Sudden Death

Round to my mum's residential home this afternoon to drop off some 'goodies' that I had been told to buy over in Blackpool. Another pair of trousers and a new duvet for the autumn. She was pleased to get the 'haul' - I don't know how she copes with the tropical heat in her room. But however much there is there never seems to be enough of it for her. So now she has a new 10.5 tog duvet as extra insurance against a chilly autumn. Whatever 'togs' are - it is the Danish word for 'train' but what meaning it has in the context of insulation I don't know.

One of her friends had died in the night. A sudden death - actually I was talking to the lady only on Saturday afternoon, she was a big fan of Julia's dog. It seems that last night she was fine, wished my mum good night, and then just died in her sleep.

We hovered around the topic for a while like bluebottles. Did she want to talk about it or not? Like a missing tooth after an extraction. I impressed myself with the sheer banality of the questions I was asking. Did they think it was a heart attack? Had she got any family? What part of the country was she from? All of these pointless little forays were scattered around the same target of course - did she want to REALLY talk about it or not? And especially did she want to talk about it in relation to herself? Was there a BIG question lurking in this for her, dropping like a ripe fruit into her lap? This is not a question you can put into anybody else's mouth is it?

But it seemed not, at least not this afternoon. I have limited direct experience of talking to very elderly people at such moments, but from personal observation being so adjacent to a death spatially and temporally provokes different and often completely contrary reactions: for instance fear, acceptance and avoidance all at the same time. My grandfather lived with us for the last few years before his death in 1989. A survivor of the Somme and later the Ashiago campaign in northern Italy he was once seriously wounded and also spent several months on burial parties recovering body parts from battlefields. There were few as well qualified as him when it came to the practicality of the sights and smells of death. So it was a surprise to me just how little he came to terms with the whole idea of his own death as it loomed up, despite all the struggles that he had with emphysema in his later years. It was a topic we just never discussed. The deaths of friends and relatives came and went like hailstones in a thunderstorm but he lived looking straight to the front like it was going to be forever. It made me start to ask the questions of myself that I could feel he was keeping pretty tightly corralled in his own subconsious mind.

Tudor portrait

While I was down in Sussex I got up to London for the day and visited a few 'old haunts'. One of these was the National Portrait Gallery, that interesting little building just to the east of the National Gallery and around the corner from Trafalgar Square. It probably doesn't get one percent of the number of visitors that the bigger gallery receives but I've always found it more interesting somehow - not so much for the creativity of the art but for its content. If you don't live in Britain and have never visited the place, they have around 120,000 images of English men and women from the fifteenth century to the present day.

Whenever I go there I like to look at the sixteenth century in particular - to take a close look at some of the Tudor aristocracy and royalty from the reigns of Henry, Edward, Mary and Elizabeth. This era has to be by far the most interesting in our cultural history but also the art of the time takes on an amazing clarity and vibrancy. For the first time we meet faces we can recognise: these are people that we might meet in the street or at work, people who no matter how different their thinking and biographies might be we would easily understand if we had the opportunity to talk to them.

One face that particularly fascinates me in the collection is Ann Boelyn. The unknown artist painted her in her late twenties - perhaps even in 1536, the year of her execution. An intelligent, energetic looking young woman, very popular with many members of the King's court. She was well educated, had studied abroad and was an excellent linguist. You couldn't say that she was extravagantly beautiful but she was certainly a very attractive woman whose intellectual and emotional company and warm sense of humour you would enjoy. Someone that you would look forward to meeting in a corridor or the corner of a garden.

Anna Bolina uxor Henri Octa. But I like to imagine what she must have been like before the shadow of all that.

Critical Geographies

Back in the cool North this evening. How anyone lives south of the Ribble is a mystery to me but there you go, someone has to occupy the blighted southern parts of this island I guess. To paraphrase Flanders and Swann

"It's not that they're wicked or naturally bad
It is knowing they are Southerners that makes them so mad..."

A pile of late late urban theoretical reading from Amazon has arrived on my desk during my days 'down south' including 'David Harvey: a critical reader' edited by Castree and Gregory. It was a bit of theoretical reading I was hoping to sidestep but just when I thought that it was safe to come out of the toilet at the bottom of the garden it drops through the darn letterbox. Harvey and Marxist Geography, just what I wanted for Christmas.

I never feel very easy about books with 'critical' in the the title. I'm not exactly sure what it means. Well, of course we aren't talking your plain old "inclined to find fault" here - allegedly. When we discuss critical geographies we aren't checking the author's grammar or spelling - "I'd think a lot more about his theory about the global mobility of capital if he could spell "longitude" properly and there wasn't a missing apostrophe on page 59.

And can we have 'uncritical geographies'? "They say that Athens is hotter than Reykjavik but hey! I'm cool with any data really, as long as they print the graphs in that nice cyan blue ink. Live and let live I say!"

