Royal Trains - 1

I just got my copy of Part 10 of the new "Railway Atlas of Japan" published by Shinchosha today. This is a very fine publication, in fact it is easily the best railway atlas I've ever seen anywhere. It will eventually cover the whole country plus former colonies in thirteen parts and the level of detail is just amazing. If you are a railway 'buff' this series is a classic, a 'must buy'. Every station, with opening dates etc.

Some of the features are very good too. This volume covers the Osaka area but there's an excellent piece on Japanese Royal Trains including a database of all rail trips made by the Taisho and Showa Emperors between 1914 and 1954. We even had the Royal Train down the line through this part of leafy Chiba-ken once! I must check out the local newspaper archives and blog it.

It is interesting to 'compare and contrast' the differences between Royal Trains in Britain and Japan and the similarities far outweigh the differences. Until after World War Two these weren't so much public occasions in Japan, but from 1946 Hirohito did a huge amount of criss-crossing the country to see and be seen, and the photographs of these events say more about the realities and issues contemporary Japan than a thousand words ever could.

The top photograph here (reproduced with thanks to Shinchosha) shows the Showa Emperor's train at some unspecified date about to pull out of Tokyo station's platform 10 for a trip down the Tokaido line. These days you would be jumping on a kaisoku bound south for Atami here. As every child knows the Emperor has a special carpeted pedestrian tunnel to platform 10 from the Marunouchi side of the station and the station master (seen here in his morning dress) walks ten paces in front of him to lead him through it to his waiting train.

I like the bottom picture, taken around 1955, as the Emperor's train speeds by some elementary school class somewhere in rural Japan. I seem to remember standing outside Marton Road Junior School with a 'Union Jack' at almost exactly the same time as these kids were waving at Hirohito as our Queen's cavalcade went by up Marton Road.

What is my name really?

Into Chiba yesterday to try and sort out some new banking arrangements. It all revolved around being in a better position to shuffle money quickly between yen and Sterling, something which has loomed as a big issue for me over the last few months. If you live only within your own national borders maybe you haven't noticed that you are probably a lot poorer than you were six months ago. But if your pension is paid in one country and you live in another you soon notice just how unstable the international currency market has become, and have to learn to look after your savings.

Well, I got things pretty well sorted out with opening a new account, but the fact that I have three forenames just throws everyone here and caused all the usual hassle. Almost all Japanese have a family name and one given name and usually they are both two characters each which means your name is only going to be four characters long. The characters in the given name might be a bit idiosyncratic but it will be short.

So the fact that I have three given names and that to get my whole name on a line takes twenty eight characters is hard to handle. A lot of my official records here don't even have my whole name. My parents can't possibly have foreseen what a problem all this was going to cause me later in life.

Anyway having got the new account open I had to go around to my other bank and transfer some money. And that's when the fun started. The name on the transfer slip had to be exactly the same as the name on the account, otherwise their system would reject the payment. But the name on my new bank card only had my initials, not the full name of the account.

We were soon into one of those bizarre situations that only seem to happen is Japanese offices. People are just so obsessed with process here, nothing must be left to chance. And this one was so deliciously opaque - maybe there was no 'correct answer'. The nice clerk in "Old Bank A" was soon on the phone to "New Bank B" to decide what I should be called in the documentation. Was I to be 'Witto-san' - the closest she could get to my initials on my bank card? Or would only the full name do? And if it was the full name should it be in Roman Characters, or katakana, or both? Much consultation at both ends, forms taken for the inspection of various managers and lots of stamping with 'hanko' seals - mine, hers. It is bizarre to hear your name being debated over the phone for half an hour. A kind of koan going on there - "What is your name really?" And nothing you can do about, just let it all go, sit there with a polite smile on your face, one day it will all end.

I wonder if the money will get there this morning. I'll have to see.

Barn Dance Prospect

I've been thinking through a few options for this 'choir trip' that I have to plan for next year. Goodness! I'm going to be busy when I get back to Britain, in fact I'd better start looking up a few things on the Internet before I set off. Apart from the 'singing' bit there are a few other musical options I'd like to put on the agenda and one of them is a bit of good old-fashioned barn dancing. Anyone know anyone who does it?

Do people still do barn dancing? Oh! I guess someone will do a Google search on the term and turn up this blog and then there will be trouble. The next thing will be that I'll get a few hundred angry e-mails from the committee of the 'National Barn Dance Association' or something like that. Recently I even heard of a 'Gilbert and Sullivan Society' still hard at it so I'm sure that someone somewhere must be doing lots of barn dancing. The old ones are always the best ones eh? "Between consenting adults" as the expression goes.

I don't think I've been seriously barn dancing since I was about seventeen. There is a vague memory lurking beyond an alcoholic haze of some swinging of partners (no laughing at the back there matron!) and 'do se do'-ing on a couple of occasions during my later Lancashire village years but I first seriously developed the habit as a teenager in Sussex. But why the heck was I going to barn dances at that age? It is all a bit of a mystery. I think that there must have been a vogue for local school PTA's to organise them but that doesn't explain what a spotty callow youth would be doing there.

Anyway, there you go. I learned to 'circle to the left' and 'circle to the right' and all the other 'calls' and I sweated away many a Friday night singing "Sussex by the Sea" at the top of my voice as I dashed up and down the hall with a partner. Who with and why? - Who cares? Probably someones mum. It was fun.

"For we're the men from Sussex
Sussex by the sea,
We plough and sow and reap and mow,
And useful men we are we:
And when you go from Sussex,
Whoever you may be,
You tell them all that we stand or fall
For Sussex by the sea."

I'm sure that "The Ladies" are all going to be excellent barn dancers to a woman. In fact I'll have to watch that one or two of them don't take it to excess after a thimble-full of ale. I already know who the trouble makers will be. I'll get them all kitted out in those nice gingham dresses and cow-girl stetsons and it will be a good evening in store.

Black Beast

Tonight I feel a bit like a young bullock that has just been released into a meadow in April. OK, Well a young bullock might be stretching it a bit but a bullock anyway. All the work I had to complete before going back to England was e-mailed off this afternoon so I have a few days looming where I won't be slaving over a hot computer. Or if I am, at least not on academic work. Wonderful!

At home in the north livestock is usually let out into the fields as soon as the ground has dried out and there is a bit of growth in the grass for them to nibble at. Too early and the ground becomes a quagmire in a minute but too late and the poor animals are going crazy with their winter confinement in byres. Anyway, towards the end of March or the beginning of April the gate is opened and they go charging out into the open air full of excitement and doing the kinds of little dances that cows do. They can't get over how big the field is, they have to hare around and try out all that space for themselves.

