Crook Visit

Earlier this month I mentioned that I was on the 'Furness Trail' - tracking down my maternal grandmother's family on their journey from being farm labourers in rural Westmorland in the 1860's to working in mines and shipyards in North East England a generation later. Shortly after I wrote that I managed to spend an hour in Crook, a small town in County Durham where some of the key events in this story happened in the 1890's.

It was a very wet and cold Thursday but just so interesting! I had two specific addresses where I kew they had lived in 1881 and 1891 and two more where I only knew the street. I thought that these places were in nearby Billy Row but as it turned out my geography was quite wrong. The family had been based close to the centre of the town of Crook which in the 1890's was in it's heyday. I guess it has been downhill ever since, pit and factory closures and families moving on as the coal ran out and jobs were lost.

One of my great-great uncles was a miner in the local colliery He 'vanishes' from the census database between 1881 and 1891, the victim I would guess of an accident underground. My great grandfather at this time of his life was a local trader. I'd imagined quite a lot about the places they lived but it was all mistaken of course, the area turned out to be some rather interesting streets of tiny terrace houses, it must have been a reasonably 'smart' neighbourhood in which to rent somewhere to live in the late Victorian period. Now of course a complete dead end, you could buy a house very cheaply - for England - in this kind of a place.

A lot of things happened around here in the summer of 1897 that had a direct impact on my own life. Maybe I'll write about it soon!

No blog for the next three days as I'll be at my local Buddhist temple here in northern England.

Shildon

On the way back from Durham yesterday I stopped off at Shildon to take a quick look at the railway museum there. It's an 'outpost' of our main National Railway Museum at York and I'm taking some visitors there in a couple of weeks time, so I thought I'd better check out the location. Lucky I did too, the car parks are a long way from the museum site - maybe nearly half a mile - and I actually set off walking in the wrong direction!

Shildon was the point on the original Stockton and Darlington Railway where back in 1825 locomotives took over from rope haulage to pull coal wagons down to Stockton, so this really is the birthplace of public railways. This is where railways started! You can still see the 'Soho Works' shed where Timothy Hackworth built and maintained the first S&D locomotives, real railway archaeology.

The main museum is a large modern building with six tracks containing about fifty locomotives and coaches that they don't have room for at York. A few of them - especially Edward Fletcher's 2-4-0 N.E.R '910' Class have strong local connections but to be honest the selection is a bit dull and not really related to County Durham at all. For example they have the rusting hulk of Britain's APT High Speed test train from the 1980's - a real 'lame duck' if ever there was one and I can't imagine why they even bothered to rescue it from the scrapyard.

I enjoyed the trip but for me it is a bit of a sad case. Back around 1960 when I used to watch trains here Shildon was one of the most interesting railway sites in Britain, maybe in the world. But all that stuff is long gone, torn up and sent for scrap. If there had been more imagination around at the time this might have been a major international museum site. About thirty years after the event when there was little left to conserve the politicians eventually got around to spending a few bob on this 'heritage site' as part of a general 'tidy up' of the area when unemployment was bad.

Down in Worcester there is a Sainsbury's supermarket with a plaque on the wall saying "Edward Elgar's dad had a music shop on this site". Sadly that how Shildon is too ...

Three Little Pigs

Passing by the BBC News Website I came across a story today that you couldn't have invented. It concerns a UK government QUANGO called BECTA and even now I've taken a 'gander' at their own website I'm not really any the wiser about who they are or what they do. But no doubt they spend obscene amounts of taxpayer's money in the process. Their remit is "to take lead responsibility, on behalf of government, for the co-ordination, development and delivery of e-Strategy". Whatever that means. Anyway, whatever e-Strategy may be, you won't be surprised to learn that that our politicians believe we have "the best in the world". Like our Health Service eh? Ho hum ...

But I digress. The story was about how this QUANGO called BECTA have turned down a story for their 'annual awards' because it was a digital book that re-told the story of the Three Little Pigs and "the use of pigs raises cultural issues" because the subject matter 'could offend Muslims'.

It gets better. The book was actually titled 'Three Little Cowboy Builders' (seems that they missed the Hindu 'card' there!) and so might "alienate parts of the workforce (building trade)". I bet those piggwigs had never even read the BS ISO 9002 regulations - their sites aren't properly scaffolded and I see there must be at least a dozen contraventions of the Health and Safety Regulations. Serious stuff.

Hard to imagine that there are people out there walking the streets, even in charge of motor vehicles or maybe dangerous machinery like lawn mowers, that could be the authors of such gob-smacking nonsense as this. But there you go ...

