Celebrity status

Edera was telling me yesterday that when they got home on Tuesday they found that they were appearing on NHK television. The outside broadcast crews were at Narita to record the arrival of their flight, but to be honest the appearance of our family on television was purely coincidental. They passed through customs and walked out of the arrivals door just a couple of paces behind the celebrity that all of Japan was actually waiting to see arriving on the British Airways flight from Heathrow - Susan Boyle of 'X-factor' fame.

It seems that she will be appearing on the big New Year's Eve spectacular on NHK - the programme where the 'Reds' and the 'Whites' compete with each other for something. Points I think - or is it prizes? I've seen this show sometimes when the girls turn it on as midnight approaches and I'm too lazy to get out of my chair and I can't imagine what Susan Boyle will do on it. Sing I suppose. Do gaijin get attached to the red and white teams or do you need a resident's visa to do that? An interesting legal technicality. Have they allowed enough time for her to get over the jet lag? It takes me a week at least, long hours of sleep in the afternoon sunshine. Edera says that she is as bright as a button after two days but there you go, it takes all kinds to make a world and I'm the sleeping after lunch kind.

It is nice to bask in other people's celebrity status. I once went into Foyles Bookshop about fifteen minutes after Michael Jackson left. Or was it Mick Jagger? Anyway the place had been cleared for someone important to buy some books, all the guys on the tills were talking in hushed tones about it. And when I was eight I went to a concert in Middlesbrough Town Hall and shook John Barbirolli's hand, I still have the autographed programme somewhere.

That reminds me of a completely different story about Middlesbrough Town Hall I read a long time ago which makes me proud to have been bred on Tees-side. It seems that some judge had the police arrest a man at the Crown Court entrance to the building and throw him into the cells for screaming abuse at his car and making Vee-signs at the judicial convoy as it swept into the courtyard. But he let the guy go free with no charge when he apologetically explained that he'd seen the Rolls Royce show up and thought it was the mayor arriving for work.

I do like judges with a sense of humour.

Snowpersons

I was heading down the street to the Co-op in Kirkby Stephen to buy some milk for lunch and try out my new 'divvy' card today when I half overheard half a conversation between two kids about the two Snowpersons they had been building. Nothing much to report there, I wouldn't have mounted my spirited and sweating pony to gallop to raise a hue and cry concerning the contents of this discussion, no Siree! But it seemed that these two Snowpersons were doing what Snowpersons do, inch by inch, victims of a few days of marginally milder weather. Shades of a Raymond Briggs story I fear, mortality of a different kind but mortality none the less. 'Ou sont les hommes de niege d'antan?' I ask myself. I always feel rather sentimental about such things, we speed through the days between damp falling leaves of November and mad March gales without drawing breath, snowmen are so symbolic of the transience of all things, halcyon days are bad news for Snowpersons wherever they roam.

'Her Indoors' had a go at building a Snowperson during our recent seasonal adventures in darkest Bolton-by-Bowland. There's always a first time with a carrot and two lumps of coal for everyone - 'Snowpersons 101', they do an NVQ in it these days, I know you don't believe it but there's an NVQ in everything now and we should remember to be grateful to the Labour Party and hard working educational administrators for making all this stuff possible. As you see, she fulfilled the required practical task within the allotted time and was graded a 'pass'.

And - a hallmark of a good Snowperson this - he/she melted straight down in a non-lopsided mode. Well, almost. After three days the head remained on the torso but at a slight angle although the figure was about 65 cm shorter. That's good. Attention to detail - the correct packing of snow ensures even evaporation and gelification. Even the circumpolar Inuit, who as we all know have 32 different words for snow, have to work hard at packing Snowperson anatomies to just the right densities. Although they build lots, errors and mistakes can still occur. So credit where credit is due please, the lady done well.

Snowed in

Two weeks of looking after the family over Christmas but they were on the plane back to Tokyo this morning and now I feel like putting my feet up for at least a week myself, maybe reading a novel (or more likely an interesting book on railway history) and generally living the life of Riley. Absolutely no fat chance of that though. No sooner were their cases onto that luggage trolley in the foggy dark and bound for the British Airways check-in than I was on my way to B&Q in search of emulsion paint and rawlplugs and lampshades and the like. Good job that they have a sale on at the moment. This next few weeks are going to be even busier than the last two I fear.

