A Big View

One thing I miss in Japan is the opportunity of taking in a 'big view' Around here even if you can get to see out of the window, or past the adjacent buildings, then your view is going to be fenced in sooner rather than later by cedar trees. One reason I like walking on the tanbo in winter so much is that you can see a mile or two down the valley across the rice stubble but you have to pick your vantage point even to do that. That is as big as our views get.

Actually unless you go up Tokyo Tower or some such there are no big views in southern Kanto. There are sometimes distant views though. Every so often we have a very clear day and if I'm headed into Tokyo - quite a rare event in itself these days - then there will ba a beautiful distant view of Mount Fuji across the Bay. It looks exactly like those old Hokusai engravings done from around Ichikawa with the Edo River in the foreground. But now there are no sailing ships on the river, just a sea of condominiums and urban sprawl filling the foreground.

Distant Views but no 'big views'. In June we are going up to Noto for a few days and no 'big views' there either I guess, it is a bit like Cornwall but less hilly. But on the way through Nagano-ken we'll get some good views from mountain passes as we take the old road over towards Toyama.

In England we are quite spoiled for 'big views', they are everywhere. I realise now that they are one of our best features. Broad sweeps of landscape from the South Downs or the Chilterns or the ridge of the Cotswolds. But the one I love the most is up the Vale of Eden from Tailbrigg Hill above Kirkby Stephen, seventy kilometres north and west towards the Solway and the hills of southern Scotland. There are few views more beautiful than that one.

When my grandfather lived around there he told me of an old lady who lived in the village and once on her birthday they got a car and drove her up to the top of Tailbrigg on the Reeth road because she had never seen the view. Just five miles but she had never been there in her life. When she came down again it seems that she was very excited - "I never knew that the world was so big!" she said.

The New Routine

This last few days we have been trying to introduce a bit of mild discipline into the lives of our two cats. Well, it beats changing your own life eh? And I'll hear no special pleading for them either the little monsters, they have been asking for this for a long time.

It is all about food of course - "The Big One" in the catalogue of lusts, desires and attachments. Because they are expert 'naggers' and Edera and I are both soft hearted weak-willed 'touches' they had managed to bully us into a routine where we were feeding them on demand. Every time they threw themselves at our ankles determined to extract some nicer, fresher cat food from us we were topping up their bowls. Feline snacking of the worst kind. And also a lot of food was getting wasted because they only ever wanted to eat the fresh stuff.

Also Tora, who scrounges food better than any dog I've ever lived with, has arrived at the point where he just won't leave you alone at the table for a moment. His ears are finely tuned for the 'Five Thoughts' - as soon as he hears grace being recited he's trotting through to take up his position next to my right ankle. And if no tasty morsels come his way within a minute or so he starts to make his presence felt in earnest.

Well, NOT ANY LONGER. Now they can eat as much as they want three times a day while we are eating, the res of the time the bowls live on the shelf. The new routine has certainly got their full attention and we now eat our meals to the background noise of guzzling cats pushing their steel bowls around the floor. The trick is to keep out of their nagging way the rest of the day though.

Cats too suffer from the 'grass is greener' instinct. As soon as both of them have assuaged their first hunger and paused for breath their eyes are immediately on the other bowl. "Did that cat more than me? Is it tastier? I'll go and take a sniff, you can't trust these humans to be 'fair' further than you can throw them".

Which may be true

Long division

often when I'm with our younger students here (see how Japanese I'm getting! A few years ago I would have used that dismissive English word 'pupil') I try and remember what I was doing myself at exactly that age. When I have my current crop of work finished I have it in mind to try and re-create a more exact chronology of my primary (elementary) school years. Some parents would have them here in their cradles learning English but Edera usually doesn't start them until the third grade.

Often the really interesting time is just before that, say between five and seven which we can often recollect very clearly but things have an quite different sense of reality about them. I'm lucky in a sense in that I can date many things around then accurately because I have 'book ends'. I changed schools, going to Barnard Castle Infants School some time in the autumn of 1953 and then to Middlesbrough probably in the summer of 1954.

Some of these memory fragments are about small but very formative experiences. For example our school (now a block of apartments for elderly people) was a very traditional nineteenth century structure right next to the ancient town churchyard. Every day I hurried through there past all those old tombs (someone once accurately described those as a kind of 'furniture' to me) to a chorus of rooks in the big elms (long gone!) along the path. That walk, like something I realise now out of a Bronte novel, not at all 'ordinary' must have deeply influenced my sense 'the spiritual'.

One that often recurs to me from that year at school is of my first experience of 'failure' - an intimation of inadequacy. It was all about long division I think and I had to do some hard sums on a piece of squared graph paper which was in itself strange and forbidding, like some Egyptian code. This rite, which I did not know or understand, involved some complex mental formation like dividing 288 by 13 and getting a remainder. Long division is 'the pits' isn't it? There is no place more forbidding than there in the land of numbers. In retrospect I should be rather proud of myself, there are lots of teenagers these days that would struggle with this, let alone a six year old.

Anyway there it was. Here was a hard sum and I couldn't do it. And even if I limped past these 'mountains and great rivers' that loomed before me who knew what might follow in twelve more years of formal education? A testing moment. I can't remember exactly WHAT I did but I do recall what my response WAS. It was so do something that I thought the teacher might like, partly to please because I wanted to please and partly out of fear of consequences. If I can't do your sum I'll draw her some flowers, or add the numbers instead of dividing instead. After all, it is all arithmetic. I wanted to do something positive, not just cry or stare out of the window. But nor did I know how to say "I'm stuck Miss".

A lot hidden in that response. A sense of connectedness, yet also fear. The world it seemed was not answerable to my personal will after all, and I could be a 'failure'. Suddenly the sun had gone in. And of course when I took the work to the teacher she was 'cross', it was not what was required of me. Doing my best was not enough, I had to do what I was told.

Any old pebble

All this talk of 'beauty' and also reading yesterday about 'being on the shore' has reminded me of something I want to do soon. Time for a trip back to the North West of Scotland - what used to be called the Counties of 'Wester Ross' and 'Sutherland'. Which was a strange name for the place because you can't get any further north without falling into the sea.

This is the northern edge of Britain and when I was in my late 'teens' it was one of my favourite parts of the world. It is a bit like Norway, or maybe Labarador which is no surprise because geologically it IS Labrador, they were joined together somewhere in what is now the Atlantic before Canada moved west and Europe moved east. But this is not meant as a geology or geography lesson! Nor is it a paean to the wonderful mountains up there in the wild north either.

What I was remembering was the coastline and especially the shores around the little peninsula just north of Gairloch. There are some wonderful beaches there but the thing I remember most is neither the bigs sands nor the distant views of the Torridon mountains but the amazing pebbles that you see everywhere here if you take your shoes and socks off and wade around on a rocky shore.

If you see these pebbles dried out above the high water mark they look like 'just pebbles', unless you were a geologist you wouldn't look twice at them. But once they are wet with the rain, or especially if they are submerged in water late on a sunny afternoon, they become so beautiful that they are far beyond any description. You have to go there and caress them with your eyes to know it, this is a knowledge only directly available to the senses. But I can tell you that it involves the vivid greens of serpentine and the intense smokey blues of chlorites. And these pebbles are 'alive' because they are full of the most beautiful patterns, frozen waves and whorls. As if they were a fragment of an ocean painted by Hokusai in three dimensions.