No I think here we are supposed to be talking 'critical' as in "characterised by careful, exact evaluation and judgement". Of course this is just academic-speak for nit-picking, scoring points and p!ssing off the 'opposition' in those big debates in the sky.

Can't put it off any longer though, I 'ain't going to emerge from this Vale of Tears without this 'critical reader' read. I'll take it to bed with me; it might have opinions of its own but at least it won't talk back during the sweet starry jasmine scented hours of darkness.

Goodbye alma mater

I'm coming to the end of a busy couple of days visiting my son Patrick down in Sussex. Thursday we had a trip up to London and then today we toured around some parts of the County that I haven't seen for a long time - up to Crawley and Horsham in the morning and then down to Chichester in the afternoon. Lovely weather for it too - I've been driving around with my car windows open all day. I never thought that the time would come when air-con in a car in England seemed like a good idea but we could certainly have used it today.

Both days have been a interesting if sometimes emotional trip down 'memory lane' for me. Today I got an unexpected shock that I still haven't quite got my head around yet. It needs thinking (and feeling!) through rather carefully. My old school has been demolished. The place which was the centre of my life for six very important years between 1959 and 1965 is now just a pile of grassy rubble behind a security fence.

Hard to imagine. As a student of urban change I don't find it difficult to grasp intellectually, but in my heart it is quite another matter. Schools aren't just buildings are they? They shape the course of our whole biography. And now the place where all that creativity and learning happened, all those relationships were formed, all that knowledge absorbed - it has gone! There is no return to that music room where we all sang, the hall where we played in the orchestra and performed school plays, that room where sixth-formers hung out together. They have ceased to be.

The memories and consequences of all that are still in our hearts and minds of course. I've noticed this increasingly in my studies - just how often what endures longest about places and relationships is not the steel, brick and concrete but the flesh and blood and especially the memory trace. We are accustomed to thinking about 'brief lives' but in truth the human lifespan is quite enduring, the impact of events is carried longest within ourselves.

One thing I noticed today is that a survivor of these events has been a large oak tree that used to stand near the main entrance to the school. It was adopted as our school badge and emblem in 1956 and also featured as the title of our school magazine - "The Silver Oak". I guess the school arrived when that tree was around 250 years old and has gone within fifty years but the oak still grows large and strong. Quercus robur - a real survivor.

Sunny Shildon

No break in the pace of this trip so far - I'm beginning to think that the first bit of peace I'll get will be on the plane back home to Japan. Certainly the coming week looks formidable - Hexham and Durham over the next two days and then a visit to Sussex from Wednesday through until Saturday. Better iron some shirts tonight! Most of that time I'll be spending in Brighton but I'm also hoping to spend a few hours revisiting some nearby 'roots' with my digital camera. It must be almost ten years since I was in Sussex.

Today was a 'meet up' with a friend from Harrogate in Shildon at the 'National Railway Museum (North)'. The collection exhibited there is mainly stuff that they don't have space for at the main building at York and some of it is really pretty irrelevant to the North East. But other exhibits are very much at home in Country Durham including one engine built by Edward Fletcher who I mentioned on this blog a couple of weeks ago. The museum is a long walk from the car park and on a cold grey day in November it can be a chilly and deserted spot.

Not today though. This weekend was a special event and there were four engines in steam and loads of people around and the weather was gorgeous. They had two very early locomotives at work - an original 'Furness Railway' Sharp Stewart engine from the 1860's and a working replica of 'Planet' - a Liverpool and Manchester Railway locomotive from the 1830's. I especially enjoyed these two. I have a great curiosity about railways in those pre-photographic times. From around 1890 it is easy to imagine from surviving back and white photos what steam locomotives were like at work but it isn't easy to imagine what it might have been like to travel by train in, say, 1850. So many of the details have changed.

And yet today here it all was! Well, if you ignore those few modern features in the background like halogen street lighting and chain link fences and heavy duty flat-bottomed track. I was just fascinated by 'Planet' - steaming along she looked like all those early Illustrated London News railway engravings and paintings like Turner's 'Rain, Steam and Speed' You could really pick up on the link between early railway coaches and the contemporary stage coaches

The whole of the joy

Goodness! I definitely need to get more exercise planned into my busy and sparkling social life. This last couple of days I've been gardening up at the Buddhist monastery that I always visit for a few days when I'm back in England. I rashly volunteered for a bit of 'outdoor work' instead of my usual stint on vegetable preparation in the kitchen. Time for some extremely fresh air and to use some of those muscles that have been neglected since I settled down to serious writing last March. That was the theory of it all anyway. But whoever heard of 'gentle weeding' on a Pennine hillside? I was given a path and some drystone walling to clear of buttercups and Scottish thistles but by yesterday lunchtime my thighs and shoulders had had enough of all that.