We had an unexpectedly interesting time over the holidays. When did we last have so much snow here in northern England in December? All those planned excursions I had in mind went 'by the board' and we found ourselves well and truly snowed up from Sunday to Wednesday, no chance at all of getting the car even to the end of the farm lane let alone a mile down the steep hill to the village. Luckily I'd been paying attention to the weather forecast and we had enough food laid in to last the whole week if we were stranded. Actually you could hardly have booked a more interesting holiday for someone from sunny Hiroshima-ken where this sort of stuff just doesn't ever happen. All those robins and snowmen and horses racing around the snowy paddock, it was straight off a Dickens-style Christmas card. If some stagecoach had gone clattering by our cottage window with men in top hats clinging to the reins it would have been no surprise.


Interesting how relatively easy it is to 'let go' of plans and objectives when this kind of natural drama unfolds. There isn't much you can do about a storm, you might as well just stoke up that coal fire and make another cup of coffee or go out for a walk across the fields. But if it is so easy to remain unattached in circumstances like these that why can't we be equally philosophical about traffic jams? In both cases we lose control - or actually the imagined control - of our own destinies. So why do we foam at the mouth over one and not the other. Que sera, sera, don't you think so?

Anyway, nice to be back somewhere connected to the internet again. I've been missing it all.

Blackburn Excursion

Over to Blackburn this morning to pick up the Ford Galaxy I've hired for the holiday. My Japanese family arrive at Manchester at six, so blogging might be a bit 'thin' over the next several days.

It is a long time since I was in Blackburn, I used to work there for years but now I hardly recognise the old place. In fact there were slices of the town centre that I couldn't remember what was there before and half the road system seems to have been pedestrianised. Someone I once knew used to refer to Leonard Cohen's songs as "music to slit your throat to" and a grey drizzly winter morning in Blackburn is pretty well in the same mould, from the same stable. Just think, there I've been stuck in the Japanese countryside all these years and with a few different life-choices I might have been living in a bed-sit down Darwen Road and still working at the brewery. Except that has gone of course, knocked down to build a Morrison's supermarket. What used to be 'High Street' which ran between the brewery and the bottling hall now ends in two 'skips' and a traffic bollard and a brick wall.

I have to say though that however terrible the old Dutton's Brewery site was - and it really was terrible, maybe the ugliest building I ever saw - a nicer bunch of workmates I never met. It was a joy to work there as long as you didn't look at the background too closely, I could imagine bits of Calutta are like that. Not that you could compare Blackburn and Calcutta, obviously, Blackburn is much colder and wetter.

They both have great statues of Queen Victoria though! Here's the Blackburn version. It is in the little park next to the bus station and I often used to admire it, Lowry-like, on darkening winter evenings from my office window. Somehow they captured Her Majesty in a kind of Blackburn frame of reference, she looks wet and cold, like she is there encumbered with orb and sceptre waiting for the next bus to Whalley.

I liked this new pavement sculpture though. Actually it is so convincing and I was paying so little attention that I walked right by it thinking it was real people but then I realised they weren't moving. Yep! Well done Blackburn! If you are sponsoring civic aren't like this you aren't all bad.

Despite appearances.

First Load

Car loaded yesterday with various bits and pieces to take up to the house later this morning. I pick up the key at one, and then it will be a busy afternoon starting to check where furniture will fit and unloading the things I'm taking up today. The weather isn't very encouraging - a cold raw December morning here with scuds of icy rain, maybe there will be snow on the road over Ash Fell, let's hope that they have had the 'gritters' working during the night!

I'm not discouraged, far from it. In my experience new projects in life usually start of with some minor dramas, as if the Fates were testing your resolve a little, even having some fun at your expense. Obviously propitious circumstances usually aren't propitious at all, you need something mildly non-propitious to get things off to a good start. If it was a bright mild sunny morning I'd be worried.

