Poems I can't read

At the moment our students are all busily rehearsing for our 'happyoukai' open class in February. It is quite a big event this year - twenty five items! - because many adult students are also taking part. So at the moment I'm listening to them earnestly practicing and correcting their pronunciation.

Last night K-chan was rehearsing a short talk about the poem "Stars and a Dandelion" by Kaneko Misuzu. Of course you can't really translate poems but the only version in English I have found goes ...

In the deep blue sky,
Like the pebbles in the sea,
The daytime stars, sinking until night comes,
Are invisible to our eyes.
Though we can't see them, they are there.
Things invisible are still there.

An old fallen dandelion,
Silently hides in the roof tile cracks.
The strong roots, waiting until Spring comes,
Are invisible to our eyes.
Though we can't see them, they are there.
Things invisible are still there.

I was going to read K-chan Edward Thomas' poem 'Adlestrop' and started to look for a copy of it but after a while I realised that even if I could find it I wouldn't have been able to recite it without tears anyway. I knew just where my voice would waver - at that line "And for that minute a blackbird sang". Somehow these words are far too potent now for me even to put into my mouth any more.

Where do such emotional tsunami pick up all their energy? Until that point in the text the poet is sketching mundane reality, a kind of 'water colour' of events, images. It becomes more diffuse and less stable for me when we arrive at 'haycocks dry' and 'high cloudlets in the sky' but my feet are still on the ground. And then in seven words he takes hold of my heart and leads me through a gateless gate, out of a relative awareness and into some place of perfect awareness where blackbirds eternally sing and I have angel wings. And there, close by that blackbird and round him, mistier, farther and farther, are all those birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire who reside within the ocean of all the worlds.

Possessions - Part I

Wah! First Degree jet-lag this morning, I knew that it would be coming and now here it is! Our taxi-driver neighbour helpfully slammed his car door and revved up on his way off to work at 3:45 AM and that was it. Here I am, Mr. Completely Wideawake, scanning the dark horizon from my eyrie. How many mornings will this last I wonder? Two or three probably.

Possessions. That's where I left my golden thread of conceptual thought hanging yesterday. I'd just suffered an overdose of junk 'antiques'. The function and value of possessions has been bugging me a lot during this last month, mainly because I have just transported some tons of them around northern England in arctic conditions. What are 'possessions' for, what is it that is 'possessed', and who possesses who? It all sounds like those anally retentive debates that academics love.

Working on my thesis a couple of years ago I briefly delved into Actor-Network Theory but I didn't follow it though for several reasons (not least that it seemed A: pretentious, and B: too French). But one of the theoretically interesting aspects of ANT for me was that it insisted on the agency (capacity for changing situations) of non-humans and things. It isn't just us that 'pulls strings' in life; a balloon, a china vase and a lollipop stick for example also act to produce outcomes, but without intentionality. In other words objects 'DO' things just like sentient beings do.

Well, this is what is starting to come up for me now. My relationship with 'possessions' is not one of simple title ("it is mine!") nor of functionality ("I can eat my dinner off it!"). Almost everything I own has a 'sign' or meaning related to it too. "This is the plate once OWNED by my grandmother". In fact all those things in boxes in my attic relate to complex links, almost nothing there except maybe the bathroom scales is simply functional. It is like a glacier. The snow falls and is transformed by physical processes into ice and then it takes on a new function and energy and does something new, maybe even destructive. Some things - say photographic images - clearly have this quality, in fact they exist ONLY for this purpose, images frozen in time (at least for a while). But also all my furniture and books also work this way, they have complex histories, you could sit down and catalogue all the different kinds of association they contain. Maybe I will. And attachments. Wah! There's a dodgy word. Non-attachment good, attachment bad.

And 'value' too. Marx identified 'use value' and 'exchange value' as quite different but in truth there are lots of kinds of value when you start digging.

Now I've only just picked up the shovel here and I already feel that I could write a whole essay but what comes to me for now is that attachments of themselves aren't bad. My life is integrated with this stuff, it defines my 'journey', it has 'agency'. Possessions aren't bad BUT also they are not me, they don't define 'me'. If I just let myself be defined by that stuff then already I'm in the swamp up to my ankles, if not my knees.

Somehow I need to look at 'possession' and the agency it involves carefully and see the WAYS in which this works. Possession isn't intrinsically 'wrong', but maybe it draws unhelpful boundaries. And this is probably a process without boundaries, no going back. Why just draw a line around one group of objects or ideas or relationships once you get started?

And really get rid of some stuff? Who said that?

Possessions - prologue

Yesterday morning we made a trip over to Yachimata to buy a bottle of French wine for a friend as a birthday present. Of French extraction himself he was hardly going to appreciate a bottle of Hokkaido 'red' or some cheap Californian 'plonk' and the Maxvalu supermarket often has some good offers on European stuff. Anyway that part of the proceedings was concluded soon enough when we found a bottle of Chateau-bottled Cotes du Rhone and we were soon heading back in the direction of home.

On the way we stopped at CAN!Studio - "Share the Dream!" - a kind of a 'cross' between a second hand shop and 'Poundstretcher'. In the UK you might find such a shop in Fleetwood or Skegness; in leafy Chiba-ken such establishments masquerade as 'antique shops'. I'm always rather puzzled as to where their stock could come from. 'Antique' it isn't but who could manufacture nasty fakes like that at such low prices? I guess they come from the Philippines, or maybe Indonesia or Brazil. Edera wanted me to give her some advice about buying a "closed" sign for a friend - an outdoor one that you can put in the car park entrance. In Japan we don't say 'closed' which would be a bit impolite, we deviously say 'jumbichuu' ('getting ready to open'). This reminds me of a kind of koan I struggled with as a child which were those signs on the doors of corner shops. On one side they would read "OPEN for you to buy Capstan Cigarettes!" But on the other side ... well, what can you say? It felt like for politeness it should read "CLOSED except for you to purchase Capstan Cigarettes!" but of course then the shop would have to be open (in a limited sense) all the time. So it read "CLOSED even for the purchase of Capstan Cigarettes!". This always felt both rude and illogical to me. You don't think I'm cracking up here do you?

Anyway as the wood on this 'jumbichuu' sign was split my strong advice was "don't buy it!" But you can never remove E from a shop so quickly, she's like a healthy wisdom tooth set deep in the jawbone and gums of life when it comes to extracting her from retail premises. And that is when the sudden wave of Satrean nausea set in with me. There was just something awful about all this stuff crowding in on me in this darn junk shop. Who would give any of it house space, let alone spend money on it? "You would!" came the reply from the sky, "seek out not the speck in your neighbour's eye before you cast the mote from your own mate!"

