'Great Northern' Hotel

It is about time that I 'put in order' herein some of the material that has been coming up in my all-too-vivid-dreams recently - Quiet at the back there!. This stuff is better than NHK TV (not difficult!).

Anyway. A couple of nights ago I was dreaming of the King's Cross Hotel in London. I stayed there once. I was just rooting here on the internet for a picture of the old place to use in this 'blog' but they are all embedded in architect's web sites, I'm sure that if I 'borrowed' one the writ would be in my mail box faster than you could say 'Ove Arup and Partners'. Anyway if you don't know London Kings Cross is the railway terminus for the north east and the area around the station is a pretty seedy area of London, as seedy as they get. And next to the station is the "Great Northern Hotel". That used to be the name of the railway company back in the nineteenth century. The architecture of both station and hotel is rather severe, built in a buff-coloured Peterborough brick to designs by James Cubitt.

One of my favourite railway stations! There is no real Japanese equivalent. I suppose to some degree King's Cross is London's 'Ueno'. For a long time - and I think still - the area around King's Cross had a very unsavoury reputation. So this hotel was a kind of island of refuge in a sea of darkness. Good idea not to go out too late, have an early night if you stopped there.

Now once when I started to work for Whibread, in 1980, I stayed in this hotel for a week while I spent time in our London headquarters learning some computer stuff. No laptops in those days, this was big boy's mainframe programming, and in a language called 'APL'. Very enjoyable, a bit like clockwork, you could see what it all did. Elegant, like the women in my life.

I stopped there for five nights, I think on the fifth floor. What a weird place! Firstly there were no en suite loos, you had to come out of your room and hike around a curving corridor that ran the length of the hotel, you could have used it for greyhound racing it was so big. All pure 1850's, I kept expecting to meet ghosts in stovepipe hats.

But downstairs was one of those old fashioned hotel restaurants with ageing waiters in leather aprons and a ceiling so high there were clouds in the room. Utterly impersonal, full of people in a hurry to catch trains to Skegness or Dundee. Might have been somewhere in Hausmann's Paris, London from another era. All swept away now I'm sure, I was lucky to catch it.

So what happened next? Heck! I'm just telling you about a dream here you know, it doesn't have to have a plot! This 'ain't Hollywood.

Mops for Merit

Area tidy-up this morning, they were 'off the mark' at 8:00 am as usual. There are five or six such Sundays in the year, times when people pick up litter (not that there is much, because obviously it gets picked up the moment we see any anyway!) and weed and 'strim' around the place to make it tidy. The quality of this work is very different to what would happen in England somehow, where I'm sure some hearty volunteers would take over if such a thing were ever to happen (which I guess it usually does only in 'nice' places). Here it has more or a sense of undefined obligation, something that you do like taxing your car. And most places get cleaned up by the residents, not in the middle of the city I guess but certainly out here in the country.

I've never got involved with this event somehow. It is partly practical, I've a phobia of snakes and I don't fancy leaping into the long grass around here in summer time. And also only one person from a household goes, which is obviously going to be the Japanese one if there is a choice. But mainly it is cultural - could a mere 'gaijin' actually do this? Isn't it something only 'we Japanese' can do?

There is more to this, mustn't overstate it because it is no 'big deal' - but it definitely doesn't bring out the best in people. I always feel there is something competitive going on here that I can't quite put my finger on and it is about being a 'better citizen' than other people. It must come from a now largely vanished farming village culture, where the 'moral high ground' was 'power'. Heck! Isn't it always?

So if we plan to meet at 8:00, I'll be there at 7:00. I'll do more work than you, and better, I'm more 'competent'. Maybe no need for you to turn up! Then the merit will all be mine! Why don't you 'take it easy' then we can do it? This comes from when people acquired status through their capacity for work, I'm sure of it. And obviously, the more you work the more important you are ...

Naming no names but I've often noticed this at a temple I sometimes visit for meditation. After the meditation and the talk and more meditation there is 'temple clean-up'. Everybody is there at the starting gate and when the monk blows the whistle (It is OK - I'm joking! Honto!) there is a scrummage for the pile of brooms because there aren't enough to go around nor is there enough floor for people to sweep either. You might end up with a non-job like wiping the slippers with a moist rag - the shame of it!

I've seen people almost come to blows over that last broom! Really unpleasant competitive stuff, wrestling over mops for merit and brooms for 'Brownie points'. It never seems to occur to anyone that maybe the really compassionate thing would be to let someone else have a go, let them feel like THEY are doing something useful instead. maybe the 'grown ups' should let the kiddies have a turn. Very, very sad.

Back to Japanese

Got my Japanese text books out again last night. One of many, many solemn vows I made to myself (and almost everyone else!) while I was immersed in thesis writing was that I'd start to do some serious study again it that department when I had more time. And here we are - I have more time!

I'm ready for it, to be honest. Not having even opened a text book for a couple of years has somehow changed my attitude to it all. When I was trying to run both studies in tandem it was a pretty hopeless case, Saturday mornings would arrive and I would be up at dawn to do the shukudai (homework) that I ought to have done during the week and my brain was already a mess full of other things. I was always the dunce in class, teenage kids from Dairen or Manila would overtake my slow progress in about three weeks. The difference was of course that they were using it at home and school all day every day. Here I am rather sheltered from Japanese red in tooth and claw most of the time, people come to learn English and in any given situation Edera is always there to translate if I haven't 'got it'.

Still, it is pretty awful eh? I've been here ages and I am still far from fluent. Very, very far. I cringe when I hear 'rednecks' back in England who never even got as far as learning their twelve times table banging on about how "if they want to come here to live they have to learn to speak our language". If only life were so simple. All those mums and maiden aunts from Karachi that survive in an English-free environment in some house in the back streets of Batley are pretty well exactly in my position. That old proverb about how before you criticise someone you should walk a mile in their shoes seems very appropriate to me.

The trouble for me is use. We don't use Japanese at home. It surprises me how I generally follow the flow of what is being said (but not necessarily the detail eh!). But you can't just switch the language of the key relationship in your life and not expect it to be stressful. Another angle on this is that it feels hopeless having your spouse teaching you, there is a pretty good parallel with learning to drive a car; how is it that you are so intolerant with people who you are really close to? It matters I suppose. Easy to be tolerant in situations with others where it doesn't matter at all.

Anyway one way or another 'Minna no Nihongo' is down off the shelf and dusted. And I'm looking forward to it.

Job Done

Well, I've been bleating on about it enough over the last few weeks but now here we are - my revised thesis draft is with my supervisors in the UK at last! I have a meeting there early January, and if they are happy with everything then it will get sent to the examiners. But, barring any major issues, my work is done.

Umm ... not quite. There are two items I need to finish. First I have to find the copies of the archive pictures I used and put an acknowledgement in for them. And also I notice there are some entries in the bibliography that I need to add page numbers to, that will need to be done when I'm back in England. But maybe between the two a day's worth of work and I can't do it at the moment.

