recall some item omitted from their shopping list. It's as if a fairy had waved a magic wand and eveyone was put under a spell. Mind you I can hardly complain about this, 'senior moments' are a familiar part of my routine too ...

And to make matters worse today the car park was just so full that we had to queue for twenty minutes just to get back out onto the highway again.

In Japan we don't have this kind of obsessive and lemming-like shopping surges at all, seasonal gifts are not such a big part of people's routines thank goodness. It is still a very 'gift-oriented' society but the occasions of giving are more spread around. There is no one day of the year when crazed consumers fight for the last turkey and sprig of holly but on the other hand every railway station shopping arcade and motorway service area is crammed with shops selling o-miyage. Woe betide anyone returning from some trip without plenty of cookies and cakes in neat presentation boxes to pass around amongst their friends and acquaintances.

Things left behind

Bill's funeral today. It was only the second I've ever had to arrange but thanks to a very kind and experienced undertaker it all went smoothly. Afterwards we went to a local hotel for some tea and to get warm after a chilly hour outdoors and in the crematorium chapel. Carleton is only a mile from the Blackpool seafront and no place to linger outdoors on chilly December afternoons.

Over the last few days I'd spent time starting to sort out the house too, another new job for me. When my grandfather died back in 1987 he was living with us as 'family' and his belongings were already a part of the general household bits and pieces. This time though it is a matter of sorting out someone else's separate home. Neither my mum nor Bill has lived there since the 10th November so in some respects the trail has already started to go cold and in others their presence is still in each room.

One thing I notice is how 'frail' their occupation of their home had become when the final inevitable crisis came. Drawers full of medication and surgical dressings, walking frames, wheelchairs and stairlifts; all those artifacts that we come to rely on as we get old. When these things make their first appearance in the house they seem almost transient novelties,and then later a familiar and un-noticed part of daily routine.

But once the house is empty at last, the radiators have gone cold and the place remains only inhabited by objects then these modern signs of old age stand out, no longer props for familiar and cared-for faces but almost like a last layer of life's silt that has finally blocked the river bed, a kind of 'geological' strata of things that represents the stratigraphy of old age

'Step' relationships

It's been more than a week since my last entry here. I made my planned trip to Kyoto and presented a paper there at a conference on the history of East Asian architecture. Then on Sunday evening I had news from England that my stepfather, Bill, had died.

It wasn't unexpected news, although at the end his death came very suddenly. He'd been suffering from prostate cancer for three years and I could see when I was in in England in October how he was starting to fail. But I'd phoned him a couple of days earlier and he had seemed cheerful enough.

So now I'm back in Lancashire sorting out the details of his funeral and spending time with my mum. There is so much to do when someone dies.

Over the last few days my relationship with Bill has been on my mind often. I've referred to him as 'stepfather' but perhaps 'my mother's second husband' would be a better description because I'd already left home and gone to college when they married. So we never really spent time living under the same roof although I've known him for forty years. We always seemed to get on well and yet it was never a 'close' relationship. Now that I look at the dates I realise that actually he was only in his mid-thirties when I was the stroppy student 'stepson' that came with his new realtionship. We probably 'got off lightly' getting on as well as we did.

Now that I have experience of being a step parent myself I can relate much more to the way things must have looked to him back in the 1960's. Relationships through remarried parents are never easy eh? Maybe back in the olden days when generations were shorter and families had to rely on each other more for sheer survival it was more 'black and white' but now 'step' relationships are an altogether more complicated thing.

Singing in tune

Great! Our conductor, M-sensei, is back for the next couple of weeks to coach us through our Christmas repertoire and conduct us in concert. Most of the stuff we are singing is familiar to us but there are a few new things there to learn including a splendidly 'mushy' version of "If you wish upon a star" and a new arrangement of "Jingle Bells"

Learning in our choir practices involves really 'internalising' the music. There comes a point when it becomes a part of you and then you can sing it anywhere, any time, without coming 'off the rails'. Hopefully!

Because we are quite a small group we can't afford to have our teacher coming every week. So we rehearse ourselves and then she takes us in hand as key dates loom. In a way that makes the times when she is with us even more of a treat. I love her delicate and sensitive leadership and the style and humour she brings to guiding our singing. It's like being taught by some small , delicate and cheerful piece of exquisite Dresden china.