But here's the thing. These rocks came to be even before the ocean itself was formed. These Lewisian gneisses are the oldest rocks on the planet, they 'were' before everything else. And you can actually 'touch' this, be aware of it. Pick one of these pebbles up and it is the nearest you can physically experience to holding 'eternity' in you hand. This is 'eternal beauty'. When you touch one of these pebbles you can 'know it' with your finger tips.

And yet that beauty is only really revealed by the very 'transient', by that state of for a moment 'being wet'. I should go back and take a closer look at them.

Aesthetics

I've realised recently that I struggle with 'aesthetics'. Ha! I'm really turning into an academic eh? Only the anally retentive could type such a thing with a straight face. But no ... heck! ... I really do.

Aesthetics: The branch of philosophy concerted with the study of the concepts of beauty and taste. What is 'beautiful'? - and why? For me it all has the pretentious feeling of wine tasting, isn't it enough to enjoy beauty, to recognise it instinctively? Don't I know the difference between a mountain lake and an oil refinery, a Rembrandt and a snack wrapper? Do I need lessons in how to appreciate things? But that's partly inverted snobbery, my cloth-capped working class roots. Of course an understanding of what you are looking at can add to the appreciation.

This came up for me on Sunday. At our concert there was a pianist I've come across - I use that term in preference to 'met' - a few times and she is an extremely 'classical' Japanese beauty, perhaps 35 years old. Where exactly does this beauty 'hang out', why do I say she is 'beautiful'? Beauty in women - or men - partly comes from the balance of the facial features and their conformity to a middle range, faces are conventionally 'beautiful' because they are close to the 'average'. And other things of course, soft hair, good body and posture and - for me especially - good legs. The sort of body that Greek and Roman sculptors would have unpacked their hammers and chisels for.

Now here's a thing. Somewhere, instinctively, I don't like this woman much. My experience of her is as a 'striver', rather cold and humourless and she doesn't look you when she's talking. Also I have the vibes that she just doesn't like gaijin because she can't easily locate them on her social scale. Of course these judgements might be wrong, instinct sometimes is, there are always angles you don't know about.

So there is a rather exceptional physical beauty here but I don't feel any matching quality in her 'inner nature', the two just don't match up. Hardly a Nobel Prizewinning observation this, but it points to the more basic question - if this kind of contrast exists is there really anything there you can call 'beautiful'? It is just a label after all, and it feels like it is the work of a discriminative mind at work. Feels like? Well - of COURSE it is the work of a discriminative mind, aesthetics is entirely about discrimination, you can't be an aesthete and believe a mountain lake and an oil refinery have equal value beauty-wise in the big scheme of things.

But then there are still things you see and you think "that's beautiful!" At the moment I feel beauty is a bit like weight, rather than an 'on-off' electrical switch. The experience of 'how beautiful is it'? and 'How heavy is it' feel rather similar to me. Or perhaps energy is an even better metaphor, beauty has a kind of 'mass' or 'calorific value' associated with it but this isn't the same as the opposites 'beautiful' and 'ugly'. Not at all.

Park circuit

I've been making a lot of use of our local park recently. Wild horses wouldn't drag me into the undergrowth of our local forests at this time of the year, but I badly need exercise what with spending so much time hunched over a computer.

So every evening I head for the park. It is about two miles away up near the city office and library and just across the road from the local supermarket and by Japanese standards it is quite a big one. On the plateau there is a large level grass sports area, roughly circular in shape, and then a couple of paths lead down a steep slope into the yato - the narrow valley that winds down towards the station about a mile away. That's where 'civilisation' runs out for now. After a short distance the park just stops. In Britain this valley would have a nice footpath running through woodland to the crossroads I'm sure but here it is impenetrable bamboo thicket, you would need a machete to make any progress.

My activities are limited to the big grass area. Around the boundary is a wide tarmac drive , with shrubs outside and a circle of trees between the path and the playing area. It also has street lamps so you can walk around after dark too. For me the circuit is 690 paces - just over six hundred metres - and I will do a minimum of three laps to get my muscles moving.

Well it might not be in the "Big Book of Best Walks in the World" but I enjoy it. I usually get up there some time after five and then when I'm finished I can pick up any shopping we need at the supermarket. And guess what, I'm not the only greying over-weight old git circling the place either. Hard to imagine but in fact there are many even more weird than me and a selection of miniature long-haired dachshunds and stray cats also out to enjoy the evening air. The place has the ambiance of a Manet painting somehow, ladies with large bottoms and enthusiastic toddlers 'kicking for goal' and ending up on their backs, the ball unmoved.

If you are an 'oldie' exercise freak of course you have to have a shiny blue lycra track stretchy suit to make the grade here and get accepted into the close circle of limping obsessives that lead a shadowy existence amongst the bushes. I don't know if they make those in my size - I'm 'Medium Zepplin' I think. Somehow I doubt it, but maybe I should go down to the 'remainder' counter at 'Fashion Center Ogawa' where all the farmers around here acquire their sartorial splendour and take a look, then I would really have the right gear eh? I'd fit in and be inconspicuous. Or maybe not.

Talking about music.

I had a discussion yesterday with a professional musician about 'quality'. We were talking about the relationship between 'art' and 'professionalism' in music -it is a complicated one that I find I have increasingly strong views about. Id' expected that our feelings might be very different but in fact it felt as if agreed about a lot of stuff.

I sometimes think that music and athletics have a lot in common. Perhaps athletics IS music in a different dimension, and the two are linked through dance. Lots of amateurs around but if you want to get onto a 'serious' level - wherever THAT might be - then you need to work hard and relentlessly, with complete devotion, and have ability and talent too. Nobody ever sits down and thinks "now what do I want to do in life, work in MacDonalds or be a concert pianist"? But maybe they should because there are a thousand brilliant pianists at least out there for every one that succeeds in making a living on the concert stage. If you aim high and fail then you will probably end up on the French Fries 'station', or something like it. This isn't just a possibility, it is a probability.

There can be a cruel and terrible snobbishness around music. People - and their mothers! - strive endlessly to aim high, to be 'superior beings' and they reject second best. But on the other hand if it is 'all heart and no technique' then there is no quality involved. In fact the singing or playing can be awful. Especially singing because you just have to open your mouth to do it and like the violin the voice doesn't have any neat black and white notes to give you a clue, you can be a whole tone out and not know it if your 'ear' isn't trained to spot the difference.

There is a real koan around this and I think a lot about it, or 'explore it with my mouth' might be a better way to put it. Somewhere 'up there' in the thirty third Heaven or thereabouts is the purity of sound and harmony and then one step down from that it resolves into two conflicting aspects - over here on the left love, the passions, blind emotion and then over here on the right professionalism, technique, and darker interesting lusts like ambition. We want to grasp the purity and possess it make it our own like those adverts on Ebay - "Rare! You can OWN this today! Don't let it get away!"