When I'd finally sent the files yesterday I kind of sat back and wondered how it felt, I'm always curious to notice my body's reaction to things. There is always that "warming of the heart" that goes on as your internal antennae pick up on events, that inner place that is very in tune with a deeper kind of reality. It can't be fooled easily, nor does it always run in tandem with what is in your mind either. Your mind can give a 'big tick' to events while something right in the centre is saying "don't know about this one" and equally your heart might say "yes go with that" while your brain is out to lunch. I've learned to listen to both, carefully I hope, I've had a fair amount of kicking at various times through ignoring one or the other. A small price to pay for education.

Yesterday my heart was warm and happy, about two bars of an electric fire's worth of contentment. But I can also see that I need to take things a bit carefully. I have poured everything into this for months, now "what to do?". My mind lurches between catching up on neglected duties, plunging into something to occupy the void, doing nothing, and going somewhere. Or maybe just sitting still for a day or two would be good. And just walking around, my body is desperate for gentle exercise. Apart form all this stuff I have two feline bereavements and moving house on the back-burner somewhere, that is a lot of 'stress points' to absorb in a couple of weeks; job, deaths, moving. Good grief!

Anyway today I will go into Chiba for a couple of hours I think, just to walk around the place, have a coffee, see a few happy faces in the archive office. I haven't been anywhere just for the heck of it in months.

'Newness' revisited

When I was writing yesterday about "New Places" there was more I wanted to say but just no time. Actually what was coming up for me was the quality of that 'newness' aspect of it all when you are a child. Just like that shoebox I was remembering, a 'voyage of discovery' - and here we are if not exactly in the captain's chair then at least on the 'bridge' of the ship.

That time when the whole world seems new, things have a kind of a very luminous utility to them, as if they got put there for some mysterious purpose that you are discovering for the first time, like a detective with a big magnifying glass. I love to watch young children doing this. Perhaps you are walking along and you see a child with a parent and coming the other way is someone with a puppy dog on a lead full of the usual enthusiasm and 'bounce'. The dog pulls towards the child wagging its tail crazily and then the child, after a moment of caution, reaches out and touches the dog and feels and then KNOWS the warm fur and the licking kisses.

This isn't a moment that you need to intervene in, is it? It happens without any volition on anybody else's part. Buddha bows to Buddha. A discovery is made and then the child's first instinct then is to communicate the wonder of this experience to others. He or she turns to the adult full of excitement about the encounter, there is no rational thought there about how when the adult was also four or five themselves they had the same wonderful experience and probably now thinks that they know all there is to know about dogs. No, there is a sense that something very important must be shared and communicated about all this, this is the first dog, the first licky kiss. Actually it is a pure 'religious' understanding of a kind, something new has been 'touched' in the deepest place and only afterwards comes the need to share and interpret, put it in some frame of reference.

Words are just a code, quite inadequate for this task, bit by bit that is the other discovery we make. Words are fine to create a facsimile of the original but they never come close to replicating it, they really are a finger pointing at the moon. As we grow older we seem to feel this 'newness' less and less but no reason why we should. When did you last say to the person next to you on the train "Look at that amazing cloud over there! It looks like a horse!"

But clouds still do look like horses don't they? It didn't stop when you were six or seven years old, you can go outside now and there they all still are, up in the sky. I'm going to practice for at least an hour every day looking at things and noticing how new they all are.

New Place

Some of the work I did recently on Chiba-shi in the early 1950's reminded me of that time in my own life. We'd been living in a pre-fab - an old RAF Nissen hut on the edge of an airfield, where a lot of families from bombed out Teesside had been given temporary accommodation after World War II. Then my dad got a job as a rent collector on a new public housing estate in Middlesborough - Berwick Hills. Dread to think what the old place is like now, probably a real 'sink estate', I must go and take a look when I'm in England next time.

Anyway, the thing that was going through my mind was walking with my parents on a grey Sunday afternoon around an area where some new roads had been laid in a field. There must have been a plan to extend housing in that direction, but so far only the drains and kerbs and tarmac had been laid. It was a 'New Place', former pasture sprouting mainly 'Old Man's Beard' and thistles.

Being born just after the war didn't seem unusual at the time but I can see now that it was very unusual - there was something that all the older people around you shared that was no part of your innocent experience. So with this 'field with roads' for example, it was a kind of opening to a future. Somewhere nice for people to live, the world was being transformed, it made you happy to see the new drain covers shining in the rain. On a shoebox at that time - 'Startrite'? - there was a picture of a boy and a girl walking hand in hand along a straight road with a dark pine forest on each side, and that was the whole feeling of this 'New Place'. It pointed to some utopia that was just around the corner. And as a young child you could really sense this, in fact although you didn't know it you were one of the key actors in all this. Bad times were gone and new times were represented by new roads in new places.

I can see that it must have been the same here in leafy Chiba-ken. The Kawasaki Steel plant being built along the foreshore, cheap wooden apartments being put up for the workers and their families. The dark night had passed, and there was no alienation yet between people and place, workers and the product of their labour.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!

Everywhere a mess

The house is really blitzed out at the moment. Not only have I been just completely focused on writing almost to the exclusion of breathing, but this last couple of weeks Edera has been the same - in addition to teaching she has been getting her annual 'student essay' booklet together. She'll have it finished in the next day or two and as usual I will be the 'Tail End Charlie' - the last one to get his page to the editor.

So we have both been hard at it. But about a week ago Edera had a major campaign in the spare room upstairs and you can see the tatami in there again. And I've had one modest purge on the books and papers spread around the floor in here, just enough so that you can walk from the desk to the door without having to jump; I kind of scraped them into bigger piles. 'Come the revolution' after tomorrow job number one in getting lives back under control will be to cleanse the Augean stables.

I've never lived in a seriously clean and tidy house, come to think of it none of my friends do either. Maybe no seriously clean and tidy person would want me as a friend. My friend Margaret in Lancashire has a little plaque in her bathroom that says "Dull women have tidy houses" and maybe it is true. One reason we like having guests here is that it means that we just HAVE to get the place looking a bit more shipshape, at least for a week. Maybe I should take a solemn vow to keep this new house in England in perfect order - if it is going to be used by others I suppose it will have to be.

I passed this bad tendency on to my kids I think. When Julia was younger she had a fearsomely untidy bedroom. It was so bad that our cats and dogs used to pause at the door and reconnoitre the options before proceeding. Which way to leap across? Our old cocker spaniel used to love to head in there for a few zzzz's in the daytime but sometimes it was all just to much of an effort to try and vault the mountains of papers, books and toys. Her tail would droop and she would head back downstairs, a refugee from clutter. Our cat on the other hand - well, he could clear it from the door to the bed in a single bound anyway. And also he was a master of finding the 'rabbit holes' under the wreckage, if you had put a miniature barrel of brandy around his neck he could have played the part of a St. Bernard lookalike in the Land of Kiddycr*p, seeking out lost souls in the blizzard of junk. Except that he was a cat of course, with cat eyes and cat ears and a cheesy grin.

Straight out of Sazae-san

Funny how just one or two small thing cans really 'lift your day' sometimes. Yesterday we had M-chan around for lunch; she's here on Sundays every other week for a couple of hours of lessons and eats with us before class as her mum still at work. M-chan is one of a few that I think of vaguely as being an adoptive daughter in Japan - actually I'd be so happy is she really was my daughter! Mid-teens, tall, 'gawky', energetic, incredibly cheerful and a bit unconventional somehow, very 'open'. And a heart of gold. She's great! Whenever she's here there is always talk, talk bubbling up, lots to laugh about somehow. If they awarded degrees for cheerfulness she would be a professor already.