Year of the Ox this year. You can't help but like cows. When I was a child I was always slightly afraid of them, they were big and a bit unpredictable. Also our Pennine cows are usually black and a bit wild-eyed and farmers used to refer to them as 'black beast'. Sounds a bit dodgy don't you think? - "Watch out sonny there are some black beast loose in the top field today". The Devil's herd! Have they got '666' branded on their flanks??

Of course this lot were really just a friendly bunch of cows - curious to see who you were and if you had anything for them to eat. But if you don't know how to tell them to 'push off' their curiously can seem very threatening, they are bigger than you and there are more of them too.

These days there is nothing I like more to see than a little knot of black beast peering at me over a stone wall, preferably on a damp day when the clouds are down on the tops and their warm breath is steaming in a moist mist. I'm the most exciting thing that has happened in their lives all day! Some bovines seem made for show - the shaggy faces of Highland cattle or the smooth flanks of Gurnseys or Charolais 'milkers'. But the black beasts of the Dales are just a part of the landscape somehow. I'm looking forward to seeing some next month!

On the Edge

When I took my afternoon 'constitutional' down the banks of the mighty Sakuta River yesterday I did my usual gaffer's check on work in progress on the new flood defences. They are doing OK. Maybe on day when there is the most God awful typhoon in leafy Chiba-ken I'll see these new retaining walls restraining some mighty surging torrent but it all seems a bit like building a state of the art tiger's cage to keep harmless moggies in to me. But at least someone is making a fortune out of the taxpayer for doing it.

Ah! But this isn't what I wanted to write! Just below the station they are putting the retaining wall on the far bank at the very spot where the 'new cut' comes closest to the railway track. About a year ago JR East installed a line of white laser aligned benchmarks here to automatically detect subsidence and stop the trains and I thought "Typical Japanese over-cautious engineering! Do they think a train is going to slide into the river?" But now I can see why they were worried. The hole they are digging to put the levee wall in place is very deep and very close to the tracks. I sure hope they have got a heck of a lot of steel piling down there and that the ground stays dry.

As they have dug deeper and closer to the railway boundary the space for the workmen to operate has got more like the North Face of the Eiger by the minute and suddenly everyone is paying attention to what they do. There is an awful fascination now in watching lorry drivers reversing slowly along a ledge which is only a couple of feet wider than their big heavily laden vehicles. Needless to say they are offered a stream of advice through a megaphone from the supervisor but I guess if you are sitting in the driving seat you like to take a good look for yourself anyway and take your time. As I stood there watching I was trying to remember what that old war movie was where they took all the lorries loaded with TNT over that mountain pass. I mean you just know what is going to happen next don't you? Where is the fun in that?

I don't usually go for my laughs to the text of Lefebvre's "Production of Space" but there is a one-liner on page six about the philosophical 'abyss' between mental space and social space across which "from time to time some intrepid funambulist will set off across the void, giving a great show and sending a delightful shudder through the onlookers" which makes me chortle

Heights make me dizzy. Sometimes I play a little mental game where I think "fancy if there was something you valued so very much that you would walk across Niagara Falls (or some other chasm) on a tightrope just to get it". What could it possibly be? To give you the confidence risk your life to walk the rope it would need to be something of almost inconceivable value, don't you think so? Something so valuable that your whole body willingly accepted the task, not just your heart or your head. A million pounds, ten million pounds? Ha! Ha! Ha!

Mating Season

Good grief! This last couple of days the sunny weather has stirred the local felines up into a maelstrom of mating activity. There is one local 'Tom' that I seem to have heard all day every day for the whole of the past week. He's racing around the district declaring his interest I suppose and he's been hollering so much it is amazing that he still has any voice left at all. Small furry gangs lurk on every alley corner in search of a good fight and two minutes with a fecund female. Which one? Who cares! I feel tired just watching them. 'Angst' hardly begins to cover it. Nature is often interesting but not necessarily restful.

It must be strange to have this kind of thing all crowded into just two hectic weeks of romance every year, all of life's passions concentrated into a few days in February. How do they know when 'it is time'? Is it the lengthening day that starts to trickle new hormones into their blood steam? These cats all just look so confused. For many it is their first breeding season and they literally have no idea what all the excitement is about but boy! Are they excited! Life just used to be the odd wind blown leaf to chase, a saucer of milk and then this stuff all turns up - ' a loaf of bread, a flask of wine and Thou! Meowing in the wilderness!' Something like that.

Both our cats have 'had the operation' of course. Pero seems to be quite curious as to what the mayhem is all about and keeps slipping outside to see what her friends are up to. Tora doesn't seem to have much curiosity, he's seen it all before many times. Like all eunuchs he can't imagine what the fuss is all about, a tin of tuna and a nap in the sunshine near the window is more his idea of a good time. Sometimes I know how he feels!

Cut-out

Just when you think things can't get any more intrusive in terms of 'security' there you go, some new way to squander money on making nervous old ladies more nervous appears out of the woodwork to surprise you.

This cardboard cutout appeared in the foyer of our local post office a couple of weeks ago in the corner behind the cash machine. Actually the first time I encountered it, which was after the 'witching hour' of five when the 'curtains are drawn' and the counter is closed but the cash machine lingers for an hour, it quite made me jump. All Japanese cash dispensers are indoors, not quite sure why, and when I slipped my Post Office bank book into the slot a booming voice somewhere behind me blurted out something about how I was being watched! For a moment I thought I really was being attacked.Yep! This guy is somehow wired into the machine to give 'friendly advice' about minding how you go.

Well, I'd already worked out years ago that I was 'being watched', our cash dispense has a camera fitted just like every other. Seems a reasonable security precaution to me. I don't need a cardboard cutout to reinforce the message in any way. The bizarre thing in Japan is that the actual counters in Post Offices - banks too! - are generally completely open, no security grills at all! Millions of yen just stuffed into drawers guarded only by young ladies in green blazers who bow politely when you turn up to rob the place. But that's it of course, nobody does turn up to rob the place here, it isn't a part of the culture.

Earlier this week I was reading a comment in the 'Guardian' by someone who signed himself 'Batley Muslim', a nom de plume that would say a lot to English readers. A military aircraft 'geek' and also obviously of Pakistani extraction, he'd gone on his day off to an RAF museum to photograph some of the exhibits. There he found himself 'quizzed' not by a cardboard cut-out but by a young military man who asked if "everything was OK?" Huh? The author had obviously had some fun at this youngster's expense by asking him awkward technical questions about an exhibit that his inquisitor didn't know the answers to. "I could have pulled out my RAF Service ID out of my back pocket and made him stand to attention" he continued, "but it was fun just giving him a hard time."

But his concluding comment was interesting. "As an active member of the Armed Services with many years service and several campaign medals I'd like to thank the government for spreading such a climate of fear around that I was unhesitatingly treated as an object of suspicion".

