Oh Yes! We remember him well ...

Back from three days up in snowy Niigata-ken and a really interesting trip - lots to write about! Snowy - and also very sunny! The forecast blizzard did not materialise and we enjoyed some beautifully stormy weather with sunshine that Turner would have had his brushes out painting in a minute. I certainly know a lot more about Ryokan now than I did when I set off.

But more about all that later. Today just out of interest I wanted to feature this place in 'Little House'. It is deep in the Niigata 'boonies' about a mile from Raihai station. A community centre? The local art gallery? Nope! You would never guess what it is unless I told you so I better had. It is a museum about a politician.

The Member of the Diet for this area for many years was the sixty fourth Prime Minister of Japan, Kakuei Tanaka. Yep! That's the one! Friend of Richard Nixon - the 'Black Mist' Tokyo mafia property scandal. And then the 'Lockheed Corporation' scandal. U.S. Senate hearings. Sentenced by Japanese courts to four years in prison for corruption in 1983 but he never served it because he died during the ten year 'appeal'. Endless 'pork barrel' politics of the most blatant kind, even to the extent of building a shinkansen route from Tokyo to his constituency to generate construction jobs. Around this area they loved him. After his criminal conviction he was re-elected with his biggest ever majority.


I know it is April the First tomorrow but I couldn't help wondering if we will be building a 'Gordon Brown Centre' in Kirkaldy or a 'Tony Blair Centre' in Sedgfield any time soon. I wonder who the last British Prime Minister was (Churchill excepted) that anyone bothered to build a museum about. Disreali? Gladstome? William Pitt?

It is an interesting one and it could start a whole new trend. For God's sake don't tell any British politicians about this place, they might get ideas above their station.

On the Road

Packing my bags here for an early start by car tomorrow for Niigata, so I just couldn't resist publishing this picture. Of course our trusty 1990 Nissan Skyline isn't quite this vintage but the heater isn't working so it will probably feel a bit like this one by the time we arrive at the Sea of Japan coast.

This is one of the pictures that I've recently copied from old negatives into JPEG format on my computer. It was taken on the A23 at Tilgate near Crawley, I'd guess in 1963, and shows the 'London to Brighton' veteran car rally. Somewhere I have some cine film taken on the same day. We walked over to the 'Crawley By-Pass' to see the cars pass by with my grandfather. The hill at Tilgate was always a good spot to see the action because entrants often ground to a halt on the long drag up to Pease Pottage.

A very English style of event eh? It must be a lot more difficult to organise in today's traffic. Actually for me the 'ordinary' cars in the background of the picture are even more interesting than the 'old crocks' themselves. Just look at that 'Hillman' trying to squeeze by! Now they have rallies devoted to just such cars as those too!

Off to see Ryokan's birthplace but 'Little House' will be back in a couple of days. Take care!

Feline update

Some of you 'furry ball' addicts have asked me if I have any pictures of the 'new cat' so here she is earlier this week lounging on the 'down line' ('westbound' to my American friends') of the 'Little House' garden railway. At the moment she's sleeping about six feet away from me just outside the French window on yet another section of this famous high level route. But this morning we'll leave her there in peace I think, she needs her 'beauty sleep' after a cold and wet day yesterday.

I find myself wondering just how big cats get before they get to have kittens. She's big, much bigger than she looks from this picture. In the mornings she has taken to jumping up onto the tracks as a better vantage point from which to watch me typing away on the kitchen table. It amazes me that she can get all that bulk airborne. When she comes down again she makes a heavy landing on the timber decking, he back legs slightly splaying out as they serve as 'shock absorbers'.

Yesterday was no day for any animal to be outdoors, and I didn't see anything of her after breakfast. The rain and gloom set in and the temperature plummeted and the world suddenly felt like a wet Sunday in Clackmannanshire. To make matters worse the heater has now packed up in the car - just before a long journey to snowy Niigata. Driving to get some kerosene at Komeri I had to have the window open to stop the windscreen misting up.

It doesn't stop the frogs chanting away at night though. As long as it isn't actually freezing they seem happy to do what frogs do in the paddy field at the back regardless of wind and rain. Noisy little blighters. Next time around maybe I'll be a frog, they seem to have lots of fun before they get eaten.

Il bianco e dolce cigno

Three absent at choir practice last night, but we still 'made a start' on a new madrigal by Jakob Arcadelt - 'Il bianco e dolce cigno' - 'The white and gentle swan ...'

About time too, we are moving too slowly through some of the repertoire for this summer. How to get more 'pace' into practice? I was worried that we might hear the sound of much hand-wringing and many muzukashii's muttered at the prospect of a completely new Renaissance piece to get to grips with. But I was counting without the skill of Arcadelt himself at putting performers at their ease. How could you sing such a piece and not fall in love with it? And it isn't as difficult as it sounds, rather easy in fact for a madrigal from the 1550's.

When I was young I don't ever remember coming across a piece by this composer. How did that happen? Maitre Arcadelt was a Franco-Flemish musician probably born in Liege or Namur, but most of his work was done in Paris and Italy. he wrote more than 200 madrigals and is even mentioned in Rabelais' novel Gargantua and Pantagruel. Certainly 'Il bianco' is a very 'classy' piece to sing. The words are by the Italian condottiere Alphonso d'Avalos and for me there is something that I connect with completely in the deeper meaning of this text. It is something to do with my age.

The gentle white swan, singing, dies; and I too, weeping, approach the end of my life. The difference is strange: he dies disconsolate, and I die blessed. That death - which is not to die but to fill me with all joy and desire: if in dying thus I will not feel sorrow, I will be pleased to die a thousand times each day.

If the theme feels familiar to singers it is because Orlando Gibbons, having heard this piece, adopted it when he wrote "The Silver Swan" a few years later - now one of England's best known madrigals.

If you don't know this piece you can find a lovely version of the King's Singers performing it here. To be honest I was really delighted with my bunch of Japanese ladies last night. Within twenty minutes and perhaps half a dozen run-throughs they really 'had it' in both their minds and hearts. It is very special to sing with that kind of a group of musicians, if you have the opportunity just once in a lifetime you are lucky. Even angels and archangels don't get the gist of such stuff much quicker than that, it only comes from deeper harmony with each other which takes shape in a love of music.