Then after her class we headed over to the 'Million Volt Store' to buy (yet more!) ink cartridges for the printer and then to the Nagasakiya supermarket in Naruto. Recently I've been avoiding even these local forays because there was just no time. But I feel kind of 'let out on parole' a bit now so Edera and I both went and we took our elderly neighbour who lives at the back, T-san, along for the ride and so that she could do any shopping in the downstairs food market in the department store. You have to keep a bit of an eye on her! She must be well into her seventies and still seems very fit thanks to the usual iron sense of self-discipline that most Japanese 'oldies' have. But that doesn't mean that she's a model of rational and predictable behaviour. No Siree!

Anyway yesterday she was soon 'off the leash' in Nagasakiya. First we were all more or less in a bunch carrying our shopping baskets and then - gone! I saw her headed off 'right-field' somewhere near the tofu counter but then when we arrived at the check-out a few minutes later there was only tumbleweed and the whispering wind, no sign of T-san anywhere. And it is quite a big store too. Had she headed for the book shop? Upstairs to the women's department? back to the car?

And then just as Edera and I were hovering near the front door wondering what to do we both spotted her. We were looking down a long aisle and then whoosh! A small figure wearing a rucksack with her hair back in a bun pushing a shopping cart almost as big as her and moving very very fast suddenly shot across our line of vision moving from right to left and vanished. It was like one of those 'Tom and Jerry' cartoons where the mouse suddenly shoots at amazing speed across the screen, I was expecting her at any moment to shoot back across our line of vision moving the other way. We just burst out laughing. I wish I had the skill of a cartoonist to capture that image. She looked just like one of the crankier characters out of the old Sazae-san strip cartoon, which I suppose she really is!

Sundays

Sundays here in Japan are different to the rest of the week but for all the wrong reasons as far as I'm concerned. The day may be slow to start but by mid-morning the place is heaving as everyone heads to the shops and busy is how it stays until around six or seven. It is the busiest day of the week on the roads. It has its nice side - seeing dads out with their kids in the park kicking balls around or trailing around 'Cainz Home' looking for new kitchen storage ("Just what they always wanted!"), but on balance I'm not so sure.

Sundays have been invaded by capitalism over the years. As geographers we study capitalism's 'spatial fix' - the way in which more profit is made by getting things made where wages are low, selling where incomes are high, and moving on from one pace to another to get the lowest possible cost of production. When the Americans arrived in Japan in the 1850's with their battleships it wasn't for the good of the Japanese, it was because they wanted to insist that Japanese markets were open to American business. And there is a 'temporal fix' too - 'credit' allowing things to be made or bought before you actually have the money to pay for it, and the constant gnawing away at those hours when buying and selling is forbidden. Colonising time - like Sundays for example.

In many European countries trading on Sundays is still generally forbidden, it is treated as a 'special day' on which most people don't have to work and at least if you don't go to church twice and read the bible you can get up late, have a leisurely breakfast and then do the gardening or make some excursion with the family. That's how it used to be in Britain too, but we sold our souls to Mammon in the Thatcher era. Suddenly supermarkets started illegal opening on Sundays, the trading laws were mocked by people who argued (but was it true?) that it was unlawful to buy a Bible on Sundays but legal to buy porn. I wonder how many Bibles they bought on Sundays afterwards eh? Of course if the government had actually enforced the law - imprisoned a few Tesco's directors might have been a start - traditional Sundays would have been protected. But that was not what was in their minds.

I always liked 'traditional Sundays', that sense of withdrawing, things quietening down, a mild isolation, perhaps spending more time with family or by yourself. At least it gave space, a cast iron reason to NOT work seven days a week. That is what it comes down to, institutions and organisations now have full use of your time 24/7 when they can profit from it. We even see the same erosion of holidays like Boxing Day.

In Japan there never was an equivalent of Sundays, they had a fifteen day cycle based on the Chinese calendar and Buddhism. But if there was ever a country that needed traditional Sundays now Japan is it!

Descending Carrauntoohil

I had an interesting moment with my all my thesis writing yesterday and one which I felt was never going to come. Sometime during the early afternoon, as I was working on a second draft of the last few sections of Chapter Nine, the thought suddenly popped into my head "Good grief! This is almost done!" and a kind of relief started to spread through my veins.

It isn't done yet, a few more days - perhaps by Wednesday but I'm making no forecasts! But yesterday it suddenly felt like the place I'm headed for was visible. It reminded me a bit of a mountain walk I did in Ireland in my 20's. I decided to climb Carrauntoohil down in Macgillycuddy's Reeks - it is the highest mountain in Ireland, but not much by Japanese standards, just over 1000 metres. Actually I was lucky, I didn't take this day at all seriously nor really register what a large and potentially dangerous ascent this might be. Nor did I have a good map, nor a compass in my pocket. Crazy eh? Anyway there we were, three of us, and then of course the clouds came down. We got a few brief glimpses from the ridge, but on the way back from the summit in the late gloom of the afternoon which was the 'right descent' to take became a point of debate.

Fortunately I have a good sense for that kind of thing. Going by the breeze on my cheek I got pretty well exactly the right direction, we ended up going down the right spur and didn't arrive above any sheer cliffs. Eventually we dropped below the clouds and there was the little mountain road we were looking for about two kilometres away. You could even see our parked car in the far distance.

Well, that was the kind of feeling I had yesterday afternoon. Somehow I was 'below the clouds' again after a couple of months up there on the cloudy ridge. Hard to explain that sense of 'being lost in a creative world'. People think that my kind of research is mainly about counting and tabulating things but actually the most important part is 'insight' - you have to turn up lots of 'new thinking', understanding, find an original aspect of reality. More like mining really - just where is that seam of precious metal inside your head? And when you've found it you have to write and write to get it out and onto paper. Often you start paragraphs and don't even know exactly where they will end up, expressing part of the idea helps the rest to emerge.

And now just that last little bit I hope. No big areas of country out of sight between me and emailing this stuff sometime very soon. I hope!

Getting a grip

Sometime early this morning I had quite a vivid dream about my days working for Whitbread. It is more than seven years since I retired, and I don't think I regretted even for about fifteen seconds not having to get up in the mornings to trail into the office for a row with the boss, so I wonder why my subconscious keeps trawling through memories of that time. Probably because last night I was writing something about working in Japanese companies, an experience I don't think that I would have coped with very easily.

Now the only detail I can remember about this dream was that one of the secretaries, Caroline, was making me some kind of a 'leaving presentation'. It was just a small circle gathered around in the office, nothing grand. And although I liked her, this lady wasn't someone that I knew especially well, wasn't 'close to'. In fact when I woke up I struggled for a few minutes to remember what her family name was. But in this dream she had a tight hold on my left forearm. At the beginning I thought that she was doing this to give ME some emotional support but then I realised as the grip grew tighter that it was actually HER that it was giving support to, she was almost leaning on me and drawing energy out of me to try and put something into words that she was finding hard to express.

