Glasson Dock

My visit back to England is drawing to a close, so last night I went out for a pub meal with four friends here. We went to a pub at Glasson Dock that has been popular around this part of Lancashire recently, and we had a good evening during which we pretty well managed to knock our table over twice with everyone either sober or reasonably so. We are getting old and clumsy it seems.

Funny little place Glasson, there are more than a few like it dotted around the coast of Britain. Once somebody had great hopes of building a major port there and built a link down from the Lancaster Canal to a remote spot at the mouth of the River Lune. But tides and sandbanks put an end to their dreams, Glasson never developed much beyond a sleepy village with a nice harbour and 'remote' it has remained.

Hearing all that rigging rattling in the wind has put me in mind of travel again though. Tomorrow I'm headed east again so watch our for the next 'Little Paddy' from Japan in a couple of days time!

Sight, Sound, Smell

Over to Yorkshire today to do a few things, the first of which was to enjoy a spot of 'gricing' at Hellifield. In case you haven't come across the word before 'gricing' is the activity of standing by railway lines (usually with only a pencil and notebook, camera, cheese sandwich and bottle of 'pop' for company) watching the trains go by.

But today's gricing was special. There was an excursion over Settle-Carlisle railway and for part of the journey northwards from Hellifield the "Cumbrian Mountain Express" was to be hauled by the preserved LMS Coronation Class Pacific 6223 "Duchess of Sutherland"

My taste in British steam express locomotives is very much in favour of the East Coast Main Line designs while the 'Coronations' were used regularly on the West Coast Main Line. But I have a considerable soft spot for these big engines which I frequently saw as a child thundering down the north side of Shap or rocking and rolling as they hauled expresses through Penrith station at not much short of a 'ton'. A scary sight! The were designed for power output - the ability to haul heavy trains uphill - but in service they could run fearsomely fast too.

Lots of pictures today of No. 6223 and the weather was just perfect for steam locomotive photography, a biting cold gale with fits of sunshine to shine through the clouds of condensation as the fireman stoked hard in the five minutes before departure and the safety valves lifted with a roar as the boiler reached maximum working pressure ready for the 'off'. Driving up to the station I could smell that engine a mile away - that never to be forgotten scent of smoke and steam oil. There's no file format on my PC for me to bottle the scent for you to sample but here is a picture of 6233 getting underway with her heavy train for the race north over the fells towards the Solway Firth.

Lovely. Long may Englishmen be able to enjoy the sight, sound and smell of steam locomotives like this.

Duality, Az.

I was listening to something on the radio a few days ago about people using big words they didn't properly understand and 'hyperbole' cropped up. Always a favourite word of mine, in fact come to think of it perhaps the most delightful and attractive word in the entire English language, probably in any language. Anyway it got me playing a favorite game of mine which is imagining that I have to think of a name for a new town. You know - like they used to do out in the Wild West. Welcome to Hyperbole, Idaho, population 64 - the most beautiful place on earth. Hmm ... maybe I'll call our house 'Hyperbole'. But I'm not sure that I ever saw a house with a name in Japan.

I'm sure that I mentioned this here before, my memory grows dim, but there's a place in the Mojave Desert called 'Zzyzx'. I would have said 'town' but actually now I think it is just a pile of bleached lumber and a few rattlesnakes. In American English this would be pronounced "Zee-zix" and it was obviously some one's ambition to be absolutely the last place listed in the gazetteer. And once I found a town in an old atlas called Bovine, Arizona but it too seems to have vanished already as small American towns often do.

But this isn't what I meant to write at all! As a good Buddhist if I was ever called on to give a desert 'gold rush' town a name I think I would go for 'Duality'. We always say that you don't see things so clearly so long as you are in duality and caught in the opposites so if you had a town called 'Duality' then you could head for the city limits and then you wouldn't remain in Duality any more. Neat eh? Welcome to Duality, Az. Perhaps I could patent this one

Eighty four today

My mum's eighty fourth birthday today. She lives in a residential home about a mile from here, so when I'm in England it is quite easy to get to see her. Normally I make a point of dropping over just before lunch but today I was there during the afternoon just before tea time to give her some presents and wish her a 'Happy Birthday'. She'd had a lot of cards including a couple from people she hadn't heard from for a while. When she first told me I thought it might just be her imagination but then when I took her through for tea there they were on the table.

This year has treated her well. Some people grow old more easily than others and at times it has been a struggle for her to keep hold of the threads but the last twelve months have generally been a good time. She has found a bit of a plateau and found some acceptance too. When I get over there the conversation is often familiar - actually it is often pretty well exactly the same as last time! - but at least we need no maps for this well known territory. Probably at least half of our lives we've been cirling each other like a pair of boxers but there comes a time when you let go of that stuff. Some years ago I was given a good steer when someone asked me the question "Does it really matter?"

When you are younger you always think of "being old" as being something fixed and immutable. To be old was just to be old. Watching my mum has made me realise that for many people it is probably the most varied time of their life, even more changeable than being a child because the entire geography of events and possibilities is forever changing.

Low sunlight

Back from the monastery after a couple of days quiet time there. It is located in a very remote part of Northumberland about two hours from our house and it would hard to find a more suitable place for a place intended for quiet contemplation. It isn't easy to get there, you'll need a good map, and if you haven't got access to a car it is a difficult journey too that takes some planning and involves a variety of trains, buses and then a taxi. Zen monasteries are supposed to be in out of the way places, the "journey to the temple" is always the first step of practice.