Kabuki-za

Into Tokyo yesterday to go and watch some kabuki at the Kabuki-za in Higashi-Ginza. Edera has been planning a trip for a while and actually we just got it done in time - the place will be demolished next month and a new and bigger theatre built on the old site. There have already been three previous Kabuki-za buildings, the first burned down in 1911, the second flattened by the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923 and the third by bombing in 1945, so the new one will be the fifth in a century. The transience of urban Japan eh?

We got there mid-afternoon and had a late lunch in the 'Lion' beer hall in Ginza before the performance began at six. During the whole day at events like this there are three 'sessions' of around three hours and each features two plays, or one act from a longer play. But most people only attend one these days. The evening session featured 'Domyoji' from 'Sugawara Denju Tenarai Kagami' and 'Monju Bosatsu Hana No Shakko' - 'The Shishi Lion Spirit at the Stone Bridge'.


All some experience. The first time I ever saw kabuki on any scale and at Kabuki-za the scale is certainly 'grand'. The stage almost twice as wide as a conventional 'Western' counterpart and the hanamichi - the 'flower path' stage by which dramatic entrances and exits are made through the audience - makes it feel much more like European experience of 'theatre in the round'. But in truth it is nothing like a Western theatre experience. I absolutely loved it, the pace, the style of narration and the gestures. Like our trip to Kozaki, it is like stepping back into the Edo Period, like being in a Hokusai engraving. And the second play was based on a Buddhist story about a bridge leading to Manjusuri's 'Pure Land' - lots of dancing and traditional music, some adopted from Noh themes.

Yes, a great day out. Just too much there to write about to be honest, maybe I will get around to it bit by bit.

Forgotten Performance

I was writing a couple of weeks ago about crowding into the back row behind the band in Nogiku Plaza to sing some arrangements from 'Cavalliera Rusticana' and how this had reminded me of singing 'behind the orchestra' in productions in my school days. And now, darn me, just a couple of weeks later exactly such a 'view' has turned up in the photographs I'm archiving as JPGs from my old negatives.

And here it is.

The year, I think, must be 1964, the summer of the Tokyo Olympics. And with those cotton dresses around it is summer. The place is Ifield Grammar School in Crawley, Sussex and we are in the main hall which was just to the right of the front door of the school. It was a strange layout - you walked up about half a dozen steps into the foyer, walked into the hall and then had to walk down the equivalent number of steps into the main part of the hall building. A kind of raised walkway ran down the left side of the hall to the music room and stage. We ate our school lunches there.

On the wall at the back are some 'brass rubbings' hung there by our art master, 'Chalky' White. Although a strict Methodist he loved brass rubbings and would bring new ones back from country churches he had visited during school holidays.

So what is the action? I can't really say but it seems to involve only the string section of our school orchestra, and the 'senior choir'. On the low rostrum is Graham Gooder, our music teacher. Everyone is looking to the left, and some people appear to be clapping. Perhaps some soloist was involved in the occasion, or someone had been invited to 'say a few words'.

I used to love taking part in school music 'do's' like this. I even have some old 'reel-to-reel' tapes of them somewhere. Interesting to think that forty five years later being a part of all this back then still has such a strong influence on my interests and pleasures. Even the school is now demolished, a grassy heap of rubble, but the enthusiasm of Graham Godder lives on every time I get in the car to drive to choir practice on Wednesday evenings.

Niigata trip 'looms'

Our trip up to Niigata Prefecture is starting to loom on the horizon. We are going next Sunday and coming back on Tuesday, the second of our planned longer distance 'exploratory' trips to a areas of Japan we haven't visited before. The topographic maps are already bought! Last year we went up to Noto-Hanto. The purpose of the trip this time (and with me of course trips must always have a 'purpose', slacking is not allowed) is to visit places connected to the Zen poet Ryokan. No doubt there will be much more about him here next week.

By "looming" here I'm thinking of beginning to worry about actually getting there. It is only the equivalent of travelling from, say, Sussex to Manchester, or Sacramento to Reno but the first part of the Trip involves getting across Tokyo in a completely untried direction to get onto the Kan-etsu Expressway. We come into the metropolis at 'four o'clock' and we need to get to 'ten o'clock' and there is no circular motorway around the capital, nor even a direct route. We have to cross southern Kanto on a dog-legged course via Kawaguchi. Driving in Tokyo is not as formidable as it sounds but I do like to know where I'm supposed to be going.

This morning Edera phoned a friend whose parents live in Niigata to see how she does it but it turns out she doesn't - if she goes home she catches a bus or a train. Japan is remarkably different in that way, people just don't have the habit of mind of making longer distance journeys by car. It is hard to see why. Of course the motorway tolls are pricy, but not as expensive as two people catching the shinkansen, and petrol is cheap. And traffic is bad but not usually as heavy as in urban England. Although the frequency of traffic lights and absence of roundabouts is wearing Japan manages to avoid the 'killer' traffic jams we have in the UK, what we love to refer to as 'severe delays' as if they were some kind of a natural disaster.

No, it really is mainly just 'habit of mind'. Widespread car ownership here didn't take off until the late 1960's and in cities men don't usually use cars for work and public transport is excellent. So people really don't think to drive distances which in Britain or America would be considered completely average journeys.

Varnish work

A beautiful sunny day yesterday and it gave me the chance to get a second coat of varnish on the "Tom Robinson Memorial Shed". 'Varnish' was American railroad slang for passenger cars. Back in the old days when they were built of teak they were beautifully varnished with about ten coats of proper natural wood resin varnish, all 'rubbed down' between coats. The shed is getting polyurethane and certainly not ten rubbed down coats! But I like to think of the old place as a kind of wheel free vintage 'Pullman Car' in which I can make journeys of fantasy. It is certainly pleasant working away with a brush getting the clear liquid into the 'grain' of the cedar in the warm sunshine. And there was such a beautiful wind yesterday too. Nothing delights me more than a good gusty wind.

As I worked quietly away the new cat came and sat and watched me. First at some distance, then closer, then quite close. She was feigning indifference, had that 'I just happen to be here' look about her, but I could tell that she was very pleased to be sitting near to me, almost hear her purr, and I chatted to her as I worked.

