Dancing School Open Day

Yesterday was Y-chan's dancing school happyoukai so of course we went along to give her some support. The event was on the big stage in the local cultural centre - a rather odd building because with the slope of the land you enter on the third floor where the library is and then get the elevator down two floors which takes you to the level of the park in the wooded yato below. Still it is a very nice facility - Japan has thousands of these community buildings, beautiful meeting venues and theatre auditoriums built in the affluent days of the 1980's.

It was the first time I've been to a formal dancing performance in ... um ... forty two years. The last one I can remember attending was at the Paris Opera, a much grander occasion. I guess that this says I'm not a big fan of watching dance eh? Not that I have anything against the 'scene', it just doesn't pull many strings for me.

Anyway I really quite enjoyed it all, if Y-chan is dancing next year I'll go again. The programme was split between ballet and hula, and the younger girls (no boys!) made a good job of getting on their 'points' and putting on a good ballet performance. The bigger girls too! Somehow the hula disturbed me a bit (and no laughter in the back row please!). Is this popular in Britain now? There's something about the idiom - it feels like the 'movement' equivalent of gospel singing - which seems particularly suited to Japan. And I'm not sure that is entirely a 'good thing'. I must think about that.

I felt an awkwardness around watching dancing, perhaps a kind of self doubt about my own lack of capacity. I can dance OK, forms I learned in my childhood like Morris and country dancing I really enjoy, and jigging around on the dance floor is great. My social life in England once involved lots of ballroom-style stuff too to 'big band' music, and though I say it myself I had a real flair for it.

No, it is this use of my body as a means of artistic expression which leaves me with a vague sense of inadequacy. Why is that? It isn't just because I'm too old and a bit overweight to do such things well any more, and more about an underlying self image of my body as not a competent form, incapable of expressing something by moving in space. Social movement that says something about relationships between partners I love, and when it comes to singing you can't shut me up. But this more refined nymphs, fawns and satyrs stuff is something else. Maybe I should go to dancing school.

Descendant Chart

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours working on my 'family tree' database, not with the usual intention of pushing it a generation or two further down one of the ultimately infinite number of branches reaching back into the past, but trying to bring it up to date 'forwards'. During the summer I hope for a chance to meet up with some relatives in Liverpool, and if we do get a opportunity to talk about the extended family still very much alive in that part of the world I want to be sure that I understand 'who is who'.

The main document I have to help me in this work has been an airmail letter that my father sent me in 2003, in which he sketched out a diagram of the extended family as he recalled it. This precious single sheet of blue paper has been a very useful guide - in fact the job would have been impossible without it. Checking it against the 'on-line' databases of births, deaths and marriages in a couple of cases his memory was imperfect and of course there may be many omissions I'm still not aware of. But in general it is a very accurate chart.

Usually when I print out charts from my database they are 'trees' leading back in time but this time I have printed out a 'descendant chart' starting with my paternal grandfather Albert Edward Robinson. He was born in Toxteth Park, Liverpool 16 July 1886 and died in Liverpool 29 January 1951. He had six children, and in my generation, the third, he had twenty one grandchildren. On my chart, which must be far from complete, there are seventeen great-grandchildren and there must already be several fifth generation and probably even some sixth generation children that I am just not aware of.

I'm so used to looking at this 'family tree' material from the other end of the telescope that I must give myself some space to think about this 'forward perspective' more carefully. It is the unknown dimension isn't it? Or unknown for different reasons. looking back the past is - or so we believe - an entity fixed in time and space. Our knowledge of it is imperfect and partial and the further back you go the more that is true until beyond a certain point you know nothing. But looking forward - that is wholly a latent or potential reality. Things are forever being added because...

Pierrepoint

Last weekend Edera and I watched a DVD of the 2005 TV drama 'Pierrepoint'. I'd seen part of it before when it was on television in Britain, but to see it as a film provided a chance to appreciate in more detail Timothy Spall's amazing performance as England's most prolific hangman. Between 1934 and 1956 The real Albert Pierrepoint was responsible for the execution of more than four hundred men and women, including those convicted of the most infamous murders of the time, and also many of the Nuremberg Nazi war criminals.

I don't know how biographically precise this drama is to the specific detail of Pierrepoint's life and attitude towards his work but Timothy Spall's portrayal of him is truly compelling viewing. Before we abolished the death penalty in 1964 to be an executioner was always contract work in England, and for years neither his wife nor the customers in the pub he ran were aware of the part-time work carried out by this quiet and unassuming man. It only came to light because he was identified by journalists when he was hired to travel to Germany to execute some of the former Belsen guards.