Last night she must have picked me up a dozen times on hitting intervals between notes, and I noticed that she was often following the bass part on the rehearsal piano as we sang. What sounds fine to my clod-hopper and not very cultivated Anglo-Saxon ears wasn't passing muster for her perfect sense of pitch. Nothing new there.

Singing exactly in tune is something very difficult to cultivate. If we could actually hear where we are going wrong there would be no problem in the first place eh? But if you want to make beautiful harmonies there is no short-cut to getting it perfectly in focus and spot on. You have to do the work and really TRY to listen and hear where you fit in.

Where would we be without PowerPoint?

On Friday I'm off to a conference in Kyoto for the weekend - my first real academic 'bash'. In work of course life was one long round of meetings and conferences but I've got out of the habit and I'm quite excited about it all.

And nervous. Over the weekend I have to do a presentation at Kyoto University on "Some origins, forms and processes of change revealed in the residential environment of Chiba-shi". I bet you are sorry that you won't be there already eh?

Well, I put together the mandatory PowerPoint presentation (whoever heard of relying on good old oratory these days?) Then I ran through it aloud in the privacy of our bedroom. ABSOLUTELY AWFUL! So I have spent most of the day re-writing it in the hope that at least I know what I mean on the day. But it's scary the way this ten minute presentation is drifting far away from the ten page published paper I wrote six months ago. Of course it is to be expected eh? How can you write something on 'change' and then expect your ideas to stay the same for half a year?

I got pretty blase in work about giving presentations but all this is bringing to mind a nightmare that exploded on me in my second job when I was in my twenties. I was busily 'minding the shop' one lunch hour when my boss popped into the office and took me out to a nearby Chamber of Commerce meeting in a hotel where I was sat down at the 'top table' and it turned out that I was their after-dinner speaker. Stuff of nightmares indeed! He must have thought that he'd mentioned it before, maybe he did, but I don't have any recollection ... argggh!

Three slightly ominous noises

Woken by an earthquake at 6:18 this morning. Not a big one, only Shindo 3, hardly enough to spill your tea. But the house frame creaked in that now familiar way and there was a general rattling of vases and swishing of curtains and blinds. It was a 'bullseye' on our bit of leafy Chiba-ken so lucky it was small. Take a peek here It must be something to do with greater tidal forces at full moon - I often notice them early in the morning around full moon time. Actually I haven't noticed a quake for some weeks; call me supersititious but that's something I NEVER say out loud when the thought pops into my mind "Hey! We haven't had a decent quake for ages eh?" I mean that would really be asking for it, don't you think so?

Lying awake in the dawn after it had gone quiet I was remembering my day yesterday, out under a big cold sky just north of Mitsuwadai. It is almost but not quite open country and fields of vegetables there are dotted with small rusty engineering plants, scrapyard businesses and two big JDF military bases with tanks lined up for ... well, who knows? There's some real Japanese ghosts lurking up there for sure, these self-same bases were used far back in the 1920's and 1930's to train tank crews too. And as fate would have it as I plodded along one of those black right-wing mesh-protected 'battle buses' was blasting out stirring martial music at fantastic volume somewhere far away over the fields, a not uncommon sound around here on Sundays. Surreal.

Then today grabbing a bite in the Mossburger at "One's Mall" in Naganuma-cho a little girl of perhaps four years old was happily sitting with her mum and kid sister playing with her latest toy, a model machine gun. State of the art educational technology, when she pressed the trigger its range of sound effects included "Fire!Fire!", "pow-pow-pow" and "argh!" Means, motive and opportunity all found residing in one object eh? And she even got to learn some useful English vocabulary too.

Ursa chibaensis

Heading back for the train this afternoon I walked down the long yato (once rice paddy but now a mile long car park) that runs from Sanno to Chiba Zoo. That's a heck of a big car park, there must be ten thousand places at least. Not all for zoo visitors of course, the city baseball stadium is not far away either.

It must take people months to find their cars after games. I mean it all looks exactly the same; the same clumps of bamboo along the side of the valley and the same unidentifiable tannoy poles every fifty metres. It is a civil engineering 'biggie' too - 'Construction Japan' in concrete and steel. Higher up the valley is a dam and spillway so that in the worst typhoons they can hold back the floodwater and the city centre won't be flooded. They hope! Scary stuff. Once the water over-tops the upper dam this car park will be a lake about the size of Haweswater.