But not TOO close. It isn't a lack of trust, just a lack of socialisation with humans. She doesn't know what to do, how cats and humans fit together. It is hard to judge how socialised she really is or has the capacity to be, certainly the slightest unpredictable move on my part and she is off like a flash. Gentle verbal invitations to carnal pleasure of the 'puss, puss' variety are viewed with concern and her big green eyes look confused and doubtful. And even a partially extended hand is downright scary.

She's obviously had some contact with humans though, a truly wild cat couldn't be so sociable and trusting. But not much. And if they don't learn to accept human touch and society as kittens it is much harder to do it later.

Still we get along just fine and after a couple of weeks of fattening up she's much better nourished to give birth to that bunch of kittens she is carrying around.

Kozaki Buddha

One thing that I like about travelling around in rural Japan is the way in which you come across Buddhas and Bodhisattvas in unlikely places. Or not so much unlikely places as just 'any place' I suppose.

Of course there is always a 'crop' of serious looking ones around temples and roadside shrines, you would expect to find them there. But now about this one for example, spotted in Kozaki last weekend? Difficult to really pin down the origins and function of the little steel-framed building he meditates in but my guess from careful observation of the visible evidence is that the history of the place goes something like this...

When new it was a small garage repairing cars and motor cycles but then as a 'side line' (somebody has to do it!) the owner kept a hearse to cover the 'once a month' requirement for local funerals. And if you are keeping a hearse why not offer a small supply of memorial tablets and grave markers?

First generation retires or dies and one way or another the garage business finishes and the hearse is sold, so what to do with the old place? Wife or daughter cleans it out and starts a fruit and flowers business in the shed, opening the shutters every morning. In the back of the shop near the old garage office are a couple of so far unsold grave markers nobody bought. Plenty of space and a good 'passing trade' so why not put a few racks of dresses and blouses in there too? And there we have it. A dress and flower shop in an old garage with some unsold tombstones in the back.

And all the time Buddha sits here in eternal meditation. One upon a time he might have been sold himself and found a new home in the cemetery just up the road but I think the time for that is gone now, this is pretty well where he belongs, sitting in the sunshine by the mail box. And as we all know, our meditation place is just where we happen to be at the time.

Web feeding frenzy

Late blogging here today! I just got much too absorbed in thinking about a couple of web sites I want to design and in particular one to cover our choir trip to England and publish details of our programme. I'm not exactly sure why I wanted to do this now, it seemed a good idea at the time and perhaps it is. Anyway, watch this space. And I'll learn a lot about the medium through doing it. Educational opportunities are never wasted, as I never tire of reminding myself.

It is about ten years since I last looked at Web Site design and it was all really Paleolithic HTML technology back then, at least for me. Plenty of woad and mammoth meat as we sat in caves and picked away at keyboards with our teeth. Stuff like Cascading Style Sheets was around of course but not on my planet. And the idea of applets and things that moved on screens and collected data and stuff was only a dream.

In fact I seem to remember our old IT Department did their level best to keep anyone who worked for me from getting anywhere near web site development. Their idea was that they would design the whole caboodle and if we were very, very good and nice to them then we might be allowed to write a few paragraphs to include here and there and supply some numbers. We certainly never got allowed near any REAL developers, the last thing that the men in grey suits on the ground floor wanted was for 'the business' and particularly troublemakers like me to talk to the creative chaps and definitely not before the contract was signed.

It has all moved on since then. Not only did we sack all our IT Department and outsource everything, we even sold the company to the Belgians. And here I am, a happy pensioner, doing my own site development at last just like I always knew I would. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have work to do!

Those 'cultural differences' again

The last couple of days I've been trying to sort out the programme for our choir visit to the UK in the summer. We have the dates and venues 'sorted' of course but what exactly are we going to sing on those days and in what order? It needs to be agreed because soon I need to share this information with several people.

Here loom some pretty deep and dark canyons of 'cultural difference' to contend with, but I'm no novice now when it comes to the Art of Japanese Negotiation. If I'm not in the Masterclass I'm at least somewhere in the Second Division. Still, it is tricky stuff and not least because I still have to work mainly through Edera as 'interpreter'.

It is all a whole new game of understatement. "Chotto muzukashii ..." - "a bit difficult" for example doesn't really mean that something is a bit difficult but "not on your nellie mate!" Similarly in return I'm learning to play the 'duty' card - "we have to do this because people expect it of us, they will think it is strange if you don't". Always a strong suit in Japan.

But the really big difference is the obsession here with the concept of "if a job is worth doing, it is worth doing properly!" In Britain when do we ever do anything 'properly'? We are generally lazy, careless and slapdash but "Go for it!" is an innate part of our attitude to life. In Japan on the other hand people never "Go for it", they are zero risk takers. He or she who succeeds is the one who takes least risks in life and has the least 'black marks' on their record. In England nobody even keeps records any more.

So inevitably the perfect programme for all Japanese choral singers is the one consisting of one short item which is rehearsed for twelve months and which people sing absolutely perfectly, in a performance which they can replicate precisely every single time. Perfect, but boring.

Dragging people away from this 'ideal' is a real labour. Everyone becomes convinced that they can't possibly try anything new in their agenda about three months before your average British choir would even begin to rehearse anything. It is a huge cultural difference and one I'm sure that I'll trip over many more times before the summer is over.

How do they do that?

There's been another cat hanging around here the last few days. My guess is she is female and pregnant, hard to be sure with such a thick coat and cats carry it so well don't they? They don't fill up and 'waddle' until the last minute. Anyway she's taken to the section of my garden railway that runs behind the shed, always a popular spot with cats who clearly like to play by following the the 'skyline' route around the yard and through the shrubbery. A great place to lounge in sunny weather. I think she must be one of A-san's 'strays' that frequent the lane that takes off next to our car port on the other side of the house.

She's nervous but not TOO nervous, 'cautious' rather than 'afraid'. A kind of smoky blue coat with white facial markings of the cutest kind. Often now when I'm in the corner of the kitchen near the piano I notice her through the French Window.

Anyway yesterday there she was sitting perched on the tracks looking at me intently and it didn't take a Ph.D. in feline psychology to know that the question being asked was "Why not feed me human?" Cats are brilliant communicators that way, not so? Also a hint here - they like it and it puts them at their ease if you look at them directly and make squinty eyes at them, it is the cat way of saying "Hello". We have a whole big plastic box full of packets of food bought for various departed cats, so I hunted out Kuu's old bowl and put some out on the decking and within a couple of minutes she had found the courage to come and eat it.