Says it all really. What are cardboard cut-outs like this really meant to do? Instill even more doubt and anxiety? It's a kind of a fable of our time eh? We aren't even afraid of our own shadows any more , but some marketing agency's cut-out. Don't people have any b*llocks at all these days? The Chinese used to call all this stuff "killing the chickens to frighten the monkeys" A bonfire of all such garbage is long overdue.

Committee

I was watching the Japanese equivalent of "Today in Parliament" at lunch time, the usual debate on the economy of course. In fact I often see it, the programme seems to coincide with breakfast too. Maybe they don't have anything else on that channel and I just never realised it so far. Watching TV is a new experience for me here, since we treated ourselves to a small portable set we can watch the news and all the soaps as we eat our mochi and miso soup without wrapping up warm for the 'ordeal' of sitting in the washitsu.

Anyway this was the equivalent of a 'committee' session in progress today, not a debate on the floor of the main Diet chamber. Interesting to see the cultural differences around it all and compare them with UK practice. I've mentioned before that politicians here often remind me of Edo Period samurai. Same mindset, even the same posturing, and in some cases same families too! Just in different disguises.

How true that is really struck me again today. The room these committees meet in bears no relationship to it's Westminster equivalent where MP's like to imagine that they are judges. There they sit across the room at tables with their 'witnesses' out in front of them like the accused in the dock. Here committee men (hardly ever women of course) are drawn up facing each other in two opposing teams, it all has the feeling of a chess board. The quality of the seating itself is carefully graded according to rank. The Prime Minister and cabinet members have deep armchairs out of some nineteenth century Gentleman's Club and behind them Ministry officials are ranked on different grades of padded upright chairs.

The debate is incisive but courteous, no insults here in case swords are drawn I suppose. Someone makes a speech, asks a question, the minister gives a polite reply. Senior politicians don't carry or make notes, they sit and listen and then answer without props.

It all reminds me strongly of the audience room down in Nijo Castle in Kyoto - now a museum and beautifully set out to represent one of the shogun's council meetings back in the seventeenth century. The mannikin's representing the senior samurai taking part are sitting neatly in formal rows in exactly the same way, except that they use the tatami floor instead of armchairs. The shogun sits about ten feet in front of them and facing them. Of course this gap is not what it seems, to the side is a closet and everyone knows that inside are the shogun's bodyguards, swords drawn, ready to cut down anyone who attempts to cross this narrow space uninvited.

Connie's

The last couple of times I've been to Barnard Castle I've been meaning to stop off in Coronation Street and take a picture of where Connie's shop was. It must have been about number fourteen or sixteen, across the road from us and a few doors up. It has long gone now of course, been transformed back into an ordinary terrace house. One of a whole generation of very, very small shops that just evaporated when their owners died. The small shop tradition partly lingers on in Britain but mainly thanks to Asian families who moved into inner-city stores and built up businesses often relying on a surrounding Asian community.

Connie's store was just groceries I think. Perhaps she sold a few copies of the 'Teesdale Mercury' every week but I don't remember it and I certainly don't recall any of the other newspapers and magazines which often keep small shops ticking over. There just wasn't room. The 'shop' was the converted front room of a terrace house, you walked in through the green front door and there you were in a linoleum covered area that might be big enough for half a dozen people to mill around in. The counter was along one wall - the one to the right - and there were shelves along the back wall and in the corner where the stairs led up to the first floor. There must have been a 'kitchen' with a cooking range, table and armchair behind the shop and a scullery, but I never saw in there even as a child.

Connie's trade must have been limited to about eighty houses in the street itself and perhaps as many again down adjacent lanes and back alleys. You wouldn't have bought much there at any one visit - for serious shopping you headed 'down the street' with your shopping bag to the Co-op or the butchers.But if you ran out of tea or wanted a tin of beans or tinned fruit it was convenient. Her turnover can't have been more than three or four pounds a day - she might have earned ten pounds a week from the whole business if she was lucky. My contribution to this was the occasional packet of liquorice or sherbet, and very occasionally and with my grandmother's connivance a bottle of Dandelion and Burdock. If you were really sick there might be the unimaginable luxury of a bottle of Lucozade around.

She wore a light blue beret and was cheerful enough if a bit grumpy, perhaps a widow but my guess is a spinster. Perhaps a husband or a beau killed in the War, there were still a lot around like that in the 1960's. At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember them. I think that maybe the last time I saw her when I was around twelve I might have offended her by appearing to query my change, it was just that I wasn't sure what I'd spent. Sorry Connie, no offence intended.

And then sometime not long after that the shop vanished. She probably died in her late sixties, that was a good batting average back then. I must be one of the very few people around that remembers it.

In or out to lunch?

Up to the doctors yesterday to get this terrible cough sorted out and also to collect a 'double prescription' of my various diabetic pills to take to England with me. I was worried that with so much coughing my blood pressure was up there around Polaris but it was fine and also my long term glucose had even dropped a point or two which surprised me as I've been lying around feeling sorry for myself for days. So basically although I felt absolutely awful, I was pretty fit, as opposed to feeling fine but being on the North Face of the Eiger in terms of blood sugar risk. Isn't that always the way of it?

I was sitting in the "inside" waiting room, one one of the three hard chairs where we sit nervously listening to the guy in front of us getting a hard time (Hey! This is Japan! What do you want? Privacy?? It must do wonders for stuff like our outstandingly low local incidence of certain medical problems such as erectile dysfunction and it must save sensei time too with the 'no booze no fags ' lecture because you already just heard it). At times like that I think of my old grandad. He always used to call the doctors 'sawbones' and I have a feeling this probably had a lot to do with his time as a stretcher bearer on the Somme In 1917. I haven't seen S-sensei wielding a tenon saw yet though I am very familiar with his hypodermic skills.

Anyway none of this is what I intended to write about. I was thinking more of what happened afterwards in S-san's pharmacy. There I was waiting for my 'haul' to be dispensed when a woman of around thirty five came in. S-san said something polite to her along the lines of "do you want some pills then?" - I didn't hear exactly- and she looked surprised, said "no" and looked to the left. (This is my best Erving Goffman observational style creeping in here).

There was nothing so mysterious about this, you could see what it was. It was just that she was one of those people that live on a different planet. Know what I mean? You say something to them and somehow they aren't there. 'Lights on, door open, nobody home.' 85% there perhaps if you are lucky, but you can tell that you haven't completed the mental docking procedure somehow, the Eagle has not landed. They go through life being like that all the time. How do they do it? It is a mystery. In any given social situation I can't get past the first "hello" but what someone has the bag with the hammer and the six inch nails out on the table and the contract for me to sign in blood already under my nose. But some people are just so skilled at skimming along on the surface of reality. Like those stones we used to throw when we played "ducks and drakes" down at the shore of the lake they only touch the surface at the places that they bounce. Why can't you and me do that?