I've found myself thinking about how it is best to start off on the right foot with a new property, and I decided that the first through the door ought to be a small Kanzeon statue I bought years ago in the little shop at the Weaverville joss house in Northern California. The joss house was a kind of temple and community centre for the thousands of Chinese gold miners employed around there a century ago, a beautiful little timber building. This Kanzeon statue is a favourite of mine, she has been California to Europe to Japan and now back to England again, so although she's never crossed the Pacific (yet!) she has been pretty well around the world. She can keep watch over the new place for us until I move in after the New Year.

The stuff going up today is mainly kitchen stuff. Some of it I collected when I was living in Dunstable, but most is from my mum's old house in Cleveleys and a few items - like weighing scales - from my grandfather's kitchen. It has been cluttering the garage here for three years but I'm glad that I hoarded it all now, 'squirreling' has its benefits. Also there is a couple of pairs of curtains there that I hope will fit at least one of the windows. A lot of the things have 'history'

The main thing today is to make friends with the place though. I hope it is somewhere I'll have a relationship with the rest of my life. Let's see how it goes.

New House

Some of my friends who read this blog have e-mailed me recently asking about our new 'English' house. Yesterday I had to be up in Cumbria for another event (the 'Santa Special' day at the preserved railway that I'm involved with restoring!) so I got a chance to take some pictures of the place. It is only about half a mile from the station. And here it is! Ours is the house with the white door and no upstairs curtains and the car parked outside. If you look carefully you can see the present occupants' belongings stacked in cardboard boxes in the front room. They move out at 12:00 tomorrow and I move in at 1:00. But tomorrow just some crockery and spare curtains etc. My main furniture move won't be until 9th January.

This kind of house will be very familiar to all British readers but not to North American and especially Japanese readers. In Japan housing joined like this is called 'nagaya' and was characteristic of the worst of Meiji-era city slums, very poor quality housing. Here we call it 'terraced housing' and when it first became common around 1800 it was also very similar cramped poorly built brick stuff. But pretty well the worst of all that was demolished by 1900. As we became more affluent during the nineteenth century more good quality working class terrace housing was built. This terrace of four houses is from the Edwardian period, built in 1912. Built to last in stone and with nice big south facing 'bay windows' so you can sit in the sun on summer afternoons. It must have been one of the last built around here - by 1920 semi-detached buildings with bigger gardens was the norm. Ours has a nice garden to the rear now where the current owners have bought more land and added it to the site.

I really have a feeling of 'coming home' with this site because the layout of the property is very similar to several I lived in as a child. My grandparent's home had exactly the same layout except that in those days they were renting the place from the railway company and they couldn't afford this rather larger style of property with a bay window. Our old front room (which of course we hardly ever used, it was kept only for use when visitors came which wasn't often!) had a small window which was directly next to the pavement.

The quality of Edwardian terrace housing is a good indicator of how affluent skilled British workmen were in those years before the First World War, this kind of design was probably some of the best-built worker housing anywhere in the world. And they could afford the rent with just the man's wage coming in. When I was a child back in the 1950's the home was still being used just as it had been in Edwardian times - coal fires for heating and cooking, rag rugs on the floor, no fixed bath, outside toilet and of course no frills like phones and TV's, we sat and listened to the radio in the evenings. I was lucky to experience that kind of a daily rhythm in the home.

Railway Hauntings

Since I got back to Lancashire I have started working my way through a small pile of books I have ordered here in the UK over the internet since I went back to Japan. Once of them is an excellent seasonal 'bed-time read' and I have been working my way through a few scary chapters each evening before retiring to hide under the sheets. There's nothing like a good ghost story on dark December nights!

The book I'm referring to is "Railway Ghosts and Phantoms", by W.B. Herbert. Published twenty years ago and I think long of print, I spotted a copy of Ebay some time back. It is a compendium of a hundred stories of railway 'hauntings' around Britain edited by someone who seems to have made a lifetime study of such things.

Railways have always been closely associated with ghost stories since Charles Dickens published one of the first - "The Signal-man" - in 1866. I suppose they offer an ideal setting for the genre. The danger of speed and machinery, fatal accidents, long dark unlit tunnels, men working alone in wild and remote places during the night. And until recently that love of yarns and stories that workers in country areas would have shared in common. I was a bit surprised to find that I'd visited nearly half of the locations mentioned in these incidents at one time or another. One 'haunted place' - Balcombe Tunnel in Sussex - I used to live quite close to once.