Yet here was the interesting thing. A bit later I spotted both her and her brother fast asleep on the tracks. They were piled in a heap together like Edera and I in the futon on cold January nights. These two cats are very 'close' - I've noticed it before. But somehow she had communicated the information that 'lunch was served' to him, he doesn't usually ever come around here.

How did she do that? How did Cat Number Two, the white one, pick up on the information that food was available? Somehow they had eaten together and were now sleeping it off together. Did she have to go back and 'tell him' in some way? Or was it some kind of telepathy?

Whichever it was it brought home to me that cats are very capable of communicating information and probably intention too. I suppose they must be, how else would they ever relate to each other? But how exactly?

Kozaki day out

Our first real 'outing' of the season yesterday. We drove up to Kozaki on the Tone River north of Narita to go to a 'festival' there. Actually although I say 'festival' there were none of the usual trappings of o-mikoshi and traditional Japanese music, no 'swirl' of shrill shinobue. But there were a heck of a lot of stalls and tens of thousands of people packed into the lanes of a very small country town. A 'Fair' might be a better description. I'm sure that the local sake brewery has something to do with the origins of this local event too, it seemed to play a prominent part in the day, as did its products.

Beautiful weather, still March but I arrived home sunburned and beetroot-coloured. I really like that Tone River area, pancake flat and even a century ago still with vast areas of marshland and lakes. It is all a lot tamer now and Japan's biggest river is safely corralled behind some serious eight metre levees and looks like a real pussycat in the sunshine. Just like a sleeping crocodile looks like a log. Far away on the horizon is a line of 'blue remembered hills' in Tochigi-ken, I'm sure someone once wrote a poem about all that. We had a picnic of udon and gravy sitting on the grassy levee bank to rest our feet after queuing for half an hour to see around inside the brewery. A bit of a busman's holiday for me, the scent of that fermenting grain took me back to Ely Brewery yard on windy March mornings.


Town was absolutely heaving. Amazing that you could cram so many people into such a small place and this was in the morning before the crowds poured off the trains from Tokyo. Perhaps five hundred stalls selling all kinds of local delicacies and lorry loads of Thai and Vietnamese ethnic clothing. At one point, almost incredibly, someone was trying to thread a brass band of perspiring youngsters through the mayhem.

I love days like this, the sights, sounds and smells of big 'gangs' of country people enjoying themselves on an outing. You don't even have to half close your eyes to imagine yourself back in the Edo era, amazing how much of old Japan is alive and well if you know where to look for it. Something much more deep than that for me which I can never finally put my finger on but which spells h-o-m-e. It lurks in the turn of a phrase, the smile of a child, the smell of mochis grilling and the taste of soy sauce. I could sense it in every pore wandering aimlessly around Kozaki gawping with the best of them.

My VIP ponzi scheme

Fair old earthquake here just a few minutes ago. Edera and I were inspecting a cupboard upstairs that she keeps kimono in, I need to repair the joinery on one of the doors. Says something about the routine of living in Japan that we just remarked 'big quake' and continued to discuss the repair as the house shook. They feel different, big ones far away, 'by their shakes shall ye know them' eh? Checking the JMA site it seems that it was Shindo 6.6 in the ocean off Fukushima-ken. It had the whole of northern Japan from Hokkaido down to Nagoya trembling.

Anyway on the way back from Kozaki this afternoon (and I'll write all about that tomorrow maybe) I was enjoying the sunshine and mulling over my latest 'policy initiative' to suggest to whichever party wins the General Election due soon in Britain. Now here it is and by the way this is all patented already so don't try beating me to that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

My plan is deceptively simple. As a new source of revenue and taxation the government should create a 'VIP Card' available to all UK residents for an obscene and spectacularly large fee, let's say five million pounds. Once you buy this card you are considered a 'Very Important Person' and, like the Queen, politicians and senior bureaucrats like Chief Constables, you are literally 'above the law'. Minor laws that apply to the herd no longer matter to you, you have a perpetual 'Get Out Of Jail Free' Card. Obviously there has to be some limits to this, no murder, GBH or robbery for example. I'm thinking more of a recognised list of civil offences and felonies. Certainly stuff like parking offences and speeding, obeying 'stop' and 'give way' signs and the need to buy television licences and turn your hifi down at night. Also you'll get the right to go to the front of any queue and push in. The whole concept is basically a licence to be perpetually ultra-selfish, to consider yourself more important than other. Which you clearly must be if you have that much money to burn. It is a 'status' thing, one step up from a Cartier watch. Proof of your significance.

I think this would be hugely popular. Of course it would depend on the list of offences you were immune from, nobody would hand over that much 'dosh' just to be excused library fines. I mean, it is basically how many people already behave all the time isn't it? But now you can have the legal right, give hapless Joe Ordinaries that get in your way a two fingered salute backed by all the laws of the State.

It isn't the first time it has been tried. Back in the seventeenth century the nouveau riche were forever at this stuff, buying their place in the landed gentry and splashing the poor with mud as they sped by in their phaetons or coaches and four. This is simply an updated scheme to nakedly buy status for cash. Why even continue with the pretence of equality and fraternity? It was just a fantasy anyway, nobody ever seriously believed it did they?

Pretty neat don't you think? Can anyone think of any objections?

Tournament

Here's a picture that I must have taken thirty years ago. I can't remember exactly where or when, it turned up during my 'scanning' marathon during the week. But I can hazard a guess that it was during the winter of 1980-81 and that it was taken at a pub deep in the South Wales valleys, possibly Rhondda or Ogmore. Somewhere in Glamorganshire or Gwent there are bald old men who would recognise themselves in the photograph.

Back in those days my job used to involve organising a darts league in the 600 pubs we owned in the region and to be honest I still sometimes wake up in the night in a cold sweat at the memory of it all. You just couldn't afford to make a single mistake in arranging fixtures or the 'Wrath of God' would surely have descended on you. For the guys taking part playing darts was their whole life, and for a lucky few an opportunity to step away from existing as a coal miner and to make some 'big money' under the bright lights of TV tournaments in faraway Cardiff.