This little valley has become deeply familiar to me over the twenty five years I've been coming here, and especially this view directly across from the Abbey grounds to Farney Shield farm. It all looks very wild and natural in the picture but if you look carefully you might notice that those sheep in the distance are grazing on old spoil heaps from a vanished mine. Lead was worked for centuries around here, dug out and smelted and then the ingots were carried away on pack horses. Some were even shipped from Hull to make stained glass windows and roofing for medieval cathedrals in France or Germany. From the head of this valley there was once an ancient 'horse level' - a tunnel big enough for a pit pony to walk in - that ran a couple of miles under the ridge and into the neighbouring Tyne valley.

The industry was wiped out almost overnight in the late nineteenth century by cheap ore imports from South America but you can still see signs of it everywhere and especially when the sun 'westers' on gusty days like this when the light floods in at a low angle and the flying clouds dapple the moors with a chiaroscuro quilting. Interesting how it is the most intensely beautiful weather that most clearly reveals the course and intent of forgotten events. It often feels to me that the course of our own actions is revealed in the same way. Stuff you don't notice on a grey day or in the brightest noon sunlight stands out more when you see it lit from one side. A kind of sideways illumination throws the landmarks in our lives into a kind of relief that reveals things we never noticed before. They take on a character that was never obvious at the time.

Grease Stripping

Up to Kirkby Stephen today for my first visit as a volunteer on a railway restoration project. I 'joined up' last year but this has been my first chance to get there to actually do some work and I'll never be more than an occasional visitor on site I guess. But maybe there is something I can do to help things along here while being in Japan and/or having time to spare.

The scheme is to restore the derelict station site and re-lay the track northwards towards Brough. Maybe even one day you will be able to catch a train up to Appleby again though I doubt I'll ever see the route eastwards across Stainmore operating again in my life time. All journeys of ten thousand miles begin with the first step and I'm impressed with just how many steps this project has taken since the nadir of the old railway in the early 1990's when not only had all the track vanished but it seemed that the remaining buildings were about to be bulldozed too. Now the station - once converted to a factory unit - is starting to look like its old self. You can see more of it here.

That's my interest of course. My family worked on this railway and I have strong recollections of it from my childhood. It is such a treat to see it moving towards the possibility of running trains again, and the preservation of some beautiful historical buildings dating from the eighteen-sixties.

Today I was given the job of de-greasing some locomotive wheels prior to repainting. Here is my bucket and tools! Hard work - first you have to soak the ancient caked on grease with special solvents and then set to with scrapers and chisels and then do it all over again. And again! Eventually from underneath that thick grime cast iron wheel spokes and steel tyres and brake blocks start to appear. Thousands of volunteers in Britain spend millions of hours enjoying this kind of work at weekends - something that doesn't happen so much in Japan.

Regular readers - I'm on retreat for a few days - 'Little House' will be back mid-week

Shopping spree

This visit to England is speeding by - another ten days and I will be on the plane back to Narita. So today I took advantage of the nice weather to head into Lancaster to do some shopping for presents.

No possibility of returning to Japan without a suitcase bulging with omiyage of course. Whenever we get to make a trip anywhere we always end up buying gifts for everyone, usually some attractive (and expensive!) comestibles in outrageously excessive packaging. There is nowhere in Japan that doesn't have some local speciality sweetie, cookie or bean paste filled cake or dango that you can buy for your boss, neighbour or friend.

Omiyage from Britain requires careful thinking through. Nothing too heavy to use up valuable baggage allowance, nothing that will melt on the journey home from Narita. Last time I took small books of English recipes but this time I struck gold - small and exceptionally light boxes of miniature dominoes that you just couldn't buy in Japan and we can use them to teach some unusual vocabulary too like ... um ... 'knocking' and 'doubles'. Useful words like that. And best of all they were only £1.45, an absolute bargain. There were also a couple of 'specials' that I bought for individuals, a tea towel and two books. And three bars of 'Kendal Mint Cake' to try out on the younger students. Let's see if they find it as 'gross' as they did the 'Liquorice Allsorts'.

Somehow you never get a 'clean sweep' of this stuff though do you? There was something I was looking for to give to 'you know who' but I drew a blank with that one, and one other present is still to track down. But the list is a lot shorter than it was this morning.

I also bought myself three pairs of boxer shorts, five pairs of socks (including a 'long distance walking' pair), a new silk 'kipper' tie for a fiver and a bright red bow tie that will look nice on stage with my purple shirt.

Still no birthday present for my mum though - what to get her? She is 84 on Thursday and I can't think of a thing. She already has about as many dressing gowns, blankets, cardigans and picture frames as you can cram into a small room, so it had better be good. Suggestions welcome.

Shedful of Crocodillo

Interesting how dreams can throw up very specific memories of completely trivial things. Last night I found myself transported back to a pub in Barry in South Wales just a few months after I started working for the brewery nearly thirty years ago. I woke up laughing at the recollection.

That was a steep learning curve for me back in 1980. Being a total 'rookie' in the pub trade I was taken for a sucker by just about everybody in the business during that first year but I soon got to spot the danger signs. Pub landlords 'on the make' are professional story tellers and after being 'conned' about thirty times I got a nose for it at last. In that line you only learn by your mistakes.