I know what is causing this crisis of possessions - it is the weeks I have just spent heaving and lumping a lifetime of possessions of my own around northern England in the snow. Suddenly I have become VERY focused on such things from my past, where did they come from and what am I supposed to do with them?

Big questions these and I will return to them tomorrow - or not as the mood takes me I guess.

Back to Japan

Back in my eyrie in leafy Chiba-ken this morning. It was a very smooth trip and had the advantage of the plane being half empty so I got a pair of seats to myself. The luxury of both an aisle and a window! With my restless feet and bladder an aisle seat and easy egress is a 'must' for me so I seldom have the luxury of a view out of the window too on flights between England and Japan. And at this time of year there isn't so much to see - although I got some nice views of Essex, Suffolk and Ibaragi-ken on take-off and landing and some rather mistier sightings of bits of southern Norway and the Russian Far East. The chief merit of it all was somewhere to put my books and snacks.

And then - there we were back at Narita, a familiar incoming view of Naruto and Hasunuma and the Otis Lift factory at Shibayama and then our wheels were down on the runway on a gloriously sunny winter morning. I'd forgotten just how incredibly bright and sunny it could be here. Pushing my suitcase across the car park with Edera I was positively dazzled after a couple of months of all that northern greyness and gloom, grateful for my 'varitint' glasses. Our familiar 'classic' and slightly beat up 1991 Nissan 'Skyline' was waiting in the car park and away down the maze of lanes back home. Farmers out with hand tools in the fields and even on tanbo ploughed ready for the 2010 rice crop - all so different to Lancashire and Cumbria and yet equally familiar.

After a long siesta it was so nice to get back to a choir rehearsal in the evening - people pleased to see me back and the first chance in a long time to settle down to making some music. We were debating which pieces to include in the repertoire for our English trip in July and we sang through around twenty items to see if we could remember them. Now we can start getting a programme put together.

A long sleep afterwards, the first night back is always a case of letting go of fatigue. Tonight and the next few nights jet lag will kick in and I'll become hopelessly awake from around 3:00 am but I've learned to roll over and go with the flow. On one blog I was reading this morning someone had written "knowing my body is doing its best and getting out of its way" and over a decade of long-haul flying between England and Japan that has certainly become my approach to time zone changes. You just have to 'give in' and take whatever time it takes to readjust.

Anyway, it is fun taking a siesta in the afternoon, not so?

There's no place like ...

That's it - job done! Everything is put away that I will have time to put away this visit, the downstairs rooms are hoovered and today's dishes put away and my case, if not exactly packed, has a big heap of clothes, files and books tipped inside so that I don't forget anything. All I need to do now here tomorrow is wash my sheets and pyjamas and leave them to dry on the clothes horse in the back room. Oh! And take some letters to the post office.

And after that quite a catalogue of things to do tomorrow in Lancashire. Buy some stuff, see my mum and take some recyclable garbage to the tip. Then to Julia's house and an early start the following morning for the airport. With luck I'll be home by midnight UK time.

'Home'. That has become a much more complicated idea this last few weeks. I've moved around a lot in my life and I've felt that several places fitted this description at various times. If you live in a different country married to someone from a different culture the issue of 'home' becomes even more complex because you have family in two different places - and not just physically. One home grounded in an intimate and loving partnership, and another rooted in 'who you are' in a kind of genetic sense, the place where the wind and weather blew through childhood hair.

This last several years that second 'home' has been rather low key for me, and I have learned to really love Japan and put down roots there too. But now it has suddenly materialised and taken form again in terms of stone and plaster and plumbing and it is full of my 'stuff'. It all still requires 'taming'. And then getting used to.

In the short term it doesn't feel like there is any easy answer to any of this - it is enjoyable, even 'right' - to have more than one home but confusing too. Way back then sailors were said to have a wife in every port - that might be an interesting solution to the "where is home?" dilemma! Ha! ha! Only joking - I think!

So the next 'Little House' will really be from the original "Little House".

Shetland Bus

Some time this week - to be honest it has been so busy that it has all become a bit of a blur - I found myself eating beans on toast and watching a programme on Shetland. It was something to do with geology and it had a very interesting piece about a big tsunami in Sullom Voe around 15,000 years ago caused by an underwater landslide near the Faroe Islands. One of those places I always wanted to visit and never got to and now never will I guess.

Anyway one of the other items in this programme presented a brief history of the "Shetland Bus". This had nothing to do with the four-wheeled variety, but with the story of the link that local trawlermen kept between Shetland and Norway during World War Two. During the long stormy winter nights they would make the crossing from Lerwick or Scalloway to the Norwegian coast, taking in resistance fighters and supplies and bringing out refugees.

This item made me smile because of a memory it brought back for me, -not of the actual events but related to a copy of the classic book on the whole subject written in the 1950's by David Howarth. Back in my twenties I worked for a while in the Orkney islands, and a regular visitor to my office was a character who was always on the scrounge for some small change for beer. He'd turn up a couple of times an month and he was like a leech, you would never get rid of him until you had parted with a couple of bob and he would spin any yarn to make you part with it.

One popular strategy was to tell me that he could get me a rare first edition of "Shetland Bus" for only ten shillings but of course I was never going to hand over that amount of money. However the day came when it dawned on me that this might be a good investment. The next time he came into the office I handed over a ten bob note and asked him to drop the book around the next day. He couldn't believe his luck, he was around to the public bar of the 'Kirkwall Hotel' in a few minutes

Of course I never saw either the book or the ten shillings, but I had a lot of fun accosting him in the street for months afterwards asking if he had got my copy yet. He never set foot in my office again and when he saw me looming up in the street he would dive down the nearest alley.

Some years later I came across a copy of "Shetland Bus" in a secondhand bookshop and of course I bought it straight away. I wonder where it is. I just scanned along my bookshelves here and I can't spot it. Must still be in a box somewhere.

"The Bird" dies

I had a sad piece of news this morning. Edera emailed me to tell me that our bird had died. He was very quiet last night, and then when she got home from helping E-san at the restaurant at Narita today she found him dead in his cage.

He never had a name - to us he was just 'The Bird'. He was a Java finch (or sparrow) and he'd lived to a pretty ripe old age, eleven I think. He was one of a pair bought for M-chan when she was still in elementary school. The other bird was much more extrovert and bold and even a bit aggressive towards him, but she fell victim to Tora in an unfortunate accident as a youngster. He was shyer, more cautious about flying out of open cage doors, and his instincts saved him. Later, when we moved to "Little House" he progressed from the girls' bedroom and took up residence in several different rooms - the genkan, later the washitsu and then the outer room of the ofuro near the washing machine. When we had guests he went upstairs either to my study or the front bedroom, but wherever he was he had a wonderful song that would spread around the house like sweet incense. He was always so pleased to see Edera that he would go through a little dance when she came near his cage.