Basically my role in all this was to sign off the free beer and organise the 'Finals' which would be held in the Ely Brewery canteen. Coaches, buffet, free booze (of course!). I got absolutely no 'training' for this, talk about being put in charge of the cavalry without ever saddling a horse. And to make matters worse the League Secretary ran off with the free beer tickets and the match records (if there had ever been any) the moment I joined the Company. Still it was all an 'experience' in learning, we can't get enough of them.

There are some interesting details here that make the image a piece of history. Most noticeable for me are the cigarettes and ash trays on the tables. Nicotine and alcohol, so much a routine part of my daily life back then but both now banished from my life. And back in 1980 before Tony Blair and the Puritan years of New Labour you could sit in a pub, play cards and smoke to your heart's content. Oh! And sing too - if the landlord didn't mind. Something else you need a licence for in modern Britain. 'Fags' are long gone from pubs. The £10,000 prize money for the darts marathon also caught my eye - now I'm sure you would be looking for at least a million to bankroll that kind of activity. Oh! And look who is sponsoring the event - the now vanished 'Woolworths' retailing group.

Mostly though I just like the bunch of blokes in the picture. It would have been an excellent evening. Nice company, several beers, some excitement as those 'arrows' sped towards 'treble top'.

Change and Decay

I started putting the new ladders we bought on Wednesday to good effect yesterday, to get the front of the "Tom Robinson Memorial Shed" ready for painting. It is going OK but the problem with ladders is always that the top has to lean against something, and that 'something' is then a bit that you can't easily sandpaper. Also you have to buy the ladder for the biggest job, which means that they tend to be over-sized for smaller ones. No matter, I'm a lithe and agile person, I can just swing monkey-like from rung to rung. Not so?

Our new purchase is a 7.3 metre extensible. Actually you have to be even more careful than usual with ladders here, and always bear in mind that an earthquake might kick off when you are up there. Not sure how exactly you plan for that eventuality, but it does make sense to secure the top with a rope wherever you can.

Sanding off the shed fascias and cedar cladding yesterday had me straight back into 'thesis territory'. Here was a classic example of transience in the built environment at work. If you look at the picture you will see what I mean.

The shed was built between January and March 2005 so it is exactly five years old. When I took down the "Limestone Brae East" sign that graces the front of the building yesterday it revealed the polyurethane varnish that had been applied five years ago. Still pristine, and so a measure of change over time.

Take a close look at the photograph. It reveals the effects of five year's worth of solar radiation, humidity and biological degradation on a south facing wall in a Japanese climate. The most obvious effect is that the polyurethane itself has been largely destroyed, probably in the first three years. A lot of that destruction is 'mechanical' due to the expansion and contraction of the cedar - and there's an interesting thing. Wood doesn't expand uniformly, it expands most across the grain and so the varnish peels in that direction.

Mould has taken hold everywhere that it can escape the direct attention of the sun, and these areas are surprisingly large on a south facing wall because the sun is high here so far south and so there are shady areas under the fascias. Generally cedar stands up well in this harsh environment but where dampness lingers - near the guttering on the left for example - then rot has set in.

'Change and decay in all around I see'. It is literally true if you look carefully. I wish I'd started to study this more deeply earlier.

Routines

I've been watching myself this last week. Now that I've finished a project that has occupied so much of my time for six years what have been my early 'instincts' in terms of how I use my time and 'fill my days'.

Of course there were several tasks and items in the queue, neglected things to be done around the house and lots of 'nice to do' projects awaiting my attention, and these have rather seamlessly taken over the available hours. Some of these - sorting out details for the choir trip in the summer for example - are starting to get pressing now. I wasn't ever likely to sit in an armchair, open a metaphorical can of beer and settle down to watch the football on TV, especially as I find football completely boring. Railway DVD's and Blackadder ... hmm, well maybe . Nothing 'wrong' with piling into all these projects and at the same time I'm not sure that they should 'define' my existence. They are not me.

One of the things I noticed in my studies was the degree to which we inherently need routines and rhythms in our lives as a framework. We really are creatures of habit. It is like a 'second house' that we dwell in, from the time we get up to the time we go to bed. A change from this rhythm is fine, 'as good as a rest' we say, but even when we make changes we still hanker after ontological security. We don't take a holiday and willingly cast off all defences against chaos and entropy. Or maybe some people do.

I need to do a lot of this new stuff and yet I shouldn't let the new found opportunity for some deeper 'time out' pass me by. It would be a good time to go on a sesshin at the moment. But even sesshins are very structured , in fact they are ALL schedule but the difference is it isn't one you made up yourself.

None of this will get the shed painted however. But there are many ways to paint sheds.

Beehive

I came across this picture yesterday in the material I'm copying into JPEG format and I could pretty well guarantee that no readers here would ever guess what it was, even though I'm told it is now a 'listed building' and so a part of Britain's "architectural heritage".

It is known to those who work there as "The Beehive" because it is perfectly round, and it is actually the original first Gatwick Airport. It was designed by Frank Hoar in Art Deco style and it is about a mile south of the present day London (Gatwick) airport terminals. It was built close to the old Gatwick Racecourse station on the London to Brighton line and opened to passengers in 1936. People rich enough to be able to afford air travel in those pre-war years could walk to the terminal from the train using a subway, and catch their Imperial Airways flight to Delhi or Durban. Air travel had real romance back then, and by today's standards it was pretty dangerous too, with many intermediate stops on long haul journeys.

In 1966 I had a summer job cleaning the toilets and washing the floors here. It was a bit of a sinecure, the building was only being used then as a terminal for very occasional helicopter flights and there was also a company there with a flight simulator training pilots. One of the 'perks' of my job was to rummage in the bins from time to time to retrieve air navigation charts that had been thrown away and I still have a couple of them somewhere.

Inside it is a very interesting building, laid out like a wheel. The "tyre" is a ring of offices around the outside wall. Four entrances lead into a perfectly circular concourse located where the spokes would be. The "hub" contained maintenance rooms downstairs and the original control tower upstairs. That concourse was fascinating, you could circumambulate it for hours if you wanted to do kinhin.

There were two women cleaners on the same shift as me and I'm sure that I have written about them here before. They viewed me - "the boy" - with considerable suspicion as I was a potential threat to their daily 'work' routine of drinking tea, reading the Daily Mirror and sleeping.

My my most vivid memory of this place was of polishing the concourse floor wih a machine one day and accidentally getting the cord wrapped around a fire extinguisher which toppled over and certainly worked just fine! I had to flee for the exit with it squirting foam everywhere and it took me the rest of the shift to clean the mess up before the boss showed up. That is my one and only experience - so far - of fire extinguishers.