But you can't own it, what you desire the most will never be yours. It was there before 'you' came onto the scene and will be there long after 'you' have left it and all you can ever hope to do is pass on something precious. AND this can also only be done with skill, technique, application.

Oh! Goodness! The separation from the Centre can be very painful in this kind of place. Just when you thought that you could hear angels, the whole darn host of arahants and bodhisattvas clustered around the adamantine Lotus Throne somebody mentions that they won Bronze Medal with a 92% score two years ago in a choir contest. Purity and Pain, Beauty and the Beast.

This kind of separation and dissociation between art and professionalism, love and desire is just one window into what the writer of the Sandokai had in mind for sure, I seem to trip over the Sandokai in almost every corner of life at the moment.

Each sense gate and its object all together enter thus in mutual relations ...

With the ideal comes the actual, like a box all with its lid;
With the ideal comes the actual, like two arrows in mid-air that meet.
Completely understand herein the basic Truth within these words;
Set up not your own standards
If from the experience of the senses basic Truth you do not know
How can you ever find the path that certain is
No matter how far distant you may walk?

Getting it 'on board'

Choral Festival today. My two shirts and black trousers are already on a coat hanger in the hall and I've got my black shoes out in the genkan. I've forgotten them all at various stages over the years. Experience shows that if I don't get it all in a row and 'do it by numbers' then something will get left behind. I don't want to end up on the stage in brown hiking boots. Get it all 'on board'. One year I really did leave my shoes behind and had to do a pretty fast round trip and miss my lunch to retrieve them.

Yes, you have to be 'organised'. If something can go wrong, it WILL go wrong. I remember one time when I was working for the brewery having to drive down late one evening from Lancashire to Gloucestershire for a 9:30 business meeting with our regional Sales Director at our Gloucester depot. I was overnighting at Tewkesbury and didn't get away until late but I had a fast 200 mile drive down and got to the hotel at midnight. Loaded my stuff out of the car and ... no hangar, no suit, no shirt and tie! They were still in my room in Lancashire. All I had was the tee-shirt and dark green cord trousers I was wearing.

But I'm always one for thinking how situations can be 'recovered'. I lay awake working out a plan and I was up early and into Tewkesbury for 8:30 and walked around town until I saw a gentleman's outfitters and then I checked all the shirts and ties through the window. The second that door was open at 9:00 I was in through it, grabbed that shirt in my size and the tie and by 9:02 I was back in my car and headed down the motorway at about 90 mph. There was a lay-by just near the depot I could pull into and change. No jacket - but in would look as if on that warm morning I'd left it in the car.

Got to that lay-by, tore my tee-shirt off and ripped the packet open and there was - a nice SHORT sleeved causal shirt. Luckily that Sales Director has a sense of humour. I guess it had happened to him too eh?

Limping a bit

Male voice choir rehearsal yesterday evening. We have the local choir festival on Sunday and there's no rest for me, I'm in it twice. And I have to get from a white shirt singing with the men to a pink shirt singing with the ladies, I'll have to rush out into the car park and do a Paul Newman-style switch. Or maybe a bit like that old Levi's advert where the young cowboy takes his clothes off to swim in the river as girl ogles him from behind the bush. Or maybe not. There's a lot of me to see, I need to breathe in so as not to frighten the horses. And in the local scheme of things I'm a very pink person too, kind of noticeable. I'd better find a broom cupboard to make the change, let's hope that one of my choir slots doesn't follow straight on from the other.

The men were limping a bit last night. Two absentees, one of whom was sick and may not make it on Sunday. But we weren't in gear either. And with the attention we've been paying to accurate pitch recently with the ladies I was appalled to notice how out of tune some of the men were singing without even noticing it. Let's hope we get it together on Sunday, fear is a great lubricant for getting things in focus.

There's a definite genre for men's choir music - the "here we are together marching down the road of life" stuff that the Red Army Ensemble use to sing with enthusiasm when I was a teenager. Such is our fare this time. One of the songs - Michi ('The Road') is peppered with references to our home village and mummy. Makes a nice sound but I feel a strange sense of sadness singing stuff like this, there's an awareness in me of the untold millions of people that were misled by such music in some way. It is a great intoxicant, not quite as effective as whisky but perhaps the delusion is greater because it is subtle and even respectable, "I vow to thee my country" and all that. When you link music and politics, even music and religion, watch out. It isn't the fault of the music, our hearts supercharge the original intent somehow, we add beauty and harmony and a sense of sharing something deeply to to an ideal which might or might not have serious virtue and create a volatile mixture that can easily blow up in our faces and kill us

Harry Worth

For some reason the 'comedy actor' Harry Worth popped into my mind yesterday, now why was that? Anyway I don't suppose that more than three or four 'regulars' here have the slightest idea of who he was and maybe it is a good thing. He had a 'show' on the BBC way back in the nineteen sixties when men were men and women hadn't been invented and television was still 405 lines in black and white. And those winters too ... brr. Did I ever mention that walking home one night I saw a woolly mammoth cross the road ahead? But that is another story.

Harry Worth was best known for an trick he used to do at the start of his weekly programme. He used to line himself up with the corner of a shop window where he could see exactly half of himself in the refection and then raise an arm and a leg and it used to look like he was levitating. This was very popular to attempt when I was about fourteen, it used to really pee off shopkeepers because it left fingermarks on their nice clean windows.

He also had a catch phrase (they all did in those distant days!) "My name is Harry Worth - I don't know why, but there it is!" This raises an existential question that troubles me deeply too - how do we actually know why something has a particular name? Say you are walking down the road and see "St. Helen's Church, Churchtown" - when they built that church how did they KNOW it belonged to St. Helen? Well, I'll leave you to struggle with your own personal answer to that koan, I don't have time here and now to go into it.

Anyway, I got to check up on Wikipedia and was amazed to discover that there is not only a biography there but also that, even though he died in 1979, there is an 'Official Harry Worth Website'. Isn't that scary? It seems that he was born Harry Illingsworth near Barnsley (a Yorkshireman! Explains SO much!) in 1917 and died in 1979. Despite his bumbling middle class image he had worked as a coal miner for several years in the 1930's. And the other nugget of information there is that "he was a martyr to piles".

Oh! And the famous shop window was in St. Annes Square, Manchester. That has a web site too.

Only joking.

Great God! Despite the earliness of the hour I now feel an urge to wax lyrical about what a better world we all lived in back in the 1960's surging through me, but you all know my views on THAT one so I'll go and get my grapefruit and porridge.

Giving a talk.

Wah! Another anxious dream just before I woke up. I was with my teachers at university for a final meeting to sort out a few concerns about my thesis but somehow it wasn't just that. We ended up in a large messy room, and lots of other academic staff and students were there, it seemed that I had to give a talk! In fact a lecture! Nobody had mentioned it. And being an anxiety dream it never quite got around to starting because not everyone was there yet, or had slipped away for some reason.