Keeping the bird caged used to worry me sometimes but then one day he escaped while it was being cleaned, flew through an open door and headed for a roof-top further down the lane. Edera called him softly and immediately he came back to her finger and allowed himself to be put back on his perch. After that I always felt that he was living with us through choice.

Three years ago he left the house to live with M-chan but her changed routines saw him back with us again about eighteen months ago. He had grown pretty decrepit with age by then, one leg was lame and his sight in one eye was fading. But being back with us gave him an extra lease of life somehow, always there chirping away when we did morning scriptures. He and the cats had arrived at a kind of modus vivendi, they all sat in the corner like a small family while we recited the sutra. When the cats were shut out and he was out of his cage he would happily hop around the room and occasionally he'd make a short flight and perch on my shoulder; he had come to trust me at last.

And then finally to our surprise he out-lived both cats, who would have thought that would happen? Every morning I used to peep in through the fusuma just to check he was still alive and he was. Amazing stamina.

But sadly no longer. For the first time ever we are a household without animals to care for. It will take some getting used to.

Snowy Drive

A young ginger tomcat keeps landing on my windowsill (no curtains yet!) in the evening dark and making me jump. He's very friendly, and keen it seems to pay me a nightly visit. Nice to stroke him out in the dark back yard, although it is a bit early yet for me to touch new cats; I could feel the love flowing out of my fingertips and into his ears, much too much emotion there. Cats are cats; nothing more beautiful.

This afternoon I had to drive up to Hexham and it was a great trip, but I'm tired now. After three more days of general thaw I decided to give the sensible M6 via Carlisle a miss and take the "as crows fly" route across Grains o'Beck to Middleton in Teesdale and then into Weardale and across into Allendale. Lovely journey and I had the whole North Pennine range pretty well all to myself. The roads were OK apart from the crossing from Teesdale to Weardale. I made my first attempt taking a little gated road I know from Newbiggin to Westgate but after a couple of miles the ploughing stopped and I came to a wall of snow around six feet high. My luck was better with the road from Langdon Beck to St. John's Chapel which at over 2000 feet must be one of the highest public roads anywhere in England. I made it up to the summit quite quickly but the steep descent down into Weardale on the shady un-thawed northern slope was pure Torville and Deanery. The car was away like a toboggan down the hill on the black ice but of course I'd taken the precaution of slowing right down to around five miles per hour. Even so you couldn't hold it, but then every so often was an ice-free are of tarmac on the road that let you brake. And not much risk - the snow walls on either side were high enough to keep you on the road.

I always find situations like that are a bit like walking along the edge of some beetling cliff, I have to really work to resist the temptation to throw myself off just to see what it feels like. Just how fast could you drive down a hill like that and still walk away I wonder? Say you came over the top, accelerated to sixty and then hit the brake. What would happen? Only joking! I think ...

I've always thought that the top end of Weardale is the kind of place you would have to be born in to make a success of living there. There are other places like that and they are nearly all narrow and - to me - claustrophobic valleys. The Rhondda and Cynon Valley to name but three. And East Lancashire. In Japan parts of Mie-ken have the same effect on me, a potential 'life sentence'. Best not to think about it.

My career as a spy

Had a bit of a laugh today. Naming no names but somebody in Japan I was chatting with asked me a question on behalf of somebody else and I can guarantee that you would never guess what it is. If you don't live in England you might not know it, but many English towns have Bye-laws forbidding the fouling of the pavement and parks by dogs. Of course you can't stop the little blighters, dogs do what dogs have to do, but what they mean is that if your dog DOES let fly with something then you have to pick it up in a grey plastic bag which hopefully is hole-free. I guess this performance takes place in every corner of the civilised world these days. And many places here have special strategically placed 'poop bins' where you can dispose of these plastic bags rather than having to carry them around all day while you visit the supermarket etc.

Now, what I got asked, indirectly and by someone actively involved in local community services back in Japan, was "who empties these poop bins and how?" Bit of serious industrial espionage there, don't you think so? Not quite solid state electronics secrets nor the latest ladies' high fashion but I had visions of someone lurking in the shrubbery in one of those soft felt hats we wear back in leafy Chiba-ken with powerful binoculars glued to their eyes, in search of the inside story on British canine poop management.

As the question has been posed I'm kind of curious myself. Is there some advanced technology at work here or is it some poor devil on 'work experience' that has to do this? Oh! Sorry - we don't call it 'work experience' now do we - the buzz work is 'internship'. Yep! An internship in dog cr*p collection.

Being Britain we paste up signs everywhere threatening to flog people and imprison them for life for such serious offences as letting their dog answer a call of nature (And quite right too! The death penalty is too good for the lot of them!) but actual bin provision is a bit rarer. I do know that they have them on the 'Stray' in Harrogate. I used to take Julia's dog Darcy for walks there and I always used to pray that she wouldn't have a dump but of course she always did. Lot's of 'cover' for park keepers with video cameras there so no option but to clean it up, that is always the way of it.

I'll ring up the city council there tomorrow and ask them. Of course I won't confess I'm a spy working for a major foreign power, I'll just tell them that I'm doing scientific research or some cock-and-bull tale. Watch this space for some interesting answers which you may not be expecting.

Double Death

Visited my mum today and I was showing her some old pictures I'd unearthed in the aftermath of last week's move. I'll have to put them in my rucksack and take then back to Japan with me to scan into my laptop. A couple of them were of my Auntie Nora (actually my great-great aunt Nora) sitting chatting to my grandfather. We were both musing on how much we still really missed her company, even though she died more than twenty years ago. It is a bit of an accolade that isn't it - to still be missed more than twenty years after your death? Not many people in your life leave such an impression.

She was very close to my grandparents and a regular visitor to the house and after my grandmother's death in 1960 she and my grandfather remained lifelong friends. They had lived in the same streets in Stockton and known each other more than eighty years. In fact she was a second grandmother to me.

She had a stroke in October 1987, and was taken into the Airedale Hospital at Keighley and I went over to see her as soon as I heard the news. She knew me and was sitting in a chair putting her customary brave face on it but one side of her face was drooping badly and she was very distressed. The staff told me that they were planning to start physiotherapy the next day to get her moving again. But on the way home somewhere between Laneshaw and Colne I just pulled over into a lay-by and had a good howl. It seemed so desperately unfair that someone who had been so kind and compassionate and yet had such a tough life should suffer like that. It didn't look good to me. But I put a brave face on it when I got home and painted the brightest picture I could for my housebound and anxious grandfather.