I needed the break, I've been going at it a bit too hard since I got back, a lot of commitments to sort out in a short time. I've been visiting this temple for nearly thirty years. Come to think of it, it is the longest established 'home' I have anywhere. And I do think of it as home now, many of the people that are most important to me I came know through my connections there, a network of dharma brothers and sisters that stretches from the Pacific North West of America through Britain and Europe and to Malaysia and East Asia. Literally 'all around the world' come to think of it.

When I first started going to this place it was extremely 'rugged'. Good old fashioned vigorous Zen. We slept in sleeping bags on the floor of our meditation hall which was a whitewashed barn. It was darn cold in there, when you sat of your zafu you had to wrap up in a blanket to stop shivering. Although youngsters still have the fun of sleeping on mattresses in our new carpeted and centrally heated meditation hall us 'oldies' have the luxury of rooms with beds and armchairs and electric kettles and nice views out of double glazed windows these days. But of course we love to spin yarns to the young 'uns of sesshins of yesteryear when the snow drifted under the barn door. And we were grateful!

Whatever spiritual path you find yourself on don't ever underestimate the importance of good spiritual friends. In Buddhism there are three refuges - Buddha, dharma and sangha. Often in the West the emphasis is on the first two - the teacher and teaching - we take ourselves so seriously. But somewhere in the scriptures Ananda comments to the Buddha that half the joy of spiritual training lies in the sangha fellowship that arises from it. The Buddha gently reproves him - 'Say not so, Ananda, say not so! The joy of sangha fellowship is the whole joy of Buddhist training!' Or something like that, I'm hopeless at these quotations, must look it up!

"Guy's Court" birthday dinner

Julia's birthday today so we headed out for a meal this evening. I'd forgotten what a formidable size restaurant meals can be in Lancashire, completely 'out-facing'. Is there really someone around that can eat all that stuff down to the last piece of carrot and cauliflower florette? I started to seize up about a half way through my dinner and the last few mouthfuls found their way home for Hector the dog wrapped in a serviette.

We went to Guy's Court, a popular local spot for dining a few miles from here. I've been eating at Guy's off and on for about thirty years. When I first started going there it was a popular but rather small thatched pizzeria that had been opened in the former school building at Bilsborrow. Soon the owner bought some land,added a pub and hotel next to the original building and then all kinds of appallingly 'twee' and increasing bizarre fake village features down even to an ersatz wishing well. It was Gnomesville without the gnomes. The development was loudly opposed by local residents but of course no Wyre Bourough planner was ever going to take a scrap of notice about anything that mere citizens said. As always money talks, 'funny handshakes' and the rest of it. That campaign was the first time I realised just how fundamentally corrupt British local government can be.

Funny place "Guy's". A kind of north Lancashire Disneyland. Canal boats, clog dancing, black pudding. I haven't been there for years and it was like stepping into a time machine. The same heavy handed jokes on the wall, Little Boy Blue signage. 'Cloaks this way'. The accommodation at one time had a considerable reputation as a knocking shop, a place to take your secretary or even two for a night of carnal pleasure. But not if you were actually a 'local' of course, only for new arrivals from out of town.

But the really wierd thing was after I moved to Japan and started buying timber and tools I discovered that the 'Joyful Honda' garden centre in Narita had a 'dead ringer' copy of Guy's Court next to their wooden shed department.A perfect reproduction. Some Japanese sales director had clearly visited Bilsborrow, taken a pile of photographs and gone home and said to his shopfitters "I want one of those".

In Japan the Guy's Court copy has gone already, demolished for a fake antique shop. But the Lancashire 'original' soldiers on, a veritable machine for printing money. Same menu, same wording, same jokes, same artwork but now half the size and no longer in colour. Oh! And at three times the price it once was too. Pure nostalgia.

+ + + + +

I'm on sesshin for a couple of days. 'Little Paddy' will be back at the weekend

Proud Preston?

Into Preston this morning to do some shopping. 'Proud Preston'. Even in the best of times it was probably not the best motto for the town and now is not the best of times. Once I went into Preston every Saturday but not this last ten years and it is sad to see how the old place has declined recently. I mean, you could never say that Preston ever had much charm but it was interesting, had a fair helping of northern civic pride. It has all gone, along with some of the back streets along Fishergate and Church Street. The people look shabbier too, more haunted. And burkas even more in evidence than they used to be. 'Uneasy' - that is the word I'd used for Preston just now. Or maybe 'feral' - a word that almost rhymes with Preston. When the red revolution comes, as it must, you will hear if first in the back alleys off Ribbleton Lane ...

And the muttering grew to a grumbling;
And the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling;
And out of the houses the rats came tumbling.