Tees Valley Viaduct

Here is one of the photos that I copied over from negatives yesterday. It is a long vanished view of the Tees Valley Viaduct near Barnard Castle taken from the woods on the north side of the river. From the context of other images on the strip I can date it quite accurately to February or March 1966. Forty four years ago already.

The viaduct was about half a mile 'up river' from town and from the 'Scar Top' and you could see it clearly crossing the gorge cut by the Tees as it made a big double bend just west of the town. When I was a child the whole of this ravine was filled with beautiful oak forest but in the 'sixties' it was partly cut back and then twenty years later another quarter mile of ancient woodlands was felled along the valley. But the area around the old viaduct site and the big bend beyond is still mature forest, mainly durmast oak - Quercus sessiliflora - but with some big pines on the 'flats' by the river. One of the most beautiful places I know.

But also scary. The Tees is a dark, powerful river here, its peat-stained waters deep, fast and cutting in under the south bank. The story goes that during the War some soldiers from the nearby camp at Deerbolt were training to build a 'Bailey Bridge' here one day after a night of heavy rain. A passing 'local' warned the officer in charge of the danger of a 'roll' - a sudden flash flood. A little further along the path had seen the wall of water roaring down the channel but too late to get back and shout another warning and many men were drowned. I was always warned never to go near the river after rain.

The viaduct was a hundred and fifty feet above all that, up in the clear air and sunshine over the tree canopy and dark river. I often walked over with my grandfather as he headed for work at a signal box another quarter mile up the railway. In the middle you could look down through the steel gratings between the rails and see the swirling water far below, get that wonderful sense of vertigo at the idea of just a quarter inch of metal plate between you and a fatal plunge. Late one evening we were half way over when we had to stand to the side as a fast westbound freight train pounded across passing just a few feet from us and making the whole bridge shake.

When we were there on this trip in 1966 the bridge was already out of use; the railway closed in 1964. In 1971 the girders were taken out and then the following year the beautiful ashlar sandstone piers were demolished. Unless you know where to look you could walk past this spot now without the slightest idea that a railway had ever crossed the gorge here.

Blue Belle

This last couple of evenings I've started working on a project that has been on my mind for a couple of years. Ive always loved to take photographs and I have negatives going back to when I was perhaps eight of nine years old, as well as some collections of much older family photos, slides, negatives and even glass plates. But the main part of this stuff comprises of three volumes of black and white negatives dating from around 1958 until I eventually gave up processing my own films in the early 1980's.

Well, our new Canon printer has an amazing facility for printing slides and negatives and also capturing images as jpegs. This week I've been trying it out, and it is pretty good. Not very fast, but automated enough to make copying from 35mm to JPEG quick enough (a lot faster than an enlarger!) and also something you can let the computer get on with while doing something else. So now every week I'm going to transfer a few negative sets to computer files and see what is in there. If you have known me a long time - and a few of you regularly reading here have - then watch out! Some sets of old photos might be arriving in your mail from time to time.

Here is a picture that turned up in the first set I copied on Saturday, an odd piece of serendipity because I was only reading a book this week about the "Railway Race to the North" which featured detailed logs of the running of this engine over Beattock from Carlisle to Edinburgh on summer nights in August 1888.

This picture was taken on 15 September 1963 when Caledonian 123 and London and South Western Railway 'Greyhound' T9 No. 130 ran an excursion from London down to the Bluebell Railway in Sussex. The name 'Blue Belle' was very appropriate for the train becasue No. 123 was repainted in the beautiful Caledonian blue livery. Hard to imagine it now but the picture was taken at Haywards Heath, which was then a junction at which the excursion could reverse up the short branch to Horsted Keynes and onto the Bluebell Line to Sheffield Park. Maybe this was the last steam train to grace Hayward's Heath station. Despite their Victorian appearance these engines were built for speed and later in the day I got some lovely cine film at Gatwick of them roaring back up the 'Brighton Line' towards London at perhaps 80 mph.

Back in the early 1960's ,when a lot of these venerable locomotives had just been restored for preservation and had valid boiler certificates and there was still a surviving infrastructure of water columns and turntables, trips like this were frequent on the British Rail system. But two or three years later it had all vanished. Impossible to imagine now a Caledonian 'Single' taking on water at Hayward's Heath I'm afraid.

In the Workshop

As if on cue, now that I've got the varnish and paint brushes out to give the outside of the shed some much needed attention the rain has arrived. And it has set in for the week too, according to the JMA forecast no chance of getting on with that job until next Thursday. I'm not short of work to do around the house but I'm going to have to be patient when it comes to the 'main job' for the Spring. At least it gives me time to pay attention to the remaining work for the choir trip to England in July.

Still, time for some relaxation though. I love to relax just pottering around in my workshop making things and as you can see in the course of just one week I've reduced the place to a reasonably spectacular mess. I'm one of those people who needs things spread around on the bench so that I know just where everything is, I am not a 'putter away'. It might look like chaos there but my hands know where everything is and if you moved a tool just a few centimetres to the left I would be cussing and spending an hour looking for it.

This is a part of the interior of "The Shed". In fact the 'West Wing'. I built this shed in about a month early in 2005 just after my father's death. I discussed the design with him in detail so I guess it is the "Tom Robinson Memorial Shed" but so far I haven't had much of a chance to use it. Now all that changes.

On the bench you can see my current project about half complete. It is a North Eastern Railway Q6 class freight locomotive. I'm appalled to realise that I started this in 2003 and it has sat in a box for seven years but this week it has taken a giant leap forward again already. It is '0' Gauge, a scale of 1:43.5, nice and 'chunky' and a very satisfying size to make things in out of metal. You can build for 'live steam' in this size but this one is electric powered.

I always had this love of making things with my hands. Carpentry and joinery I like but somehow metalwork is the most interesting, the different sounds and smells of cutting and filing material, all the different metals but especially brass. The pleasure of seeing things shine as they are 'turned' in a lathe and the scent of solder and flux in the air, the heat of the 'iron' as it is tinned.

All in good order though. I don't want to be spending the whole day out there, that would never do! Maybe some passing cat will wander in and curl up on my rug eh?