The next day Nora had another massive stroke, and within a few days had been moved to a grim little cottage hospital in Bingley. I saw her a few times after that but she never seemed to regain any awareness and inch by inch slipped away into a coma. She died in January 1998.

At the end of October my grandfather also suddenly took ill, developed pneumonia and died within twelve hours. And there is the strange part of these events really. These two people who had been so close for their whole lives in the end knew each other's fate. He died before her, but she was already in a coma. He never really knew just how much she was deteriorating, he died before she really declined. So in a way they were each spared the other's loss. And these days when I remember one I remember the other.

Round to the hostel.

I nipped across to our local Youth Hostel here this morning to confirm and pay for a booking for 'the ladies' in July. They will certainly be staying here for one night, but maybe four. Hopefully we'll have our slightly revised plans settled by the end of this week.

It is a nice hostel here - a converted Methodist Chapel. Actually I can remember dropping my Auntie Nora off outside for a service back in the nineteen seventies, but I can't recall the old interior, perhaps I wasn't inside back then. Now you no longer enter by the front double doors but by a side entrance that must have led to the caretaker's rooms. Just behind the original entrance is the member's kitchen, and then part of the old nave is converted as a dining area. The dormitories are at the east end, which is a bit of a warren with a new floor inserted over where the altar must have been.

I felt kind of nostalgic taking a look around the place. I've used Youth Hostels all through my life in various incarnations and guises and soon I might just take to the road for a while and use them again. During my university years and for some time after I used them to travel around the more mountainous parts of Britain back in the days when you had chores to do like cleaning the kitchen floor and emptying the potato peelings. Later, in the nineteen eighties and nineties when the kids were growing up we often used the hostel at Alston for Buddhist-style 'family weekends'. Once we even took the place over in December for a winter get-together which involved lots of singing, games and large vegetarian meals contrived on Calorgas stoves.

In Japan I've used hostels too. No English-style member's kitchens there and in most of them I was sleeping on a futon on tatami floors, but generally they have the same feel and flavour and they are fun to visit. Once I even used a hostel up at Abashiri in Hokkaido next to the Sea of Othotsk. Thanks to some horrid cartography I had to wander around in the moonlight up and down the shore until I found it but it was romantic enough and I got there in the end although I've never believed a Japanese sketch map since.

I wonder how 'the ladies' will find an English hostel. They all enjoy sleeping together in a bunch on the floor at occasional choir 'sleep-overs' so a dormitory to themselves should be popular too. And who will take the top bunks and who will take the bottom bunks? That's an interesting one. Like snow at Christmas you could start a 'book' and take bets on it and I could make some educated guesses. But my lips are sealed

Tous pour un - un pour tous.

There's that "roots of co-incidence" thing at work again. We've been having some real difficulties - not of our own making - at choir recently, and yesterday I sent an email to the other members along the lines of "Let's all cheer up and get on with it! We have a show to get on the road (literally) here!" That quotation from Dumas' "The Three Musketeers" seemed very appropriate. "All for one, one for all!" It is certainly the spirit we have engender in each other over the coming months.

And then, blow me, I was working away with boxes of stuff here just before tea time and suddenly there was "The Three Musketeers" on BBC2. You-Know-Who is having a joke with me eh? It was the 1993 Disney version of the film, one of the "To Paris five leagues" variety - cowboy-and-indian style chases on horseback but with tabards and hats with big feathers and pistols rather than 'chaps' and sombreros and Colt 45s. As the movie progressed Dumas was left further and further behind, there is absolutely no subtlety in Disney plots. In this version Richlieu gets socked on the jaw and falls in the lake and Louis XIII makes a speech about the astonishing value of democracy and capitalism. But APART from that it is a BIT like the Dumas story. Well, the characters have the same names at any rate. Usually.

Edera edited out my stylish Dumas reference when she turned my scrawlings into good Japanese. "It has been used by everybody" she said. This came as a bit of a surprise to me, I didn't know that but of course thinking about it I can see that it is one quotation from European literature that would make complete sense of a kind in Japanese culture. Loyalty to the priorities of group, the groups priorities are my priorities. And the support of the group, I'll never walk alone. But do these six words have exactly the same meaning in a Japanese and and English context? I'm not so sure.

I experience 'fellowship' is a kind of magnetism. There comes a point in relationships both with individuals and groups when this invisible force is either at work or it isn't. It grows out of trust. And for me, once that sense of trust has emerged - and it can alarmingly quickly - then this sense of 'all for one, one for all' follows on rather quickly too. The obstacles dissolve, I'm inclined to give people the benefit of the doubt, see the best in them and make all kinds of allowances. But sometimes that trust is withdrawn too, something often apparently trivial arises but it isn't trivial.

Closed Roads

Sometime next week - maybe Monday evening - I'll need to get over to Hexham for a meeting. I was beginning to think that it would be the 'long way around' by Carlisle and the Tyne Valley but this last couple of days have seen a serious thaw in progress around here and with a bit of luck the higher crossings of the Pennines might be open again next week. If I head due north from here and across to Middleton-in-Teesdale then I can cut over into Weardale and straight across to Hexham. We'll have to see.

Over the last fortnight there has been no road open across the 'roof of England' between the Tyne and Wensleydale - a distance of around 130 kilometres. Quite extraordinary really. Of course we've had our share of snow and gales, but nothing really exceptional. This winter weather would have been the norm here forty or fifty years ago and count as easy going in Canada or Hokkaido. So what has changed? The police now seem to close roads on a precautionary basis and not open them again until there is a thaw. This 'closure' is no longer on an advisory basis, it is an interdiction, you would be charged for disregarding it. Back in the 1960's the decision was left to you. Now the police take the decision for you.

A few years ago I did actually drive over one of these Pennine passes - Hartside - when the police had closed the road in this way. It wasn't really by intention, I took a minor road which joined the closed major route beyond where the barrier had been placed and unwittingly drove across to Alston where I found the other barrier closing the road to traffic headed south. The drive was fine, quite straightforward with reasonable care. There was no reason at all for that road to be closed.

