Leap Year Day

Leap Year Day! I always feel that there is something interesting about a date that comes around only once in every four years. In England we used to say that it was the one day when women could propose marraige to men.

It has a special association for me too - it was the date on which my maternal grandmother's funeral was held back in 1960. Good grief! Forty eight years ago, nearly half a century already. I can remember that funeral very clearly because it was the first one I ever attended, I'd managed to arrive at twelve years of age without ever going to one before. Only four of us 'official mourners' in the family car and we followed the hearse down Galgate to Barnard Castle Parish Church on a chilly February morning for the 'religious service'. Back then people in the street still took off their hats as a mark of respect when a hearse passed by and that's the thing I remember most - middle aged men along the route standing to attention and doffing their hats to the coffin. I suppose these days we don't wear hats so much anyway

Afterwards we drove back through town and then speeded up along the main road towards the crematorium at Darlington, one hearse and one car, just the corpse and four 'family'. I remember vaguely thinking at the time "I hope that more people than this come to my funeral" but my grandmother was a great one for 'keeping herself to herself' - she thought it was a virtue I suppose

Something for Nothing

I see on the Guardian website this morning that, following a 'contract renegotiation' (and keep your hands high in the air Mr. Taxpayer where we can see them!) a recent UK National Audit Office report claims that British GP's (family doctors) are now earning 58% more than they were two years ago for doing 5% less work. Sounds like a good deal. I wonder when everyone else will get be getting it. Especially us InBev pensioners who, as is well known, make an absolutely invaluable contribution to modern society and of course deserve to be paid the going rate for the job and what the market will bear, etc. QED. Watch out, if you don't give us the cash we'll buy our Sanatogen and support bandages someplace else.

I don't hear so much about this kind of stuff in Japan where people generally seem to lack the worst of this instinct for rapacious greed. But we do have a society here that loves to cash in on what in the UK we would call 'options'.

For example. Earlier this month one of our students was recently offered a place in a well known and reputable private university in Tokyo - let's call it "University A". It was his second choice - his first choice was another Tokyo university, the more prestigeous "University B".

Now, here's the trick. To keep that "University A" place available his parents were required to make an obscenely large payment (well over £1000) by the exact day before the offers by "University B" were published. A kind of 'insurance policy' eh? Of course you can take the risk, but then if "Option B" doesn't work out "Option A" is closed and no college for you until next year. "Stand and Deliver!" as Dick Turpin used to say.

Luckily in his case his parents did cough up the 'ante' because in the end he didn't get an offer after all from his preferred university. But if he had, it would have been money down the toilet. What a wonderful way to make a shedful of cash for doing nothing at all. Like the Indian rope trick, or those 'perpetual energy' machines.

Our local city hall recently relieved us of £300 with a very similar scam (sorry, "policy"!) The previous owners of our house once paid towards the instllation of a water supply pipe down our lane although we aren't connected to it because our perfectly good borehole and pump is much cheaper than metered water. Then, suddenly "to keep our options open for connection" a premium by a certain date was demanded otherwise future connection would cost so much that piped water would become a distant dream for us.

Neat. Whatever you do, don't mention this to your local politicians. Maybe they haven't thought about it ...yet!

Buttermere

Still limping around today and tottering up and down the stairs with the aid of a stick. But it's certainly better than yesterday. This afternoon I even made it down to the river and back to get some exercise and that was far enough. I can see that when one leg is causing problems like this the important thing is not to put too much pressure on the other one, the action of walking in an unbalanced way puts a strain on other muscles and tendons. Moderation in all things eh?

I've been looking through some of the pictures I've taken over the last few weeks and I was particularly struck by some I'd taken at Buttermere. It was always one of my favourite parts of the Cumbria and if you want to visit the lake now a sunny February day is probably a good time to do it. The road here must get to be impossible now under the weight of modern summer traffic.

What's so special about Buttermere? It is one of the most 'out of the way' of the Cumbrian lakes - this area was described as "The Secret Valley" in Nicholas Size's novel about local resistance to the Norman conquest of these parts in the eleventh century. And the mountains across the lake from the road are very rugged and beautiful. It has a fine walk along the eastern shore too.