There were two threads in this story which really struck me. The first was the way in which any activity no matter how grim acquires a kind of banality and 'ordinariness' through repetition. The techniques and 'tricks of the trade' of hanging become such a routine part of life that they develop a kind of comfortable familiarity for all involved - except the condemned person of course. Like an old pair of slippers. So for example in the middle of a day involving several executions in Germany Pierrepoint and his assistant stop for lunch, eating their sandwiches and drinking their flasks of tea and chatting on the steps of the scaffold before dispatching the rest of the condemned prisoners for the day. He takes a real pride in his competence as an executioner, in knowing all the ways in which it can be made more humane, involve less trauma for the condemned and be over more quickly.

And the other striking thing is that the executioner in some respects is as much the 'victim' of events and the men and women he hangs, his work is not free of consequence for him. Pierrepoint says many times during the film "When I do this I leave Albert Pierrepoint outside the door", and he maintains that he acts only as an agent of events and that he is not personally involved. But of course he does not. He also maintains to himself that by the process execution the condemned are restored to a state of grace, are 'now innocent of everything again and should be treated with respect' as he puts it.

When he wrote his autobiography after his retirement Pierrepoint said that he believed that the execution of none of the 400 people he had hanged had ever had acted as a deterrent to others, and that the process was purely one of retribution.

A very impressive piece of drama, and one that should be watched by anyone who debates the rights and wrongs of capital punishment.

Practical communication

We were talking yesterday about some work that Edera wants to do in the front garden to finish off the edges of the new crazy paving that I've been busy with there, and I noticed something again that has been a real feature of this project. When two people who don't share a common first language do very practical work together, certain aspects of communication suddenly seem to become difficult.

Of course there is never perfect communication between two people, in fact often I don't communicate with myself any too clearly either! You think the message is clear enough but then something happens and you know that it wasn't. Most of the time you can rely on love and goodwill to at least get the essentials across, and I realised a long time ago just how important that is in relationships that function across two languages. And even if you don't sometimes understand, then often it doesn't really matter. In practice we don't share ourselves with others as much or as clearly as we imagine.

But when it comes to practical things like mixing cement and spreading sand then precise communication IS essential. You have to be able to say "put half a trowel of mortar under the lowest point of this stone on the left when I lever it up" and the instruction needs to be carried out. Sometimes this is mainly a matter of vocabulary. What ARE those round brown double tube kerb things with different height columns called? How do we distinguish in words between those and the ones with the same height? We don't use either of them in England.

Often though it isn't vocabulary, it is the precise perception of the meaning of words. We all know what green and blue are don't we? But here in Japan, although the colours are exactly the same as in England, traffic lights are perceived and described as 'red', 'amber' and 'blue'. "You can go now - it's a blue light!"

This happens all the time in detailed practical work - 'lowest point' and 'mortar' and 'lever' take on different meanings. You have to use signs - to point and to gesture. Words don't do it. Of course, if you were doing it all day every day in a week you would have a shared vocabulary again, this problem arises when you do something practical and NEW.

I'm noticing something in this that takes me back to the cats. Maybe verbal communication often emerges as an additional 'layer' - a kind of audible shorthand - that lies above signs and feelings. Once the top layer breaks down, we have to SHOW in some way until we can establish verbal language again. But this doesn't mean that SHOWING is necessarily any less sophisticated, or on some more primitive level, it is just quicker and can be done at a distance. The fact that we resort to it so instinctively and successfully shows its real potential.

Good Companions

Just two more regular choir rehearsals to go before I get on the plane for England though I have no doubt that we will crowd in a couple of 'Sunday extras' too. Over the last few weeks we have been focusing on the music we had needed for the event last Sunday but at last yesterday evening we could work on a few pieces for England that I feel we are weak on. It was an interesting couple of hours.

Firstly we had a chance to listen to a CD of our Sunday efforts and to our surprise from the perspective of a microphone in the hall rather than standing on stage our mistake in 'Il bianco' was nowhere near as bad as we thought. In fact if you didn't know the work you wouldn't have noticed it. Not the earthquake that we felt in the spotlight. That was a real surprise, and an interesting measure of how closely we identify with each other when we sing.