I write about this with some feeling because early in my career it really did happen to me! It was my second job, I was maybe 23 years old and I worked as the Tourist Officer in the Orkney Islands. One Wednesday I was just going to slip out and buy a sandwich for lunch when the chairman of the management committee turned up and said "are you ready then?" I obviously should have been ready for something so I just said "fine" and followed him out and we went around the corner to the Kirkwall Hotel where there was a kind of Business Luncheon about to start (was it Rotary?) with about fifty guests. And it turned out that I was the after lunch speaker! What a nightmare! I was speaking on the role of tourism in the island economy it seemed. There was even a poster up about it (luckily or I might not even have known what I was supposed to be speaking about!)

Even worse, I couldn't sit there over lunch and think about what I was going to say because the wretched guy next to me on top table talked non-stop from the soup to the coffee. So unsurprisingly when I got up to speak I made a pretty poor - and very short! - job of speaking on the subject. Awful.

How could something have gone so wrong? I still don't have the slightest idea. Had my boss really ever told me about the event? He was a bit wierd and I sometimes wonder if he hadn't, either by design, he was capable of it, or maybe he just thought he had. But I was hardly an 'organised person' back then, I'm still not so hot on keeping a diary. My guess is that he had mentioned to me that I could speak there in a particular month without suggesting a firm date. But how crazy can you get not to ask me what I wanted to talk about?

Anyway, I survived, people clapped politely even if they must have thought I was the worst that they had ever had. In the end you just can't control events, just do your best with the ones that turn up.

Christmas sorted.

Well, that got Christmas sorted then. I took a couple of hours out yesterday to finish making the arrangements for the 'big trip' this December. Edera's mum and dad and one of her aunts will be spending Christmas in England and the five of us have taken a cottage near Settle for a week. Should be fun, let's hope that there is not too much snow of the 'deep and crisp and even' variety in evidence.

I only ever went away to a cottage once for Christmas and that must have been twenty years ago, perhaps more. We took a gite near Beaune in a village famous for wine (and aren't they all?). I love Burgundy, I could live there quite easily, maybe my favourite region in the whole world. And that was a nice Christmas too if a bit unusual. I remember 'Pere Noel' appearing in a spotlight on the roof of the Hotel de Ville in Dijon and making all the little kids in the audience nervous. "Is Jean Blanc out there ... have you been a good boy this year Jean?" Small toddler disappears behind mother's skirts. Makes you want to leap in there and holler "No hiding sonny! Step out, be a man and confess to Santa!". The power of information! I guess Santa's list was the first step towards a database society. Also we went to Midnight Mass at Meursault, a big grey church full of wine growers where the slopes of the Cote D'Or flatten out into the Saone valley. Then there was trips in the dark to the TGV High Speed railway line near Veuvrotte for the fun of trains thundering by in the dark. Well, fun for me.

Skyline Santas, wine growers, Trains a Grande Vitesse. All of these I confidently predict will not be a feature of a winter week in Settle. Maybe we will get a 'Santa steam special' on the Settle-Carlisle line though, and I'm sure we can find a carol service too. And plenty of wine in Sainsburies if not for me.let's hope the old place is still standing when we get back there. At the moment the political 'pace' in the UK is hotting up so much that it feels like we might be seeing Cromwell's 'Ironsides' mustering again at Clitheroe Castle by December. Long overdue.

Camera in the mend

My camera is 'in the mend' at the moment. Nothing serious - I hope! - there seems to a problem with the shutter mechanism and it means that the whole area of the image isn't getting exposed. They said "about a month" but I hope it is a bit quicker. In mid-June we are going over to the Noto peninsula on the opposite side of Japan, and there are a lot of things that I want to see up there that I'll want to take pictures of.

I always thought that in retirement I'd travel a lot, but so far it hasn't happened. My studies have kept me 'nailed down' of course in ways that I didn't really foresee but mainly it has been the routines at home. If you have a couple of cats they are a real brake on any plans to be away for long periods of time, especially Tora who is too old and set in his ways to settle at a cattery while we are gone. And of course we can't just neglect our students for weeks at a time. I also have family ties and responsibilities in England which take first priority which means I can't go anywhere else.

So actually I've travelled a lot less recently than I used to when I was working, quite the opposite to what I intended.I need to think what it is I want to do; I don't have limitless time left to make journeys.

The trip to Noto might be interesting - it is that bit of Japan's main island that sticks up northwards into the Sea of Japan on the opposite coast from here. I've been there a couple of times to visit temples that are important in the history of our strand of Buddhist practice but I've never been there with a car before which means that we can really get into exploring the remote areas. In English terms it is a bit like Devon, but here retired people don't head for such places so it is depopulating quickly and parts are pretty empty and wild now. It will be nice just to get away for three nights even if it is in rainly and sweaty Junes.

Big Orange Arrow

I was sketching out a few ideas for a big orange arrow yesterday. I've felt for some time that I needed this piece of equipment, so it is 'on the list' as a simple carpentry project to be completed the next time I get my tools out. It is about a metre long, a large plywood arrow painted luminous orange, and it is mounted vertically on a broom handle pointing downwards so that when I stand and hold it in the air the tip of the arrow is just above my head.

This will be a very useful piece of equipment when it comes to drawing attention to myself. My guess is that it will identify my position in a large crowd at up to two hundred metres. It is good that everyone knows where I am.

Actually this ties in with another project I have in mind. Many of my friends know that my whole life I've been a closet 'naturist' - a nudist, an avid reader of "Health and Efficiency" and purchaser of inflatable ... wait for it! wait for it! ... beach balls. But now I've moved on far past the attractions of outdoor ping pong and volleyball in Suffolk pine woods, or shivering on some goose pimpled Baltic shoreline fenced off with a sad strand of barbed wire. Let's move all this up the public agenda eh?

I want to start organising nudist family outings. The idea is we all take out togs off before we get on the coach and then head off for a social, enjoyable and educational afternoon. A cream tea followed by choral evensong at Canterbury Cathedral perhaps. We are forever using nakedness as a metaphor for vulnerability, I'm sure that God will understand. Or how about taking that visitor tour around the nuclear power station with no clothes on? In the big scheme of things it won't make much difference in terms of exposure to radiation. When you get to my time of life its just nice to feel the breeze on your belly.

And here's the neat thing. This big orange arrow will come in handy on these trips if fellow nudists need to find me in a crowd.

Now I'm off on this tack maybe I'll suggest to the ladies in the choir that we sing in the nude too. It would save on all those endless droning debates about what to wear for the concert and it would add a whole new artistic angle to the performance. We could sing "Ave Verum Corpus" and really mean it.

Local Barbecue

Our local barbecue here yesterday - a good job that it wasn't today as it is raining hard this morning! The weather treated us quite kindly; it was grey and cloudy and cool. It could have been very hot or humid but we are going through a chilly May here, thank goodness. It keeps down the mosquitoes and can even feel a bit like England, long may it continue! But it won't. The worst of summer is just around the corner I fear.

The 'do' was held in the middle of the small field behind our district 'kominkan' - the community hall a couple of hundred metres away. The grass had been strimmed for the occasion and plastic sheets lad out on the stubble and a collection of picnic tables and chairs set out in a row. They must have been setting up from around nine because by the time we got across at 11:30 things were in full swing, a positive banquet was being grilled and beer and shochu was being swigged by an increasingly chatty crowd of neighbours who broke into cheers and applause when they saw us turning up.