I recently came across a photograph of my grandmother and I walking hand in hand along the road leading down to the lake from Honister taken in around 1951 or 1952. Later - perhaps about 1956 - I stayed with my mother at a bed and breakfast place in Seatoller and walked over the pass to Buttermere and Crummock and back again in a day, something which was a doddle at nine but which I'd stuggle to do at the moment!

'Jiggered' my leg

Back in sunny Japan at last. The light may be brighter but it is pretty windy around here, the usual February dust storms when those red Shimosa loess soils (originally volcanic ash from Mt. Fuji!) get blown from the fields and the sky is full of dust. Great weather for car-wash manufacturers. Landing at Narita yesterday was a bumpy journey indeed, like a fairground ride which began on the other side of Honshu near Niigata and didn't stop until we were on the tarmac feeling pretty 'green' and air sick.

Not a bad flight though. Cabin service with Lufthansa is always good but their 'in-flight' entertainment is showing it's age - just three movies on a communal screen in 'economy class' and they were all those tedious and allegedly 'action-packed' Hollywood offerings where the good guy wins. I spent most of the time acting as a pillow for the elderly and very large Italian guy sitting next to me who had taken a sleeping tablet on take-off and spent most of the flight snoring and farting. It turned out that his bouncy and pretty daughter up front in business class was an opera singer and is in Tokyo for five days to make a couple of performances.

Got back here and then - 'jiggered' my leg as my grandad would have said. How did I do that? Just went out for a short walk before bed-time, somehow stepped awkwardly and - OW! Something went 'crunch!' in the tendons of my right calf and I was lucky to be able to hobble and hop the half mile back home. I've been doing lots of driving and manual work recently so maybe there's an element of RSI in this, my foot pressed hard on the accellerator for too long eh? Now I'm limping up and down stairs with the aid of a stick but I could hardly have a better excuse for 'taking it easy' for a few days. There's a silver lining to every cloud, or is it a cloud around every silver lining ...

Bag packing

Bag packing at last! I've been in England since 10th January and my return home feels long overdue, it has been quite a hrd trip with some difficult things to do. But now I'm flying on Saturday morning and it is time to finish off all the loose ends. I'm getting really excited.

The trip between Manchester and Narita is pretty familiar to me these days, I think that this is the eighteenth time that I've flown from England to Japan. It's always a tiring journey somehow - it seems longer flying west to east because most of the flight is completed in a (very short) night - even though it is actually an hour shorter than flying the other way because of favourable high winds. Usually the route is over northern Siberia and Khabarovsk, but sometimes by Mongolia, Beijing and the East China Sea depending on the weather.

I've got the mechanics of this trip down to a fine art, from weighing cases and re-setting watches to knowing which will be the quickest line through customs and where all the toilets in the airports are. I've made the journey using six airlines. SAS are the most laid back and comfortable followed by Lufthansa, Alitalia was easily the worst and I never used them again.

Despite the familiarity it is still a stressful trip somehow, you can't travel half way around the world in th blink of an eye and expect it to be easy. But this time it is Lufthansa so I'm hoping for a comfortable ride. Wish me luck and my next blog will be from Japan again!

Weston Lullingfields

Wow! A trip with a big suprise attached today. We'd been planning to take a trip down to Shropshire before I flew back to Japan and so we headed down there this morning to the area where my dad's family had lived before they migrated to Liverpool in the 1870's. It is a part of the county north of Shrewsbury and an area that I'd never explored before. My father's great-great-grandfather had been a village cobbler at Weston Lullingfields near Baschurch and I had a copy of his marraige certificate from his wedding at nearby Kinnerley in April 1852.

But the hightlight of the day was the moment when walking around the churchyard at Holy Trinity Chuch, Weston Lullingfields, we discovered his headstone and also nearby that of his son John. Two Robinson graves side by side and next to the door of a beautiful country church set amongst the corn fields. The stone recorded where he lived - a lane nearby at Weston Wharf - so we could also guess which house our family had lived in.