It seemed that she didn't want any pills herself, she wanted to collect some pills for a neighbour called - um - Tanabe? I'll just sit here and read the wrapper on the support tight packets. And for lunch today? - will we be in for lunch then? Or out?

Fixable; Transformable

I was re-reading some of Henri Lefebvre's work on 'space' today so that I can finish off a chapter of my thesis. He's a French philosopher I've mentioned here before. I find his work frustrating at times, even irritating, and yet I can't help but like it. No one could ever have accused him of being overly structured in his approach to ideas. He's a great example of the obvious truth that you don't have to be organised and precise to be a creative and deep thinker.

It is sometimes hard to put a finger on what specifically irritates me in a text like "The Production of Space" but basically it is his Marxist outlook. The more Marxist academics I read the less I understand what makes them tick. I have no problem with Marx himself, a great and original thinker who really understood capitalism. No it is the character of what gets added by others afterwards, a kind of committee thinking. Marxists have the same kind of an evangelist glint in their eye as some brands of Christian do and they struggle with conformity in the same way.

But the main thing is that sense of 'inevitability' they perceive within history, the underlying belief in everything 'coming good' with the world if you just work away at it. What a perfect society we might make tomorrow if we all keep chipping away at it. Yep! That's exactly the spot where my problem with that kind of stuff lies lurking.

On trips to England I sometimes hear people talking about themselves, or others, as 'socially engaged Buddhists' as if there was another and less valid category. What they usually mean when they say this is 'Buddhists with a bee in their bonnet about a political issue' but that doesn't sound so good. They have a rather Western, modernist agenda. Their working assumption is that with a few demos, 'green' policies and petitions this saha world, samsara, the world of suffering and life and death - is fundamentally 'fixable'. Of course it is always fundamentally transformable but that is a hugely different thing, quite the other end of the telescope.

When we go to our 'renewal of vows' ceremony and we repeat the Bodhisattva Vows we aren't day dreaming about some piece of social engineering that will finally keep the old jalopy on the road. It is much more practical and personal than that. It points to the fundamental and endless transformation required within our own hearts that in turn makes so much else possible.

"However innumerable beings may be, I vow to save them all;
However inexhaustible the passions may be, I vow to transform them all;
However limitless the Dharma may be, I vow to comprehend it completely;
However infinite the Buddha's truth is, I vow to make it one with myself."

'HJ' and cough medicine

I've just been taking a peek at a video clip on the 'Guardian' website. It shows Nakagawa Shoichi, the Japanese Minister of Finance, taking time out at the recent G7 Summit in Rome at the weekend to make a fool of himself. Yesterday he came in for some pretty hard criticism in the Japanese Diet for being drunk at the meeting but he maintains that it was just the effects of taking "too much cough medicine". I'm not sure that even the Japanese ever-courteous Japanese public are generous minded enough to swallow that one. They are amazingly inclined to take politicians at their word compared with us cynical Brits but it would have had to have been a heck of a lot of Tixy-lix to get that legless and slurred, a whole pharmacy full probably. And no sign of any residual cough there today either, it must have been powerful stuff.

In my first year working for Whitbread I used to work for a trade director - let's call him 'HJ' - who must have been a world expert on cough medicines. Actually he was a complete nightmare as a boss, the only good thing to come from the experience was a lot of anecdotal material that might make a good sit-com one day. But I got amazingly skilled at knocking on his door at just that moment in the mornings when he'd consumed enough 'Underberg' to have pulled around from the previous day's hangover and not yet become pissed enough to become aggressive and unpredictable. That was the brewing industry for you back in the 1970's.

I thought of old 'HJ' the moment I saw the video of Nakagawa-san at his press conference. During that year I worked for him down in Cardiff Whitbread's had taken the 'chair' of a trade charity and I ended up having to organise about a dozen trade banquets for him, a great opportunity to learn how to do some serious 'fixing' and general bribery and corruption. On the first night that HJ was "in the chair", in Cardiff, he had so much Tixy-lix during dinner that he completely lost his thread and gave a speech after the meal that rambled on witlessly for nearly an hour. After about ten minutes angry diners started to walk out and by the end there were maybe just a dozen or so Whitbread managers left nailed to their seats and staring at their empty coffee cups. I think "not a success" would cover it, these days you seldom have the chance to witness failure on that scale unless you work in the banking industry.

Now you would think there was one obvious way of avoiding this problem at the next banquet, but that is where you are wrong. The obvious answer for 'HJ', who was underneath it all a rather shy person and lacking confidence, was not to keep off the cough medicine until later in the evening but to bring the speeches forward to the beginning of the dinner while he could still remember his own name, or at least a part of it. And that is what he did under the pretense that it was "what they did up in Yorkshire". Roomful after roomful of angry diners waited angrily as their dinners got cold in the kitchen as 'HJ' mumbled his way through the whole winter at trade function after trade function giving his after dinner speeches before the meals.

Well, at least I remember them well thirty years on!

Still coughing my way through life

No afternoon walk for me today, I'm still coughing my lungs up. If anything it has got worse; when I lie down on my side and rest then I can avoid those coughing spasms but as soon as I sit upright again I'm off. It now seems to have deteriorated into what I had two years ago when the doctor called it 'bronchial asthma'. I'll have to go to the surgery for yet more pills tomorrow or Tuesday I think, I need to get some other stuff before my English trip in any case.

Chest complaints have influenced my life quite a lot. When I was a toddler I had double pneumonia and I'm told I was lucky to survive it, fortunately my grandmother was a trained nurse. That created a weakness which the fumes from the steelworks and petrochemical factories around Middlesbrough soon exploited and I coughed my way through every winter of my childhood, missing weeks of schooling thanks to bronchitis. Eventually the doctor made it plain that if I waned to thrive then I needed to live someplace else and that led to the firs big relocation in my life, from 'home' in my native North East down to a new town environment in Sussex at the other end of the country. Transitions like that influence the course of your life. In 1959 that really was some move, I might as well have been relocating to another planet. None of the kids moved out from the slums of south London that lived in our street could understand a word I said and I soon learned what it meant to be an 'outsider'.

Recently Edera helped me locate some texts in the Chiba Prefectural Library about the eighteen year court battle between Chiba City and the Kawasaki Steel Plant to get compensation for residents in the Soga area whose health was wrecked by sulpher dioxide pollution from the plant and the effects of the acid rain it created. It all felt very familiar stuff, that relentless stone-walling by officialdom in the face of pretty irrefutable evidence of serious and later even fatal levels of pollution. All that time 'distinguished' academics were conducting research paid for by the company which 'conclusively proved' that the holes being burned in tin roofs by acid rain had nothing whatsoever to do with the chimneys belching out smoke from industrial processes half a mile away. It says in Matthew 16:26 "What profiteth a man if he gains the whole world yet forfeits his soul" to which those guys would probably have answered 'that's an easy one! Status, money and power'.