I bought a birthday present for Julia and sorted out a problem on my mobile phone and did some shopping to take back to Japan and then headed back to the car which was parked not so far from the Preston North End football stadium. On the way I passed the prison and it brought back some memories. My first wife was a member of the Parole Board there, for a while our dining table was often loaded with photocopies of prisoner's files as she worked through them before interviewing the prisoners themselves.

Once we went to a carol service there. We took our two kids - they were maybe ten and six. Somehow I'd imagined that we'd be sitting in a gallery in the chapel or something but we were let onto the wing with about a dozen other guests and shown into the main hall and there was a sea of about six hundred young men in striped blue shirts and jeans and we were sitting right in the middle of the crowd. It was fine, they were a nice bunch and having younger brothers and sisters themselves were happy to see kids in the place. Nice to sing in such a big group too.

And I remember the date.Wednesday 21 December 1988. When we got home on that chilly winter evening and switched on the TV they were broadcasting the first newsflashes about the Lockerbie air crash but at that stage nobody knew what had actually happened.

Stenkrith

Yesterday we met up with some friends from Yorkshire up at Kirkby Stephen. Yes, I know it is hard to imagine having friends from Yorkshire but there you go. It is an increasingly 'globalising' world we live in (an "increasingly competitive world" too so I'm told!) so by the law of averages, about which I know a lot, somebody was going to have a friend from Yorkshire sometime. Look on it as 'progress' of a kind if you like, a surprising but inevitable consequence of the laws of time-space compression. Some of my best friends are Yorkshiremen. Nah! Only joking of course.

The main purpose of the day - what we management trained types refer to as "the primary objective" - was to take a gander at large mobile objects that run on rails and go "clickety-click" but an important secondary target was a visit to Stenkrith. One of my favourite places anywhere in the world. Might not be your Bamburgh Castle nor even your Machu Picchu but it has a cool shady charm of its own and there is nowhere I would rather be on a summer evening when the insects circle over the river in the slanting sunlight.

Stenkrith. It is the Kirkby Stephen town park. Here the River Eden, headed north out of the Mallerstang valley, does a little wiggle as it meets up with the 'brockram' - the limestone breccia that was laid down in a Permian Era desert around 275 million years ago. The strata have been deeply eroded by the river into those lovely ribs' and 'kettles' - perfect limestone scenery.

I've brought pretty well all my women here on summer evenings over the years and several of them took advantage of the cool sparkling water for a bit of impromptu skinny-dipping. That was just the four-legged ones of course - honestly!

You can sit by the river here all day if you want. Why not? The sound of water is truly something to meditate with. Music that lasts for ever. What is your relationship with this sound? On one level we imagine it here before we arrived and that it will be there when we are gone and yet ... that is just a view of it, not the reality. The sound of the water was, is and shall be there when we were, are and will be listening to it. In 'keiseisanshoku' there is a poem written back in the Sung Dynasty by a layman called Sotoba

The sound of the valley stream is His great tongue,
The colours of the mountain are His pure body.
In the night I have heard the 84,000 hymns
But how to tell people the next day?
How indeed?

Last Night of the Proms

I was watching 'Last Night of the Proms' on TV yesterday evening. I could hardly keep my eyes open but I stuck it out - it is years since I last had a chance to watch the event. If you don't live in Britain and have no idea what I'm talking about the "Last Night" is the final concert in the summer season of Henry Wood 'Promenade Concerts' held at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Over the decades since the 'Proms' started in 1895 this final night has become a British 'institution' - we 'Brits' just love to invent 'institutions'. The final part of the programme features some very patriotic songs and it is expected that that the audience is going to join in and make a heck of a racket and wave flags around. There are three pieces that are especially associated with the evening - the playing of a medley of sea shanties and singing 'Rule Britannia' and 'Jerusalem'. This year the sea shanties weren't on the programme (or did I just fall asleep and miss them ?) but the other two were there OK.

This concert is so popular that they have an 'overspill' in Hyde Park outside where a huge crowd gathers and also in four other parks around the UK. I have no idea how you would even go about trying to get a ticket these days. A long time ago it used to be by lottery - applying on a coupon in the 'Radio Times' - but then they introduced some arcane scheme which favoured those who bought several tickets to other concerts effectively limiting attendance to people from the South East who could get up to London easily. Probably there are a hundred people who would like to go for every one that actually gets in. Back in the 1960's I got to this event two or three times - twice I think. Once in the top gallery and once in the promenade circle - the ultimate place to be! What a happy time that was! We had to queue all day to be close enough to get to the doors. When they opened we had to sprint along the tunnels and into the auditorium and I think perhaps we were in the third row just behind the conductor. That must have been the first year that Colin Davis conducted - 1967. Malcolm Sergeant had conducted for years but his health was failing. He appeared briefly on the rostrum with promises to be 'back next year' but sadly he died just a few months later.