Most of these stories concern strange figures and hauntings which those involved in put down to accidents and other sad events that had happened at that location, the ghosts of men or women killed at that place that came back to haunt people who worked there much later. But some interesting ones involve ghost trains themselves. And not all of these are so old as you might think, nor do they all involve remote locations. One strange story involved two trainspotters on a footbridge at Hadley Wood South Tunnel on the main line north out of London, who at dusk on a sunny evening in September 1980 saw a 'Deltic' Class 55 passing by on a parcels train and disappearing into the tunnel. They both make a separate record in their notebooks - 55 020 'Nimbus'. It was only later comparing notes that they realised that 'Nimbus' had been scrapped and cut up at Doncaster eight months previously. 55 020 has also been seen since travelling 'light engine' and headed who knows where on the tracks between Crewe and Stafford.

I'd like to see 'Nimbus' again myself - it was a locomotive I liked and often came across at Durham and Newcastle in my student days in the 1960's. If I see it rumbling by on a sunny autumn evening I'll let you know.

Simple Life

Hitting the ground with my little 'pixie' feet whirring away here. Arrived Wednesday evening and first thing on Thursday morning I was hammering on my solicitor's door demanding to know how my house purchase in England was going. 'Just fine' it seemed ... hmm, but a pity he'd not quite 'clicked' to the idea that, as completion of the sale had to be on the 14th and the weekend was looming, then all the paperwork and money movements would need to be done by tonight. Anyway, it looks like it might all happen, just about. let's hope that I get the keys to my new house on Monday as planned.

And then up to Lancaster for a meeting with the vicar there to arrange for the choir to use the priory church for a couple of hours practice next year, just before our 'main event' at Cartmel Priory on 10 July. Traffic is bad in Lancaster at the best of times - worse than the Tokyo 'rush hour' to be honest - but yesterday it was so awful because of roadworks that I actually abandoned my car a couple of kilometres from the town centre and walked to my appointment, the only way that I could get there on time. Still, worth the effort, another key job ticked off the list.

Coming back home in the car there was an interesting debate in progress on Radio 4 about the 'Me Society' in Britain, and I was quite impressed with the standard of discussion. One of the contributors claimed - don't know where the statistic was from - that 23% of UK residents had been treated for some form of mental disorder at some stage during the last twelve months. I guess that includes everything from the most severe bipolar cases to mild depression and drug abuse, but it was still a startling figure. The United States was higher at 26% but for mainland Europe the figure averaged around 11%. It seems that mental and social disintegration is very much a child of the Anglo-American brand of capitalism.

An interesting point was made concerning the extent that the 'Me' Society is actually a product of marketing. People seldom use 'me' time just to relax or spend time with others, they use it to consume. Consume holidays, time at the gym, luxury food and drinks, therapies, entertainment. Even these areas have now been colonised by a consumer society, yet another of capitalism's "spatial fixes". We are told that it is 'our right' to expect time to ourselves - in which to consume yet more goods and services.

It was good to hear people discussing for a change how to 'back off' this kind of stuff. Serious poverty brings few pleasures, but some of the happiest people I know are the ones without much cash and who just accept and deal with what comes up next.

Case Packed

Here we go again. The case is out on the tatami in the spare room. Soon I'll be carrying it downstairs to sit on the kotatsu to pack the rest of my stuff . It is a real struggle manoeuvring the darn thing down our steep narrow staircase even when it is half empty, so better to do the last of my packing within easy reach of the front door.

I'm taking quite a few things back to Blighty this time. With having clothes and stuff at both ends already usually my case is half empty on an 'East to West' trip, although in practice, no matter what I have in England, if you aren't planning to pack a standard 'clothing allowance' in your case then you always end up with gluts and shortages - eighteen pairs of socks in your English drawer and one pair of underpants. I try to keep the balance now by moving nothing in terms of essentials, if I am short of something I go and buy it then and there as a normal 'wear and tear' replacement. But this plan breaks down a bit because there are loads of things that are difficult to buy here in terms of size. It is true what they say about gaijin it seems; our waists and feet are certainly bigger for sure. Where do all these professional sumo wrestlers buy their normal gear I wonder?