Anyway at least I can celebrate my hopefully temporary invalid status by buying a new stove. It isn't as dire as it sounds - 'stoves' here are more like camping stoves at home and usually have two rings and a grill underneath. Ours has been sinking fast for a couple of weeks; first one ring stopped working and then the grill wouldn't light and now finally the pilot light on the second ring has stopped working. To paraphrase that old Aer Lingus joke if the last ring stops working we'll be stuck up here all day

Hot flush

By gum it has turned warm! Last night was just incredibly windy, woke up up a dozen times, and then this morning it was suddenly twenty degrees and rising. We've gone from February to May in about three hours.

Very confusing it is too. Tora made his way to bed last night in the usual Arctic conditions and I had to rescue him from his electric blanket this morning before he finally fried. He's been sitting around half the day in the genkan in his favourite summer station on the cool floorboards but now he seems to have decided that if Spring is that far advanced it must be time to go out for a fight. I just hope he doesn't find any 'opposition' on his territory. The 'bad cat' from last summer has been doing the rounds again this last few nights but I think he has already dealt with all the local females and moved on to the other side of the tanbo. Let's hope so. Sadly Tora was neutered when he was a young cat, he would have made a wonderful father.

All the plum blossom seems to have exploded out of the branches today. There's an area of a park in Chiba with literally hundreds of different varieties of plum in one place, a bit unusual here. If people want a lot of blossom they usually go for cherries, plums are a bit unpredictable. I'd like to make a trip over there but I just haven't the time, I'll promise myself that I'll make a whole day of it next year.

What causes this kind of sudden change? Well, the 'fronts' that passed through Kanto last night must have dragged a lot of sub-topical air from Okinawa, Taiwan and southern China up with them and pushed our usual staple diet of Siberian air further north. In autumn the reverse condition - the squeezing south of humid subtropical air - releases vast quantities of atmospheric energy and gives us the worst of our typhoons.

At least so far I've not heard the familiar drone of hungry mosquitoes, perhaps we have four of five weeks' grace before they show up. And if we get a really good storm in March the larvae get washed downstream and they aren't so bad during the summer.

I don't seem to be getting much benefit from all this though. Earlier in the week I had a chill and now it has turned into the kind of hacking cough that drives everyone within earshot crazy. Even the cats clear off when I come into a room. I sound like an old TV advert for Benelyn or Tyxi-lyx, or even like the expiring soprano in a Puccini opera. If any Italian tenors turn up at the doorstep I'll let you know.

Crab trip

I just can't remember exactly if this was in the last year of Junior (Elementary) School in 1958 or my first year at Grammar School 1959, but it was probably 1959 and maybe even I was somehow a member of a 'bird watching club' (no laughter at the back there matron!) Anyway, no matter because it was an ambitious trip for those days, we had a school bus trip from Teeside up to the Farne Islands which must have been at least a three hour drive each way and in those days through the middle of Newcastle too. We arrived at the shore at Seahouses in the late morning to be told the weather was too rough that day after all and that there was no chance of crossing to the islands which are, if you don't know, a very famous sea bird sanctuary off the North East coast of England just below the Scottish border.

BUT - and here was the ray of hope! - if we hung around on the cold jetty for a long time, ate our sandwiches, consumed the produce of local whelk stalls, sticks of rock and other confectonery, bars of Cadbury's chocolate, sherbet, kippers, fish and chips with lots of vinegar - then there was just that slight chance the the gale might ease off to a stiff breeze and we might make that two mile crossing in an open boat after all. So we did hang around and part of that long wait seemed to be picking up bits of crab on the beach. Why were they there - had they been killed in a storm or were they (more likely) cast offs from a local fisherman's boat? Who knows but of course all those claws with tendons inside that you could pull to make them work were a magnet for spotty eleven year old boys.

Then we were out in that open boat pitching and yawling and within five minutes one of my friends, Keith Dowding, had thrown up all over the boatman's packet of Daz. Why did he have that packet of detergent in the boat? Again history is silent on the subject but that 'jolly tar' was not happy, and he was even less happy when the sight of puking fellow travellers set off half a dozen others.

Well that was a good trip and I vaguely remember seeing a puffin but not like in this photo, more of a small black dot on a rock. And we got back to Seahouses without sinking but not of course without vomiting.

Then came the ordeal of the long bus ride home. It was hot and rainy and here was the thing. Once the heaters were going and the bus steamed up those crab pieces we were taking home to play jokes on our friends with started to smell powerful strong. Powerful bad too. In fact we all started feeling sick again. Then being sick.

Somewhere around Alnwick that bus driver pulled over and said "Right! I want every one of those ****** bits of crab chucked in that waste bin out there NOW!" We obeyed meekly, and eventually came safely home to Middlesbrough again.

A really great day out! "Please Sir! Can we go again?"

And the reason I remembered all of this is that in the soup Edera made for lunch today I found a bit of crab's claw lurking under the 'greens' and tofu!

Have scores, will travel

'Early doors' at choir practice last night to discuss our proposed trip to England in July 2010. We'd set the pre-practice get together up to give me a chance to sense the mood of the gang before I get on the plane next month, so that I can start to pester people about the whole thing. If you are a choir conductor 'somewhere in the north of England' be very afraid, your phone might ring at any moment now.

Of course being a dab hand at the old 'marketing presentation' stuff I can bash together a pretty fair 'Power Point' presentation is about an hour and that is just what I did too, with a lovely picture of wild chrysanthemums ('nogiku') as the background to every page. Nogiku are our emblem, they grow wild along the margins of tanbo and woods around here in summer. Edera then had to translate every page into Japanese which was a good move because when it came to it she ended up doing most of the talking which left me free to watch and listen.

Maybe I really can write a best seller about this one. I can see that over the last six months we have moved from the 'we could never do that' stage to the 'maybe after I have retired' viewpoint and we are now pretty deeply into the 'girlies big night out' moment albeit in a rather cultured and international setting. Much giggling last night as the prospect of freedom for a fortnight beckons, much completely unrealistic talk of 'maybe we can take in Barcelona and Mont St. Michel too' and all that kind of stuff. The Tower of London and Buckingham Palace also got mentioned, maybe we could sing something for the Queen while we are there. Does anyone know if she likes Japanese folk songs?