I loved the vaguely 'amateur' feel of the evening back then. Looking back it feels like Britain was infinitely more 'innocent', lots of overgrown schoolgirls and schoolboys in blazers and flannels. I was blissfully unaware of 'class' and 'caste' but of course that didn't mean that it didn't exist, just that being very young and happy I never noticed it. Despite the shadows and confusion around we were so optimistic about everything, the bubbling music reflected it.

Later on though life I saw the 'Last Night' on TV several times. In Maggie Thatcher's years I was appalled at how nationalistic it had become. Much flag waving and lots of people with stern cruel faces who believed in a 'Free market Economy' singing 'Jerusalem' with shining, glassy eyes. William Blake must have been turning in his grave.

Last night I felt that we had moved beyond all that again, at least a bit. There was a real international flavour to it all, amongst the thousands of 'Union Jacks' and 'St. George's' flags being waved lots of other flags from around the world - even a couple of 'Hinomaru' there! They used the original Thomas Arne score for 'Rule Britannia' - not that you would have heard much of it in the general uproar - and Sarah Connolly sang mezzo-soprano dressed in a truly formidable eighteenth century 'Admiral of the Fleet' uniform revealing more plump thigh and well-filled tunic than you could shake the proverbial stick at. Opera in 'drag' - gorgeous! Square jawed and flashing eyes and sweating flanks - I felt that I was watching the 'off' at the 3:30 at Kempton Park rather than a musical event. I'm a bad, bad person these days.

Mild jet-lag

I always find it hard to pick up any strong pattern in the way my routines change when I travel from Japan back to the UK. The other way is clear enough - I can bump along for at least a week eight hours behind trying to get back onto Japanese time with my body clock. West to east is never easy, very predictable. East to west on the other hand is like stretching chewing gum, the day of travel and the next day I find rather straightforward except that by nine I'm ready for bed. It is the days after that I find unpredictable.

This time I have felt tired, very inclined to put my feet up. It is partly the sunshine and fresh wind - I have spent a lot of time outdoors today and that is probably catching up with me just as jet-lag has reached a peak. Another busy day tomorrow but then Monday I don't need to do so much.

A couple of times since I've been back I've felt a bit like a 'fish out of water'. To be honest being in England has made me feel a bit 'old', I'm not so accustomed to the pace as I once was. Tokyo is hardly a restful place but the pressures are different, you learn to go with the flow. And things seem to have got worse, people here feel much 'pushier' to me than they once did. I think it is more likely to be me losing a bit of social confidence here, I start to see the old place through partly Japanese eyes. British people are big, they often have hard features and they talk assertively, are pushy, restless and impatient. It isn't 'me' any more.

Part of it is that older people are often seen as 'a problem' here. I'm not saying that in Japan people are deferential but they are polite. Here drivers are forever a few centimetres from your back fender and cursing older motorists and younger people seem to struggle to understand what I say, I speak too quietly and perhaps even now with an odd accent. Certainly some of my vocabulary has become a bit bizarre.

Oh! Perhaps I'm just feeling too tired, another day or two and I'll have my confidence back. Jet-lag does funny things to your sense of self awareness, you have to work your way through it carefully. You can't just ignore it, that is for sure.

Broadband Blues

'Little House' is back on line after three days' enforced absence. I've been struggling with technology since I arrived in England and true to the opinion of Shakespeare that 'troubles come not as single spies but in battalions' I've had not one problem but two - and that is just with my laptop! Two at the same time feels like a factor - 'trouble squared' - rather than just simple addition - 'trouble plus trouble'.

Interesting how you can see threads of 'events' at work - small happenings that you notice that seem to mean nothing much at the time but they eventually add up to a big picture. I love following evidence trails like that. I should have been a policemen, I have a real nose for it.

Anyway early Wednesday morning, jet-lagged and goggle-eyed, I set about configuring my laptop to use the new Sky broadband router that we have here now in sunny Lancashire. A friend had stayed over with us and she helped all she could before she had to leave. But we are both more accustomed to the old 'XP' version of Windows and we just couldn't get the darn laptop to talk to the internet. Then we suddenly realised that the Skype router wasn't even switched on and a quick investigation showed that the mains power for our plug circuit had gone, the 'trip switch' had blown. Then we realised that the computer itself wasn't working as it should, we were on low battery power and it was quickly running out.

Well... I won't bore you with all the details but Toshiba kindly sent me a new power adapter to connect to the mains electric which solved the problem and now I can see the whole sequence of events. My old adapter must have been dodgy for ages, but working on much lower Japanese mains voltage (it is a dual voltage transformer) it was still 'hanging in there'. The first time I plugged it back into to the much more powerful UK mains again was enough to blow both the adapter and the domestic power circuit too, switching off the Sky router. Without realising it we were trying to link to a signal that had got switched off using a battery that wasn't charged and the information we HAD already entered into the laptop by hand was now corrupting the switched on router which was working away trying to automatically set up the link.

