What are the monkeys doing today?

I was watching Pero during one of the classes here with elementary school students this afternoon. She was sitting in the circle between two girls, her front paws crossed, paying close attention to a word card game in progress in front of her. It really felt like she was trying to puzzle out the rules of the game, work out what the young monkeys around her were up to.

Actually Pero is well known for this kind of thing. She's a thinker. Often she will sit on a stool in class too, observing the lesson as if she was a school inspector. Tora has no ambitions to intellectual prowess; he often sits with the kids as well but it tends to be looking vacantly into space as if he's having a 'senior' moment. Basically he just likes the company, maybe he will get a stroke if he hangs about a bit. Some of the very young children are slightly nervous of him because he is such a large cat and has staring eyes but they soon work out that he is a complete softy.

I often wonder what the pair of them make of their human companions. Do they ever ask themselves the question "What are the monkeys doing today?" I'm sure that they must, there has to be some kind of rationalisation of the meaning of "Life, the Universe and Everything" going on in their heads. Always a comfortable chair here, a stroke there, monkeys coming and going all day long. Some of them we know and some we don't. And that magic food bowl which, like the legendary glass of Guinness in the joke, never runs empty. What is it all about?

Behind all this lie deeper questions eh? How did I end up in this house with these particular monkeys? What is it all for? Why here and not someplace else? What was I before I was a kitten? Cats seem to take these things for granted, do they ever wonder about the answers to such questions. I mean, we KNOW why we are in this particular house with these people but for cats it just all seems such a mystery, almost random somehow. Don't you think so?

Iain by Gaslight

Interesting how sounds often crop up in dreams - like smells they can be subtle reminders of something long ago but still with a strong emotonal charge. One sound that I still occasionally hear in my sleep is the sound of gas lights hissing gently.

Hmm ... this is a topic that will get 'oldie' readers of 'Little House' going I'm sure! And let's be clear! - I'm not so old that I can remember our home boing lit by gas-light - you would probably have had to have lived in Victorian times for that to be a memory! But I do remember that when I was a child our street lighting in Middlesbrough was all gas. At dusk a man in a cap and muffler with a long pole over his shoulder would cycle along the roads skillfully opening the glass door of each lamp, turning the gas on with a hook and then lighting the lamp with a taper at the end of the poll. It took a few seconds for the 'mantle' to begin to glow. After he'd gone you could here a soft hiss of gas from each lamp post as you played in the street.

I wonder when they were turned off. Long after I'd gone to bed I guess, around 10:30 when everyone was home from the pub.

More intimate though are memories of evenings spent with my grandad in signal boxes on the railways around Barnard Castle which were still usually lit with gas in the 1950's. At dusk he would light up the gas light in the box and then as darkness fell you could start to see the twinkling paraffin lamps outside in the darkness lighting each signal red or green. The only sound would be that hissing of gas, the solemn ticking of the clock on the wall, and the occasional settling of the coal fire in the grate. Lovely.

Fishy Numbers

Since I started doing serious research it feels like I can't pass any 'statistic' by in a newspaper article (and especially those quoted by politicians of course!) without looking twice. It is hardly news that there's lots of dodgy, misquoted and frequently downright 'bent' numbers out there. I always run through a 'reality check' in my mind to see if the figures could actually possibly be true and many fail to even pass this simple test. Eightly million UK residents can't suffer from bunions because there aren't that many residents around

One tell-tale sign that starts warning bells ringing with me is 'spurious accuracy' - those figures quoted to decimal places where no-one could possibly know that detail. It is usually simple 'back of a fag packet' stuff even though it is often based on spreadsheet calculations these days. Excel has a lot to answer for.

So my nose tweaked when I came across an item on MSN News today. Initially I thought it was a kind of Monty Python send-up but no, I'm afraid they were in deadly earnest. The "Marine Conservation Society" (Registered Charity) are currently running a campaign "Don't Let Go!" to try and get balloon races banned. That's right. It seems that - to quote - "a balloon is not a cause for celebration, but a possible death sentence for an animal..." a turtle has died at Knott End on Sea (well, some years ago). And here was the bit that really caught my eye. Balloons found on British beaches have increased from 3.4 per kilometre to 11.5 per kilometre in 12 years. Ho hmm ...