Fun, fun, fun. Somehow this is turning into one of those big all ladies 'dos' with me as the honorary woman, purse carrier and chauffeur. There is a slight air of 'The Full Monty' or 'Calendar Girls' about it all in a wholly innocent way. And still sixteen months to run before we hit the road, where will it all end?

Anyway I need to start to find musicians of all kinds now. Our three 'target areas' are north Lancashire, York and Harrogate and County Durham, so I'll have my work cut out when I get back to the Old Country.

After this 'extraordinary item' we settled down to some serious singing, learning our two new Thomas Weelkes madrigals with a kind of extra zest in the the air. Considering we felt a bit 'on the ropes' last summer I think we are doing OK. "Have scores, will travel" is our watchword.

No dry runs

Flying back to England in a couple of weeks. Whenever I reach this point panic always seems to be taking over, I'm circling anti-clockwise and about to vanish down the plug hole. Lots of things to finish to hand in for my thesis and so little time to do it in is usually the main problem. But other stuff to get done as well, and of course cases to get out and start putting things into. Suddenly there aren't enough hours in the day any more.

I never thought that 'being retired' would be at all like this but I only have myself to thank for it The crazy lifestyle split between two places eight thousand miles apart hardly helps, and I can never just 'sit on my hands' and take that proverbial back seat, I always have to be volunteering to do things. In a way I kind of envy those people who have that 'teflon' knack. I've occasionally promised myself (and others!) that I'll take that back seat myself sometime soon, sit and look at a wall and maybe sort out my stamp collection.

I'm sure I've mentioned this before in some other blog but times like this I always remember once overhearing two clerks in our finance team in Whitbread chatting to each other. They had just been moved yet again to another desk on another floor of another office and one was saying to the other "I wonder when we will get our permanent desks". I still laugh when I remember it. Only a book-keeper could imagine a 'permanent desk'. I wonder when my 'permanent desk' will appear? And will I know it when I see it?

This is one of those themes that is always in my head - the "road not travelled" question. Just suppose that ...

Say for example I'd gone to work in a local office from school and slowly I'd worked up through four or five jobs in thirty years and become the office manager and never moved more than five miles from where I'd lived. Well, such life patterns seldom happen now, takeovers and redundancies see to that. But just supposing? When I was a young man the plane trees along the road verges would have been saplings and now they would be mature trees but I'd still walk or cycle or drive along the same streets.

Would I have been happy? Who knows, you just don't know do you? It is all random somehow, what makes the difference between restless me and the man who sat at the same desk his whole ife? I see people like that here often - working the photocopiers in the library or in the ticket office at the station. I want to go over and ask them "Is this your deam? This IS what it is you know, it isn't just a 'dry run' at life, you don't get a second one."

Rubato rubato

This new TV of ours is certainly improving my Japanese and what is more I'm up to date with all the soap operas too. I watch the doings of Nozomi and Megumi over breakfast and lunch daily. Will they get back to singing together again and what will their dad do with one wife too many? Well, nothing impolite I guess, this is NHK after all, although it might involve lots of bowing and meaningful stares, I can feel it coming on already. They could never cope with 'East Enders' down here in leafy Chiba-ken.

Today there was some fruity singing in progress as I downed my egg and rice, a soprano and a tenor in a love duet with more rubato in the room than you could shake a stick at. In Britain we moved on from that stuff around the time of the Beverley Sisters, the BBC Light Programme and the British Forces Network in Germany ("Love to Mum from all of us at BFPO12 in Osnabruck and just to say that we hope to be home for Christmas!"). Here melodies like that can be deceptive, it feels like 1955 but it is probably late Showa, say 1985. Or even later, there's a market for it.

That was when I had the mild 'eureka moment'. Here was one of the missing jigsaw pieces and I finally got the picture. There is something oddly reminiscent in Japan of post-war southern Europe. Not the really 'Roman' bit, I'm thinking more of places like the Cevennes in France, the countryside around Turin or maybe parts of northern Spain. If you are tuned in to what I call a sense of 'history and place' then you'll know what I mean. Hot nights, long grass, advertising hoardings, decrepit buildings, closed shutters, the din of the crickets and the moths around the dim street lamps. Tiny bars and local 'picture houses'. Simple stories, simple heroes. Men who should be past all that already with long black hair who use too much brylcreem (can you still buy it?) and eau de cologne and chase after larger than life women. How quickly the blossoms fall from the bough eh? Don't turn the lights up too much or you might be disappointed ...

And it is all a part of small town Japan too. I just spotted the connection! Now why is that? Something to do with the peasant 'small proprietor' culture? It must be, what other cultural connectedness is there? How would you define and measure this? There is a good book lurking in this one if you only had the time.

But the icing on the cake is in the music, the raw emotion, the crescendos that flood in like tsunamis at the end of every verse. Tomorrow I must leave on the Tokyo express my love but tonight, tonight is ours ... if you get my drift ... climax on the violins, twang of koto.

Bath time

I was thinking in the bath last night how we never had one at home when I was a child. Well, that isn't quite accurate, the council house my parents occupied in Middlesbrough did have a bath with water heated from a back boiler behind the living room fire, so if you didn't have a fire on no bath for you. Mind you, that wasn't a problem in the North East, even in July - who didn't have a fire burning in the grate, unless they couldn't afford any coal?

No, I was thinking of my grandparent's house. A solid stone terraced property built around 1900 but without the benefit of either bath or indoor toilet. That was entirely the norm then, only rich people had baths.

We were lucky because my grandfather worked as a signalman on the railway - a skilled and responsible manual job and a clean one too. In those days bathing once a week seemed the natural thing to do, perhaps most people unless they were in really dirty jobs like mining only took a bath once or twice a month and just washed under the cold tap in the scullery the rest of the time.

Our tin bath was zinc plated and about a metre long. It was painted in a thin yellow paint which had peeled off over the years and when not in use it hung on a nail outside in the yard, tied down with string so that it didn't rattle and bang on windy nights.

On bath night by grandmother would warm up a couple of gallons of water and set that bath up on the scullery floor next to our gas cooker. Then the water would be tipped in - if you were lucky it might be a couple of inches deep, enough to float a few toy boats on. But I have no recollection of how that bath was emptied afterwards, I guess my grandfather got in and has his while I went upstairs to bed, and then my grandmother afterwards.

In Japan most working people didn't have a bath installed at home either, and they made great use of the local bath house. You would have been hard put here not to have taken a bath every day between April and October and especially if you were doing physical work. On my first trip to Japan I had to use one of the last pubic bath houses around when the boiler broke down in a Youth Hostel up in Wajima in Ishikawa-ken. I have vivid memories of the experience, especially the ancient woman attendant behind the desk dividing her attention between me stripping off and a soap opera on TV. The TV won out for her attention I have so say, a few curious glances was enough to convince her that naked gaijin were not all she'd been led to believe.