This trip things are changing a bit, my case is going to be close to the 20kg limit. Now that I have a new house of our own to sort out that I'll be spending longer in during the summers there are certain classes of possession I want to consolidate there, if only to make more space in our small home here. So this time for example all my OBC Buddhist 'Journals' are joining their counterparts in the UK, I've read them once here and it is better that they are part of a set. Also there's an English teapot going back, and two books on the Shasta area, and some copies of things related to my thesis I won't need in Japan again.

Yes, there is definitely a 'sea change' in the air around all this rearrangement in progress. A big life step and who knows where it will lead to? The next seven weeks are going to be appallingly busy, tasks crowd in from all sides, but I'm looking forward to getting back and actually doing it all as opposed to just thinking about it. Inevitably 'Little House' in going to be published a bit more erratically while the bulk of the heavy work gets done, but if you are a 'regular' please keep checking in and I'll try and keep you up to date with it all. Next time I write here I'll already be in sunny Lancashire - I hope!

Great Hot Water Bottles in my Life

I spotted the words 'hot water bottle' on a blog yesterday. Do they still make them? When we stopped at Cainz for some stationery on the way home from Mobara I scanned the shelves but I couldn't see any there; I wonder if they even sell the British-style ones in Japan? Everything is so high-tech here. We have an electrical one that you plug in, kind of square and about bottle sized and it is supposed to live around your feet. I think it even has a thermostat, but I've not used it much. It always seems to fall out for me after about an hour, an affliction I suffered from all my life, and anyway my problem is always keeping cool in bed; even in winter I need one leg sticking out of the side to radiate an bit of energy skywards. I'm a one-man global warming system. They are about to ban me at Copenhagen at last.

When I was a child though I always had a hot water bottle in England, in Barnard Castle in winter it verged on a 'necessity' I think. We had two absolutely 'bog standard' rubber ones, red and blue, and we filled them with hot water from the kettle on the gas stove. Not BOILING water of course, that was a complete 'no-no'. Nor too full neither, and you had to squeeze out all the trapped air. My grandmother would always perform such crucial operations, I was not to be trusted with the domestic hot water bottle capital stock, new ones cost money. They soon 'perished' anyway though, it was the quality of the rubber at the time. Nowadays the quality of the raw material is probably better and more reliable but the design and construction will be cheaper and nastier to make up for it. In the days before central heating going upstairs was like walking into a large refrigerator in January.

I once saw a programme on TV in England years ago that featured somebody who had the world's biggest collection of hot water bottles. It is part of our national character to seek fame that way. The French love to be pretentious, lots of capital letters and real estate investments, "The Museum of Wallpaper" (they REALLY have one, it is in Mulhouse) but in England we want to have more different ones than anybody else. Anyway this guy had hundreds of old hot water bottles collected over a lifetime. Why keep such a treasure to yourself, hidden in brown cardboard boxes, when you can inflict it on others? Not just red and green ones, there were loads of 'novelty' ones too, a bunny rabbit from Brighton, a teddy bear from Scarborough, a Ship in a Bottle cunningly wrought so that you poured the hot water down the main-mast, avast there you land-lubbers!

Novelty hot water bottles, the mind really does boggle. I thing I might start a competition for the most imaginative design. Quiet at the back there! I rather fancy some tasteful vegetable designs myself, perhaps a King Edward potato or a turnip to keep me warm at night. What do you think?

Open Air Nudity

Out last night to Daniel's Christmas Party. If it seems early it is only because they wanted to have it before Edera and I headed for England, which was pretty kind of them. Not that anyone in Japan would find it strange to have such a seasonal event on 5th December. And Daniel throws really good parties too, in fact he's the best party-giver I ever came across. Everybody gets talking to everyone else, kids and 'grown ups' are well integrated, there's lots of collective fun and games and - he being French by ancestry - the food is excellent. And lots of friends there too. Just amazing how harmoniously half a dozen nationalities mix together, the language swapping going on between Japanese, English and Chinese depending on who is talking to who. And what a beautiful bunch of children there, perfect to see so many from two upwards getting on so well together. I stayed out well past my bed time - even though I don't drink alcohol I feel rather 'hung over' this morning with such a late and busy night.