I wonder when this habit of closing upland roads really 'took off'. At one time local road maintenance crews would begin to shift the snow as soon as the storm began to abate, keeping local traffic in Britain's uplands moving wherever possible was seen as a priority. Not any more I'm afraid

Napping

I'm going to have to really stir myself - just twelve days and I'll be on the plane headed for Narita. And so much to do, I need to start working through the contents of this house in detail. But somehow today I just had to seriously vegetate for an hour or two. Too many days of constant effort and motion and it was time to do nothing, at least for a short time. After lunch I snuggled down under the quilt and read a book until I fell asleep. Such luxury! I like our new bedroom - spacious and nicely proportioned and when it is sunny outside it catches the light right through the day. Not that it was sunny today, but it was just great to lie there with the wind and rain battering on the window. Pure Gothic romance.

About fifteen minutes after I'd dozed off the phone went. It was Edera confirming the dates for her weeks over here in the summer. British Airways tickets are cheap at the moment but it feels like a good time to get them ordered. Then no sooner had I put the phone down than it went again and it was my mum asking me (yet again!) if I'm taking her to the dentist's on Thursday morning. But after that I had half an hour of complete quiet rest and I feel a lot better for it.

I'm not so sure about 'after lunch' naps as a regular event but I take enough of them. They are usually part of my routine in Japan but there I get up early and also go to bed quite late so six hours at night and an hour during the afternoon feels reasonable. There is a real sensuous pleasure in going to sleep in the sunshine filtering through the open window with a light breeze drifts in through the mosquito guard - in increasing stages of undress as spring advances into summer and temperatures soar. But there comes a time around June when the window has to be closed and the air-con turned on.

Not much risk of that here, even the balmiest summer day in Cumbria doesn't point to air conditioning

Russell Ackoff

Driving back up the motorway from Lancashire this evening I was listening to a programme celebrating the work and research of the late Professor Russell Ackoff into management styles. With luck you might still find this broadcast here. Ackoff wrote about management science even in his late eighties, and his last and most popular book was "Management F-Laws: how organisations really work". He was a quite a subversive thinker when it came to studying approaches to making organisations work well, and the programme prompted me to think that if I was still interested in this topic - and maybe I am though certainly no longer in any formal sense - then I ought to get a copy of this work and take a look at more of the detail.

In the course of thirty minutes he seemed to raise at least a dozen questions about management style and content which worried me for years. Back in the nineties Whitbread followed the fashion. We were forever sending senior directors over to Harvard Business School to learn about management and then there was a general cascading of contemporary management philosophy down through the organisation, with lower grade directors getting sent to 'secret squirrel' weeks at West Country hotels and much plotting about how to make us a leaner, meaner organisation. At the heart of this stuff was our "Information Technology and Business Process Engineering" team who were collectively about the dumbest and least imaginative bunch of bureaucrats I ever had the misfortune to meet.

My boss came back off one of these courses with the term "No Brainer" tattooed on his forehead. It was like living in a Monty Python sketch. Almost everything you suggested to him afterwards from going to the toilet to investing in Brazilian hotel chains became a 'no-brainer' but to be honest the real 'no-brainer' was him. A favourite acronym was "KISS" which for him referred not to what you sought to do tot he woman of your dreams but served as a distillation of the advice "Keep It Simple Stupid". If the cap fits ...

Ackoff also thought that this was a pretty dumb course of action. Reality is never simple, you can't reduce it to some formulaic approach. Only simple people keep things simple, if you really want to get to grips with something you have to understand the whole complexity of it. But that isn't what management science is about, gurus need to reduce everything to the level that people without imagination that wouldn't recognise an original idea if it bit them in the bum can understand.

I feel better for getting that off my chest.

Lumley Castle

Over to Durham today and as the Stainmore road was closed between Brough and Bowes because of the snow I had to drive around by Carlisle and through the Tyne Valley to Newcastle. It is like going around three sides of a square, and adds nearly two hours to the trip, but I had to get over there if possible, I didn't want to leave my trip until next week. If I'd waited and we had fresh snow maybe I would never have got there at all.

Apart from the extra driving it turned out to be quite a smooth trip, but tiring. The snow closed in this evening coming up the Eden Valley from Penrith to Brough but it wasn't much, just whitening the road in my headlights. Nice to go, nice to meet people, and nice to get home here safely.

It isn't often that I approach Durham from the north and these days the A1(M) motorway runs up the hillside from Chester-le-Street and gives access to the city from the east side. When I was a student here in the 1960's this road was just being built and I can remember the drone of earth moving equipment working a few hundred metres away as I studied in my room, a sound as characteristic of that time as 'fundamentalist' preachers ranting away about evolution on Radio Caroline. I spent two years based at Lumley Castle, then spartan student accommodation and nowadays a rather overpriced and bizarre hotel in the 'four-poster' and medieval banquet genre perched above the Durham County cricket ground. Usually you can't see it from the motorway, it is hidden by thick woodland in the adjacent 'dene', but today the trees were bare and those familiar square towers were just visible lurking behind their screen of oaks.

A few years ago I once turned off at Chester-le-Street and took Edera and M-chan to take a look at the old place. It was just a few minutes diversion on our way to Hadrian's Wall and I never felt the temptation or need to go back there again, we didn't even stop for the over-priced bar lunch. No memories around the place that I felt I wanted to invoke, too much of a bumpy ride at the time perhaps. A couple of years ago a friend from my time there, Dave Gwillim, died of leukemia in New York and maybe that was the strongest link with the castle dissolved.

Places are like that. Some stand out as significant, not always for happy reasons but important nonetheless. Others, like this old castle which you might think would resonate in memory, just seem to evaporate over time. Just somewhere you pass on the motorway, sometimes you see them and sometimes you don't.

Up the Wall

When will I ever finish writing these "The Move" blogs? When the aftershocks diminish and I finally get around to doing something else I suppose. Hard to remember now how I spent all those sunlit hours before I started on this lot, and I am certainly looking forward to getting around to some serious lounging around reading and drinking coffee in future. 'Idleness 101' is the course for me.

Well, at least the old comfy wicker armchairs are in place now, and today the last of the books got put on the last vacant shelves. No room to spare, I used the last few centimetres and I'll certainly have to sell some on Amazon to make space for some of Edera's books. Tomorrow evening I'll start at the top left hand shelf of the left hand book case in the sitting room and work away at it - taking them off the shelf one at a time and asking myself that question "do I really need this?". After all I'll never get around to reading them all. I'd guess conservatively that I've got about 2000 'proper' books here at the moment, not including the countless magazines, guides and pamphlets stuffed into folders in my study. That is more than I could ever re-read in my lifetime, and of course I must have around 500 books in Japan too. Scary! Time to liquidate some of that stock into cash on Amazon or Ebay if possible, and get some down to the Oxfam book shop.