Temporary Ponds

Just took a short walk along the road towards Garstang to get some fresh air and 'walk off' some of the effects of a stressful day. Nothing quite like a walk in the dark to do that eh? The fields on either side of the road are still flooded after the couple of days of deluge we've had here - if you don't live in the UK you should know that we've been experiencing exceptionally heavy rain here this week with a lot of flooding in all the usual places - especially down the Severn Valley and in South Yorkshire. Yesterday, as you can see in the photo, even the end of our little cul de sac was flooded out as water spilled over from the adjacent field.

I used to love this kind of stuff as a teenager with an obsessive interest in physical geography, you couldn't keep me indoors when there was a flood warning out. Very heavy rain causes depressions you don't normally see to fill with water and you begin to see an 'ancient geography' emerging - long vanished ponds and lakes reappear for a few days. Lovely! Around here you can spot former meanders of rivers that were dug out and straightened by Dutch engineers in the seventeenth century.

The singers Flanders and Swann used to have a very witty song about these little stretches of water in England. It was called the 'Bedstead Men' - a secret society of afficionados dedicated to making sure that every pond on Britain had a broken bedstead in it. Sadly these days empty lager cans and plastic garbage bags would be the norm for ponds but back in the 1950's broken brass bedsteads were the 'garbage of choice' for fly tippers'. It's a part of our heritage eh? As part of the song remarks ...

Oh, the hammer ponds of Sussex,
And the dewponds of the west,
Are part of Britain's heritage,
The part we love the best.
Every eel and fish and millpond
Has a beauty all can share,
But not unless it's got a big brass broken bedstead there.

So, we filch them out of attics,
We beg them from our friends,
We buy them up in auction lots with other odds and ends,
Then we drag them 'cross the meadows,
When the moon is in the sky,
So watch the wall my darling,
While the bedstead men go by.

The league of British bedstead men is marching though the night,
A desperate and dedicated crew,
Under cover of the hedges,
Always keeping out of sight,
For the precious load of bedsteads must get through.

Failing Memory

After a few days at Durham I went over to see my mum this morning. She's been in a residential home for more than a year and she's been doing quite well there but since I came back to the UK she seems to have 'come unstuck'. Physically she seems OK but she's been getting very stressed and this week her memory has got a lot worse.

I've seen her like this before - about eighteen months ago when my step-father was dying she ended up in a similar state. In fact I was very surprised that she's managed to have such a 'good year' in 2007. It's a combination of things at work I think - but mainly what doctors would label 'stress' and 'manic depression'. The tell-tale signs are inability to 'hear' certain things, a kind of psychological 'deafness' and a confusion that leads around and around in ever decreasing circles towards tearfulness, fear and a child-like dependence.

In some ways I'm growing accustomed to it - the need to explain things in simple words, re-inforce instructions again and again until they stick, or at least can give her some space. "You have to take it easy and then maybe the fear will go anyway and your memory will get better" is the essence of it.

There is a line in one of W.H. Auden's poems - 'In Praise of Mountain Limestone'. I don't have a copy to hand here but it goes something like "monsterous life-forms with which - we like to hope - we have nothing in common". But of course we do, this is part of the 'turning of the wheel'. In extreme old age and in the shadows of madness there are no real rules, no niceness and tea-parties and polite conversation, it is truly 'nature red in tooth and claw'. Of course I DO have a lot in common with all this, we are part of the same stream. Ultimately there is no happy ending here, this chapter will not end 'and they all lived happily ever after', but maybe a resolution of something is in progress. I hope so. We'll have to see how it goes.

Furness trail

I had a few hours to spare yesterday and I just couldn't resist getting some 'serious work' done on my 'family tree'. I joint the 'Ancestry' site just before Christmas and I'll have to watch myself with it - it's a like a 'drug' for me somehow. Some of the issues that have come up as I've been doing my research feel like they affect me rather directly. I'd thought of all this stuff as 'history' but now I see that in subtle ways some of it affects me in practical ways too, has influenced my life over the years in a manner that I just didn't realise.

At the moment I'm tracking the Furness family - my mother's great grandfather - through the nineteeth centuy, Agricultural labourers and farmers in the Vale of Eden around Long Marton, Colby and Orton. Their lives are so different to ours and much more clomplex than I thought, but what is striking to me, having just researched the same period in leafy Chiba-ken, is how different their lives are to their Japanese farmers. Here of course it was maimly sheep and dairy farming, in Japan rice and vegetable crops, but the difference in family style runs deep. In Japan people married later or not at all, had fewer kids and lived in their parents homes. And they generally stayed in one place - in fact until the 1860's it was technically illegal to move away from their village.