Of course at such Christmas parties I have a job to do. I am perfectly endowed (so they tell me!) to be Santa-san's assistant on such occasions, which means that while the 'happyoukai' is in full swing and everybody is doing their 'party piece' I have to sneak out to the car and change into my outfit. Then, at the appropriate moment, I have to start banging on the windows and doors and come in with a very loud 'Ho! Ho! Ho!' and a huge bag of presents to give to all the kids. And as there were about fifteen kids there last night it really WAS a huge bag. I'm a bit noisy and 'burly' and definitely 'in your face' in the Santa role and a few of the younger ones are scared of me the first time I turn up but then the next year they have the routine and get wildly excited.

It is always interesting changing clothes out in the lane. When we arrived last night there was a torrential thunderstorm going and I thought I was going to have to devise a 'Plan B' but it dried up and got quite frosty so I could sneak out as usual. I always wonder if a police cruiser is going to show up while I'm hopping around on one leg dressed only in my underpants but so far I've negotiated this stage in the transformation without incident. I'm so 'hardy!'

Last night though a taxi and a car both passed by once I was in my Santa suit. They slowed down pretty fast as a large red bearded figure with a sack showed up in their headlights as they drove along the lonely country road, and as they crept by me I waved and shouted 'Merry Christmas' of course. Another mystery they will be living with for the rest of their lives. Just a pity I didn't have some reindeer and a sledge parked up on the adjacent onion field but you can pay too much attention to detail, there is lily-gilding and there is taking unreality to extremes.

Quitting

We had one of our teenage students 'quit' recently. Sad. Of course they all 'quit' sooner or later as they move out of education or finish courses, but inevitably you always get some who 'blow up' and just pack up in the middle of their studies too. Thankfully we don't get too many.

This case had all the usual danger signs; a strong willed listless teenager, attendance becomes more erratic, homework left undone then the parent on the phone with ''the news". It feels to me that "juku" is always the first to give way in the unspoken contract between parent and child, the one that unhappy kids can score an intial victory over. The gradient is getting steeper, they struggle to keep up despite some extra attention and then one day the hillside gives way a bit and gravity takes over "I don't want to go and study there any more - I hate it!" Concerned, perhaps pampering parent, demurs but then eentually complies with the insistent demands of the child.

Avalanche is a good word for it. There's the illusion that once this 'problem' is resolved there will be an opportunity to 're-group'. Sometimes, and especially if kids haven't been well taught, that might be the case. But the much commoner pattern is that it is the first 'failure' in a long line of increasing inability to achieve. Once juku is abandoned, or swapped, then as Hamlet rightly observed 'sorrows come not single spies but in battalions'. Once you have learned that walking away is an apparently successful answer then it spreads like poison. It 'seems' an effective strategy - and here in Japan non-achievers are happily left alone as long as they go through the motions - but then ultimately it corrupts every life choice. There are few 'second chances' in Japanese society. Around twenty you will collect the consequences - around 700 yen an hour in a casual job (if you are lucky). Or for many the hikkikomori lifestyle, staying in your room, socially isolated and living off your parents.

There's nothing you can do about it, ever more kindness and featherbedding is no solution here. If kids make this deliberate choice learning by their mistakes is the only option, they are responsible for their own lives.

Goodness! I sound so reactionary! It is because I've experienced that sense of 'being sucked dry' by people who don't listen or respond in so many ways. Of course everybody has their own agenda but 'quitting' on anything is a very dangerous luxury, however you justify it to yourself. When something is coming to and end you need to see it through then draw a thick clear line under it, that is my feeling anyway.

On hearing the first intimation of Christmas

I was reading some 'bloggery' this week where the writer was banging on about the virtues of avoiding the excesses of the modern Christmas season. I was shocked! Hey! - come on - what kind of an attitude is that eh? Bah! Humbug! If everyone ducked Christmas and nobody got sucked into the maelstrom of remorseless commercialism where would we all be? Retail market analysts would be plummeting earthwards from the window ledges of tall buildings, not a single Debenhams or Sogo department store would be left standing on the High Street and we would all immediately be plunged into an economic ice age. And that would just be the start of it believe me. Also, if I'm going to suffer why shouldn't you? You can soon have too much of smugness, especially other people's.