Hard to imagine what this area must have been like 150 years ago but certainly very different - far more hedgerows then and at a time when all ploughing was done by horse a lot more farm labourers and their families too. So much more demand for making and repairing stout boots I guess.

Sound of a Spitfire

A busy few days. Monday I dropped my Japanese friends down to Cambridgeshire and they went on to London on their own for a short visit. But before they caught the train we visited Duxford, just south of Cambridge. This is the RAF airfield where the Imperial War Museum aircraft collection is based, and if you like planes and aviation history it is the place in Britain to head for.

It's not cheap - in fact when I saw the tariff my first thought was "How much??" but actually for what you get to see it is a bargain. They must have around 250 historic planes there of all shapes, sizes and ages. Many of them are still kept in flying condition and there is a lot of that "volunteer spirit" in evidence in the hangars where aircraft are conserved and maintained. That is something we do well in England, maybe better than in most other places.

Out on the field on a sunny afternoon a Spitfire and a Hurricane were revving up to take off to practice for an air display the following day and we had them pretty well to ourselves. Pure magic! If you've never heard it for real it is just impossible to describe the sound of one of these planes as the pilot opens up the throttle and the chocks come away and they taxi off over the grass to take off, or as they later roar overhead 'buzzing' the airfield. These 'Battle of Britain' fighters that held a German invasion at bay in the summer of 1940 have such a special place in our history, if you are English your heart jumps just to see them in action.

Yorkshire Excursion

Lovely weather today - in fact more like a good day in April or May than the middle of February. After a visit over to York yesterday today's trip was to the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway and the Bronte Museum at Haworth, only an hour's drive across the moors from Lancashire.

I like the KWVR. It is one of the oldest of the preserved railways in the north of England and the route is certainly one of the prettiest, winding up the Worth Valley from Keighley. I can remember during the early 1960's when the future of the route was certainly far from secure. But somehow with a good volunteer base it moved on from there to become one of Britain's most popular tourist attractions.

The thing that really struck me about it today after a bit of a surfeit of 'sights' recently was just how 'realistic' the KWVR is in the way it captures the true atmosphere of a 1950's English country railway. In fact I started to wonder if the volunteers had been getting coached in method acting at a drama college. Amazing how people who spend their days working in computer centres and selling insrance can somehow manage to hang about on windy platforms with the same casual, yet careful, attitude that real railway staff used to effect half a century ago. Well done boys!

Manchester trip

Posts have been a bit erratic this last few days and are likely to be the same for the next week or so too. Two of my friends from Japan are over for a trip and I'm ferrying them around several places in northern England. But keep checking back as I'll be posting some photographs of our progress when I can.

The schedule today was supposed to be the Lake District but a persistent drizzle this morning led me to do some swapping around in our plans and we headed down to Manchester to tick off a few museums. I didn't reckon much to the Imperial War Museum (North) - one of those multi-million pound architect award winning jobs with lots of interpretive 'sound and light' bandied around and not much in the way of real exhibits at all - a bit like the Museum of Tokyo which is a similar kind of disappointment. But the Lowry Gallery was good and the Mancehster Museum of Science and Industry is really first class.

If you haven't been here's a view inside the areonautic hall, which is housed in a wonderful cast iron former market building. How on earth did they get that Shackleton plane in here? Well worth a trip and even better it is all free!

The books in the washstand

Interesting how early we get interested in sex. Sorting out my study today I suddenly recalled some books that once belonged to my grandparents. I'd quite forgotten about them and I don't know why they popped into my mind as they must have vanished thirty years ago but there you are - our memories play all kinds of tricks on us.

I think I must have discovered these books when I was around seven or eight years old. There was a pile of about fifteen of them and they were a series with a most distinctive beige and mauve design of hard cover and they all lived together in my grandparent's oak wash stand in the gloomy cupboard under the marble slab where the wash bowl and jug of cold water were kept.