A very nice bunch of people. I always have the feeling that they like having an "English Gentleman" living in the area and somehow we always communicate well enough despite my excruciating Japanese. We are on the same wavelength I guess. All this study has made me a bit of a remote figure, I need to get more involved in what happens here when I get my current work finished.

Barbecues are a bit bizarre eh? Well, the ones in gardens are tame enough but sitting in a Japanese field under a bamboo festooned hillside is special somehow. I felt that the Gods were watching us, a kind of small comedy was being enacted for their benefit, we all had our various masks. Me, I'm Plato these days, or perhaps Ananda. Sometimes I want play the part of Dionysius or Pan or Robin Hood, and when I'm that way inclined I can be good at any of them. But cobblers should stick to their lasts. Hotei and Benzaiten are more my cup of tea for now.

Handbrake turns

While we were waiting at the traffic lights at Sasehara's pharmacy yesterday a small 'people carrier' hurtled around the corner and headed up the hill travelling much too fast. The roads meet at an oblique angle there so it is a corner 'locals' are tempted to take too fast. Handbrake turns eh? A few years ago someone ran into the back of Edera's car at exactly this spot as she slowed down to turn left into the Chiba-gin car park. One of our students, Y-chan, was knocked down on the pedestrian crossing at these traffic lights too, but luckily by a slow moving driver and she wasn't hurt.

As this car came around the corner, almost but not quite on two wheels, I got a clear look at the driver. A woman in her thirties; no surprise there then. Interesting how in different cultures different groups end up being the drivers to watch out for. In Britain it tends to be 'professionals' - usually but not always men - in their late twenties and early thirties.Bottom of the range red BMW (well, used to be in my day!), hands-free mobile phone fitted to the car, they hurtle around the roads of Britain perpetually late for a meeting arguing with their manager, bullying staff in the warehouse and placating angry customers over the ether. We all see them trying to edge up the outside lane on their 'fast track' to an appointment with an early cremation.

In Japan the men are all corralled in overcrowded offices in endless meetings and those who are 'on the road' are in fact on the train, in major cities here it would be impossible to make sales calls by car as there is just nowhere to park. So the dodgy driving is left to young harassed mothers speeding between PTA meetings and the ATM machine to pay piano lesson and karate class bills for their kids or assignations with other women of the same age in restaurants at lunch time. They are the shock troops in the game of achievement, they aspire for their kids to be on the 'fast track' to careers as concert pianists and to speak perfect English just like they don't.

What all these drivers share in common - and I was once one of them! - is that they are driven by other priorities and so not paying attention. They count on their skill and ability. Driven by their agenda they perform like those clowns who balance plates on poles and chamber pots on the tip of their nose. Until the day arrives when their luck runs out that is.

Oooh Sensei!

Good grief! I woke up laughing out loud this morning. Another one of those bizarre anxiety dreams - at the moment all the exciting stuff in my life seems to happen when I'm asleep. Somehow two background sources of concern got woven together in my subconscious and I really will have to write a TV sit-com script around this one.

In this dream it was already summer next year and the choir trip I'm planning for 'the ladies' was on us. I had a seventeen-seater minibus (more of a luxury caravanette really!) and we were off on our travels around the north of England laden down with scores and music stands.

But I was also moving house in England too - something that I will need to do next year as well. Somehow the schedule for this had gone very wrong and the two events had got hopelessly mixed up. I had to move the final large load of bedding and books at the same time as bussing the choir to the next event. All this stuff had to be packed into the vehicle around rehearsing choristers and to make matters worse as I got the blankets packed under their seats they kept vanishing across the road on shopping expeditions. Futons were piled in cardboard boxes on the drive, at each roll call someone else had gone missing to buy some omiyage. And of course 'her indoors' was telling me how she always thought that this is what would happen! "Here's another fine mess you have gotten us into!"

Did the choir get to the venue on time and all my belongings arrive safely at the new apartment? What do you think!

It would make a great 'Carry On!' style film eh? "Carry On Conducting!" or something like that. K-san could be played by Barbara Windsor, they are about the same build. Sid James could be the Estate Agent and I of course would be played by Kenneth Williams - "Oooh Sensei!" I'm already sharpening my pencil.

Mustard seeds

I found myself on the edge of a discussion yesterday about marking the anniversary of a recent accidental death. Someone was planning to organise an event and was asking for help.

I think everyone involved was listening with profound sympathy but there were very different views being expressed about what was best to do. I think that in part the differences were about form - if what was being suggested would 'work' or was 'right to do' in an abstract sense. And there were also doubts for some about whether it was good to do in this specific context. In the end there seemed to be a collective sense of wanting to help but we'll see how that works out. There is no straight answer to these things.

It had Edera and I talking about 'remembrance' afterwards and I was in two minds myself. Still am. In Britain we usually just have a funeral and 'get it over with'. If there is anything else there might be a 'memorial' some time later which has a gentler aspect, is often an occasion for friends to share recollections after the first pain of bereavement is easier. The Buddhist traditions in Japan encourage a more formal, structured approach to remembering and the motivation is different too, 'memorials' are something that you do on behalf of the deceased. But in each case the event is about 'letting go' of something, whatever THAT glib phrase means.

That was certainly the underlying issue for me around this discussion. Was this a 'good' thing to do in the sense that it helped to dissolve or resolve? Or did it reinforce something? 'Letting go' is seldom, maybe never, a single deliberate act, it happens in a million unrecognised moments that you might occasionally notice out of the corner of your eye.

There is a parable about the Buddha where a mother whose child has died begs him to bring the boy back to life. He thinks for a while and then tells her that such a thing might be possible but only if she can bring some mustard seed from a household in the city in which nobody has ever died. Filled with hope the mother sets off knocking from door to door but of course after many hours she eventually comes to realise in her heart that no such household exists.

I remembered this story listening to the discussion. It always seems rather shocking to me, almost cruel. Wouldn't the kind thing be to just be sympathetic but 'straight' and say there was nothing to be done. But if he had been 'straight' could the mother ever have 'heard' the answer to the question she had asked?

"Well, dredge my moat!"

Reading through some of the mountain of comments on the 'Guardian' website yesterday about the scandal of MP's expenses this comment caught my eye and I think it will become a 'classic'. One of the Conservative MP's, James Hogg I think, had claimed on his expenses for a bill to dredge the moat around his 'main' (!) medieval manor house. It says a lot about a certain kind of politics in England I think. Only in England eh? In most parts of the world right wing politicians put an electrified fence up and rely on rottweilers but in Britain a moat with a drawbridge is still the technology of choice. "Well, dredge my moat!"

It all prompted some ancient memories for me. When I was in Ifield Grammar School - it must have been around 1962 I guess - I was a member of the 'Archeology Club'. It was run by an enthusiastic young history teacher whose name I can't remember and certainly on one occasion we helped him complete a really professional dig excavating a Neolithic burial mound in Ashdown Forest. Anyway - one of those summers was really dry and the Chairman of the School Governors, a local politician called Ivan Clout, invited us to go digging in his moat. It had been exceptionally dry and the water table was very low and what was usually a duck-filled moat had become largely dried out mud.