One day a Wine Company Rep. dumped a load of almost over date stock into my store to 'run some promotions with'. I think it was a case of giving it to me or throwing it into the 'skip' but if he'd chucked it away he'd have had some explaining to do. The product was an awful fizzy grape brew for 'the ladies' called 'Crocodillo' and I literally had a shedful of it to dispose of before my boss spotted it and started to complain about all the space it took up.

Then about an h0ow later I got the long scrounging phone call from one of our pub landlords about his ladies darts team that had just - uh! can't remember now - they were supposed to have done something amazing, come third in a contest, that kind of thing. Maybe (and this with a hint of menace!) on behalf of the stingy and grasping brewery I could put a cheque behind the bar or contribute a 'ten' of beer to treat them all to drinks on the house ...

"Oh! I can do much better that that!" I replied. "I have just the thing for them - just wait and see!" The back of my estate car was soon groaning with a bumper load of cheap and nasty trays of Crocodillo, bright canary yellow tee-shits and unwanted 'point of sale'. I took good care to dump that lot in the corner of his bar just after evening opening before 'mine host' found his way downstairs. "For the boss with the brewery's compliments!" I muttered to the bar lady as I headed like lightning for the door.

Great move, just like chess really. I felt a great sense of achievement at shifting so much unwanted merchandise so fast. "Keep it moving and don't let it gather dust" has been my motto ever since. When my boss got the angry phone call the next day even he laughed, maybe the first and last time I ever put a smile on his face.

Herd Instincts

Had lunch with a friend of mine today and we found ourselves chatting about exactly the same issue that I was blogging about here last night. Looking back on what I wrote I can see that I was struggling to put it into words and I still am, but it could be summed up in part under the rubric of "being true to yourself". My problem was that I noticed that when something important was at stake I was saying things which, if not exactly false, didn't truly reflect 'reality' as I experienced it and should have been communicating it.

Over lunch we were swapping anecdotes about this and it led on to a conversation about what we ended up referring to as "fundamentalism". Not in a directly religious sense, but in terms of all that stuff we seem to find ourselves signed up to without even realising it, and especially at work. Get in early, work hard, be ambitious, tick the box, job done. It is hard to avoid getting sucked into this whirlpool of expectation even in retirement.In my working life we had wave after wave of "business fundamentalism" of a kind, those endless flip-charted sales conferences where the strong were rewarded and the weak named and shamed, targets reviewed, conventional fashionable wisdoms of the moment spouted and given 'lip service' by otherwise sensible human beings.

Of course if you'd talked quietly in a corner to almost anyone there they would have said that they "just went along" with that kind of thing. Interesting how easily people 'buy in' to assertions, beliefs, practices. Because if we don't go forward we'll slide backwards. Who believes this garbage? Hardly anybody of course, it is simply a chessboard in the discourses of power. The trouble is that today it might be about sales targets but tomorrow it might be about the wicked and stupid cowards 'over there' that somebody insists that we should learn to hate

The "fundamentalism" aspect of this permits nobody to step off the wheel, you have to play the game. Now we mainly play the game with capital, markets, workforce but it is still popular to play it with doctrines, weaponry, soldiers. We know that WE don't REALLY believe in it all and yet somehow it possesses us physically, you don't see it until your health and family life is destroyed or you are clutching a gun and facing someone just like you in the opposite slit trench and then you really are consumed and it doesn't matter that you never meant to give yourself to it because there really is no way back. Why do we behave like a herd?

Better to learn to say no at the start. It's always messy and unpleasant whenever you do it.

Take it Steady

I spent quite a lot of yesterday and today doing some legwork around the organisation of this choir tour that I'm helping to put together for July 2010. And it has been time very well spent too. Now I have a couple of pieces of good news to report back to 'the ladies' when I get home, but it is too early to share them with you yet I'm afraid. However it does look as if there is some real interest in England in helping us with our programme and a couple of locations that would be very pleased to have us pay a visit.

All this has involved a lot of phoning and talking to strangers, and tonight I feel a bit like a punch bag. I hadn't realised how much I find talking to 'new people' an effort these days, I feel like I've been climbing a steep mountain and I am completely 'out of wind' with the emotional effort it has involved. It is a bit scary; am I loosing confidence in myself without realising it? I always was a rather shy person but I can see that I could easily get quite reclusive.

I also notice a tendency in discussing arrangements for the words I use to take on a life of their own, one which seems to point to uncomfortable forms of attachment in me. To make things happen you have to get behind them, add your energy and will to the process. But when this happens you loose control and also something false can creep into the relationship between you and the words you use to breathe life into the formation of events. It is as if the truth of things gets slightly perverted. We try and add something that isn't there and so subtly turn something into a lie with minor exaggerations. Our hearts put too much into it, we set too much store by what we do. We get knocked off course, pushed away from the still centre of where we should be. The trip involves people I care very deeply about, it would be easy to become 'partisan' in what I do and a bit 'off the wall' in what I say or write just because of attachments there.

So this is going to be an important thing for me to sit still with as we move forward with this project. Just take it calmly, don't get derailed by the demands on my energy that it will take. Giving it my best shot actually requires a very steady approach. "Measure twice and then cut once" my grandad used to say. Doing a good job requires great peace of mind. Best not to forget it.

Group Evening

Got along to one of our local Buddhist 'meditation groups' here in Lancashire tonight. I was a 'regular' there for about fifteen years and always try to get back there once or twice a year when I'm on this side of the planet.