Ha! I know what you are thinking, but you are wrong! My grandparents wouldn't even have known what that kind of book was and I'm sure there were none within a hundred miles of Coronation Street, Barnard Castle. No, this was a set of books about 'Life' that they must have invested in them for my mother to read as a teenager. Lots of wholesome stuff in there about how to starch collars, pay tradesmen and cook a knuckle of pork in brine. Maybe they had been read once, somethime, in the dim past but if they had been there was no sign of it.

Except for one volume of course, I think it was XVIII. Lots of big words there that I didn't understand I think, but as a child you don't need it explaining do you? This was clearly something that I should only look at when grandad was at work and grandma was down at the shops. Why otherwise would it be lurking in this cupboard and not downstairs on the bookshelf? QED.

Can't remember a darn thing about what was in that book but as it was published for teenagers in the 1930's I'm sure that it was utterly inoccuous, nothing but the vaguest of references to the duties of husbands and wives within bounds of Christian marraige, you know the kind of thing. But you don't need to spell stuff out even to eight year olds, I already knew that I'd stumbled across something big and that I'd better keep my mouth shut about it even at that tender age.

If all the girls lived over the sea ...

Interesting stuff. Today going through a box of stuff belonging to my late step-father Bill I came across an autograph book that belonged to me back in the 1950's. I wonder what it was doing there - it looks like he's used a few of the pages himself to keep little treasures safe. I see for example there's an autograph from the artist Rolf Harris on a newspaper dated 5 December 1971 and another autograph for my son signed "To Patrick! Good luck!" from the comedian Leslie Crowther on the back of a card from the Britannia Hotel Bournemouth

But the signatures that interested me were the ones from the 1950's that I'd collected. There's a page there for example signed by some of the crew that reads "To Iain hoping that you have enjoyed your visit to HMS Decoy. 6 Nov. 1955" I can still remember the excitement of making a tour around that ship at Middlesbrough docks and I managed to find this beautiful painting of the World War Two veteran on the internet. There are entries too from some of my Junior ('Elementary') school friends - Ian Tait, Alan Rees, Keith Downey and teachers too - including our old headmaster Harold Robson.

The one that made me laugh though was the entry on the last page of the book from my first 'girlfriend' Jennifer Harris. Even at the age of eleven she had me well 'sussed' it seems. Her entry reads

"If all the girls lived over the sea
What a good swimmer Iain would be ..."

I guess though that she would never have imagined back in 1958 that this would result in me ending up quite so far across the sea eh? Not even sure that I knew where Japan was back then.

Long Marton Chapel

Back safe in Lancashire this evening. The weather further north has been pretty rough over the last few days and I got across the hills from Northumberland this morning just an hour ahead of a blizzard that had hundreds of cars snowbound by early afternoon. It's been an eventful trip.

In three places on my travels I've been looking at places that have been important to one strand of my family who all worked in farming in Westmorland back in the nineteenth century. It's the first chance that I've had to really 'have a go' at this in the field and I've been in for a few surprises. For example I'd always thought that most of our recent ancestors had graves marked with stones but that is far from true. I guess that only the rich could afford monuments, a moment's thought should have shown me that farm labourers and their kids couldn't have paid for fancy stone masonry.

And where are those graves anyway? I realise now that the 'Furness' line in my family must have been Methodists to a man. I'd guess that some of my ancestors probably listened to John Wesley preaching out in the fields and lanes, back then the 'established' Church of England was for the squire and the well-to-do. Poorer non-conformist families worshipped in the fields, then later in chapels. These chapels are now mostly redundant and often 'invisible' but still a part of most rural villages in northern England. Some still do have small burial yards, but others never seem to have had one. Where did all those Methodists get buried over the years? It's a question that I'll have to look into.

Here's a chapel that I visited at lunchtime on Tuesday in the heavy rain. It was built in 1816 in the village of Long Marton near Appleby in and my great-great-grandfather Robert Furness and his father Joseph must have come here on Sundays in the 1860's and so started a religious practice that I can still remember my great-great-aunt Nora following in the 1980's. But as you can see, no graves here. Just a nice basic Georgian building in local red Permian sandstone.