So the whole chain of problems was happened because of just one simple cause - a faulty transformer that finally 'gave up' when it had to handle more power than it was accustomed to. Once you can see the chain it is easy to understand, but until you can it is a morass of difficulties that - and especially with a brain numbed by jet-lag - you just think you are never going to dig your way out of.

Well, that must be the most boring blog I've written in a long time. But now it is 'off my chest' and it is nice to be back in operation and I promise I'll write something much more interesting tomorrow!

Back in England

Just a temporary blog to let my friends in the UK who might be e-mailing me about various arrangements that my computer is not working. Hopefully I'll be fully back on line after a new adapter arrives from Toshiba in a couple of days

Another one for my collection

One of our students came back from summer holidays spent visiting her grandparents in Beijing last week and brought me a 'First Day Cover' from the Beijing Olympics. Maybe it ws just an inspired 'impulse buy', I can't ever remember talking about stamps with her, but it was a really appreciated gift. Off and on I've been collecting stamps for a long time.

I like to think that I've been doing it in a reasonably professional way but not 'compulsively' if you know what I mean. When I was an avid trainspotter there was always the REAL geek at the end of the platform that had travelled the length and breadth of Britain to get some Class 06 diesel shunter only used at Penzance or a Class 33 based at Thurso Junction. Some people are like that about stamps too, they can't sleep at night unless they have the complete 1937 'fruit tree' series. Like women they want the full set safely in their album. And like women there is always an expensive one to track down - the 7 cents red that costs £25 when you can get the rest of the set for seventy five pence.

I'm not like that, 'completeness' is always relative. No, I go for stamps because of the window they provide on history, these things really are bits of paper that come from way back then and way back there. In our loo here on the wall I have a framed 1862 stamp from the Kingdom of Nice and Savoy - Victor Emmanuel II - a state that vanished in the 1860's. And also a postage stamp from Tibet back when it was a separate country. These things are pure history.

If you want to make any progress with stamps you need to specialise. Although I often can't resist something cheap and cheerful from Boliva or Latvia back in the 1980's I specialised in France and more recently of course in Japan with a sprinkling of China, Taiwan and Korea. I like new stamps but what REALLY fascinates me are the old scruffy ones, some grey bit of paper with the Meiji Emperor's picture on it from the 1880's that might be worth a fortune or nothing depending on the presence or absence of just one tiny kanji in the bottom right corner. What was it used for? Who wrote what to who and stuck this on more than a century ago?

Maybe from time to time I'll scan in some of my favourites here and talk about them, see if I can't get you enthusiastic about stamps!

Regular readers - I'm flying to the UK tomorrow so 'Little House' will be off the air for a day or two.

Another 'Schindler'

I've been picking up on the BBC website this week some coverage of the special train that has run from Prague to London to celebrate the work of Nicholas Winton. Back in the summer of 1939 he managed to organise six trains to bring nearly seven hundred Jewish children to safety along the same route. this week many of them were able to make the same journey again. it seems that for many years this story was forgotten, but then his wife discovered some old scrap books in the loft in the family home. Now he seems to be often referred to as "Britain's Schindler" It is an interesting link back to yesterday's blog on 'forgotten biographies'.

But do you know that there was also a "Japanese Shindler" and that his story too was once almost forgotten in Japan and even now is probably unknown to most English people. His name was Chiune Sugihara and he was a career diplomat in the Japanese Foreign Office. In 1940 he was sent to Kaunas, the wartime Lithuanian capital as the local consul, a dangerous position in a dangerous place.

As the German army approached the city and the government fled stories about the atrocities happening in Poland started to circulate within the large local Jewish community. Frightened Jews started to approach Sugihara for visas to travel east to Japan along the Trans-Siberian Railway. He consulted with Tokyo but permission to issue these was refused. But he was almost the only foreign diplomat with the power to issue visas left and eventually he took the law into his own hands and began to issue visas anyway. There was no alternative but to write them all out by hand himself and in a month, with the help of his wife Yukiko, he had issued about six thousand visas. As some of them covered whole families it is said that he probably saved the lives of around ten thousand people by helping them escape. It is said that he was still writing out visas and handing them through the train window as he was finally ordered to leave the city just before German troops arrived.

An interesting story. Hard to imagine a junior career diplomat so deliberately disobeying orders. After the war he was said to have 'resigned' his job as part of a downsizing of the Foreign Ministry but many suspect that he was sacked for his disobedience. Afterwards he made a living from a number of ordinary jobs in sales and administration and died in 1986. But there is a nice end to the story in that Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko visited his memorial in Lithuania in 2007.