It is interesting. Sometimes I feel a bit like that man in the fairy tale (which one was that?) who woke up after a hundred years and nobody knew him. The other 'old-timers' at the group all recognise me of course but most of the newer members on any one trip don't know me at all. I really enjoy the anonymity and sometimes there's a slight lingering urge to tease someone by asking "Is this where they do the meditation then?" but so far I've resisted it.

Tonight as we settled down to sitting my neighbour turned to me and whispered that she was sorry but she had to leave her mobile on because she was "On Call", I think she must have been a nurse. Technology gets everywhere, it couldn't have happened twenty years ago. But I think the risk was only slight and as it turned out we had no interruptions.

After the meditation we generally sit around and have a cup of tea and a talk or reading, I'm glad to say that nobody rushes off. In another life I used to spend holidays in Ireland and it used to depress me to see the scrum for the door of the local church as parishioners made a break for it at the end of Sunday Morning Mass. It seems that the obligation was fulfilled as soon as the bread was on your tongue and so no need to wait for the final blessing. The whole lane was filled with revving Land Rovers before those altar boys were onto the second tray of wafers. It reminded me of those childhood trips to the cinema where everyone tried to get out at the end of the film before they played the National Anthem. It was OK to leave early just so long as you got through those double doors before the roll on the snare drum started but after the first chord on the strings you were nailed to the spot for the whole "Send Her Victorious" bit.

Amazing how fast that projectionist could get the 'anthem reel' running.

Purple Prose

A neat day out at Keighley on Saturday. Met up with some friends from Harrogate and we had a "bloke's day out" which involved trains of course. Lots of trains both real and miniature and also lots of train books too. The 'Keighley and Worth Valley Railway' has a great bookshop at Eanam Station with a magical magazine room where you can track down and browse - and buy if you are so inclined - old railway magazines going right back to the 1930's.

Interesting how one person's heaven can be another person's hell. I could quite happily poke around an infinitely large collection of railway magazines and books - punctuated by frequent visits to the platform to watch passing trains - for eternity. But for you probably ten minutes would be an endurance test. A nice aspect of getting older is that you don't have to 'stand on ceremony' any more either, there is no-one left to impress. People even expect you to be a bit cranky, nobody notices or cares. Like that wonderful poem by Jenny Joseph "When I am old I Will wear purple".

I definitely 'fit in' in an area like West Yorkshire. There are a lot of odd looking old guys that you wouldn't want to share your bath with watching trains in places like that. We don't go in for Italianate piazzas or Missionary-style architecture much and we are more concerned with sheltering from the wind and rain rather than keeping in the shade. In other words a landscape with values.

But this question of 'heaven' interests me, especially the 'eternity' aspect of it. For a start you would have to really like the people you were stuck there with, you couldn't have people that got on your nerves after a millennium or two. That would cut down my 'dream team' angel list quite a bit. And it would never do to have to sing hymns all the time, waiting for God to turn up on an official visit to your part of the firmament, like the Queen visiting a tractor factory in Coventry. Imagine singing in the Heavenly Host 24/365 and then finding that everything was pitched a 'third' too high because all the other angels were baritones. Where's the fun in that?

No, in my heaven it is always a quarter to one on Darlington station platform on a sunny summer Saturday in 1956 and I have a cheese and pickled onion sandwich and I'm on my own. The rest of you can do as you like.

Scotland's Breakfast Cereal

Looking at the back of my 'Weetabix' packet this morning I see that I can get some special limited edition 'Shaun the Sheep' books for only £4.95 plus of course the requisite eight tokens cut from the carton. Huh! Self-liquidating offers, I don't think much of them. I want something for nothing from the back of my cereal packet. And why 'Shaun'? - it should be 'Sean' or if you really need simplified spelling 'Shawn'. I don't feel tempted. In fact it makes me feel grumpy.

In the 'Good Old Days' the backs of cereal packets were worth reading. Once, about 1955, we had a wonderful series of cardboard cut-out models of railway locomotives and carriages printed on Weetabix packs, and later I seem to recall "Famous Buildings of England" and something to do with 'suits of armour' too. I used to spend happy hours cutting all this stuff out with blunt scissors and getting busy with my bottle of 'Gloy'. Affix tab 'C' to the rear of the waterwheel etc.

Best of all though were the offers that got put inside packets. My all-time favourites were the submarines. They were just amazing, they had a little rubber bung underneath that you could remove and insert some baking powder. Then, if you put the submarine in the sink, it would submerge but after a while the water would get to work on the baking powder and release a bubble of oxygen and the submarine would rise to the surface, where the oxygen would escape and down it would go again. You could spend hours watching that 'sub' surfacing and then returning to the deeps of the handbasin, and I did. Just like the 'real thing' it said on the box. And that's true. In processual terms this little plastic machine was functioning exactly like a real nuclear submarine 'blowing its tanks'. Except that the Navy don't rely on baking powder to do it. Maybe they should.

Once I wrote off to "Department A" for a booklet on the nutritional value of wheatgerm and I got a nice pamphlet back with a picture of grain silos in Iowa on the cover. Perhaps that is what started me on geography.

Anyway, I ought to get a fat consultancy fee from Nabisco because I have a great concept for this cereal. Let's drop the "Weetabix" name and rebrand the whole thing as "Wee Tabix". Get it? "Wee Tabix - Scotland's Breakfast Cereal!" Think of all the stereotypes you could get to work on. Edinburgh Castle, kilts, bagpipes, traffic wardens. The possibilities are endless. You could even hire Cilla Black to say "What are you eating for breakfast up there in Bonnie Scotland" or perhaps Sean Connery to mumble "Wee Tabix - the thinking man's alternative to porridge".