We got busy with our trowels around the bridge over the moat. No, it wasn't really a drawbridge, a rather nice small sixteenth century brick-built bridge from memory. But of course for centuries people had chucked garbage over the side so there were rich pickings of all kinds of objects from Tudor kitchenware to nineteenth century beer bottles under there. The 'down' side of this was that most of them were broken - as of course they would have to be to get chucked in the moat in the first place.

The thing I enjoyed finding most there were bits of broken clay pipes, probably from around 1800. I still have a couple of fragments somewhere in a box. They must have been fragile things to smoke, the stems forever snapping, but the little nicotine stained carbonised bowls were pretty. Somehow pulling those out of the mud on a warm summer evening you could almost hear the old gardeners that chucked them there two hundred years ago still yarning away with a tankard of ale and a pipe of baccy. No problems with MP's expenses in those days


Note for regular readers: If you are someone that has e-mailed me recently and not had a reply please send it again. I discovered yesterday that my new laptop has been deleting lots of what it thinks is 'junk e-mail' without sending it to the junk mail folder for me to check first.

The Bird

I don't know if I've ever mentioned on 'Little House' that we have a small bird lives here with us - a Java sparrow (or is he a finch?). He is pretty ancient for a small bird, one of a pair bought for M-chan's birthday nearly nine years ago.

I never had much experience of birds as pets before - my grandparents had a budgie when I was about three or four but he didn't seem to last long in the cold climate of a Barnard Castle winter before central heating was invented. When I was first around ours I felt a bit uncomfortable about his 'lot' but then he once escaped while his cage was being cleaned and flew up onto the roof of a neighbours house and then later happily came back to his cage of his own volition. It was his home. After that I felt that he'd chosen to live here and indeed he always seems content enough.

For the last couple of years he's been based elsewhere but now with M-chan moving to Tokyo to go to college he's back in the house again. I was a bit surprised he was still 'ticking along', I'd rather forgotten about him. On his return he looked very frail. One leg is a 'goner', he can't perch and has to hop around on the floor of his cage. Also the plumage at the back of his head is wrecked, he won't be charming the ladies any time soon.

Now that he's settled back into the peace of our washitsu he's been getting perkier and a couple of times he's succeeded in perching on a bar. Amazing! Also he's got very chirpy, none of the wonderful warbling songs he used to fill the house with as a young man but a very cheerful "chip chip". His cage is close to the family altar and he watches us with interest and the occasional audible contribution when we say morning scriptures.

It amazes me that such a small, elderly, decrepit being can be so cheerful, he has a real lesson for me. So tiny that he fits easily into the palm of my hand and he just trusts that everything is OK. And keeps doing the next thing on the agenda - checking over his supply of seed, taking a bath in the glass saucer, watching me with his beady eye, singing. Life is amazing if you look at it closely.

Dawn Sounds

Long summer evenings never seem to be much of a feature down in leafy Chiba-ken. Even in June it gets dark around eight and by that stage of the summer who would want to linger outdoors to be consumed by mosquitoes anyway? Being home in the UK during midsummer is a real treat for me and I miss those long evenings when I'm here. Once I even worked up in the Orkney Islands for a year and that was just great, it never got dark at all. In Summer ...

In the mornings on the other hand I really do notice the extra daylight we are getting. Four thirty and it is already light and around here very still too. 'Little House' is in a small danchi - a cluster of around twenty houses built on an old tanbo - but apart from the railway a few hundred yards away there is no real source of noise around here and when you lie in bed in the early dawn it is fun to listen carefully to the country sounds outside. They are all very 'un-English' somehow.

Sometimes I'm reminded of times I've spent in cottages in the South of France. Those echoes of distant cockerels crowing (where the heck do they live? I've never seen one around here!) might be from the background of a scene from 'Jean de Florette'. But croaking frogs are not such a feature of Gallic dawns. Actually even here they quieten down as daylight approaches after their nights of amphibian lust, they have to rest sometime I suppose.

I don't really notice anything like a British 'dawn chorus'. Some of the elements are there - the chirpy sparrows abroad early to feed their young sound just like they do in Lancashire. But there are no blackbirds or thrushes or exotic 'extras' like collared doves. Sometimes there's an uguisu - a 'Japanese nightingale' - but they seem to do the best of their singing later in the day. And sometimes around here a pheasant up in the cedar forests on the hill that rises behind the lane.

It is nice just to 'be' at such times eh? To lie there and be aware yet not add anything to it. Just let the stimulus be there and the ear and then not add anything on to that

Expenses

If you don't live in the UK you might not know that our news is being dominated at the moment by some 'big time' revelations about MP's expenses. The 'Daily Telegraph' has got hold of details of claims and is busily exposing some pretty spectacular stuff about the private lives of government ministers. The substance of this might in any case have been exposed in a couple of months under a change in the law but by then MP's will have had the chance to 'edit' their receipts to hide addresses etc. and it won't be possible to identify what was spent on which property any more. A large part of the scandal relates to the cavalier way in which MP's have spent public money on buying and furnishing 'second homes' which they have then made big profits on.

Expenses. It was an aspect of my working life that I used to dread. You would think it would be simple to set out some straightforward guidelines and if the extent of 'expenses' in your working life just relates to the odd train ticket to attend a training course and a sandwich at lunch time it IS easy. But if you are spending three or four days away from home during the week and have a team of staff that you are expected to mentor and socialise with it quickly becomes a minefield. You are fed up with hotel food and want to eat in a Chinese Restaurant tonight? Fair enough. But how do you claim back the unreceipted tip it involve? A pound three nights a week quickly becomes a hundred and fifty quid you wouldn't have spent if you have stayed at home. And is a more expensive restaurant OK? And if you are meeting a member of staff who is also a friend? And then there are things like Christmas parties and team 'awaydays'. You are soon in a position where there is stuff you would struggle to justify to a tax inspector, and after that stuff that the company auditors would look twice at.

I only once had expenses queried in my whole career, and that was about a year after I started working. A very Caledonian civil service auditor queried an item on my bill for a meeting I'd attended in Inverness - the hotel I'd stayed at had itemised my morning newspaper - a copy of "The Times" and I ended up paying back I think 8p for this crime against humanity. I can't imagine that newspapers are itemised on our Prime Minister's expense claims. But they should be.


That is what is making people so angry around this issue eh? They see those who should be setting an example, who make the rules, "getting away with it". We might forgive a crime passionel where an enraged politician cuts out the heart of his wife's lover, we know how he feels, but trousering a few quid for bathroom fittings - it just has no 'class' does it?

Balconies

One thing I like about our 'little house' here (and it really is 'little'!) is that it has two balconies. Pretty well all houses in Japan that aren't just one storey have a balcony, as of course do most of the condominiums that have been built for sale over the past twenty five years, although the ubiquitous earlier public housing blocks tend just to have a large guard railing in front of the lounge and bedroom windows.

The purpose is pretty obvious - this is where you put put your futon to air during the daytime and also dry your washing. If you didn't air the bedding regularly in the humid Japanese summer climate it would soon become mouldy. Smelly too. In traditional one storey dwellings there is an 'engawa' - a kind of enclosed balcony around the south side of the house - and in multi-storey buildings this is replaced by a balcony. Where else could you hang out your washing? Do you want your neighbours closely inspecting your underwear?