Edward Fletcher

Interesting how a lot of people can do quite a lot in their lives, make a real 'impact' and then somehow their biographies just evaporate. Once those with any kind of direct memories of them have gone then it is a pretty hopeless task to try and re-create biography. Usually you can get a few dates as fixed points of reference and in England the various public records from the nineteenth century are useful too to fill in family relationships. But unless a collection of correspondence turns up in an archive then there is not much more to be done.

Edera and I have been working on and off on the biography of one senior Buddhist teacher here in Japan for a while now. He died in the 1960's but we were lucky, we were given a privately published copy of his biography by one of his students, Now that student too has died so a lot of the remaining direct knowledge has vanished, but there are still one or two others alive who have personal recollections of his life.

I had another case this week, a bit of a 'spur of the moment' dive into some nineteenth century 'minor' biography. The person in question is Edward Fletcher, one of the earliest locomotive engineers in north east England . He was born at Redeburn near Otterburn on 26 April 1809 and died in West Jesmond on 21 December 1889 and the outline of his professional career at least is known. He was apprenticed to George Stephenson at the time of the 'Rocket' trials in 1830 and in the same year he drove the 'Invicta' at the opening of the Canterbury and Whitstable Railway. Later he returned north with a Kentish wife and was locomotive engineer first of the Newcastle and Darlington Railway and later of the North Eastern Railway, in charge of a workforce of thousands of footplatemen and workshop staff. He lived in an imposing house right next to his locomotive works in Greenefield at Gateshead at the top of the bank overlooking the Tyne next to the High Level Bridge.

He retired in 1882, but nobody seems to have thought to have gone around to his home with a notebook and started to write a biography! It is a pity - he looks such an interesting guy doesn't he? So 'Northumbrian' somehow, nobody with a face like that could come from anywhere else! You just know you would like to talk to him, I can hear his 'Geordie' accent just looking at his picture. And as a young man he knew and worked for most of the key figures in the early development of railway transport.

Still, maybe in some archive somewhere there is some badly catalogued material which, when a file is opened, turns out to be his letters to a friend or an apprentice about men in greatcoats running expresses through the deep snow up the coast to Edinburgh in the bleak winters of the 1870's. What a treat it would be to track something like that down.

Early translation

Some early morning translation this morning. One of our students has a project to complete and she needed some advice on a chapter from a novel by nine. Edera was awake early working on it and then we went through it together looking at those points she wasn't quite clear on.

That's how we do translation work, which for us is usually Japanese into English. She makes a 'first draft' and then we argue (even row!) about the exact meaning of words and terms until we have something that we (or more usually 'she' - because she is much fussier about accuracy than I am!) are satisfied with which also passes MY test of suitably colloquial English. It is an interesting process, after years of it we are pretty well 'in tune' across the 'no man's land' between the two languages.

Today's effort was unusual in that it was not only English to Japanese but also a novel involving some American slang between rather shady characters in the plot. My only contribution to all this was to try and explain clearly the intention of the writer in terms of meaning. Being that kind of a story involving wartime black markets there were several crude expressions of the "You can kiss my a*se!" variety, but much more 'graphic'. English like wot she is spoke mate!

These gave some real problems of translation. How to do it? Obviously you can't just translate it literally, the precise biological reality of it was not in the author's mind. But equally you can't simply translate it as "Go away!" which is what the student had done. The kind of vulgar idiom that is second nature to many English users in casual conversation just doesn't exist in daily Japanese (so I'm told!). Most people are too polite to even dream of them, allegedly. I'm sure that there are equivalent terms but they only appear in the kind of coarse language used by yakuzas - the Japanese mafia - and the like. They would never appear in translations of fiction available on the shelves of decent bookshops. How to translate the author's intention fairly and squarely?

It's an interesting one. I'm sure that news and war photographers come across the same kind of problem. They must regularly take photographs of such a gruesome and explicit nature that they fall 'outside the pale' in terms of public viewing. Too many easily identified body parts, too much frightening violence. Translation is an equally tricky job, you aren't just rendering language precisely, you are moving ideas and images into a different culture in a way that will faithfully represent the author's intention. It is as if you have to second guess the precise language he would have used if he had been a native speaker.

Relentless rain

I was reading somewhere yesterday that this summer had been the wettest in the Isle of Skye since 1838. Or was it 1738? Anyway it was a long time. To set a new 'dampness record' for the north-west of Scotland it was going to have to be pretty damp. It wasn't just that they had had a lot of rain, more that it had kept coming and coming. It had rained at Dunvegan every day for forty eight days. Of course not 'non-stop'. Some days there had been brief interludes of brightness, sunshine even. But even so at least a millimetre of precipitation had fallen at some stage during the twenty-four hour period.

Reading this brought back all those summers of yesteryear when I used to go on various 'expeditions' which involved camping somewhere in upland Britain. The first evening of such trips was always fine, the tent was erected, the 'midges' started to bite and sausages and beans consumed for tea. But then in the grey light of a very early dawn (it always gets light about two in the morning in the far north in summer) there would be that familiar sound of raindrops on canvas as I lay in my sleeping bag. And that would be it for a week at least.