What, on all the 17820 kilometres of Britain's coastline? How do they know that? Well,no, not exactly. Looking at the report behind the press release, which is not written by the MCS, it seems that only 168.5km (around 1%) of the coast actually was surveyed. And this wasn't a random sample so you can't assume that the results are representative and interpolate that they apply to the whole of the UK. Also twelve years ago more beach was surveyed less intensively. But I don't want to knock the Beachwatch 2007 research itself which supplied the data. It seems quite interesting and workmanlike, a good volunteer exercise.

I'm more curious about the "why the balloons?" The Beachwatch survey turned up 2054 items per kilometre, most of it considerably more objectionable and dangerous to wildlife than balloon fragments, which account for only around a half of one percent of the total. And surely even most of those fragments that were found originated with kids playing on the beach rather than 'downed' balloon race participants. So actually this campaign turns out to be a real 'crock' doesn't it? A bunch of killjoys with a bee in their bonnet. But why? Was someone scared by one as a child?

We'll never know - but watch out for those fishy numbers!

Ou sont les nieges?

Good news for those regular 'Little House' readers who are starting to despair of me ever getting back into a regular routine of posting here. On Tuesday I eventually finished the archive work I've been doing on old aerial photographs after months of trailing into Chiba in all weathers with my laptop and a very large magnifying glass.

If you are one of the few people left in the world that I haven't bored to death with my studies I'm looking at the way Chiba-shi (city) has evolved and how it actually changes. My investigation goes well back into the nineteenth century, but the main focus is own how the city has changed since the Second World War. One technique I've been using is to visit around 4,500 places in the city to see what is there now and then checking back on aerial photographs to see what was there in 1990, 1975 and 1960.

Madness! It has meant setting up a database with more than 13,000 observations in it and I'll never care if I don't ever see another aerial photograph in my life! But it is done now. All I have to do is analyse the changes and write the darn thing up.

It might seem an odd thing to say but it was sometimes quite an emotional thing for me to peer at those photographs and especally the black and white set from 1960. A different world, tiny cheap wooden homes that belonged to the parents and grandparents of my Japanese friends. Houses crowded together in a now vanished city landscape. Those pictures reminded me of that refrain in the fifteenth century poem by Francois Villon - "ou sont les nieges d'antan?" Where are the snows of yesteryear?

Prince, don’t ask me where they are,
in what land or in what time.
The only answer I can give is:
'Where are the snows of yesteryear?'

I make no firm promises about posting more regulalry yet as I still have a heck of a lot of writing to do but let's hope so, I've been missing spending time down in 'Little Paddy'

Climbing Aboard

Good grief! Another 'Tora' feature this week already but he seems to be catching my eye at the moment. Perhaps it is his fine glossy early summer coat that I can't help admiring.

We were working both downstairs yesterday evening and our one 'armchair' (actually a wicker garden chair, we live a rather 'simple life' in 'Little House') was in the kitchen. Pero as usual was already installed with sole proprietorial rights as 'resident alpha cat'. Beats me how she keeps her position as boss because she is only half Tora's size but there you go, he's a perfect gentleman.

Usually. Last night that chair looked just too tempting and Pero was fast asleep. Stealthily, one paw at a time and feigning to look in the opposite direction, Tora eased himself onto the edge of that chair whisker by whisker. It must have taken him ten minutes to get aboard and settle himself down into a sitting position. We just couldn't help laughing. It was a masterpiece of deception.

Actually this is a pretty hazardous operation for him, sometimes times I've seen Pero give him a real bite for his cheek when he tries something like this. But he's learned to be a master of caution. A couple ot times Pero gave a sleepy but half-hearted "put one hair over that line pal and see what happens" kind of growl but she was too drowsy and comfortable to care, her heart wasn't in it.

And here they are both asleep on the comfortable chair at last. Mission accomplished.