Oh! Completed the circle back to 'Sean'. OK you guys, I hope my cheque for all this is in the post

Screen Routine

This new computer of mine has an integral video camera in the lid - a web-cam - and I've been exploring its potential this week. "Exploring its potential?" - I could have been a politician using phrases like that. "Playing with it" is what I mean really. Every time I've talked to 'her indoors' recently I've had the opportunity to take a look at the top half of her head too, somehow her chin is rarely visible. This is because she's looking down at the screen and keyboard and the camera is higher up. As mine is. You can't look somebody directly in the eye using this technology, another 'plus' for use by politicians I suppose.

It is different looking at someone when you are talking to them isn't it? Somehow you feel that you can't just 'be there', that you always have to be saying something. All those hours I spend in Edera's company without saying much and I don't even notice but stick some camera technology and six thousand miles in the middle and somehow you feel you always have to be motor mouthing ... "By the way ... did you get that stain out of the cat's towel ... um! Really?"

Now, here's the secret confession you've been waiting for at last. This last few times I've been on camera I've started to feel a distinct urge to be very silly. I'm beginning to see a whole world of dark possibilities, little fantasies are sprouting in my head. First I started to daydream about the merits of false noses, a Pinocchio 'number' or even better a full Cyrano de Bergerac model perhaps. But then it blossomed into the idea of your full mask, maybe I can find an Obama or the Pope in some local novelty shop (do they still have novelty shops? I bet they do in Blackpool!). The latest is daydreams of glove puppets, something a bit more radical than 'Sooty and Sweep' eh? Or a Punch and Judy show? Then I can liven up things a bit by peering around the side of the screen and saying "Hello! Hello! Hello!" when she gets a bit dull, starts talking about the ironing and suchlike.

All this lies in an uncertain but promising future; a man can have dreams eh. But for now I've started to practice my goldfish imitation, the old 'gobble gobble gobble' and loom towards the camera routine. I can even blow bubbles. Yes, I definitely see this web-cam as a promising addition to my drab and uninteresting life.

Lights On

The great garage 'wiring job' is coming to an end here. Thank goodness! - my muscles are positively bulging with all this physical work. I'd rather hoped to have it finished today but I've decided to run the socket circuit to the bench in some trunking so I had to go and buy another length of it. But I was determined to get the lights and one socket working this afternoon so I 'parked' the second socket circuit until tomorrow and got the rest of my handiwork connected to the mains supply around 4:00 pm while the light was good. If any problems had cropped up that left enough daylight to get the stuff disconnected again but it was fine, everything worked just as it should except that one fluorescent tube didn't fire up. Probably just the tube itself fitted badly in the holder, the connectors are rather sensitive.

There is always a great sense of achievement for me involved in getting new circuits working. It is either right or wrong; there is no room for making mistakes, but careful work pays off. The first time I ever did some serious wiring projects was when I was around twelve years old and I rewired three rooms in my grandfather's house near Kirkby Stephen. It is a bit strange isn't it? 'Health and Safety' would hardly approve! What was he thinking of letting a twelve year old crawl around in his loft space balancing on joists with a screwdriver and a bag full of cable and junction boxes? Presumably he checked those circuits over himself after I had finished, but I don't ever remember it. Somehow I was just a 'natural' with electricity. That house was still wired with old lead coated rubber cable that must have dated from the 1930's - in fact that was probably the first circuits in the house.

Recently my mum gave me some 'Sugg' catalogues from about 1905, she must have been hoarding them in one of the little boxes of treasures she keeps in her room. 'Sugg' were the main suppliers of gaslight fittings for homes in England and one is a catalogue of domestic fittings. Now that must have taken some planning and hard work - soldering up a lighting installation consisting of lead pipes. We have it easy these days, a quick trip to B&Q and it can all be fitted together with an electrician's screwdriver and a Stanley knife. The Edwardian tradesmen had to set to with paraffin blowlamps of various sizes and sticks of soft solder. What amazes me is the sheer price of it all - fashionable gas taps for drawing room came out at 14s9d - 74p in modern money or about fifty quid in real terms for the equivalent of a light switch that would cost about 5% of that price now. So we don't just have it easy, but cheap too.

Church History

One item of research I've been following up over this past week has involved the career and biography of a nineteenth century clergyman in Co. Durham. I've been able to follow his qualification and then his 'advancement' from curate to vicar using university records and Crockford's Clerical Directory.

This is another of those areas that I would love to have read about and researched more - there just isn't enough time is there? There is a whole vanished world associated with the 'established church' - and especially the Church of England. A few aspects of that institution are still available to us - the parish churches and the hymns that were written by the Victorians for example - but in most respects it is about as remote from both the modern church and present day Britain as the Pharaohs or Ancient Rome.

When I was a small boy in the early 1950's much more of this earlier church was still 'alive' and present in the spiritual practice of older people born in the eighteen eighties. That was the first generation to complete their schooling after the 1871 Education Act and stuff like the 'Origin of Species' was still new thinking which didn't influence much what was taught in Sunday or Day School classrooms to working class children. The nineteenth century church was heavily influenced by the reforms of the eighteenth century, and the Oxford Movement. The focus was on trying to develop the model of pastoral care common in rural parishes to the new industrial urban environment.