Anyway that isn't what I meant to write about. Seeing the zoo put me in mind of bears and how long it is since I spent time in the company of another one. I've realised over the last couple of years that I'm fast becoming a bear myself, the metamorphosis is irreversible. I look like a bear, walk like a bear and I have a bear's temperament. Basically kind and peace loving but also unpredictable. And usually hungry. I'm certainly like a bear when I first wake up until some sugar is in my blood stream. This last year I've begun growling when I get cross too. Also, I like roaming the woods and eating honey which is bad for me.

But the clincher is - don't tell Edera this! - I'm growing hair on bits of me that people shouldn't have hair on. Down my back, between my toes. And when I say hair you know what I really mean - the "f-u-r-r-y" stuff that we don't mention in polite circles. So if you are planning on any hunting expeditions please remember that ursa chibaensis is a rigorously protected species in these parts.

Jack Frost

It has got a lot colder here the last couple of nights. Day time is beautiful, with lots of sun once it gets over the tops of the cedars, but 'first thing' and after sundown it gets chilly. Last year I was still walking Kuu morning and evening at this time of the year and we would both run down the lane to get into the patch of early morning sunshine around the corner. So far we've had no frosts yet, just cold heavy dews, but I see on the weather forecasts that the snow is down Honshu as far as Nagano now.

Usually in summer I'm whingeing about the heat so it seems unreasonable to whine about the cold too. But sadly Japan is like that. No complaints at all about March and April or October and November but the rest of the time ... watch out!

Japanese houses are built with surviving the summer in mind so they tend to be very ice-box like when the cold weather comes. We have no central heating, just the air conditioning in the teaching room so in July and August the rest of the house doesn't get used and also in December and January we cluster in there around our keosene stove.

I didn't experience the joys of central heating until I went to college but English houses with brick or stone walls and insulating cavities are inherently a lot better at avoiding extremes than the timber frame plywood walls we have here, Japanese houses are almost like mobile homes that way. In my bedroom as a child I even had a proper fireplace - all the rooms in the house had one - and when winter storms raged my grandmother would light a little fire in there to warm the place up at bedtme and I would doze off to the sound of glowing coal embers settling in the grate. A very 'Victorian' style treat that I guess not many experience now. Meantime outside Jack Frost would be making patterns on my window with his icy fingers.

'In Town Tonight'

Out on the east side of Chiba today. Now I won't hear a word said about the old place of course but it's possible that some people might find just that area a bit dull, an odd and totally shop-free mixture of villages and 1970's housing between the University Hospital and the Keiyo Road motorway. In fact several of my sample points today were very close to the Keiyo Road, which takes the traffic between Tateyama and Tokyo. On either side of the main toll road are two carriageways of State Highway 16, so this is effectively an eight lane freeway.

I have to say that the soundproofing is pretty spectacular though, in the streets just a few metres away you wouldn't know it was there. In Japan they take soundproofing to extremes with huge steel and plastic baffles. Driving most motorways in urban areas is like being in a tunnel with no roof. It does nothing for your view but a heck of a lot for local residents.

I was reminded of a TV programme I used to see when we first had a televsion back around 1956. It was called 'In Town Tonight' and I suppose that it was a kind of antidiluvian chat show. People passing through London - politicians, film stars and the like - were interviewed in this 6:30 pm slot on the Beeb.

All that stuff meant nothing to me but I do remember the lead-in to this programme very vividly. A flickering black and white picture of double deckers circling a foggy statue of Eros in Leicester Square filled the tiny screen while some appropriate Elgar music (Cockaigne Overture?) played away and in the distance a Cockney newspaper vendor cried "Want a paper guv'nor". Then, SUDDENLY, a big voice in BBC 'Recieved Pronunciation' English boomed out "London - STOP!" and the whole shebang on the screen stopped as the announcer continued "We stop the mighty roar of London's traffic to bring you ..." etc.

How did they do that? Back in 1955 a BBC technical wonder eh? Freeze frame! If the film stopped at the cinema by accident it melted in the projector in a moment. But there were all the buses on the screen frozen in time and silent. Huh! And that amazing male voice too - where I came from hardy anyone could even understand 'Recieved Pronunciation' English (like our Queen speaks!) let alone talk posh like that.

Well, no need to stop the mighty roar of Chiba's traffic. It might be a hazardous thing to attempt and anyway you can't even hear it so why bother.