Offences

I found myself thinking yesterday about 'offences'. I'm no expert in jurisprudence but the whole area of laws and penalties seems to have been in focus for me lately, and a couple of weeks ago I was reading a modern classic on this topic - "Crime and Punishment" by the French philosopher Michel Foucault.

There is an element of apparent 'luck' involved in relation to the law. Everybody, all the time, 'breaks the law' in some way the moment they set foot out of the house. Certainly if you get into a car there's going to be half a dozen things you could be 'done' for before you get to the first traffic light. Checked your windscreen wiper blades recently? Brake light bulbs OK? It seems to be characteristic of the state - certainly the British state - to just pass more and more laws all the time because ... well, why is that? Because it is what states do I suppose. What else would they do? Back in the Olden Days the king and his court went hunting most of the time, had banquets and masques. But now politicians just pass laws all the time. Not just pass them but make penalties increasingly severe, criminalise things that were once simply civil offences. As they attempt to ever more closely control every aspect of our lives the law inevitably falls into disrepute because its sheer omnipresence means that in the end people have to ignore it, you can no longer live 'legally' if there is any kind of complexity in your life pattern. The legal process is like lightning, your chances of 'copping it' are rather small, enforcement is infrequent and arbitrary, just bad luck really. And what exactly is 'evil' about driving at 32 miles an hour on an open road? You are just as likely to kill someone fdriving three miles an hour more slowly.

Actually the overall effect of such laws is to make us all offenders all the time, it defines a kind of relationship with 'authority'. But is it one we find we can accept?

Also, everyone has bizarre periods in their life, especially when they are young, when they push the boundaries. Maybe even a kind of madness takes over, a part of growing up. In primitive societies this was all good stuff, a 'right of passage', make people better hunters and providers. One guy I know when he was around thirteen years old devised a scheme with his mates to 'recycle' library books to a second-hand bookshop. They would go down to the library on Saturdays, shove a few books under their jackets and then go and sell them. He tells me that until he was hiding behind a wall to escape capture from the three car loads of police in pursuit it had never actually struck him that this was - well - 'stealing' and not quite legal. It was all just a laugh and a way of making a few bob extra pocket money, it was taking from an institution, not 'real people'. If one of those 'bobbies' had looked over that wall he wouldn't have been the respected statistician and teacher that he became later. Just chance really.

There's a very big historical difference around this between East Asian Confucian societies and European countries that have taken the Roman model of written laws. Europeans like to think of themselves as 'better' somehow because they have a (supposedly!) clear and fully documented 'set of rules'. But it isn't my experience. The model in Japan was traditionally one of absolute power (hopefully) applied with compassion and wisdom, not one of logical 'right and wrong'. Realising your error and sincerely apologising for it made a big difference, there was scope to learn from mistakes.

Railway Roundabout

Really 'pushing the boat out' last night - they don't call me 'Mr. Fun' for nothing, no Siree! Last time I was in England I took up a Guardian Reader Offer to get a complete set of eight 'Railway Roundabout' DVD's for only £25. What a snip! Buy while you can - when they are gone they are gone! Anyway last night I 'maxed out' on an hour of wall to wall choo-choos on my little silver screen up here in 'The Eyrie' while Edera toiled and slaved downstairs in the schoolroom. Never had so much fun since ... um, well that day I bought the new yellow dustpan at Cainz Home.

'Railway Roundabout'. It was a series of TV programmes made by Patrick Whitehouse back in the late 1950's and early 1960's. If you are over sixty and lived in the UK as a teenager you'll remember it as the programme that used to make you get up out of your chair and change the channel to 'the other side' (there only was one 'other side'). Unless you were a 'nerd' like me that is - and did we use the term 'nerd' back then? When it came to trains 'gricer' was the favourite epithet. Or less professionally and more scornfully 'train spotter'. Anyway the Beeb ran a series of railway 'buff' programmes for around five years and as it turned out, we didn't really appreciate it at the time, they were capturing for posterity a really extraordinary moment in British social history. In 1960 much of our railway system still relied on technology from the nineteenth century, in some cases even locomotives and coaching stock built in the 1880's. They knew how to build to last back then. Then, in just a few years, it had all gone.

But it isn't the trains I wanted to talk about here. Equally interesting on these DVD's are the people and the clothes they are wearing. On every station platform is a little cluster of trainspotting boys with short haircuts and school caps and grey flannel shorts collecting engine numbers. That was me! - still is (well, not the shorts of course!). And the women! They are all dressed either in drab flower pattern cotton frocks and wearing hair curlers with a scarf or have those sexy flared skirts that stick out at about thirty degrees from the waist. Now how did those work I wonder? Lots of petticoats I suppose. At the time they seemed the ultimate in modernity bu now they look more like updated Edwardian bustles, which I guess they were descended from in terms of the underlying technology. Hmm ... best not to go there eh?

When it comes to the guys - hang onto your hats! There are many SLS 'Specials' (Stephenson Locomotive Society) and these trains are just packed to the gunwales with identikit 'nerds'. Aged 20-50, wearing NHS glasses, white shirt, tie, blazer and grey 'flannels', looking sad and they are ALL carrying grey 'macs' over their left arms in case it rains. Every time the train stops they all leap onto the platform and come running towards the engine and stare.

England of yesteryear at its best. What happened to them all after? Did they - you know - 'discover women'? Or are they like me stowed away in some dusty wardrobe that smells of mothballs waiting to eat their packed lunch on the great rail trip in the sky? Another 'project' I fear.

That's a Big One

OK so let's have the "Goodness! That's a Big One" picture. Edera insisted of course, as usual it is all her fault. In all modesty I couldn't possibly have published it otherwise. Anyway I don't look at my best in the mornings, I always appear to have been dragged by my hair backwards through a hedge. Maybe I was, I'm so 'slow' first thing I wouldn't remember if anybody had until I'd 'downed' my first cup of coffee of the day. I still look agreeably 'bearish' though, kind of 'rugged', don't you think so? I like bears, you can call me 'Bruin' if you want.

Anyway we aren't here to talk about me, pleasant and rewarding though that might be. This is the equivalent of the "Cor! What a whopper Guv'nor!" pictures in the 'Angling Times'. The only problem with pictures of books I realise now is that the interesting bit is how THICK it is. And this IS a thick one, a breath-taking four centimetres and that's enouugh for anyone. But you just can't see it eh? If I turned it on its side you wouldn't be able to see the cover. If you turned me on my side on the other hand you would still be able to see me.