Once our geography master, George Dowson, took about a dozen of us from Ifield Grammar School in a minibus to Borrowdale where we sat in the rain for a week in a big bell tent. We did our best, we tramped around on various hikes in our plastic macs (we didn't have waterproof anoraks back then.) Not only didn't it stop, but it went on getting worse and worse and about day five the inevitable happened, a tsunami of rainwater reached out and invaded that 'Baden-Powell' sixteen man 'special' and we had to make a run for it.

A kind farmer let us put up in his barn for the last two nights but even that had its down-side. There was a very unfriendly Billy Goat roaming the yard and you had to make a runner for the mini-bus while his back was turned. That darn goat managed to corner me alone in the barn too. I got the half-door closed and latched and he went on butting the woodwork for the rest of the morning while I awaited rescue. I've always made a point of picking 'goat' if it is on the menu ever since.

Anyway not a problem these days. I watch the falling rain from the comfort of my hotel room while reading a book or sitting at some viewpoint in my car thinking "isn't rain beautiful?" Nature and I are in equilibrium of a sort.

Mushiking

If you aren't too keen on bugs of various kinds Japan is probably a good place to avoid in late summer. Edera spotted this little chap (he is definitely a 'chap', females don't have horns) near our front door when she was seeing some students off yesterday evening. She brought him up to my study for me to admire and photograph. She's into animals of all kinds (except cockroaches!) - she should really have studied zoology back in her student days.

He's a nice example of a kabuto-mushi, a rhinoceros beetle or if you prefer it in Latin, Trypoxylus dichotomus. The 'kabuto' in the Japanese name refers to the old word for a samurai helmet and that is exactly what that giant two-pronged horn looks like. He uses it - wouldn't you just know it - to pursue females. The general idea is that he uses it to push other male kabuto-mushi off logs etc. and the last man standing gets his reward. that is usually the way of it in the animal kingdom. This passion for fighting between male kabuto-mushi has made them popular with gamblers over the centuries.

We have some species of large rhinoceros beetles in Europe too but nowhere near as big as this one. In Europe about six centimetres is as large as you go but this Trypoxylus is nearly twice that size.

Kabuto-mushi are popular in Japan, you can find them appearing in manga and children's stories - Mushiking, king of the beetles, Heracross in Pokemon and the Transformers Insecticons and loads more. Anyway for now this specimen lurks under the bushes in our front garden. But by the time I'm back from England in early October he'll be gone and the praying mantis will have arrived on the privet bushes.

Comfort of the ordinary

Well, it turned out that Typhoon 09-11 'Krovanh' wasn't up to much. Yesterday morning we had a pretty wet drive to Narita airport and we were forecast to be in the inner 'red circle' around noon - the eye of the storm where the wind speed really picks up. But to be honest it was all rather an anti-climax. The cyclone system headed up the Pacific Coast about a hundred kilometres out to sea. It often happens that way - the typhoon comes up from the south east headed straight for Honshu but a combination of the rotation of the earth and higher pressure air over Japan causes it to swing round in a semicircle to the right. Maybe one storm a year makes landfall and rattles out shutters and makes it impossible to sleep through the night. Even then we are generally lucky - we are on the north side of a hill and although the forest on the other side might get blasted the trees on this slope protect us from the worst of the weather.

When a typhoon is imminent the NHK news seems to feature nothing else. We have endless coverage of giant waves and tidal surges along the coast of storm-lashed Shizuoka-ken and of astonished passengers being advised by worried JR staff of delays on the shinkansen due to high winds. Compared with the hype the reality is mundane.

But today's news was interesting for what DIDN'T happen. In last night's General Election here with nearly 70% voter turnout the social democrat DPJ scored a landslide victory and ousted the establishment LDP. The election has given outright power to a non-conservative party for the first time ever in Japan - and yet today there was little news coverage. The whole governing establishment pretty well wiped out and yet the main news is a minor typhoon off the coast of leafy Chiba-ken. Of course there was SOME news coverage, the election itself was well presented on TV on Sunday evening and we had the concession and victory speeches. But that is pretty well it - no impassioned post-mortems, endless programmes with politicians and commentators 'explaining what it all means'. It is back to normal, an 'ordinary day'. 'And now for typhoon 'Krovanh' ...

That is the clue to it all I think. There is no coverage because this kind of thing never happened before. Commentators don't know what it all means so better to keep quiet! There's just no model to use ... in almost every other election since the invention of TV the LDP got back in with a large majority, no need for any further coverage of boring normality. It has all made me think just how ill-prepared our institutions are to deal with the wholly new. Aliens in Flying Saucers? Who can we get to comment on it all, the Ministry of Transport? um ... let's move on to the baseball scores ...