Later we worked through two pieces of sacred polyphony that we really have to have in the programme as we are singing in churches but which I sense some discomfort with. They are low for female voices to cover both the alto and tenor lines and also a bit risky in terms of the complexity of carefully counting rests. And both of these worked fine too. One of them - a piece by Palestrina - I had really begun to wonder if we could perform well but there it was, right on the note.

The thing which really impressed me last night though was the extent to which the whole group now instinctively contributes to decisions about dynamics and interpretation. When we get going everybody is putting in ideas about how we should be sounding and it really works so well, I'm almost puzzled as to what has happened to us. Somehow the 'disaster' of having a conductor stalk out on us six months ago has made us work together even more closely. Not only has this singing group survived twice against all odds but adversity has made it much stronger. There is a lesson there.

When we first started this English trip project it was in my mind to write a book about it along the lines of J.B. Priestley's "The Good Companions", a story I like and which explores the relationships that emerge within a group of 'strolling players' putting on a provincial theatre tour. I think that I'm still up for this, I had better start taking more notes. If you are in that cloud of people that are likely to spend time with us in England smile and watch out, you may well be on 'Candid Camera' already...

Camping trip

This image turned up a few days ago. It must have been taken in 1952 or 1953 and the location is Grange in Borrowdale. The tent is pitched in a field on the left side of the river just a couple of hundred metres down steam from the village. This is such a popular spot now and the planning rules are so strict that I'm sure that it must have been impossible to camp here for at least thirty years. But back then any farmer could let hardy folk pitch a tent in their fields and they usually did.

There is something so 'period' about this picture that I almost wish it was in sepia tones. In fact in my collection of my grandfather's photographs there ARE some of this self-same tent taken fifteen years before in similar places with my mum as a teeanger, and they ARE sepia prints. Just look at that tent! The canvas equivalent of a penny-farthing bicycle. I'm sure that it was the long vanished Bukta Brand (now a vintage collector's 'nostalgia item', and it was white (of course!). It lived in the shed in a tent bag along with wooden polls and wooden pegs and string guy-ropes. Before it was stored away at the end of the summer it had to be dried and cleaned and aired and then aired again at the start of the next season and all the equipment counted out in the yard. Of course there was always at least one peg missing, and a new one needed to be carved from a piece of pine. No silicon 'waterproofing' in aerosol cans back in the 1950's - I seem to remember my grand dad applying something inflammable with a brush.

And then when you were camping you had to take the separate ground sheet out and dry it every day over a tree and roll up the flaps to air the place, and get the primus stove alight with a wet matches and methylated spirit. It is really a wonder that we survived at all and to be honest we didn't. I don't ever remember the trip that didn't end early because we were washed out. Over-curious cows near guy ropes was another familiar problem.

Still it was fun. Going to the dairy in the early morning to see the cows being milked and buying a jug full for breakfast, washing up greasy dishes in the river. And what I most remember on those trips is waking up in the grey midsummer dawn - it comes around three in northern England in June - and listening to the soft misty rain falling on the canvas above my head as I snuggled down into an old sleeping bag. There is no more beautiful noise than the rain falling, unless it is the wind stirring the trees up

Cause and Effect

Interesting the number of times Edera and I say something along the lines of "That's your fault!" to each other in the course of a day. Usually it is a bit more subtle, claws not drawn. In fact often in the form of the reciprocal 'pouty' statement "I suppose you think that is my fault!" but the lurking intention is there. If blame there has to be then it must lie somewhere eh? And it can't be me.

And a noticeable aspect of this seems to be that the more intimately our lives involve each other in every aspect, and they do, the more this tendency arises. Actually 'blame' is too strong a word, it involves judgment. What we are really talking about here is 'cause'.

In my studies I've come across 'cause' and 'effect' a lot and it is all much more complex than it looks. For example if I see a burglar breaking into a house and phone the police and he is caught by the police then *obviously* my phone call is cause of his arrest. But say I only noticed him because a neighbour switched on his porch light. is the neighbour then in turn the cause of his eventual arrest? And if the neighbour switched that light on because two cats were fighting in his garden are the cats ultimately responsible for the burglar's arrest?

The truth of it is that such 'chains' of cause and effect are nearly always involved and they run on forever. My call was what philosophers often call the 'proximate cause' but in fact cause and effect is a kind of 'Indra's Net' of endless co-incident causes. We see this aspect of reality whenever we talk about someone committing a crime 'because of his upbringing'. Of course he did.

And also so often there is volitional choice. The cause was a consequence of a deliberate act, a choice made. I didn't have to phone the police, the burglar didn't have to be a burglar.