As this became evident I kind of helped it all a long a little by putting things into words myself, saying aloud what I thought was on her mind. How we had had a great time working together. Support and respect for each other had always been such an important part of the relationship. That kind of thing. Actually we did get on OK; we didn't know each other well but we were 'in tune' as far as working with each other went. And so here we were rather 'closer' than we had understood, in fact she was holding me tightly for support. We thought it was just our relationship in 'getting the job done' but it is always more than that isn't it? The situation is a means, not an end.

I have noticed myself noticing this a lot recently. You have to 'give people your arm' even when they don't notice it. Even when YOU don't notice it. And you have to listen carefully and respond carefully. What you are able to offer might not be what they want or expect but that is just a part of the koan, you can only offer whatever you have and actually WHAT it is might be completely secondary. This week I was talking to someone I admire who really 'strives' - puts so much sincerity and energy and creativity into things that I worry she might explode (and sometimes she does!). Actually I can't offer much more than my complete attention when it is needed. But then I don't think a Swiss Army knife or Wedgewood Bone China is what is required.

A wristful of luxury

I see someone is trying to sell me a fifty seven jewel three-dialled waterproof shockproof watch that tells me the phases of the moon again this morning. As junk mail goes watch adverts are amongst the most inventive, I guess watches have more functionality that most products being sold through junk email, they go round and round as opposed to up and down if you know what I mean.

Seems that I'm better off not wasting my time looking for cheap and old watch models, better by far to buy one of their overpriced and crap new ones. Also wearing one of these watches gives you loads of self-confidence, just the thing to sport on your wrist to visit the dentists by the sound of it. But what attracts my eye in these adverts is that word 'luxury'. I learn that "finally luxury items became affordable for everybody".

Spot the catch? According to my dictionary something "luxurious" is defined as "something expensive and hard to obtain". So by definition luxury items don't become "affordable". It would be like saying "a black light" or "silent music". Actually I might see some poetic merit in those expressions but "affordable luxury"? That "gives me self confidence"? It doesn't have the same cachet does it? Nobody is going to come up to me and whisper "be my man and wear a watch" in my ear now are they?

'Luxury' is one of those words that I keep meaning to pay a long visit to sometime, stop for tea, maybe even for a night or two of intimacy. It is from the Latin - 'luxus, luxuria' - pure excess. For me it brings up visions of muscular porters carrying trunks and cases of the blue Pullman cars of "Les Grands Trains" at La Gare and up the hill to the chandelier festooned marble halls of the Hotel Prince high above the steamers on the lake. Can you have genuine luxury without style? Probably not. But what would the point be of luxury all the time? There's nothing wrong with a bit of tasty excess in all things but you don't need it every day do you? Certainly not at my age. And your appetite gets jaded, luxury becomes boring if there aren't extensive grey bits in the cracks to struggle through in between times.

How would life be if I had a big tube of Pringles on my desk here every day, ate crisps for breakfast, dinner and tea? What a thought! Go on! I'd hate it wouldn't I?

Camping in the rain

It was pretty well non-stop deluge here yesterday, pure raining stair-rod country. I was restless for lack of exercise so I went for a short walk as the gloom descended around four, well wrapped up in my waterproofs and with a big umbrella for company. I headed south along the river for a mile or so to inspect the civil engineering crews working on the new river retaining wall. Up to their knees in mud, soaking wet, cold muddy overalls. There is always someone worse off than you eh? I can see what fun it might have been to be a plutocrat back in the last century, riding around in a big warm chauffeur-driven car feasting on caviar and champagne and shouting at hungry downtrodden labourers to work harder or else ... As Confucius once said - "Better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick."

Now when the weather is this lousy I always think what it would be like to be camping on a day like this, wondering how you were going to heat up your sausages and beans as the rain started to leak in through the canvas and then the groundsheet got wetter and wetter. And then I remember an interview I saw once on TV with someone who was going for the 'Guinness Book of Records' world title for having lived longest in a tent. This guy had been living in a tent on the lawn of his garden in suburban London for about twenty years already and in fact as long as he kept on doing it he was going to hold the 'World Title' because obviously nobody could 'catch him up' until he was dead. The glaring ethnocentricity of this claim - there must be a heck of a lot of aged Desert Arabs and Mongols around who have lived their entire lives in tents - did not strike either him or the BBC interviewer.

On seriously rainy days I wonder how I would feel about committing my whole life to the apparently meaningless choice of living in a small tent on my lawn just to get my name in a two line entry in a book. When you were sitting in there on the cold ground with the rain drumming down is it possible that you might, in the watery darkness of long solitary nights, query the wisdom of your life choices? I mean, you aren't going to have the chance to go back and do it all again, no replay where you can go to the opera, sleep with beautiful women in four poster feather beds and take advantage of central heating, piped water and electricity. To do this you would have to REALLY love camping.

Makes me a bit philosophical through. All our volitional life choices must seem weird to most of humanity. When I stick out my chest and preen my feathers and say "Aren't I a clever boy then!" about three billion others say "Good grief! Look what that clown is doing now!"

Down the Street

Still keeping my fingers and toes very much crossed, and trying too hard not to think about it, build up expectations. But at the moment it is looking like my house purchase in England is going OK and maybe within the next three or four weeks I'll have a place of my own again. This last three years I've been sharing a property with my daughter but it is time for us to move on from that temporary arrangement.

I've bought a place in Kirkby Stephen. It all feels a bit of a gamble but then what isn't? I'm not planning on spending a lot more time back there than I do already, but probably much longer in the summer, give some of the Japanese heat and humidity a miss. The house is well placed for me to take advantage of my time in back in England to get fitter, and do lots of walking, and maybe during the summer we'll have the chance to have friends to spend time with us there. Some will also get the benefit of using the place when we aren't using it ourselves, I'm hoping it will be kept used.

It has struck me this week just how much of a return to 'roots' this all is for me. Of course I chose the place because I really love the area but now that I have there are a couple of angles to it that I hadn't spotted. Firstly the house is very like the one I lived in as a child in Barnard Castle - basically the same room layout downstairs. Perhaps I can get a proper 'range' installed in the kitchen, have bread dough 'rising' on the hearth on windy Spring and Autumn days. Hmm ... that might be a bit ambitious. But I can sense that a lot of my furniture - most of which dates from that time - might end up in the same places. I already find myself literally dreaming about this. and suddenly remembering a lot of the detail from our home back in the nineteen-fifties.

On the other hand the place mustn't become a museum, at the same time it must reflect who and where we are now. And I have about 5000 more books in England than my grandparents did! And four filing cabinet's and a map chest. And where will all the tools go?

The other thing that hadn't occurred to me was just how close this brought me to my grandfather again. The place is about a mile from where he lived, but I'd forgotten that most days he actually walked past this place, right outside the bay window, with his battered old brown shopping bag as he walked 'down the street' to get his groceries. When I pull my cloth cap down over my eyes I've got to look very similar to him.

Woke up late.

Woke up late this morning. Well, the first time I opened my eyes around the usual time but I just couldn't muster the energy to get out of bed ... another five minutes! Fatal of course, I was soon deeply asleep again and never heard Edera moving around. That was me 'out like a light' for the next half an hour.