We have all the trimmings of a proper English Christmas looming this year - only the second in eight years. Here in Japan you notice Christmas, sleigh bells start ringing on garage forecourt hi-fi systems around October time, but the whole shebang is over by December 15 because they need to dump Santa in the skip to make way for the New Year fairies. Back in 2006 I was in England for Christmas and I'd forgotten what the whole thing was like. That non-stop retail madness for about three weeks before, every car park jammed to capacity, two hour queues to get out of Tescos with the packet of butter you forgot to buy before, shelves long stripped bare of poultry, sprouts, double cream. Go on, tell me honestly, you love it don't you! Who needs Raymond Briggs and "Walking in the air"?

Now here's one for some serious sociological analysis. Was there ever an uncommercial Christmas? Honestly? Was there really ever a golden age when children brimmed over with starry-eyed happiness at the sight of some doll made from two clothes pegs and poster paints on Chrstmas morning? Hurried to church to praise the Eternal clutching two toffees and an oatcake? OK then, put a date on it - which year was that exactly? If you look carefully at those paintings of cheerful Breugel peasants there are always Dorothy Perkins or Sears bags pushed under the trestle tables laden with goodies, in those snowbound cottages they are all watching back numbers of the Morecambe and Wise show, drinking too much and falling out with each other.

Tom Lehrer is one of the all time 'greats' for me and I love that Christmas Carol he wrote - you know - the one with "Angels we have heard on high ... tell us to go out and buy!" and "God rest you merry merchants may you make the Yuletide PAY!" You can find it here. And always remember

It doesn't matter how sincere it
Is, nor how heartfelt the spirit,
Sentiment will not endear it,
What's important is the price.

Salon Concert

Over to Hasunuma last night for our 'salon concert' performance - a chance to try out on an unsuspecting audience some of the stuff we have been rehearsing over the last couple of months with our trip to England in mind. That big full moon - yellow I guess - rising over the rice field stubble out on those wide fields out towards the coast, lovely! And for once we were on time, not just on time but at least six minutes early - how did we do that?

It was a 'salon' too - the main hall in the kindergarten that we rehearse in. We wanted to try out singing in a different setting. Here we always end up on stage, far from the audience, and that won't be the case next year, singing in churches we will be far closer to listeners. Last night plenty turned up to listen too, even through we charged for tickets for the first time ever we had more than seventy and there was standing in the back in the small room. Nice. A responsive audience for Japan as well, they 'sang along' well at the end with 'Silent Night'. But carols were only a small part of the programme.

I felt like the usual 'square peg' as the ladies all rushed around on their allotted tasks. Despite looking for things to help with there was always someone there before me. A few times I found myself thinking "This is why we produced the Beatles and you produced Toyotas" as somebody rushed by with a duster to hurl themselves on another pile of chairs. Japanese capacity for organisation is awesome, we are just such an idle lot back in Blighty.

I think our singing went OK. It is always difficult to judge when you are involved in it and especially when you are at the 'end of the line' and have to rely on the conductor for 'balance'. You try to remember everything that you have been told over the past several weeks but in the end it is a leap into the dark, you need to trust the leader and the other singers. I can see that singing well is in part a case of being able to replicate the same thing time after time accurately, to 'get it right' almost instinctively. But it isn't instinct, it takes a lot of practice.

Afterwards as we all sat around a laden table eating a late supper and talking over the evening that was the point that I took away for myself - that I needed to pay much more attention to 'specifics', getting it right and then just as important remembering what 'right' was. As music isn't a 'concrete particular' - not something than you can see, measure and put in a cupboard somewhere - then the only way you can do that is by working on your senses, remembering accurately what your body was doing and the sound that you made. Needs a lot of work, lucky that we have a good teacher to get us into more good habits.

Galopin

Last time I was in England I got this small print on Ebay, but I've only just bought a frame for it in 'Cainz Home' and taken it out of the tube it arrived in back in September. I thought that it was a lithograph but actually it is clipped out of an original June 1875 edition of the 'Illustrated London News'.

Race horses at 'Little House'? Well, I had the odd million to spare and I thought it might be an investment. No, only joking. I do enjoy days at the races though, it is a pleasure I discovered late in life and you couldn't keep me away from Haydock Park, Cheltenham and Sandown in my forties. But the link here isn't really to do with the 'gee-gees'.