We also got five pictures, a Japanese calligraphy, a mirror and a clock up on the walls today too. I've got lots of pictures from the various houses that I have lived in during my life and I notice that they are harder to handle than books. For example some might sit well on one wall in one house and rest uneasily in another. I also seem to have lots of prints acquired on my travels too. Twenty years ago the whole house looked like a cross between a gallery and a travel agency, I couldn't go anywhere without acquiring some poster that would end up in a sous-verre. The best ones I seem to remember came from the American South-West.

None of that stuff is up so far, indeed I suspect some of it is still lurking stowed under a bench down in Lancashire. It all makes me wonder what is the 'perfect picture'. Something vaguely Buddhist featuring American trains and sunflowers in a pointillist style but not too showy. Anyway just for now I'm exercising Zen restraint, no vanity boxes full or trinkets from Bavaria nor flights of mallards over the mantelpiece headed up the wall towards the window. There is a puffin on a bookshelf though, not sure where he came from, I think he might have lived here before.

Hmm ... now which drawer did those ducks get put in ...

Great Moves I Have Known

Well, that's the job done at last and tonight is my first night in my own bed in our Kirkby Stephen house. Yesterday was the heaviest part of the move - on Saturday we had brought up a 'cargo' box van full of furniture but it was mainly light stuff. The second load included some real 'dead weight' items, including three filing cabinets and a large map chest. Despite having two very fit helpers it took us all our time to get those off the tailgate, through the snow and upstairs into the study. We were knackered.

This morning I fought my way through the awful traffic into Preston to get the van back to the hire depot and we headed up here this morning to sort out the mountains of stuff dumped around the house. We've been at it all day. Somehow sorting out this kind of situation always involves one or two key jobs and so it was today - the first thing I needed to do was to get a cupboard back together that I use for storing journals and magazines - that gave us the capacity to get lots of material out of storage cases and back into some kind of a longer term space.

I'd like to think that this is my last 'serious move' to organise, but who knows eh? Over the last couple of weeks this move has had me thinking about 'Moves of Yesteryear', and 'My Life in Moves'. I've moved a lot in my life but three especially came to mind. When I was twelve we moved from Tees-side to Sussex; I have no idea of how our limited stock of furniture made it from one end of England to the other but we travelled overnight by train and had to go and pick up the key from the housing department on arrival and walk to the new maisonette. Then after I was married there was a move from Glasgow to the Orkney Islands. We took our stuff to Scrabster in a 'Transit' van and loaded it over the rail onto the deck of the 'St. Ola'. When we arrived at Stromness the tide had gone out and our sad little heap of tea chests, cases and a single pine table was about four metres below the level of the quay. Some kind person put it into a net, hauled it ashore and stored it in a building with some fertiliser until we found somewhere to live.

Then there was the time we moved from South Wales to Lancashire when the kids were very young. It was an inauspicious move somehow and I don't remember much of the detail but I do remember after everyone else had left dragging a Harrison 5" lathe down the garden path on my own. Around 150kg of solid steel.

Why was I doing that? Something is obviously awry when you are dragging a large lathe down a path in the rain on your own, don't you think so?

Ash Fell

Well, that is my move more than half done. I took a box van with a full load of furniture up to Cumbria today followed by two friends with their hatchbacks overflowing, one with a trailer attached. There is some real 'dead weight' to handle tomorrow, including three filing cabinets and a map chest, a wardrobe and the bed, but suddenly it all seems to look much more manageable than it did a couple of weeks ago.

As we were unloading the van this afternoon the snow set in. Only light showers but it produced the usual comments of "I'd better get set off back while Ash Fell is still open" from my helpers. Over the last fortnight as darkness fell and the snowflakes settled on the yard wall outside the kitchen I've had the same feeling myself. Better get back over Ash Fell while the road is still passable, if the snow gets deeper I might not make it.

'Ash Fell' is the hill on the A685 between town and the M6 twelve miles distant. It is a ridge just over a thousand feet high. When I was a teenager the west side of this mountain especially was a difficult drive but it has been straightened and better graded over the years and it is kept well ploughed when snow starts to fall. But a good blizzard will leave it closed for a few days before the ploughs get through.

It struck me today that the difference between living in Kirkby Stephen and living anywhere else in the whole world is how you view this Ash Fell road. If you don't live in town, then Ash Fell becomes an obstacle to getting out of the place, something to worry about least you get caught on the wrong side of the summit and turn into a pumpkin. On the other hand, if you DO live there, then you have to think about this the other way around, getting over the ridge before the snow gets too deep is important if you want to avoid a long trip around by Penrith. Or even worse, getting stuck in a drift on the fell. In future my cast of mind in winter will be on 'getting in' rather than 'getting out'.

Howgills in winter

One of the nice aspects of the last couple of weeks during which I've been driving between here and Kirkby Stephen early in the mornings has been to see the Howgill Fells in the early light of winter days. As you head north into Cumbria the motorway starts to climb past Kendal and Oxenhope and makes for the Lune Gorge, the only low level gap in the mountains between north Lancashire to the south and the Vale of Eden to the north which leads to the Solway and the Scottish border. The railway between London and Glasgow follows this route and also since the 1960's the motorway. As you approach the gorge at Greyrigg the Howgill Fells are straight ahead of you, forming the east side of the valley.

There is something especially beautiful about this little explored group of mountains. They consist of Silurian shales, a type of rock that creates a distinctively smooth but steep shape of upland. You can follow this outcrop of rocks right around the north side of the Lake District and everywhere they create this smooth kind of landscape. On mornings like today they look like a wonderful Chinese ink and brush painting, completely bare and the brilliant white snow shading off indistinctly into a piercing blue sky. A Hungarian friend once said that they looked like a 'green desert' and it was a good description. They never fail to look serene - in complete contrast to my beetling life as I hurry along the motorway.

Also striking as you drive into the gorge is the contrast in hill form between the smooth Howgills on the right and the craggy Ordovician volcanic rocks of the hills to the left. They are like chalk and cheese.

Doing this drive daily in a car with an outside air thermometer I've been noticing something that I had never spotted before although I have known this area my whole life. As you approach the narrow Lune Gorge from the south the temperature starts to drop and by the time you arrive at Tebay at the north end it might be five or six degrees lower. Then, as you head off east through the basin of the upper Lune Valley it gets even colder still - minus fifteen there today! This area is completely surrounded by hills and there is no way - except through the narrow gorge - for the cold air flowing down from the mountains to escape from that upper basin. In still wintery conditions with no wind it forms a lake of cold dense air, what in meteorological terms is known as a 'frost hollow'

Regular readers please note - 'Little House' is moving over the next couple of days, weather permitting, and I may not have the opportunity to write.