In Westmorland seven, eight, even nine kids was the norm, but they left home at 13 or 14 so usually not more than five were with their parents at a tme. It is rare for people to live with their aged families - the norm in Japan. Families were perpetually on the move between jobs, often within a restricted area but housing for labourers was tied to jobs, it is a 'capitalist' society, not a 'Confucian' one.

Interesting, it is through looking at the detail that you really come to understand the differences.

New Tyres

Two new front tyres fitted to our 'Corsa' yesterday. They have been 'barely legal' in terms of tread since the last time I was in England and it definitely wasn't a good idea to be driving over the Pennines in January weather with them so I headed up to our local 'National' type depot. They usually offer a good price.

Well, they weren't expensive and were fitted quickly but I couldn't help but smile at the differences between this job and getting similar work done on our venerable 'Skyline' back in leafy Chiba-ken. In Japan this kind of garage work is usually done by someone dressed up like a civil engineer in charge of a big suspension bridge or aeronautical project in a spotless workshop and surrounded by more electronic kit than you would find in a hospital operating theatre. Here it is done in a scruffy and draughty ancient recycled factory building by a man called George wearing overalls that have never been washed in the ten years he has been wearing them. It is indeed a different universe.

But the real differences aren't just the superficial ones. In Japan the customer is seen as 'the client', treated wth formal 'politeness' and as someone who should only ever have the 'front of house' experience. In England you are usually treated with 'courtesy' of an informal kind but that's a very different thing. Also they hide nothing from you. "Those would have been four quid cheaper but we haven't any, we ordered them on Tuesday but they didn't come on the van." ... "Yeah! I'll fit those in a couple of minutes mate, I just need a fag first, haven't had one all morning ..." Unimaginable in Japan. Not that they might not have stock or need a fag, just that it wouldn't be mentioned to you, the honoured customer ....

I kind of like aspects of both these approaches. The English one is an honest one, just so long as the job is done properly and well. But it easily leads to slovenliness, even sloppiness. The Japanese one is discliplined, respectful, but sometimes leaves me wondering what the heck is really going on.

It would be interesting to write yet another book about these subtle but profound cultural differences. What would be really nice would be an informal and friendly yet immaculate service.

Wot no letter box?

Back in Britain again. Yesterday I was fairly 'full of beans' and I'd thought the 'jet-lag' wasn't so bad this time but that was before I was wide awake at 3:15 a.m. this morning eh? I did a couple of hours work and study and then went back to bed and slept again until Julia came to wake me up around 9:30 a.m. wondering what was wrong. Maybe I'm in for days of this.

In January the weather here in Lancashire is much milder than in Kanto - at night. None of those hard frosts we have been getting with our clear night skies in eastern Japan. But during the day what sunshine there is is quite watery, none of the stong 'mind you don't get sunburned' stuff that I've grown used to in December and January in leafy Chiba-ken.

The first morning back I had to go and pick up a parcel from our local post office delivery depot and walked straight into the kind of row that sadly represents Britain to the ex-pat in me these days. A guy there in front of me had also had a parcel to collect but hadn't been able to get to the depot as he'd been working away from home like so many have do. Here they only hold onto the parcel for two weeks and then return it to the sender. He'd tried ringing the number on the 'can't get it through your letterbox' card he'd had put through his door by the postman but the number didn't work and then he'd tried coming down to the depot to leave a note that he could collect it on Saturday but there wasn't a letterbox for him to put it in! He'd ended up putting his letter under the depot door where, of course, it had vanished. The parcel had been 'returned to sender'

Yep! He was pretty cross. "What kind of Post Office is it that doesn't have a letterbox for deliveries?" He demanded of the 'manager' of the place. What kind indeed? Hmm ... back in Britain again, hard to imagine a Post Office Sorting Office without a letter box anywhere else in the world eh? Like a pub with no beer, or a garage with no petrol

And yet it's not all bad - many cheerful smiles from 'locals' around town as I went for my car tax disc. Mustn't forget that side of the old place too.

Airborne

Good grief! Apologies to regular readers of 'Little House' but I've missed writing much recently - it has been a very hectic week preparing to fly to England tomorrow. Amazing how everthing goes awry when you are trying to get stuff finished before you get on a plane.

Well, I'm airborne tomorrow. British Airways too, so keep your fingers crossed for me! I see on their web site they are already warning of cancellations and delays in the UK due to 'high winds'. Last time I flew with them we were an hour late to Manchester because of 'clouds'. Seems that they had some up there in the sky, unusual I know but I suppose you can't see the ground eh?