The horse here is 'Galopin', winner of the 1875 Derby and great great great great great grandfather of most of the racehorses in England I would guess. He was born and bred in Lincolnshire and owned by the Hungarian aristocrat Count Batthyany and he could run pretty darn fast! He was a hugely popular horse in the late Victorian era, people would travel miles to see him. So what's my interest?

Well, it is the name. In the 1920's the directors of the London and North Eastern Railway, who were pretty well all race horse owners themselves and loved a day out at Doncaster Races, used to name all their express locomotives after famous racehorses. As part of this traidtion A3 No.2575 (latter 60076) was named 'Galopin' after this Derby winner.

Nearly forty years later, in 1959, we travelled up on Christmas from London to Darlington overnight by train. While I was waiting bleary-eyed on a freezing platform around 5:00 AM 'Galopin' arrived with a parcels train for Newcastle. Those A3's that were based at London King's Cross and hurried expresses north through Stevenage and Welwyn were photographed pretty well daily, but actually you'll have to search hard for photographs of 60076 because the locomotive was always based at Darlington or Gateshead. We were a poor lot in the North East without money for cameras in those days.

Anyway that cold dark winter morning the driver headed off somewhere and then - wonder of wonders! -the fireman, a kind-hearted young 'Geordie' - asked me if I would like to come up into the cab! He sat me down in the driver's seat as he stoked up ready for the departure north and explained how all the controls worked. My first ever 'cab visit' on an express locomotive! That sizzling boiler 'backhead' and the gleaming brass and gauge glasses - the memory has stayed with me for half a century like it was yesterday.

So the name 'Galopin' is very special to me. Horse flesh and steam - and they were both as swift as the wind

Females in charge?

Yesterday we had to call around at Y-san's house over near the beach to pick something up. She has five King Charles' Spaniels around the place, you might say that she has a house full of dogs. They are already barking when you park in the lane.

I really love visiting friends who have lots of dogs. All that fuss they make when you arrive, leaping up to welcome you and generally being naughty and jumping around on the furniture. With five of them you aren't going to be short of a good licking, that's for sure. And it takes them about ten minutes at least to settle down, work out the 'pecking order' in terms of socialising with the 'new humans' etc.

Later we we sitting around her kitchen table drinking coffee and eating persimmons and I had to laugh because all three of us had a dog each sitting on our knee. Y-san had the 'dominant female' on her lap, Edera had one of the three mutts that had taken a fancy to her and I had a 'softie' called Kei-chan - I think! Not sure how the other two landed on their respective laps but I hauled my dog up for a cuddle, I wasn't going to be left there dogless in a doggy world. But I had to laugh to see the three dogs all there sitting so seriously looking at us and each other, like three gnomes or dwarfs. Interesting how naturally this situation develops, a bit like with toddlers but usually with little kids it takes them an hour or two to get used to my beard, warts and wild staring eyes. Dogs will sit on any monster's lap, they don't discriminate, if you smell OK they love you. If only our lives were so simple.

I was a bit cautious about touching fur, a bit soon, touch is the most powerful of the senses when it comes to raw emotion, about 95% of your love flows out through your fingers. I've been giving our 'outdoor cat' Mew-kun a perfunctory stroke when I take his bowl outside in the morning but nothing too 'clinchy' or 'serious', nobody would want to linger much over his dirty matted coat anyway, grooming is not his 'thing'. But it was OK, I didn't get weepy.

Y-san's 'alpha female' growled at the two luckless and lapless canines left on the floor from time to time, just to remind them to keep their distance. And so the conversation got around to which was the fiercest, males of females. With dogs the females usually let a male enjoy the illusion of being alpha dog - I think - but just insofar as it counts for keeping the pack together. For 'Big Cats' it is usually the female that is boss, I wouldn't want to poke a stick in a tigress's ear.

Humans - now THAT'S an interesting one eh? Of course the rest of the coven were convinced that the female of the species is deadlier than the male, no doubts lurking in any corner of their jam-making and kimono-buying minds on THAT score; well they would say that wouldn't they! I feel an old joke about the Irish staging the Eurovision Song Contest year after year coming on here. Do they still have that on TV by the way? - another good reason to live in Japan.