Orientation of housing is a really crucial thing in Japan. You just have to have a south facing prospect for your lounge and hopefully at least one bedroom. If south is impossible then west, if not west then east but never north. The north side of the house is for the kitchen, bathroom and toilet.

To someone brought up in terrace houses in the north of England balconies where you can step outdoors and enjoy the view seem like impossibly grand luxuries. With my well known capacity for daydreaming about anything I can't walk past a pigeon-plastered balcony on a Victorian public library or town hall without imagining using it to speak to a vast crowd gathered below to listen to my words of wisdom. I know these balconies were just for decoration, an architect's idiosyncrasy, but you could walk through a door and out to those balustrades and greet an adoring crowd below. In theory eh? Perhaps I can wear a toga and a wreath of laurel leaves too and really get into my stride here. Now what was it that I actually wanted to say?

Causation

Inch by inch I seem to be getting under way again with my writing and in part it is due to a very well written book on methodology that has helped me get some structure around my thinking - "Social Science Methodology - A Criterial Framework" by John Gerring. It is rare to find a book about such a complex topic so well written, usually I seem to turn up badly written texts about straightforwards topics in the area!

Yesterday I was reading about 'causation' and it is an interesting topic to 'take to pieces'. What exactly is the cause of anything? One of the examples the author uses is 'cause of death. A patient dies - but what is the cause of her death, is it 1) that Joan is mortal? 2) that Joan has cancer or 3) that Joan has a heart attack? The first seems a bit weird but if this was an analysis of Ancient Greek literature, or you were explaining the death to a child by making a comparison with her inanimate doll, the it would be the best answer. The 'cancer' angle identifies the primary collapse of health vis a vis the rest of the population that led to Joan's demise. The heart attack was the actual final occasion of her death. So actually any or all three of these answers could be correct depending on the context in which the 'cause' was being identified.

This isn't an unusual case at all, it is the 'norm'. If you sit back and thing about it almost very event is 'caused' by a very complex set of relationships. Was it that someone driving too fast, or carelessly, or was the pedestrian careless? In legal cases we talk about 'necessary' and 'sufficient' causes. There is seldom a simple "if X then Y" relationship behind any of this.

Cause and effect is like a spider's web. We are seldom the "sufficient cause" but on the other hand we are often a "contributory cause" without even noticing or knowing it. So how does that relate to that perennial question - especially in Western culture - "Whose fault is this?" I'll leave that one to you to think about.

Obsolescence

In my usual careless way I had left the most up-to-date copies of two of my thesis chapters on my old laptop. In fact I think everyone else had them on their computer but me. So yesterday I had to get that old machine fired up to see what was stored there. Amazing how OLD your previous computer feels when you have to go back to it for something, isn't that always the way of it. What was shiny and new just a couple of years ago is now just a scruffy heap of junk. I can't even close the lid on it, if I do maybe I'll never get anything to display on the screen ever again. It has to live in my map rack with the lid perpetually open.

Obsolescence. When and why did we start doing it to ourselves? Making stuff so that it will fall by the wayside as soon as possible. You can get vintage clockwork gramophones made eighty years ago that still work like they were new and yet the MP3 player you got for Christmas is already dud. And if belongings don't 'die' soon enough they even legislate now to move it along the road to the leafy bonfire faster. Here in Japan it costs you a fortune to own a nicely maintained classic car because you have to have an expensive 'examination' every two years. Purely a tax on old things, they want you to 'maintain growth' by spending money on a tinny new one.

Somewhere in the garage in England I have an old Southern Railway electric bell push from the platform of the first Gatwick Airport station demolished in the 1960's. It was probably made around 1920 and it still works perfectly, even though the station has long gone. When the last trump sounds that big brass button will be working just like the day it was made. All pre-World War II railway equipment is like that.

Of course I can see the argument for technological innovation, if things lasted for ever no new things would be invented. But that is garbage isn't it? In a world with shrinking resources if you make quality things that lasted a long time you could spend longer making them and charge more but use less energy and the rest of it. I'm sure someone noticed it already.

Oh! And now my Canon camera needs to go to the 'mend'. A shutter problem I think. Good grief!

Marking time for pasta

We are well into 'Golden Week' and yesterday my brother-in-law came over with his wife and my niece A-chan. In best 'Bank Holiday' tradition the weather was truly awful and then it got even worse, but of course that didn't deter us from anything. We drove over to Kujukuri where I sat in the car reading a book on Methodology, NM. as the rain drummed on the car roof while the rest of them went into a glass making place where A-chan had a 'slot' booked to make some jewellery. Then over to an 'Italian' restaurant to find we had to wait an hour to eat after they had reassured us just a couple of hours previously that we didn't need to book.

Put the time to good use though. First we went down to the rain-blasted beach where the local town council were still hopefully trying to make the best fist of it by charging Tokyoites 1000 yen ($10,£8!) to use their car park. Needless to say we didn't take advantage of their kind offer, like the few others there we just parked in the lane while everyone took a quick look at the surfers in the big surf. Then on to the 'Herb Garden' by which time the rain was so heavy that even the cops who had been running the usual holiday speed trap had gone back to the police station. About a thousand people trying to park there - well, it was a holiday even if it was raining! - and the girls tramped around a few beds of tarragon and thyme with their umbrellas while we stood under a canvas canopy and watched them. Some of those packets of dried leaves they were selling in the shop there looked a bit dodgy to me! A bit kinda 'grass' coloured if you get my drift, maybe they kept the 'real thing' under the counter. There was a picture in the cafe of two people getting married in the greenhouse, who could ask for more than 'cutting the cake' in a Kujukuri field?

Back to the restaurant hungrier than we were the last time and by now the rain had really set in, thick mist and big drops of water plopping into the already flooded paddy fields that stretch to the horizon around there. Bedraggled crows hunched on the cables strung along the road, traffic moving at fifteen miles an hour, a queue at every traffic light. Just like a few English bank holidays of my youth.

Yep! Pretty good trip out really. Nice pasta too buried under the usual mountain of cheese by the time I'd got my hands on it.

Methodology looms

Back in the 'Slough of Despond' here with my writing. 'Methodology' Chapter - whatever that means. Seems that all good theses need one but the more I read on the topic the less I see what the excitement is all about, what possible relevance it might have to anything I'm writing about. Added to which the weather is getting hotter and stickier and I'm getting fatter through lack of exercise because I'm reading and writing too much. I also waste time. So just another normal day then eh? What am I worrying about?

I hope this is the last dip in morale though, I don't think I have another 'recovery' left in me. But after this I have a pretty clear idea about what is left to say, I've just got to keep myself rivetted to the laptop.

Part of this 'methodology' thing is the whole 'ontology' and 'epistemology' angle - what CAN we know and how do we know it. It is an interesting one - when I first started studying it was a closed book to me, it just seemed so obvious that I couldn't understand why people got so excited about it all. But now I 'get it'. We think when we look at objects it is a pure relationship, just me eyeing a cat for example, but there is so much other stuff in there. 'Cat' is not really that furry thing, it is the product of sixty years of absorption of expericence and cultural values about cats.Darn it you have to learn all this stuff and then you die anyway, what a 'bummer' eh?