Edera picked the three copies up from the printers around five yesterday evening and then took two of them to Yachimata post office to airmail them straight to England. So even as I type they should be sitting in a bag of mail somewhere at Narita waiting to be loaded onto a plane for Heathrow this morning. Then by the time she got back here (I was waiting for someone to come and pick up the large Japanese drum sitting in our genkan) it was time to go to choir practice so of course she couldn't resist taking the spare copy along there to pass around. Fame at last. I'm sure that everyone has been wondering what the heck I've been doing all these years. I'm sure I've been wondering myself.

Now I just have to wait for a date for my 'viva' examination. April or May I hope but you just can't be sure. Anyway, plenty of painting and maintenance tasks to get on with around this house. Better get started I suppose!

And now for something completely different ...

Well, that is THAT job completed. Yesterday morning I made the last minor changes to the text of my thesis and then I spent most of the day printing off three copies. The final text was 390 pages, so just actually printing and collating it all took pretty well all day and a fair amount of five-star prayer that the printer kept going and that I didn't run out of ink after the 'Million Volt Store' closed at nine.

There has been one major hiccup over the past week, and that is that I couldn't find anywhere to get the thing bound. Comb binding - the process you would use in an English office services store - just doesn't seem to be done much at all here. I could have taken it all into Tokyo and gone back in a week to collect it, but there was nothing any closer. So it is being glue bound in soft covers, by a cheerful local printer with three dogs and an office in a heck of a mess with cat fur on the chairs. Feels just like home really. They will have it ready by tea time and it will be in the post to England tonight.

It sort of feels lucky, let's hope so. I'm terribly superstitious about numbers and anyway 'co-incidences' certainly aren't co-incidences. Three in all its many combinations is my lucky number and if you haven't spotted it today is the third of the third, an auspicious day to complete such an undertaking.

So that is that done, at least until I have a date for my oral examination. I wonder how I'm going to adjust to all this. This project has taken me six years and it a way was much more 'central' for me than my business career ever was. You have absolutely no status as a student in a foreign land but the content of the work really 'grabbed' me and I learned a heck of a lot about what goes on under the surface of things and perhaps especially about social reproduction - how we go on doing just what we always did over decades and centuries. In a sense cities are just a reflection of that, any permanence in brick, stone and timber is quite incidental to the ways in which the use of places endures.

I'm not sure I'll adjust well or easily to moving on to a new agenda, at least for the next few months. But I have loads of things waiting to be done. most of which involve tools and paint and starting with the outside of the shed and the decking behind the kitchen. Like they say in Monty Python "And now for something completely different!"

Wolf!

I was reading a couple of comments on Japanese web sites yesterday along the lines of "that was the tamest tsunami I ever saw" and it is true. The excitement of Sunday was just that - pure excitement. Flashing maps on our televisions throughout the day, wall to wall pictures of seagulls bobbing up and down in harbours, the hushed voices of NHK commentators expecting the worst to strike and around 150,000 people evacuated and then ... nothing! Just a slight rise in the surface of the sea, like the tide coming in and going out at the wrong time. All those giant steel 'tsunami gates' at the entrance to ports banging shut, all the trains cancelled on coastal lines, the motorways and highways closed - and we might just as well not have bothered.

You can see WHY this happens. There have been sophisticated tsunami warning systems around the Japanese coasts for years, but the trans-Pacific system was only put in place after the Chilean earthquake of 22 May 1960. Experts thought a tsunami might be possible after that but as misfortune would have it there was another earthquake near the Ryukyu Islands on the same day. When the small tsunami from that occurred everyone thought the danger was past. Then the trans-Pacific wave arrived unannounced a few hours later, killing 138.

Now of course if there is a trans-Pacific warning no bureaucrat or politician is ever going to gamble that it won't have any serious impact. You can't judge natural phenomena so neatly. This is the first time in seventeen years that such a warning has been issued here, and it was taken pretty seriously by everyone. The thing about earthquakes and tsunamis is that no matter how big they have been in the past, a thousand or a hundred years in the future - or maybe this morning! - there is going to be an even bigger one. It is just the law of averages.

At the same time you can't call "Wolf!" every time. In October 1987 we had a "Great Storm" in southern England that the weather forecasters missed out on, they simply didn't think it would be so severe. They were criticised so much that ever since we seem to get "Severe Weather Warnings" on the TV Weather Bulletins at the rate of at least one a week. People have stopped taking notice of them. They should be reserved for only the most serious of risks - but then who knows what will REALLY happen?

Using a Stage

One of the big differences with the 'happyoukai' this year was using a stage for the presentation. It was a conventional 400-seater auditorium with a nice lighting set up which we took full advantage of. C-chan came back from Tokyo for the day to be our 'lighting technician'. She used to do this job in the drama club at her High School years ago and she can't keep her hands off stage control panels. She soon had those rheostats sliding around and the footlights going up and down. But this wasn't what made the difference. Nor the proscenium arch, because we didn't use the curtains either.

No, it was having that raised stage. If you are running a production in a room used for salon concerts everything is on a level and it is a very intimate space. The younger students aren't far from their mums and dads and you don't have to work to project what you are doing, in a way it is too 'ordinary', it feels like doing 'party pieces' in front of uncles and aunts at a family gathering. On a warm day you could fall asleep.

If you are a metre higher in the sky on the other hand you have to 'raise your game' to match. First there is the 'long walk' up those four steps on the left hand side of the stage, and then T-san 'wiring you up for sound'. Did you learn your lines properly? No hope of escape now, all eyes are on you. "The prisoner ate a hearty breakfast." But of course we've made sure that everyone is OK as far as we can. And then the adrenalin starts to flow, the lights are up, it is down to you. The idea for the sketch was yours, with Edera-sensei's help you did the script yourself and you rehearsed it and now this is the moment at last. Rehearsed but not 'drilled' - that is the important bit. They all have talents, it isn't about producing a perfect 'scripted show' but about them sprouting wings.

It is really interesting to watch. Sometimes they just fight their way through, like swimming the length of the baths for the first time and not drowning. Other times they really are up in the air and flying. But stages give everyone the buzz, it isn't 'ordinary life' eh?