Definitely a bit of a 'danger signal' there for me - I've been using mental energy at both ends for months, come to think of it 'all ends' if you can have more than two. I'm hurling myself against this last (I hope!) mountain of academic work with the aim of being finished by around the 25th. I think that still looks OK. Three chapters remaining to edit; two look OK-ish anyway but one involves a re-write of perhaps ten pages. I can't remember the last time I actually went anywhere, it must be nearly a year since I spent a day in Tokyo. Not that my life looks any more restful through December and January but at least I don't have to be chained to my laptop.

I was always quite a good 'getter-up' when I was working. To be honest I had to be, my working routines were so bizarre that some nights it hardly seemed worth going to bed. Also lots of nights away from home in hotels, so I got used to sleeping in strange beds too. Occasionally, I would have a king-sized hangover to get a grip on in the grey dawn - not an unusual thing in the brewing industry I guess - but generally I would just plant my feet on the floor and get on with it even when I was not exactly Mr. Sparky and I was not looking forward to whatever 'goodies' the new day had to offer.

Up at the temple I regularly spend time at getting up very early for meditation is just a part of the rhythm of daily routine. When I was younger as soon as the 'rising bell' rang in the dark I could get myself into gear in about fifteen seconds, get that mattress off the floor and into the cupboard in front of my 'sitting place' and be ready for 'sitting' in about five minutes. These days I don't sleep in the meditation hall any more, 'oldies' can apply for the comfort of using a guest room and a bed. It isn't so much the bed that attracts me as the possibility of getting up slowly in the dark and pad around and make myself a cup of coffee, to 'get moving' slowly.

Vase of flowers

Wandered down to the washitsu yesterday evening to give myself a break from typing. Edera was down there with her feet in the kotatsu doing some proof-reading for me, a second check on the chapters of my thesis that are (hopefully!) now finally finally put away for the examiners.

There was a new vase of flowers on the tatami to the right of our family altar. What? No of course I don't notice such things, I am just a man after all you know. But E, being a woman, likes to challenge me about such things to confirm my dumbness. "See anything different ...?" And could I guess who they were from? A double whammy in life's little power games coming up.

It seemed that they had just been delivered, and that the were from the vets who had been looking after Pero over the last few weeks. I was touched, such unexpected kindnesses come as a real surprise don't they? I'd always felt that we were being carefully 'looked after' during that time, not just the mortally sick cat but also her stressed out human carers. And then to be remembered in that way. Pero's flowers. They were the last of her many fans it seems.

One of the things I have parked on my 'back burner' to think about more carefully when it is less painful is my own position vis a vis vets in situations where an animal is terminally ill. Just exactly when does euthanasia feel right? I've always been given rather strong advice that if possible it is better for the animal to die a natural death and that in the bigger scheme of things it makes an important difference, but what exactly does 'if possible' mean here? Certainly it doesn't mean suffering serious unnecessary pain. Luckily in all the cases where I have had the responsibility so far things have worked out OK. I'm certainly never going to be of the school that believes that once an animal is mortally sick the only option is that "the kindest thing is to have them put to sleep". It isn't true.

In the past in England I've found myself side-stepping the vets in that final couple of days because I didn't want the overt pressure, but I suspect a lot of that is in my own mind. I can see that if and when I have other animals to care for in the future I need to talk to any vet I'm going to use around this issue years before decisions become a sudden necessity. And maybe I need to read a bit more about the issues too, and how small animal practice vets feel about it. In a way this vase of flowers has helped me a lot, it is a reminder, if I needed one, that the vets cared as much as we did.

Just slip it into your mouth

Saturday mornings are usually a 'bad start' because we have two young students who have an 8:30 class. That would be painful enough in itself but as their mum takes them to baseball practice afterwards they have a bad habit of turning up fifteen minutes early too. If it was up to me they would be locked out in the rain on the doorstep until the appointed hour, like the 'Good Old Days' at Youth Hostels in England. Anyway, one consequence of all this is that I find myself blearily watching breakfast TV at a different time to the rest of the week, much, much earlier. And it is no improvement.

Around that time there always seems to be some 'down your way' style slot in progress. 'Down Your Way' was a BBC Home Service programme years back where some BBC 'toff' went to visit some undistinguished community in darkest England to meet and interview the 'locals'. I can imagine the months of backstabbing nastiness that must have accompanied the programme planning for this series - just who should be heard on air? The vicar of course and the squire, but who will represent the Women's' Institute or the Allotment Association? The general message that this programme invariably delivered was that Little-Bloggsworth-in-the-Marsh was the most wonderful place in the whole world to live in. Somehow they never went anywhere that had to endure any class of social delinquency. I bet there were a few novels to be written about all THAT eh?

Now there is a big cultural difference with this programme formula when it comes to comparing rain soaked England with sweaty Nihon and that is that here we always have to have food playing a big part in the whole thing. An NHK Outside Broadcast Crew can't go anywhere for five minutes without ending up in some ramen noodle shop or a tonkatsu parlour in a tin shed tasting local delicacies. They are just like big kids - "Oh! Time for 'Tuck' everyone!. Let's all scoff something!"

And every time that interviewer is presented with a plate of this stuff, the camera zooms in as a morsel of the 'goodies' is prised up with hashi, popped into the mouth and .... OISHIKATTA!!!!! Much rolling around on the floor in ecstasy and orgasmic kicking of feet in the air ... this local food is a million times better than even 'you-know-what'! Maybe two million times better!

But it is compulsive viewing. I know it is pointless but I still dream that one day the interviewer is going to take a gob full, spit it out and say to camera "Oh Jeez! That is absolutely GROSS!"

But I'm wasting my time eh? It isn't going to happen, is it?

I'm getting so Gothic these days

Cold and windy yesterday - real autumn for a change! Great! It has made me feel quite cheerful somehow, my heart was happy happy! Wandering around in shirtsleeves in sunshine in November is all very well but it is nice at last to get some REAL seasonable weather. You can only take so much of frogs hopping around the place on Guy Fawkes Night, that manner of thing. Just too foreign isn't it?

Mid evening I stepped it out down the lane to the level crossing by the driving school to get some exercise, too much time at this keyboard. Lots of wet leaves blowing around near the small cemetery at the corner by the forest and I had to put my head right down to push my way through the buffeting wind there. Great!

It really brought back some memories. When I was a child I attended 'infants' (younger elementary) school in Barnard Castle and I had a nice, almost Dickensian, walk to classes each morning and evening. Past the old workhouse and police station, down the back lane and through the 'Hole in the Wall', a long alley between grey stone buildings that also tunnelled under an old printer's shop. And then through the church yard. Lots of elm trees in the 1950's - long gone now of course thanks to Dutch Elm Disease in the 1970's - and in those high trees hundreds of rooks making a racket. Spreading their black wings and circling high in the sky. And maybe a skane of geese headed east - or west?