Life is full of disappointments eh?

Full Moon

Great! Full moon last night and it was a really big beautiful one too. A good night for a solitary walk in the dark once it had climbed in the sky really high. But I had to wrap up very warm though, that wind was biting.

Nights like that I feel like I should call a few ladies around and hold a 'moon viewing party'. Just me and about half a dozen of them sounds about right. Only joking! But maybe I should have asked Edera nicely put a kimono on and call Yuko-san or Fujiko-san or one of the other kimono 'regulars' around here and we could all have hurried down to the moonlit river. There is a plum tree in blossom by the lane already. If we gathered around it then we might make up poems and stuff and sip green tea.

Just a dream at this time of the year though, if we headed outdoors in kimono or yukata in February we would freeze to death in about four minutes. September must be the last month for organising moon-viewing, and then there will be mosquitoes to contend with. And then April of course, cherry blossom time.

When I see a full moon on a beautiful night it makes me feel that I want to be a character in a Heian Period novel, perhaps 'The Tale of Genji' or even better 'The Pillow Book'. I'm a rich and handsome young poet and musician lying there so restless on my futon on a warm Spring evening. Silently the shoji slides back to reveal the silhouette of a beautiful court lady outlined against the starry night sky. Still with me? OK. Beckoning and murmuring an exquisite 'waka' poem she softly invites me to ... step outside so that we can walk under the blossom and view the moon together. Did they REALLY have moons as big as that back in those days? Of course they did.

Anyway this assignation is all a part of a kind of subtle 'Truth or Consequences'. We have both vowed that when we are looking at the moon together we must always say exactly what is in our hearts, we must never hold back even the smallest part of our most secret desires. And this being the Heian Period of course when we converse about love we do so in verse. When we ask a question we offer a chrysanthemum bloom in our right hands and when we give an answer we offer a perfect white rose with our left. The moon is a kind of intermediary between us, representing our 'original face'. We ask the moon all we want to know and an answer comes with warm sweet breath on our cheek.

Lovely.

Hojoki

I've just been re-reading the 'Hojoki' this afternoon. In English it is usually called "The Ten Foot Square Hut" and it is a short essay written in the thirteenth century. It isn't certain but it seems likely that the author was a nobleman and poet called Kamo no Chomei.

Writing from that period of Japanese history has a quality that you don't find contemporary English literature. You have to look at writers like Geoffrey Chaucer more than a century later, or perhaps from a different direction Julian of Norwich, to find comparable prose in England. It is powerful stuff, even in translation.

The writer, who has retired from court life in Kyoto and now lives in a small hut outside the city, reflects on the impermanence of all things and the futility of fame and gain. My personal interest is in the first few pages because he talks a lot about the way in which the urban life changes and how. Hard to imagine that he could never possibly have read Heraclitus or Ecclesiastes.

"Ceaselessly the river flows and yet the water is never the same ... even so is man and his habitation"

And further on a section which will be the epigraph for my own research

"Men and their dwellings are as the dew on 'Morning Glory' blossoms. And who can tell which of them will endure longer?"

The dangers of contemporary urban life are described in detail. The periodic fires which gutted the city when 'the flames driven by the wind went leaping on' - the typhoons in which 'the boards and shingles filled the air like driven leaves in winter' and the ravages of wars and riots. And of course earthquakes - the ultimate terror in which "the dust rose in clouds like smoke around them and ... the sound of the falling buildings was like thunder."

But of course these weren't just thirteenth century problems, they have been an inescapable part of urban living through the whole of Japanese history from the first capital at Nara down now to the firestorms of 1945 and the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995 which left 300,000 homeless


The author reflects "On these occasions it is the way of people to be convinced of the impermanence of all earthly things, and to talk of the evil of attachment to them, and the impurity of their hearts. But when the months go by, and then the years, we do not find them expressing such views any more."

Will Kempe

We are checking out some music at the moment for a concert in May. In total we need around ten minutes worth of new material, probably three items, and one of them should be a madrigal of some kind.

Since last summer we've been limping along without a tenor. Actually 'limping' isn't the right word, we've been doing fine without one but it does limit our choice of new music to sing. One of the altos can cover the tenor parts in four part singing but that means there is her alone on that line and me on bass line and around eight or nine other singers on either soprano or alto. That's hard work - you have to really sing up to balance it and of course if either of you had a sore throat on the day and couldn't sing everyone would be lost. So that means I've been trying to track down material we can sing in three parts - soprano and mezzo and then three of us sing alto, me an octave under the rest.

When I was in England last time I came across a copy of Thomas Weelkes' "Air or Fantastic Spirits to Three Voices" in the University Library which he published in 1608. Good grief! He could have written them all with us in mind! Maybe back in the early seventeenth century there was already a shortage of male singers around to keep the ladies happy and he spotted a market for this combination. Tuesday morning Edera and I worked our way through the book and picked out three 'possibles' and then we tried them all on Wednesday evening at choir practice.

The most likely at the moment seems to be No.20 - "Since Robin Hood ...."

Since Robin Hood Maid Marian and Little John are gone-a
The hobby-horse was quite forgot when Kempe did dance alone-a
He did labour after the tabor for to dance then into France
He took pains to skip it in the hope of gains
He did trip it on the toe
Diddle diddle doe!

Will Kempe. Clown, Shakespearean actor, dancer. In 1600 he did a Morris Dance from London to Norwich, a distance of around a hundred miles, in nine days of dancing. Maybe that was the start of our crazy British passion for sponsored runs, sponsored walks, sponsored everything.

Well, it is fun music, I wonder if we can do it? The harmonies are straightforward enough but the timing follows dance rhythms and is tricky, will take some practice.

I like Thomas Weelkes, he had a bawdy nature and nearly got sacked twice from his job as organist at Chichester Cathedral for general drunkenness and bad behaviour. Some of the lyrics in this collection really make me laugh. And diddle-diddle-doe to you all!

Redcar

For some reason I found myself thinking about Redcar this morning. I haven't been there for at least forty five years so maybe I'll plan to make a pilgrimage when I'm in England in March.

What made Redcar pop into my mind? Dunno. Probably one of my synapses blowing out I suppose, another black hole appearing in my memory. Like laddered tights. Probably you don't even know what Redcar is eh? A rare kind of gold perhaps, used only by the Aztec Royal Household for ceremonial tooth picks? No, only joking, it is a small seaside town near Middlesbrough up on the north east coast of England. When I was a child living in the back-to-back Victorian terrace slums near the Dorman Long steelworks on Teeside then Recar was our 'Saturday out'. You could catch a train for about fourpence from Middlesborough and spend the day wandering around the place or even, if you were very brave and had a thick overcoat, go onto the beach.