Household contents

Moved the first furniture out of the house today. Only as far as the garage at the end of the garden mind. But we took advantage of the unpromising weather to shift some of the items going up to my new house from upstairs and from the lounge into the garage. The proverbial 'Journey of Ten Thousand Ri' that always begins with that first step. I'm starting to feel that I've done about as much as I can without resorting to some serious muscle. The last week has been an 'emptying out' process, a stacking of belongings in provisional places, but not much of this stuff can be 'put away' until the furniture is placed against new walls.

If nothing else this move has been focusing my mind on the subject of 'households'. Households, rather to my surprise, became a central part of my studies over the last six years. People conflate 'families' and 'households' but the two aren't the same at all although the many households comprise two generations of a biological family. Households are processual - they consist of one or more people in a complex living association and that is usually expressed in all kinds of relationships and 'hardware' - bank accounts, gas suppliers, wardrobes, frying pans, front door keys. It is amazing how complex households are, 'comings together' of all kinds of artifacts requited for sleeping, mating, nourishment, shelter, warmth, entertainment and generally living as a group.

It would be interesting to research households further. Say for example to descend on a household with a dozen researchers and catalog every last hair grip and picture hook within the dwelling, analyse menus for a whole month etc. It is always the detail of reality that interests me, the 'starting point' for discerning patterns of behaviour. It is the only way to begin to seriously look at things, you can't assume that you know what is there. Day by day I become more like Mr. Gradgrind in Dickens' "Hard Times".Everything must be counted carefully.

Methods of moving would be interesting to research too. How did people manage before Ford 'Cargo' van hire was invented? My great grandfather was a carter in Stockton-on-Tees and much of his work consisted of shipping loads of furniture around town from house to house. In those days tenure of homes was a pretty tentative thing, people 'flitted' as necessary from one renting to another at a few days notice. And if you couldn't afford a horse and cart you took your few belongings on a hired hand cart.

I'd be stuck if I had to rely on that now.

Clearing a path

Bought a broom and a spade to clear the snow and ice from my new back yard today. Over the weekend when the big move takes place some stuff needs to be stored in the outhouses at the back and there was about six inches of snow in the way. I 'set to' outside the back door working towards the gate, shovelling the worst of it away and then attacking the remainder with the broom.

After a couple of minutes something 'clicked' in my mind and I realised that all this activity was unleashing some very deeply buried childhood memories. This is EXACTLY what my grandad used to do first thing in the mornings in our back yard in Barnard Castle if there had been snow overnight back in the mid nineteen-fifties. It was an important little winter routine for two reasons. Firstly our only toilet was at the bottom of the yard, and we didn't want to be wading through snow to get down there. If it had been a particularly cold east wind overnight there might be a quarter of inch of ice there to chip away at before 'normal service' could be resumed, and in the depths of winter a paraffin 'tilly lamp' was kept burning there so that the pipes to the lavatory cistern didn't freeze up and burst. Going to the loo could be a darn chilly experience.

Then, next to the toilet, was the coal shed. This was nearest the back gate and there was a little cupboard-like door leading to the lane through which the coal man could empty his sacks if nobody was home. Not that my grandmother would ever have trusted the coalman to deliver full measure unsupervised, those sacks were always counted in under her eagle eye! A new scuttle of coal would be needed to light the fire each morning and you didn't want to be slithering around with a heavy bucket of coal on ice and snow.

Well, in my house there is no outdoor toilet or coal shed any more but the layout is just the same and that was where I was shovelling my way to.

Rev. Mugo was helping me out today with some decorating and balanced on her steps in the back living room where she was busily applying emulsion paint to the walls she could see my progress down the yard with shovel and broom. Later she commented that when I paused and looked around it seemed like I was remembering something.

She was right!

Keeping a grip

Over this past couple of weeks someone has let me down very badly. Worse, they have let down some of my closest friends very badly too. I don't want to talk about the detail but there you go - something went very wrong and it makes a difference, someone that I'd considered a friend I maybe won't be able to ever trust or think of that way again. I'll just have to sit with it and let the anger dissolve and see how I see it afterwards. I tend to trust people rather instinctively and you can trust most people most of the time, it isn't often that trust is betrayed. But it happens.

Maybe the saddest part of it is that no matter how painfully we've been let down the one who has lost the most, has been most damaged by what has happened, is the person herself. There was a small problem there and she massively over-reacted in a situation which actually required no particular response at all. Somehow her perspective was completely wrong - well, that is my opinion. I can be pretty hot tempered myself but I seem to have spent most of the last forty years learning the hard way to spot the danger signs, to let go of burning embers that seem to hot to hold, not to add energy to situations that others seem committed to stirring up. If you don't add bad energy there is always a way through problems in relationships.

In this case it all feels like some straw broke a proverbial camel's back, an earthquake was waiting to happen and it only took the breeze from the wings of a butterfly to unleash the cataclysm and bring the dam toppling down. Then a deluge of stuff came pouring through the breach, no hope of any repair there I think, too much said and done, things broken. It isn't so much a case of anger, that fades after a while, it is the destruction of trust involved, you could just never work on the assumption that it wouldn't happen again. Actually she was in a situation that was a real dharma door for her, that contained the seeds of many things that might have carried her through several of the issues I sensed crowding into her life. But she pressed the 'detonate' button. Big, big mistake.

It surprises me how often people seem to stamp their foot, throw in their hand and stalk away from life and they apparently get away with it. But they don't, do they? You can't duck reality. You might apparently get away with throwing your toys out of your pram and if you are really deluded you might persuade yourself for a season that it was all justified and it doesn't matter. But not for long, and you can never lure that famous moving finger back to cancel even half a line even if you want to with all your heart. Getting and keeping a grip is crucial.

Whatever happened to cardboard boxes?

The 'cold snap' here in the UK doesn't improve any - lots of snow showers over the last week but the worst of it is the black ice on the roads and pavements. We are getting some really serious 'sub-zero' stuff during the nights too, it takes fifteen minutes to clear the windscreen before I can move off in the mornings. But the new house seems to be OK in this kind of prolonged freezing spell, I'm keeping the central heating on for just an hour during the night and again in the early morning and that seems sufficient to keep the place modestly warm.

Actually I more or less took the day off today, I had some good advice in that direction and I think it was a good move. But it wasn't a complete break. Some curtains that were on order came so this afternoon I headed into Preston to do some shopping for stuff that I no longer have - an ironing board, a clothes horse and a toaster. The price of stuff here just seems outrageous to me compared with Japan, you can't walk into any DIY store and get out without spending a hundred quid. I'd guess that hardware and paint is around 30% more expensive than back in leafy Chiba-ken. Living abroad your pension seems reasonable and then suddenly you realise that you would struggle to do much more than make ends meet and keep a cheap car on the road if you lived here full time and had to rely just on one income.