Now this walk was just great on dark windy wet autumn days, like something out of a 'B' movie eh? And the best of it was that is churchyard was packed full of ancient stone tombs, the flat ones on lichen-covered pedestals, what a friend of mine used to call 'furniture fields' when she was a child. And they were all skewed at crazy angles as coffins yielded up their cargoes to worms below and the ground heaved and yawned in all directions. And the wind blew and the rain lashed and my dark blue 'gabardine' flapped and flapped and my cap slipped out of my warm fingers and went bowling along the flagstones of the path in some strong gust and I laughed and laughed. Pure Gothic fantasy, lovely!

I'm all for free speech but ...

I was reading something in the Guardian's 'Comment is Free' section recently about yet another attempt by the British government to curtail freedom of speech on an issue. I never thought that this kind of thing could happen in the UK but of course it can, just like anywhere else. I reckon that in the last ten years our basic freedoms have been curtailed by around 60%.

One comment in the thread of opinions caught my eye. It began "I'm all for free speech but". Interesting that anyone could even type that without the glaring logical inconsistency leaping off the page and punching them on the nose but there you are, 'it takes all kinds to make a world' as my grandad used to say.

And yet this issue of 'free speech' is an interesting one. It is the old question of 'the "ideal" and the "actual"' creeping in. 'With the ideal comes the actual, like a box all with its lid ...' Nations and people that make a big song and dance about the importance of free speech are often the ones who restrict that concept most perniciously and effectively. And then there is 'libel' and 'slander' - seemingly fair enough in principle to stop others bad mouthing vulnerable people but the only people who use such laws in England are the extremely rich trying to bully others into silence.

That's not what I wanted to write about here though. If you accept the standard of 'universal free speech' then you have to accept that it isn't going to be 'univeral free speech about issues that I deem acceptable'. Nor is free speech to be limited to intelligent people only, you don't get a kind of 'talking licence' after taking a test. The essence of free speech is bound to be for example that it contains a fair mixture of racist, homophobic and completely uninformed opinion expressed by people you wouldn't want as your son-in-law. That's what we are talking about here ... free speech for everyone. Are we ready to defend to the death someones right to express every bigoted prejudice in the world?

It seems that people miss the real reason for doing this. If you can't articulate your own particular cocktail of greed, hatred and delusion it doesn't 'go away', you don't wake up the next morning by some trick a nicer person. The really important thing about freedom of speech is that it gives others the freedom to listen to you. And also it means that, for better or worse, others form an opinion about you. These are important 'reality checks' aren't they? Firstly there may be something in what is being said that is down to me, if I don't know what people think and feel then I just have my own prejudices about them as a yardstick to go by. And if I spout bigotry that makes me look a fool then - hopefully - I will feel one and think more carefully next time.

Wars start when people stop listening to the nasty stuff somebody else says and start to only listen to their own empty rhetoric.

Two meetings

Yesterday felt a bit of a bizarre contrast. Pero's cremation in the morning over at the same little temple that we visited only two weeks ago for Tora. We were the first of the day and were there a bit early so we sat outside in the morning sunshine waiting for the priest to turn up. Soon the temple cat - a very plump and friendly male - turned up with two small black kittens to see who was around. One of the kittens decided my knee looked like a great place for a nap, as Edera was carrying Pero. So we ended up as an odd little group sitting on the bench in front of the Jizo statue.

After lunch a meeting of our city 'masterplan' consultative committee. The last was in March but I was in England and so I missed it and it is almost a year since I last attended a session. In its own way almost as bizarre a group as the earlier one because there were twenty four of us taking part and we were ALL men! Like a Jesuit monastery! How do they do that? What is it about politicians, bureaucrats and planners that manages to create an all-male group so large? And twenty in dark business suits and white shirts too. Last year we had a token female bureaucrat but she seems to have moved on so only Edera was there as my 'helper' with translation.

During the meeting I got asked a question which seems to have been bouncing around in my head a lot since. Someone asked me about British planning practice - they thought that we were much more successful than Japan in avoiding 'urban sprawl'.

It was the kind of question which, if I had had a month's notice, I could have talked a lot about but I was left feeling rather 'stumped' and inarticulate. It is true that a big weakness in Japanese planning has been the inability to control sprawl. Back in the 1960's the government set up planning law in such a way that their supporters in the small business and planning communities could build small developments pretty well anywhere and over the years it has caused real problems.

But there was a much deeper point for me. Japan doesn't need to imitate European urban planning laws, it needs to have the confidence to evolve its own in its own images. And this isn't just about the engineering side of it - the width of roads and height of buildings. It is about the underlying philosophy of it all, what is wanted from urban space. Japanese planners look at English cities and see beautiful facades and 'order' everywhere. I look at the Japanese city and see under the superficial chaos of it all, harmony everywhere. We both have rose-tinted spectacles I guess. The grass is always greener.

Goodness! I need to write much more about all this. But not now.

Pero dies

Pero died during the night. The girls were home from Tokyo yesterday morning afterwards, towards the end of the day, she seemed to just gently let things go at last. I think probably she was just slipping in and out of a coma due to lack of kidney function as the toxins inexorably built up in her blood. We took her into bed with us to nurse and she died just after three.

We've been nursing her for two weeks. Maybe the toughest part of it for all of us, not least Pero, was all the contrary signs we have had during that time. Her blood tests showed that she was critically ill and deteriorating and yet she was so alert and often so happy to be around us. We could sense a general weakening going on, and yet at the same time her appetite and ability to eat and drink was improving as the rest of her body recovered a little from the virus. So there was always some hope that her kidney would pick up and it was difficult to remember that it was becoming a vanishingly small hope and then at those moments when the reality of it stuck home there was so much grief, so many tears. In the end you have to come to terms with accepting and beginning to let go.

Thank you to all our friends who have kept us in their thoughts during this time. Pero made so many many friends during the ten years we had with her since the girls found her as an abandoned kitten, and especially amongst the students who visit our home every week.

'Blueys'

I often get airmail letters from my mum. Aerograms - what my dad used to call 'blueys', a bit of 'Vera Lynn' style nostalgia there. I suspect he used to write 'blueys' fluently to a whole raft of women and I partly inherited this tendency and used to write fluently to women too but somehow I never got the hang of the "whole raft of" aspect of it. Sad! However that isn't what I meant to write about.

I groan a bit when I see these 'blueys' in the mail box. I'm surprised some of them get here her handwriting is so shaky and I suspect some of them don't but as I'm the only Englishman within about 15 kilometres I guess if it has the right zip code on they know who a letter from England is for. Whenever one arrives I know I'm a) going to puzzle over its contents for about an hour (a bit like reading Egyptian scripts) and b) find myself inundated with a list of demands along the lines of "don't bother buying me a digital camera for Christmas I need a new TV" and "You need to take back those blue vests to Fleetwood Market I need a larger/smaller size". For my mum my being 'out East' is simply a temporary hiatus in the crucial business of getting supplied with new underwear.

It isn't that I don't ring her about once a week. On those occasions she seldom mentions this kind of stuff, though there is always a "there was something I wanted to ask you but I've forgotten" lurking sinisterly somewhere in the conversation. I feel like I'm living n an Alan Bennett play. Come to think of it when she was younger and fitter she did visit tearooms in Harrogate excessively. And maybe I got too much like one of his sad 'only son' characters, say 'Yes mum!' too often eh? Sat in my sad little room looking at my collection of cigarette cards on wet afternoons.