Kafka wrote a book about New York even though he had never actually been there so maybe I could write a fantasy novel about Redcar where we could turn 'reality' (whatever that is!) up or down a bit. Or a lot. My childhood impressions of Redcar are of a mean little town of brick built terraced housing a bit like Blackpool or Cleethorpes, but with only about five percent of the charm of those places. Oh! And it had an opticians, I had my first pair of glasses there when I was ten. I wonder why we went all the way there to get them, surely there was an opticians in Middlesbrough even back then?

The beach. Blowing sand; keep that packed lunch under wraps or you would soon have sand in your sandwiches. Somebody once told me that was why they were called that. To get out of the arctic gale we used to carry little canvas screens with us and of course our buckets and spades, in the North East beach trips were for building sandcastles, only dogs were hardy and dumb enough to go into the water. The very rich - those that could afford the twopence fee if the council attendant spotted them - hired a deck chair to sit on but of course we only made do with towels

To be honest I used to feel guilty about enjoying myself at the seaside. My grandparents had a visceral hatred of the place, never went. 'Real men' enjoyed themselves in the countryside where there were nice views to contemplate, only soft 'townies' liked the seaside. A serious touch of Puritanism lurking there, sin in the form of amusement arcades, sticks of 'rock' (the candy with the word 'Redcar' running through), 'Punch and Judy' shows and even clowns and donkey rides. The word was uttered with scorn "The SEAside!" - huh! I'd never have dared express an opinion along the lines of "Why don't we go to the beach on Saturday!"

Anyway so much for Redcar. Low evening sun on brick built terraces, a cold wind, the scent of fish and chips. Yes, let's write that fantasy novel some time. It starts off "A boy and a girl fall in love, they run away to the seaside, a land of net curtains and uneven pavements, the sun goes down and they wonder what life is for." And all this is just on the first page ...

Technology surfeit

Our new ADSL line is up and running at "Little House" and it is certainly a big improvement. Before if we wanted to take a look at a clip on "You Tube" or listen to a talk on the Abbey's website we'd be waiting for hours for things to download before we could take a look at them but now it all seems to happen in "real time". It feels like having watched old fashioned 'lantern shows' for years we are suddenly being exposed to digital television. When we bought our new modem last week I also invested into one of those little cameras that you can attach to the PC and peer into when you use MSN Messenger and the like so now Edera and I can watch each other as well as talk to each other when I travel to England next month and I'm eating my Heinz tomato soup for lunch as she eats some late evening snacks here in leafy Chiba-ken. Our grip of new technology seems to know no bounds here eh?

And at least I can use my own PC without running up and down stairs with memory sticks and CDs of files.

Actually technology seems to be following us around this week. Yesterday was our day off and three of us headed into Tokyo to see some video art that out friend Chis was showing at the Japan Media Arts Festival being held at the National Arts Centre in Roppongi. Great! There was just so much interesting work there to see and I guess we were most fascinated by some of the "Leading Edge Technology Showcase" exhibits. There was one room in which the shadows cast were animated by some rather formidable computing power to create images and patterns around you as you moved about. Edera and Yuko-san, who had both made a day out of it by wearing kimono, had some fun slowly dancing in there to create wild patterns of light and colour on the walls behind them.

Perhaps my favourite piece in the show, liking music so much, was an exhibit consisting of a kind of vertical 'keyboard' of pairs of metal rods. By turning the handle on a machine you could generate bubbles which were blown forward, created short circuits between the rods and so generated harp-like electronic notes - literally music created by a storm of bubbles.

I would have loved to have seen what some of our students would have made of this lot. I guess once they were in there you would never have prised them out of the place

Two yen

I had to hang about at the local post office for a while yesterday waiting to pay some bills. There are no debit cards here in Japan and people don't use credit cards much when ordering on the internet so stuff is often sent on approval and you take the bill to the local post office or convenience store and 'settle up'. Trusting eh? In the very distant past we used to do something similar in England but now it is always 'payment in advance'.

I took my ticket from the machine on the counter and waited for my turn along with a few mainly elderly customers. There was one guy that made me smile, about eighty and four foot ten and he could have been a character out of the Japanese equivalent of a Marcel Pagnol novel. 'Cocky' in every sense is the word that springs to mind, the sort of country character that has to win every hand of cards, come out on top in every trivial contretemps. I was vaguely reminded of the cockerel in Chaucer's "Nun's Priest's Tale" - OK for keeping the hens in order but he would be headed for the rafters soon enough if Reynard came scratching at the door.

But the really interesting one was a small woman with a big voice who suddenly loomed up just as I was taking my turn. She started hectoring the girl in the neat green blazer behind the desk (no security screens around here!) and for a moment I thought she was pushing in for some reason but no - she was alarmed that somebody had dropped two one yen coins on the floor. She made the girl come around and pick them up at once and a debate began as to who could have been so careless as to let them fall there.

That's rural Japan for you, so honest it sometimes takes your breath away. Here was a discussion in progress as to what to do with the equivalent of a lost penny - somewhere just under two cents. But of course someone of her generation could remember when two yen was a significant sum, the price of a meal, and people were very poor.

There's no beating total honesty is there? That way lies peace of mind.

New line due

We have our new line coming this week - exciting eh? NTT phoned us on Thursday and now they are booked to swap us over from ISDN (I think this stands for 'I have the speed of a dinosaur') to ADSL.

So that will be more uninvited mayhem no doubt. When Edera was getting our temporary line working last weekend I thought that it was best to go and prowl around upstairs, I'm an emotional person and not good at stress these days, it would have been like having a hungry tiger loose in the room. So all THAT to come again too, who would choose to live with me? But then the theory is that we'll have a fast line which will last us through another of life's cycles of obsolescence.

All this has made me nostalgic and wistful about the history of telecoms past. "Ou sont les modems d'antan?" as somebody nearly wrote. Where are the modems of yesteryear? Time was, in the paleolithic of Internet connection, when I used to have to go groping under the desk to unplug the phone and nobody could ring the house for hours. The next stage was having TWO phone lines, one to talk on and one to spend all day waiting for tiny spreadsheet files to arrive at the speed of about 23 bytes a second if it wasn't windy. Just before I left Whitbread I got my very own ISDN line to the office which involved a box with lots of flashing lights and unpleasant phone calls to British Telecom. Hard to imagine any company could be so dumb but there you go.

Anyway, even nostalgia isn't what it used to be, I won't be sorry to see the last of the Mohicans vanish into he recyclable garbage bag. We went out last week and bought our new "router", we can run seventeen computers and fly a 747 with this one it seems and all for 11,000 yen. And Thursday is D-Day

Let's hope it all works.