For three centuries a 'living' in the established church in England was almost the only option for young men wanting to make a career rooted in a sense of social vocation. And of course it could be a pathway to social advancement too. But the surviving records seem as dry as dust. How could you write about it all in a way that would make sense to modern readers?

Rewiring job today

This last few days in my 'spare moments' I've been rewiring the garage here. The circuits there developed a fault over a year ago when I managed to trip over the flex to the vacuum cleaner while cleaning the car and trip the RCD ('residual current device') on the circuit. I just couldn't 'un-trip' it afterwards. It didn't surprise me - when we bought the house the wiring out there looked decidedly dodgy and of course garage circuits are often affected by the damp atmosphere.

I would have done it when I was here last time but a neighbour who is a retired tradesman volunteered to do it so I got the components and left them there for him to do the work. Despite three or four reminders over the last six months he never did. Why do people let you down like that I wonder? He seemed OK and keen to do it but then just evaporated. It could have caused a big problem as well as we almost had to make emergency use the place to store someones furniture long term - once that was inside the rewiring would have been like a 'removal' job too.

Anyway, the various components - the switch and plug boxes and the new strip light - are now all fixed in position and today I hope to have the cable runs complete. There's nothing more satisfying than doing a re-wiring job. That sense of pride when you throw the switch and get the big blue flash. No, only joking. Actually I'm very careful with this stuff and have the right tools and I have a lot of experience of it too. In my time I've substantially re-wired five houses. There is a real sense of pleasure in getting those cables neatly and safely positioned and secured, the only 'downer' for me is that I hate working over my head.

In Japan I've given wiring a miss so far. Absolutely every component is different and connections seem to rely on wires being gripped in spring loaded holders rather than secured with grub screws. I'll have to get a book on it before I make any experiments in that direction I think.

View West

Over to Durham yesterday for a meeting. It was an early start and a long day out. A bit of a 'treat' though in terms of the weather, one of those cold sunny days with blustery winds that are a feature of my native 'North East', a chance to button up against the cold and enjoy the brilliant blues and oranges of the croci and the nodding snowdrops in the woods along the river. Windy March days along the river in northern oak woods are the essence of me, my idea of heaven. "March roars in like a lion and leaves like a lamb" was one of my grandmother's favourite sayings.

Driving back to Lancashire afterwards I also had a rare treat - to be heading west over Stainmore just about the time the sun was setting. Usually I come back through Barnard Castle but yesterday it was by Scotch Corner and then directly west over the A66 which follows the line of the old Roman Road. As you head towards the lowering sun on this journey the moors start to close in on all sides - the 'Stang' to the south and Upper Teesdale a little to the north and ahead the cotton grass and stone walls of the Greta valley and Stainmore itself. The western horizon is almost always cloudy in the evening, the setting sun slanting occasionally through bars of ragged grey cumulus.

This place, this time of the day, speak to me in the deepest place somehow. I have vivid memories from around six or seven years old of peering out of the window of a branch line train chugging west to Barnard Castle on the railway that ran just a few miles north of here on the opposite bank of the Tees fifty years ago and staring forwards at this very same view. It was magic then too. Maybe we had been shopping in Darlington or down to Middlesbrough for some family reason but there we would be at this time of the evening with this magical view westwards, like we had crossed an invisible boundary into a profoundly holy place.

So to drive this way at this time works a bit like a time machine for me. At absolutely the centre of our experience is a kind of an understanding of a scared aspect of place, it is a fundamental part of who we are. Maybe one day I'll write a book about it.

Teach Yourself Conducting

Some time this week I'm planning a trip up to the big secondhand bookshop at Carnforth. There are a few items I want to hunt for - some books for one of my students on the Duke of Marlborough for example, and something for myself on the reign of Queen Elizabeth I to read on the plane going home. But the one thing I am hoping to see is a nice book on conducting.

Yes, vanity has finally got a grip of me and I realise that I really fancy trying my hand at conducting a choir. Just before I came away I was on a day course at Sakura where we picked up all kinds of hints and tips about the black art, and I can see that I might get really interested in the whole business. Perhaps while I'm here I can also get myself one of those nice little batons carefully weighted with cork too.

Interesting to study the style of different conductors. Our old regular conductress could do it with such sensitivity, passion and delicacy that actually I'm lost for words that could adequately describe it without using language that might shock some of the readers here. I can still wake up in the night in a sweat after dreaming about her drawing the music out of our hearts. At the opposite end of the spectrum on a couple of occasions I've sung with piano teachers conducting massed amateur choirs at concerts and to be honest they would have been better suited to work as train dispatchers on some busy commuting station in Tokyo. Our present musical director doesn't conduct us at performances but she has a very energetic and sensitive style capable of steering large groups of singers through bumpy scores.

What will be the hallmark of my efforts on the rostrum? I don't know yet, but I'm sure I'll ba a brisk performer, I like doing everything at least 15% faster with much punching of the air and meaningful looks at nervous sopranos and altos. And I like smiling at everyone while I'm doing it too. But I'll have to develop a darker side eh? A bit of that glowering tension, a hint of danger here and a flicker of passion there all glued together with a moody stare.

"Teach Yourself Conducting". That's what I need. My ego knows no bounds.

That kind of boss

The last couple of days I've had my nose into a secondhand railway history book that I bought last year but never got around to reading. It is called "The North British Atlantics" by John Thomas (no laughter at the back there Matron!) and was written back in 1972.