And also all language is relative. You only know what words mean because of their relationship with other words. 'Black' only means something because you know about 'white'. There are stages in waking up to this fundamental truth and once you start to notice it you start to look for the small area of solid ground where you can set up your surveying pole and triangulation point and theodolite to get a proper fix on the rest of it at last.

Here's the thing of course. There isn't any solid ground. Welcome to Samsara, AZ.

Barbecue evening

A barbecue this evening with half a dozen friends and their children up at Daniele's house. It was a nice evening for it, rather cool but still 'shirt sleeves' weather until around nine when I put my windcheater on to keep that chilly breeze out. Nice high half moon too, perfect outdoor eating and drinking conditions.

All quite low key really - we all get on very well with each other despite coming from different backgrounds and being very different sorts of people and we meet up a few times in the course of the year. Three Japanese, two Chinese, a French-Canadian and me. Plus five assorted kids. Old campaigners together. It fascinates me how the language seems to move effortlessly between sentences, sometimes in mid-sentence, just depending on who you are talking to. Japanese, French, English, Mandarin. All the youngsters are bilingual in one combination or another, one of them fluent in three languages at ten years old.

In Europe that would not be so uncommon, say in Switzerland. But in East Asia it still feels rather novel. Twenty years ago mainland Chinese citizens didn't get to work abroad much, and neither of the 'international couples' were an 'item' then. Sometimes this practical consequence of 'globalisation' just grabs my attention, beautiful to see, I can't get my head around it. Whatever some of the more conservative politicians might hanker after the genie is well and truly out of the bottle in terms of real relationships.

It was nice just to be sitting quietly under the moon listening to the flow of the chatter too. I don't feel a need to be near the centre of it any more. In old Japan and Song China, as in medieval Europe, there were times when people moved around and chatted under trees on moonlit nights like this and I had a sense of being in a Kamakura-jidai story or maybe a 'bit part' in the 'Tales of Genji'.

Comment is Free

I've been reading with interest many of the comments on the 'Guardian' website this morning. For those of you who don't live in Britain the 'Guardian' is a very special newspaper. It was founded in Manchester and has only been primarily London-based for around 40 years so it still has quite a strong 'provincial' slant on affairs. It is a 'left of centre' quality newspaper and they really practice what they preach when it comes to freedom of speech. On their website they run a 'comment is free' section where you can respond to features and say what you think about major issues. And it isn't pre-moderated, they trust people. The very best of both the internet AND British journalism and good luck to them, they are one of the few institutions around that makes me feel proud to be British at the moment.

Domestic politics in the UK has turned so sour in recent weeks that today even a current Cabinet Minister is publicly criticising our present Prime Minister. Needless to say she gets little shrift from Guardian readers because she herself is responsible for supporting and even drafting many of the policies that have brought the government to such disrepute. I noticed someone was even very aptly quoting this morning from Oliver Cromwell's formidable speech on the day he dissolved the Rump Parliament in 1653. "Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess? Ye have no more religion than my horse; gold is your God; which of you have not bartered your conscience for bribes? Is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the Commonwealth?"

Interesting how inept politicians can so easily misread the mood of a nation. And also how much our history - and especially the emotions of our seventeenth century Civil War - still runs in our blood. We might look like a sad, phlegmatic and polite bunch but watch out. They say that 'scratch any Englishman and you will still find the blood of a Roundhead or Cavalier in his veins' and it is true. If our civil liberties are threatened - and they have been by this government - we will reach for out pikes and staves in a minute

It is the colour coordinate according to clothes

A bit of serendipity there. A friend of mine has sent me an 'English Around the World' e-mail full of good 'howlers' this morning that made me laugh. And by chance Edera bought a 'glasses holder' cord yesterday (we are like Bill and Ben - a 'matching couple' in that department now) in the Daiso 100 Yen Store. It was attached to a sales card with some classic 'Chinglish'. I was already planning to quote from it here sometime so let's do it today before I lose it.

This 'glasses holder' (is that really what you call them? You know what I mean - the bit of cord that hangs around your neck so that you can't lose them) has instructions in both Japanese and English. I'd guess that the Japanese text was supplied to the manufacturer who then got somebody he knew who was 'good at English' to get busy with their dictionary. So it is represents the best of both cultures really, the Japanese passion for complete documentation of even the most utterly obvious "we suggest for your safety that you continue to breathe while reading this blog" kind combined with that cavalier "can do" Chinese attitude to consenting acts of translation between adults. All you could ever say about such an everyday artifact.

Usage

1. A transparent rubber band is passed through Temple
2. It passes through in the vicinity of the centre of the Temple side
3. So as not to shift, it tightens firmly

Caution

1. Please note that it is likely to come off when the way to tighten is bad and to fall
2. It doesn't influence strength though transparent rubber might discolour when time passes
3. No use function except intended
4. Please remind this firm does not take responsibility to be requested from third party for below actions. What you get hurt and gain a profit from this product.

Clear enough?

I thought so.

Kitchen sink drama

I've been noticing for a while as I've been busying myself with the washing up that the water hasn't been draining from our kitchen sink like it should. In fact I've mentioned to Edera a few times that she needed to do something about it. Ha!Ha!Ha! - only joking of course! But here the cause of non-emptying sinks is usually a surfeit of biodegradable 'gunge' in the large 'waste trap' that all kitchen sinks are fitted with - a kind of pan sized wire basket that catches all the peelings and tea leaves. This only gets emptied as a rule on garbage collection days, so slowly emptying sinks are not necessarily the bad news they would be back in Britain.

But yesterday the sink was hardly emptying even with the basket removed, obviously something more 'structural' was the problem there. During the morning I headed over to the 'Komeri' DIY store near Yacs and bought an evil looking rubber plunger with a 'pump handle action'. Then after lunch we 'set to' and I blew the crud out of the pipe and then flushed the system out with cold water. So far so good.

Until E took a look outside around the back and heard the might sound of rushing water somewhere under the foundations. That is when we noticed the water spilling out onto the kitchen floor too. A quick dive for 'Yellow Pages' and within half an hour (this IS Japan guys!) two local plumbers had turned up to assess the problem. Cooking fat of course, the arteries of our drains were blocked with the stuff. "Imagine what this does to your bodies Madam!" All the ultrasonic gear and the high pressure hoses came off the lorry and an hour later our drains functioned once more.

Only £100, not so bad. I dread to think what it would have cost in England. But somehow I found all this very stressful, I really did need to "go and lie down" afterwards. A combination I think of not knowing how Japanese house drains work (they are TOTALLY different in design to British drains of course, like everything else around the house) and not being able to keep tabs on what Japanese plumbers were up to in my 'own space' due to the usual language and cultural issues. My instinct these days is to NOT follow my instincts and just trust that it will work out OK and around here it usually does because everyone has to make a living in a fairly small goldfish bowl and reputations count.

But why did I fee so tired there, so exhausted by it all? I don't cope with little dramas and crises quite as easily as I used to, it is true. I need to watch that tendency.