It is curious the things that have disappeared in the last few years since I moved north from Luton. On that move I scrounged loads of excellent cardboard boxes from Morrison's supermarket but now it seems that buckshee cardboard boxes are a thing of the past. Blame the politicians eh? I'm told that supermarkets had to stop putting them out for customer use because they were declared a Health and Safety risk! Just think what might happen if they ever caught fire in a store! As at least 30% of the goods on display must be equally flammable I don't see the logic of that one myself. And then there's the whole recycling target issue - that cardboard needs to be recycled to meet EU 'directives'. So now we have to use more oil to make plastic boxes to purchase instead of using old cardboard ones that we used to recycle down the tip.

A funny old world.

Unexpected event

On my way up to Kirkby Stephen today I pulled off the M6 at Tebay and turned left towards Orton to use the loo at the J38 Service Area. It is an odd layout around that locality - just a mile to the north of the junction are Tebay Services on the main drag so few now leave the England - Scotland motorway to use the services off Junction 38. The main clientele seems to comprise of people travelling from the North East to Lancashire, and a few Service Area aficionados like bikers and truckers.

Just as I finished washing and drying my hands and as I took my first step towards the door a young guy of around thirty came into the toilets, glanced at me and suddenly had the worst epileptic fit I have ever seen anyone experience. His eyes defocused and he went backwards and sideways so fast you would have thought he'd had a massive electric shock. He bounced into the wall, his money and mobile phone scattering across the floor. One of those things that happens so dramatically that you really do experience it in slow motion. His body was slumped in such a way that he completely blocked the door and I found myself racking my brains to try and remember what you had to do in circumstances like this. Head sideways and try to ensure that his windpipe was clear was what came into my mind. He didn't seem to have swallowed his tongue.

I managed to clamber across him to get to his head and within a few moments somebody else, who knew him, arrived on the scene. He must have been part of a group and it obviously wasn't the first time because this new arrival rushed off to find help and within maybe half a minute two attendants in red sweatshirts arrived who seemed to kow exactly what to do and I just faded into the background and moved on.

I sometimes wish that I'd done a proper first aid course when I was young. It isn't the first time something similar has happened to me. Around thirty years ago a colleague down in Wales keeled over in our office reception area and there he was flat out and nobody was really sure what to do next. Our porter had done some First Aid in the army and got him onto his side so that he wouldn't choke and we called an ambulance. And hour later he was dead. Only 52 and a massive heart attack, probably there was nothing anyone could have done from that first moment but if you don't know what to do you don't KNOW that

White Heather Club

Watching the New Year fireworks on TV last night at midnight I found myself remembering some ghosts of black-and-white Christmases past. New Year's Eve TV did not always consist of such 'snappy' and colourful extravaganzas compared by cheerful big-boned women from Buckinghamshire. When I was a teenager this slot used to be filled with interminable broadcasting from 'Over the Border' I'm afraid . Those were the days of the legendary 'White Heather Club' when somehow the Scots took over all 'Hogmanay' broadcasting after dark on December 31st with shows such as "The Kilt is My Delight". You think I'm making this up, don't you? But it is true. Until the whole scene was axed around 1968 this was all that was on offer on the Beeb at New Year

I seem to remember that this show featured more than its fair share of a kilt-clad Andy Stewart singing "Come in, come, it's nice to see you ..." and "Haste ye back, we love ye dearly ..." and the like, interspersed with a bunch of dancers resembling agile ironing boards jigging around and churning out reels and 'Strathspeys' and the like. The actual 'club' consisted of around three or four of those little round white painted cast iron tables and chairs at which various dour Scots persons were seated. As an simple minded teenager I wondered a lot about what you did in such places, somehow the penny never dropped with me that it might all be a kind of fantasy and that most people in Scotland didn't leap around in dress shirts flashing their sporrans and the Stewart tartan. Bizarre - yes, that is what the whole thing was. A bit like Cilla Black always saying on 'Blind Date' "and how are you all up there in Bonnie Scotland?"

Maybe the "White Heather Club Land of Lost Content" can be another of those fantasy islands I find increasingly creeping into my thinking these days. Somewhere out there in the gloaming is this mysterious Brig o'Doon and on the other side it is always Hogmanay and an ample bosomed Fiona or Mary is lingering at the White Heather Club, her soft auburn hair shining in the candle light, as she breathes heavily like a horse and waits for me to partner her in an eightsome reel. Here it might be perpetually just before midnight, the piper is just about to play, take your partners ....

Do you think so?

Doggy telepathy

Home alone on New Year's Eve, the first time for several years I think. Perhaps the millennium was the last time I was sitting by myself in England on the last night of the year. But Julia and Peter expect to be home well before midnight, actually it is a real treat to get a quiet shower and just relax for an hour. I'm really going to have to learn to pace myself to survive these next three weeks of hard work. They say that moving is the most stressful thing you can experience apart from the loss of someone close to you. I don't rank it THAT exceptionally, but I can feel all kinds of pressures.

As usual Hector has gone and curled up on the sofa in the conservatory to wait for his mistress to return. Even if Julia is away for the whole week travelling in Europe that is still where he spends his days, waiting for her to come back in through the door. Doggy total loyalty, don't knock it. I was listening to a programme recently on Radio 4 where they were talking about some experiments in telepathy using dogs. Very convincing. They had a closed circuit television camera trained on the dog at home and took the owner to some hotel several miles away. Then at a certain stage during the day they told the owner that she could now drive home again. As soon as she started to move the dog, visible on the CCTV tape, stirred, yawned and stretched and began to look excited. He already knew she was returning. Certainly Hector always gets excited a couple of minutes before Julia turns up - I had it down to his sensitive ears picking up the sound of the car engine in the distance but maybe it is telepathy of a kind.

At three o'clock this afternoon I was painting the house but I took a break to phone Edera and wish her a happy New Year - something that arrives in Japan nine hours before it comes to Britain. She had already gone to bed but she wasn't asleep. Seems that snow has arrived in Japan too, but not in leafy Chiba-ken. I quite miss the old place, having two homes on opposite sides of the globe will take some thought, a lot of thought. It feels good AND it 'ain't simple. Even as I write this we have two hours of 2009 to run in Lancashire but this blog will pick up the date and time from the Japanese settings and get dated 2010.

Well, Happy New Year to all 'Little House' readers anyway, whether you are in front, behind or even eavesdropping from some other planet.