This book recounts the story of a small class of Scottish express locomotives built from 1906. But there is something a bit special about the author's approach. He researched very well the boardroom politics that lay behind the decision to invest in these engines, using minute books and 'flimsys' of correspondence.

What an unpleasant lot those directors of a century ago could be! The North British Board consisted largely of Edinburgh solicitors, bankers and accountants and in Edwardian days railway companies had the kind of kudos that now would be reserved for airlines. The engineers that made the whole thing work were very low down the pecking order. I could see that many of what I would still consider to be crucial weaknesses of British management were already commonplace at the end of the nineteenth century and especially a hopeless lack of understanding of what leadership was about.

The General Manager of the company, William Fulton Jackson, must have been an impossible man to work for. A martinet and stickler for detail, his days were filled by sending tart messages to subordinates along the lines of "I noted that the salt cellar on the third table on the right in the dining car of the 11:00 Edinburgh - Aberdeen express yesterday was empty and I await your explanation". On one occasion when travelling to France from Dover to go on holiday he noticed that while most English railway timetables were current the North British timetable on the ship was three months old and he wrote angrily to the publicity department in Edinburgh "Be sure to furnish me with a full account of the reasons for this on my return". Yep! We all love bosses like him.

That kind of picky-ness has always struck me as a very British failing, a tendency to bully that ripens in middle age. If you want people to work to their capacity you have to dish out a lot more carrot than stick.

Practice makes perfect

A couple of days ago I called in at a specialist tool and materials shop that I sometimes visit when I'm in Britain. There were a couple of items that I wanted to take back to Japan with me and my experience is that if you don't start looking for stuff like that sooner rather than later you won't find it. What you want always seems to be out of stock and likely to take a fortnight to arrive from suppliers - "if only you had asked earlier!" So now I do ask earlier.

While I was there I took the opportunity to take a good look around the shop and over twenty minutes or so I must have heard three conversations between staff and other customers and about the same number of telephone calls and I also asked about a couple of products myself. What was so distinctive about all of these conversations was that the proprietor and his assistant unfailingly managed to 'run down' somebody in every conversation they had. I've never noticed anyone doing it so badly before, they just couldn't string two words together without being critical in a snide way about someone. It was an unconscious habit of mind.

You know the kind of thing I mean. "Oh! Can't guarantee delivery from there ... he's not much of a businessman. You could die waiting for something to arrive". "He has no idea about cutter design ... he should get some decent products" ... "met him at the trade show and he was never sober". And on and on and on. All low level stuff, and said in a kind of 'camaraderie and banter' style. But just incessant, those guys had not a single good word to say about anyone. I think men are worse than women at this when they put their minds to it, especially when they are bored. You end up just saying nothing to avoid them saying to the next customer "He was a queer one!" but then of course they will say "He didn't have much to say for himself!"

How do people get like that? Endless 'practice makes perfect' I guess. It must creep up on you over years. I've heard it said that in China lay Buddhists are sometimes encouraged just to take one of the Precepts really seriously - if you can't keep them all then at least try and make a good job of keeping one properly. If these two were to undertake to stick with "Do not speak against others" or "Do not be proud of yourself and devalue others" they would be walking around all day like they had taken a vow of silence.

Everything teaches eh? Seeing this kind of blatant stuff makes me wonder what my Achilles heel is.

Tyre done

I went to get one of my tyres seen to this morning. The front off-side tyre has been leaking slowly for as long as I can remember. So slowly that you can go a week, even two weeks without topping up the air in it but then one morning that tell-tale 'flat' where it meets the tarmac will be visible and you have to get the foot pump out to top it up before limping along to the nearest garage to get it fully inflated again.

Yep! This leaky tyre seems to have become an old friend over at least a year. But on Sunday I have to drive down to Manchester and then on Monday I have a very early start for what could be a snowy ride across the Pennines to Durham. So it was time to get it fixed. Someone had mentioned a place near Forton and they were very good, it only took thirty minutes and they charged me £13 for the job.

It always seems that this kind of job is the hardest to get sorted out. The big crises in life demand our immediate attention and the solution is usually pretty obvious. Small problems like this on the other hand encourage 'make do' temporary solutions and 'work arounds' - such as 'topping up' the air. Often it isn't even easy to see what the fault is. A couple of years ago I had problems with the lid of my laptop - an intermittent fault inside the hinge meant that the screen often didn't work when you opened it. I returned it under warranty and it came back a week later with the unhelpful note "No problem found" as if I was going to waste my time returning the equipment just for fun. Obviously that technician didn't look hard enough because as soon as I got home to Japan it started again and it has always been a problem ever since.

Once up at the monastery I got an ear-wigging for my weeding. The monk has asked me to weed a short stretch of gravel path during the work period and knowing no better having pulled all the significant weeds out of that bit I continued on my way helpfully pulling out all the bigger weeds on the next stretch too. That wasn't what I'd been asked to do of course. I should have taken the job more seriously, stuck to the bit I had been asked to weed and pulled up all the tiny weeds too. They were the insignificant problems that were going to become significant in another week or two if they didn't get attention.

First trip to see my mum

Over to visit my mum yesterday for the first time on this trip. She lives in a residential home not far from my base in Lancashire and when I'm here I try to get in to see her every other day. 'Every day' feels a bit too pressured for both of us, and about an hour at one time is enough, but within that kind of framework we see a lot of each other when I'm here. Well, it is one of the main reasons for making the trip regularly I guess. But it does tend to swing between extremes - for maybe five months just a weekly phone call and then a surfeit of visits for a few weeks.