Back to normal service when I get to England I hope! Photos of snowy scenes no doubt and windy places too! Watch this space

Driving without lights

Drove over to the post office and 'Yacs' drugstore earlier this evening and just as I came to the 'T' junction on the awkward little hill beyond the level crossing a teenage boy roared across in front of me on a motor scooter. It was bad enough that he must have been speeding at least double the limit in the village but the worst of it was he had no lights on! Actually that isn't quite true, his rear light was working but his headlight and front lights weren't working at all. So not only was he hurtling along at lethal speed but he was nearly invisible on a dark rainy night.

If I'd been an older driver with dodgier eyesight in the dark he'd probably have been a dead teenage scooter rider already. And of course in such circumstances the motorist is always to blame for 'careless driving'.

Hard to imagine how anyone could be dumb enough to speed on an unlit scooter in the dark and rain but there you go, people are dumb. Taking silly risks is OK until your luck runs out.

In rural Japan you do have to watch out for hazards on the roads and especially kids riding on the wrong side on push-bikes without lights at night. Usually three or four abreast and sending messages on their keitei too. Although everyone relies on bikes to get to school there seems to be nothing like the 'cycling proficiency test' that we run in England to give kids basic road sense and cycling skills. The accident and fatality rate here must be awful - if these kids took a bike onto higher speed English roads they would be dead in five minutes.

As luck had it tonight though I was able to give this boy a gruff and unexpected lecture - in English too! - about the wisdom of charging around the lanes on unlit lethal machinery. It was his bad luck that he was just getting back on his still unlit bike at Yacs as I pulled up in the car park. I can be scary when I want to be too.

Enzymatic Bath

Well, almost back to normal after all that New Year stuff. The last couple of days we made a very short trip over to Hasunuma to spend the night in a hotel just a minute's walk from the beach and have a general 'blow-out' with a large traditional Japanese dinner. Very nice.

One highlight of the visit was taking an 'enyzmatic bath' which this particular place specialisies in. I ought to know better these days than to take anything in Japan at face value but there you go, I'm an optimist eh? I'd just got back from a quick evening walk down to the beach and I was looking forward to a nice bubbly soak in a hot tub but that was my big mistake. When I found the room it turned out to be a kind of a byre and everyone else was already buried in soil with just their faces poking out. The 'bath assistant' got busy with his shovel I too was on my back under about a ton of hot soil.

An interesting experience, and I'm still not sure if I liked it. The theory must be that you absorb the goodness from the soil through your skin. I remember my grandad telling me once that you could do that with honey - it was such a powerful 'natural food' that if you rubbed it on your skin in was just as good as having it on a slice of bread. hmm - do you think so? Anyway, I wasn't tempted to try the enzymatic bath on toast. It was kind of un-nerving lying there in the gloom having some guy in a boiler suit and wellies shovel hot soil on you. Buried alive - but don't panic!

The good news is that this is very good for ... well, almost everything I'm told. If you've got it ... then an enzymatic bath is going to cure it for you. Helps you loose weight too, run faster, work harder and all kinds of other stuff that I'll leave to your imaginations. Great.

I'm not sure what relevance a picture of me flying a kite has to all this but I don't have any pictures of those enzymes so here is the other highlight of my weekend which I might write about tomorrow.

New Year trip to Shibayama

New Year's Day. The family are staying over so after a leisurely breakfast we headed as usual over to the temple at Shibayama, along with about half the other people that live in the villages around here. At least we don't suffer much from 'hangovers' here in Japan compared with Britain. Back in the UK the New Year is celebrated by mainly heading for pubs and parties and consuming vast quantities of booze. But here it is much more of a family affair, like an old fashioned 'Sunday Outing' where everyone - or at least the ladies - wears their best clothes. Of course we are going to stuff ourselves too, the kitchen already a 'no go area' for mere males as the best dishes come out of the bottom cupboard.


"Time flies like an arrow" says Dogen. It is an observation that always seems especially appropriate at New Year. Last year I missed my trip to Shibayama Noison because I was in Engand sorting out my late step-father's affairs after his death three weeks before. Where will we all be when New Year 2009 comes around?

We say it is lucky to get covered with incense smoke and at New Year especially we crowd around the big burner in the temple forecourt, make our resolutions and wish for good fortune for everyone and especially those we love and worry about. Well, as they don't have 'scent files' on the internet I can't waft incense in your direction but here at least is a picture of it! Happy New Year!