Buts she can't ring me, she doesn't have a land line in her room since the "Great 999 Incident of 2007". ('999' is the UK equivalent of '911' in the USA or '110' in Japan). This autumn in a moment of weakness I relented and bought her a 'pay-as-you-go' mobile. But it doesn't reach as far as Japan, it is only for UK pestering, only a first step to world domination in the telephonic scheme of things. Sometimes in England early in the morning the phone goes and you can hear her breathing heavily as she presses all the buttons in turn but forgets to hold it to her ear. And of course I don't dial her on the mobile from Japan, it would cost a fortune, she has to pad down to the phone on the wall in the hairdressing room, get a bit of fresh air, have some social interaction on her travels.

So that is where the 'blueys' come in. Kind of 'memo to son' technology. About 95% of it gets forgotten as soon as the letter is in the post but you can't rely on it, you have to be quick on your feet.

Things dividing

Home alone yesterday. Fridays Edera helps out a friend of hers who has just started a new restaurant business by cooking, working in the kitchen and waiting all day. Usually it is just a 'get on with your work' day for me too but yesterday I had cat nursing to do as well. I was i/c felines. It wasn't an onerous task but Pero was certainly looking for my regular attention so it wasn't the day to attempt the toughest of thesis editing and I contented myself with jobs like proof-reading my bibliography, things that have to be done carefully but don't need much creative thought.

Or so I imagined. Once I started to check out the detail I realised that there was more to the 'Harvard' system that I have to use than I had imagined. It isn't that I don't know broadly what the rules are, but more than once you get into the detail of it for proof reading there is more variation in what is done - what "the rules" are supposed to be - than you realise. For example in some texts citations are given with the abbreviation 'p.' for page - (Harvey 1985, p.36) but in others the convention is different (Harvey 1985:36). What rules does my university follow?

Surprise, surprise, they aren't sure. They used to follow the British Standard on it twenty years ago, but that was withdrawn. Many university libraries publish a guide to the requirements of their institution, but ours doesn't (another surprise! huh!). We love this kind of muddy water in the UK, we couldn't write a procedure manual to save our lives and even if we did no one would ever read it. Japan is absolutely the opposite. If it isn't in the extremely comprehensive manual everyone wanders around in a daze muttering 'komatta na?' ("what to do?")

There is something interesting behind all this, and that is that in a world where communication gets ever more instant and comprehensive it becomes harder and harder to ensure uniformity or conformity in anything. People just do their own thing, often even feel there is great merit in doing their own thing. You notice it in the use of English - it may have become an 'international language' but only on the basis that far from their being just two standards there are now hundreds as new users influence the patterns. That is at the heart of it all, it is impossible to use even a bibliographical reference system without changing it. To use something seems to be to transform it.

If things are always diverging then where do they end up? Say in religious institutions for example. There is constant subdivision in every tradition as somebody says "well, I don't agree with THAT! We ought to circle to the right!" and goes someplace else. You hardly ever hear of things 'coming together' do you? Things usually divide. Where does this end up? It is a kind of "where do flies go in winter" question. A goodly share of all innovation must just die out, but some will survive.

Walkabouts

I haven't written here at all about what has been most on our minds this last two weeks, partly because just 'doing it' is enough in itself but mainly because we just don't know how things are with Pero-chan. Earlier in the week she had some awesomely bad blood test results and she has been relying on us getting any food, water and intravenous drip into her and the whole time it has been 'touch and go' and it is now as always completely 'touch and go' to be honest, don't imagine otherwise. Yesterday however for the first time since 24 October she ate something for herself. I never thought that I would have to force-feed a cat tuna.

During all the time she's been so critically ill there have been a few times - three now I think - where she has got herself so agitated that we've just had to 'go along' with her wishes so that she calms down a bit. On each occasion she wanted to go outside. Of course once she gets there, there isn't much she can do. She staggers around for a few metres until she just can't make it any further and sits down, watched by the sad, concerned eyes of our 'outdoor cat' Mew-kun. Then I pick her up, carry her around for a little bit so she has some fresh air and mental stimulation, and bring her back to her bed and she'll sleep deeply for an hour or two.

What does she want to do so instinctively out there? Take a pee or a crap on soil? - so far she hasn't managed that. Go to some outdoor water supply she likes? - we get enough water into her with a syringe to sink a battleship in. Find somewhere to die? - conventional wisdom is that cats sometimes do this. No, there's some underlying project in her mind, a powerful instinct, something that drives her on and occupies her thoughts. She feels a need to be there and it is SO crucial to her. It is really important to 'indulge her' because otherwise she would never rest. Once she has tried and failed she can rest for a bit, she knows her body isn't up to it.

I find myself wondering what 'drives' like this underlie the patterns of my own behaviour that I just don't know about. That stuff which is deeply learned, lurks if not in the subconscious then at least in the 'practical consciousness' and yet is 'illogical', felt with the heart, a kind of clock mainspring inside me whose energy is impossible to deny. We all have I guess, powerful karma lurking in there. Even when we see it clearly not always easy to step out of the path of the oncoming train.

The Bridge Project

Somehow there is always a couple of toilet roll 'fag ends' lurking on the window sill in our upstairs 'loo'. What do you call those? 'Cores'? 'Tubes'?. Anyway you know what I mean. The 'middle' of a toilet roll. In the high-pressure world of toilet roll manufacture and marketing where time is money and only the fittest survive these things must have a technical description and they probably come in dozens of different formats too.

I'm sure the world is divided into two kinds of people, those with no imagination who just throw these tubes into the bin and those with dreams like you and me who subconsciously hoard these them because in our pure hearts we couldn't possibly treat such beautiful objects as mere junk. I mean, the whole roll in itself is a work of beauty but without that tube it would be impossible to have the benefit of this invention.

But it isn't this utility aspect that interests me. Both Edera and I, being 'big kids', can see the potential in the object for all kinds of creative things. Looking at the perfection of the geometric shape, want to get out our scissors and glue and crayons and card and use it in a 'project'. From time to time this is what happens to these tubes if it fits in with some classroom activity she has planned.

Looking at two tubes the other day I suddenly had a flashback to when I was about eight years old and we had a splurge of this kind of creative stuff in school and I used a whole box-fill of these items to make a model of a bridge. It was no ordinary bridge but a bit like Tower Bridge in London and I sure that I must have modelled it in my mind on the nearby 'Transporter Bridge' across the Tees in Middlesbrough. It kind of went up, across, and then down again and it was just amazing, my first serious bit of model-making. I painted it grey. I think it might have been for a special event - perhaps the Chairman of the Education Committee was visiting the school, that is usually why such projects get done eh? It is ever thus, politicians and civil engineering contracts go together like the proverbial 'horse and carriage' and especially here in Japan. Although I don't remember a few million yen in 'dango' in my back pocket being any part of the deal at Marton Road Junior. Perhaps the 'Head' used the 'loot' to refill the stationery store.

Anyway, it made me realise that I haven't seen that toilet roll bridge now for years. About fifty-five of them. I wonder where it is? In a storeroom somewhere I guess, brought out every year and admired by generations of grateful schoolchildren. Not at Marton Road though, that got knocked down years ago.