At the moment she's in really good form. She has pretty dramatic mood swings sometimes, even from day to day, but yesterday she laughed as much as I can recall her doing in years. I often come across elderly people fearful of "going into a home" when circumstances change and there are some grim ones around as I discovered when 'casing' a few when my mum needed admission in 2006. But actually for her it has been a very good experience. I'd not realised how isolated she had become living with my ailing stepfather and the extra social contact in the new environment was stressful but also very therapeutic. She had become subtly withdrawn and distrustful of others over years but now she thrives on it, even if in some cases it involves a bit of low level feuding and competition for the comfiest chair. Having a fight can be such fun.

Whenever I see her the image of 'peeling onions' comes to mind. Amazing how in old age layer after layer of 'self' and personality get stripped away. There is a return to something much more deeply in progress and the journey involves the exposure of memory and identity. Things that have been held together with a stiff upper lip for a whole adult lifetime start to dissolve, perhaps it is the most complicated stage of life in many ways. Certainly the least predictable. When we are younger we have the illusion of 'adding' something though experience and 'growth' - whatever that is - but old age isn't about that kind of 'achievement' any more.

I've always felt uncomfortable about models of life that assume a kind of 'colonial' and "I did it my way" view of life experience. I do it myself sometimes - "if I just spend ten minutes a day doing X then in five years time I'll ....". It can't possibly be like that can it? It is a kind of emotional capitalism, a 'pyramid selling' of the heart. But what goes up must come down, we don't climb a ladder up into the blue yonder and float away on a cumulus cloud. Only our karma for company. I like that hymn with the lines

"We blossom and flourish like leaves on a tree
And wither and perish but naught changeth Thee."

Easy to relate to the first of these lines but the second is powerful stuff too.

Back again

Wherever I go these days I always seem to be catching the beginning, middle or end of winter. The minute I arrived back in Lancashire on Monday night "the cold snap" began in earnest after months, so I'm told, or near sub-tropical weather through November, December and January. Of course there are some who would have you believe that Spring is bursting out yonder in leafy Chiba-ken but I know better, there have been snow flurries there too, a well wrapped up little bird told me. Snow everywhere in fact, even Singapore had a light dusting before breakfast. All this talk about global warming is just a ploy to have us buying air conditioning, I've heard it from a reliable source that polar bears have been seen hungrily roaming the pack ice offshore at Blackpool.

So, back in Blighty again eh? A nice smooth flight and somehow I was given a free upgrade to business class; untold luxury. I always wondered how the rich lived. Well, now all can be revealed. You get a seat that converts into a bed and these amazing meals and even free Walkers crisps from the galley, not that I would be tempted by junk food like that No Siree. And also an infinite choice of movies and old TV sit-coms to choose from. That was my undoing really, I was like one of those people who die from over-eating after weeks of starvation. Not having seen anything on TV in English since September I just went fro the total OD and pretty well watched that stuff for twelve hours non-stop and never slept a wink. Why can't I ever be sensible eh? I just have to go for excess in all things, I can never leave an opportunity for pleasure unexploited somehow.

Lots to do now though. England seems marginally more cheerful somehow, I wonder why that is. Even Passport control have been told to smile and 'Security' at Heathrow said 'please' to a guy six in front of me. They have the word handwritten on a card stuck to the baggage scanner so that the can remember it.

The friendly face of 'The State' in evidence there. But they still make you take off your shoes and remove your belt as you pass them by.

"Bang out them doors!"

Royal Trains - 2

Writing about the Japanese Royal Train last night brought to mind something my grandfather told me about our own British 'Royal Train' many years ago.

During the middle years of World War II King George V made many trips around Britain to visit military units using our own versions of the 'Royal Train'. We were always rather secretive about its movements, and apart from traffic managers at the highest level most railway staff knew nothing about such special train movements until a couple of hours before the event.

Once - I must try and track down the date of this! - my grandfather was on night duty at Barnard Castle West signal box. That is the spot you can see on the left hand side of the photograph. This was a rural cross country line in the north of England and it has long been closed, but during the War they needed to operate around the clock to handle all the extra trains that were run, and that meant a 'night shift' for operating staff. When he went on duty he was told that there would be a 'special train' that night, and that it would be 'stabled' in the bay platform next to the signal box - the short dead-end platform that even in those days was seldom used for ordinary passenger trains (just to the left in the photo).

Well, when this train arrived late in the evening it was the Royal Train, and with the King on board. Perhaps he had been visiting the army garrison at Catterick that day and was on his way north to Scotland, or perhaps he was making a visit to the local army camp at Deerbolt. But the train was backed into the siding and guards were posted. It was often the case that the King spent nights at remote country stations, they were safe places to be without the risks of bombing.

Late that evening my grandad heard footsteps on the wooden stairs that led up to the signal box door and a visitor knocked. It was a butler from the dining car and he had a roast chicken wrapped in brown paper. It seems that at the end of dinner the King himself had asked that the unused food be offered to the local railway staff on duty.

Roast chicken was a real rarity during the War and indeed for a long time after, even if you lived in the country. My grandad took that bird home and it was 'dinner' for the family the following day. That was the only time he ever got a meal delivered to his place of work courtesy of the reigning monarch!

Photo with thanks to J.W. Armstrong

['Little House' will be 'off air' for a couple of days while I travel to England and configure a new laptop]