Note taking

I've just been glancing back through a notebook that I was using on my last trip to England. Pathetic!

I've been making an effort with notebooks for my thesis work - for example I've always bought one nice brand (Japonica) over the last five years. And I've separated my field work from other notes by buying 5mm squared pages in blue cover books for the former and 8mm ruled pages in green books for the latter. It gives an illusion of order but I might as well not have bothered, they are still a complete mess. Pages aren't used in any kind of order and at least half of what I write there is unintelligible by the time I get to refer to it again. If I ever do refer to it again.

I often start off well enough - put down the date at least if I can remember what day it is. But then what? Lots of single line comments, only partly legible. As soon as I loose track or interest I start adding little arrows to emphasise the perceived importance of some items. Or maybe I just do it to prove to myself I'm still breathing and give others the impression that I'm paying full attention.

At school and university I was just fascinated by people who took neat notes. What the heck did they ever find to write down there? It was as if they were just writing down what the teacher said. I suppose that is actually what they were doing. Later they 'revised' this and replayed it in the examination. I never worked like that. I was engaging with what was being said but come the bell at the end of the hour maybe I was still looking at a blank page with the date written on the top. Or more likely a few meaningless comments like "but note exfoliation as a <--" or "ecological factors - three (things?)"

Some jobs demand good note taking skills, keeping an accurate record of events, and especially where someone else might be picking up a case later, say a lawyer or a doctor. I just couldn't do it. I think part of the problem with me is that I look at experience as something to give myself to 100%, there is no time for note-taking if you are really 'there', re-working what is being said with your mind and giving a good response. Also, if I do something I want it to be 'perfect' - every set of notes should be a PowerPoint presentation.

All this is no excuse though, I should really spend some time working on this. Otherwise I'm just surrounded by useless scribbles.

Changing days

I'm finding it quite difficult this week to adjust to the change in the length of the day. The difference isn't so much here in leafy Chiba-ken - only a couple of hours between summer and winter. And with all the events of the last two weeks I'm not sure that I have that much of a 'routine' left at the moment either. But nevertheless I notice the difference. 'Clocks back' time of the year.

Until recently I've been up at dawn, even before dawn, to try and get some writing done. It is amazingly bright and sunny here compared with England once the day has begun and if the weather is good, but if it isn't the darkness seems to linger now until six-thirty and the temptation is there to linger under the duvet too. In the evenings suddenly around five it is dark already. Yesterday evening we had a heavy rainstorm. It came out of nowhere at teatime and the day was gone like a light had been switched off, a mild afternoon became a wet evening and then a cold and very windy evening.

When you are younger the days seem so long, it is at least a week between breakfast and lunch. Even when I had a busy office routine I seemed to be able to fit so much into a few hours. How did I do that? Now I blink and it has moved on from dawn to dusk, sticking a stamp on an envelope and getting it mailed can take the entire day if I let it.

Perhaps the most interesting thing when you are older is that there are no 'off limits' parts of the day. As a child - and perhaps even as late as my early twenties - what we used to call the 'wee hours' - the time between say one and four in the morning - might as well have been a foreign country. We never visited them, if we had woken up then perhaps we would really have turned into pumpkins. Later - occasionally at least - these sometimes became love-filled hours, like something out of the 'Tales of Genji'. But now these hours have become familiar friends at last, it has become a pleasure to wake up in the dark and just be there with the stillness, maybe stare out of my dark study window sometimes at a landscape in which most are asleep.

Party games

We had a small party here yesterday evening. It was planned to be a Halloween Party with lots of fancy dress and noisy fun but after the events of the last week that was the last thing we felt up to and so we just had some friends around for a buffet. Even that felt a bit onerous to me in prospect but anyway, we won't be here to give any Christmas parties this year. As it turned out it was a good thing to do, it was nice to have the house full of people and it gave us both a short break from worrying about so many other things. Pero was moved through onto a big cushion in the ofuro for the evening so that she would be in a quiet place. She's a very sociable cat, always in the middle of parties and events, and to be honest she looked really p!ssed off at not being invited. But she had the good sense just to lie in there and rest.

About fifteen came. Neither Edera nor I are natural 'party people', not Nature's extroverts, and it always surprises me when out little 'dos' take off and work but touch wood they generally do. In part it is because all the people who come know us well and over the years have come to know each other but they only ever meet and get a chance to catch up with each other's news at our house. Oh! And I suppose they all gossip about us too! - "Did you hear about the time when Edera and Iain ..!"

One feature of our parties is games. Edera is ruthless of course, decades of practice at dragooning shy young students into DOING things, opening their mouths and SAYING something. I don't think playing parlour games are the usual fare at Japanese parties but everyone does it really well, the sense of harmony and fun is just amazing as everyone swaps chairs in response to some inane question or squeezes their neighbour's hand to pass on some message. And it really brings the generations together too, little kids play with as much enthusiasm as ... um.. me. People come together and enjoy themselves in an unsophisticated way, like 'family'. It is a kind of mixture of Western lack of inhibition and Japanese pleasure in being in a group together, a very unusual quality and one which - if you could manage to bottle it and put it on supermarket shelves - would go like hot cakes.

Trip to the dentist

One other event in my too eventful week this week has been an emergency trip to the dentist's surgery. Thursday morning my lower right molar just in front of the impacted wisdom tooth that I never did get around to having anything done with disintegrated. I was eating peanuts and suddenly became aware of a large and unwelcome fragment of something else floating around in my mouth. I suppose that I ought to be grateful that I didn't swallow the darn thing and rupture my stomach too.

A fragment of tooth had broken away leaving the large filling there sticking up. I had hopes that it would 'do' until I could schedule a proper trip to a dentist this week but they never do, do they? I haven't been to the dentist for ages, I wasn't too happy with the one I've used before, but luckily Edera went only a couple of weeks ago to a new place in Yachimata so Friday morning at 8:40 we were sitting in the waiting room there hoping that he could fit me in.

Yes, English readers may gasp at this but here dentists really do just 'see you'. I don't know what went wrong with the whole business of dentistry in the UK but we seem to have ended up with a service whose 'list' for new patients is perpetually closed and who can never see you until next August. British dentistry sucks. Apart from the "National Health Service" angle - many English dentists won't participate in the scheme because they claim it doesn't pay enough. Part of this lack of appointments is clearly due to the structured way the whole business is organised in 'Blighty'. You have to have a 'preliminary check-up' to agree a course of treatment. Here everything is much more efficient, you can just walk in with your health insurance card off the street and be treated straight away. Most surgeries have two chairs so that the nurse can be getting one patient ready for treatment while the dentist works on another nearly, like two barber's chairs in the same shop.

The other thing that they do much less in Japan is give 'injections' for fillings. Obviously if they are going to do root canal work you get an anaesthetic but generally the principle is that a moment or two of pain is worth it for avoiding all the hassle and cost of waiting for injections to take effect and then the numbness to pass afterwards.

The new sensei seems OK. Not a word of English but he was very observant of my reactions, I didn't need to search for vocabulary and anyway 'Ow!' is a universally understood figure of speech. I must get thoroughly checked over before my next trip to England.