The interesting thing about cause and effect in a very close relationship is that it is always there, because the consequences of almost every action is reflected in somebody else's life all the time.

So next time I carelessly leave my glasses on the table and you-know-who carelessly dumps some papers on top of them and I'm hunting around the house to find them because I need to drive to the supermarket I'll know who to blame. It's um ...

The mistake

Phew! Now let me just 'think over' all of that. An interesting days' worth yesterday and we are still to have the inquest. But the focal point of events - at least for me - was THE MISTAKE. I'd even call it a 'car crash' but we did keep it 'on the road'. But it was a close run thing.

Learning from mistakes is the most important thing. Well, we were the last of fifteen choirs on stage, always a difficult thing because your head is just full of other people's musical smog. And then one of the gang insisted on a final final final rehearsal in a corner just a few minutes before we went on stage. And then in the wings a few of us were clearly a bit 'hyper', sitting very still I could feel too much erratic energy around there, sense trouble in the air. But we got through the first two of our three pieces in fine style. Then in 'Il bianco' - in the first two bars of the second page - it happened.

I'm not sure exactly what happened but I think it was that someone on the alto line got too relaxed (the 'home straight!' problem) and miscounted a rest by one crotchet and that then mis-cued the sopranos. That kind of thing in a performance is exactly like an earthquake beginning, you don't notice the very first wobble but suddenly things are moving wrongly. But luckily everyone kept singing and after about four bars we were all back together. Probably most of the audience didn't realise that something had gone wrong. Our eyeballs were on stalks.

Lack of mindfulness. That was the beginning and end of it. Somebody's mind wasn't on the job, they weren't watching and listening properly. Ensembles only work if you read each other's minds. Like driving a car, if you don't watch the road even on the easy bits, perhaps most certainly on the deceptively easy bits, then there will be an accident sooner or later. Also it pinpointed for me the issue that if something does go wrong then we need an agreed 'recovery plan'. And especially as there is no conductor. We recovered OK this time quite instinctively, but we need to talk about future emergencies.

Still, definitely a 'useful experience'. Better here and now than in England in seven weeks time in front of an unfamiliar crowd. It was the kind of a scare you need to get everybody's full attention. Once the earth has moved then you take care to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Gasshōsai Sunday

A long day looming down here in leafy Chiba-ken. It is the local Gasshōsai - our city choir festival - over at Nogiku Plaza. So it will be a 'black shoes' rather than a 'brown boots' day, I'd better get my brain in gear or I'll forget something for sure, I usually do. 'Bulldog' clips on my music file might be a good idea as it is already an inch thick and set up for England. I'm not taking that to bits again.

Over the years I've grown a bit cynical about these "do's". For a start they are a sure recipe for musical indigestion, each choir chooses two or three items with a complete lack of reference to everyone else's music, and usually even their own. So you get around fifty wholly unrelated pieces. And then everyone is tense and worried about their own performance and so fidgets and never listens to anybody else before their 'slot'. And - and I say this sotto voce - many singers clear off after their turn, which means that the last choir on has an audience around a third of the size of the first. And today that is us! Nobody *means* to do this of course, it is just that there is nobody else available to pick up little Ichiro from baseball practice. Can't whinge, I have done it myself.

Looking at the programme I see that there are fifteen choirs today, nine local and six visitors. Actually I'm singing in two, because the men's choir are doing their usual 'marching down the road of life, over mountain and dale, mother waiting in the furusato (home village)' stuff to brace everyone's morale. Mustn't forget to go up twice eh?

Still, it is fun to have such a busy and active local scene. And this event couldn't have come at a better time. Just four weeks and I'll be in England and three weeks after that we'll be performing there so this is our last shot to get it together on stage before the big trip. And without a conductor too - not that we don't have experience of being in charge of ourselves but not having someone out front with a little stick and wavy arms certainly focuses the mind on unspoken communication, the power of looking meaningfully at people and sticking together come what may. I'm responsible for the safe launch of two items myself today so wish me luck. Believe me it is 'dog eat dogmeat' out there

Hungarian rhapsody (sorry!)

With puns like that I need some stronger tablets ...

Another 'big push' on the picture scanning yesterday as the temperature soared over 30 degrees for the first time this year. 120 new images scanned in. It wasn't as idyllic as it sounds as the aircon here in the study is making a terrible noise and I ended up with a bad headache. I'll have to get some ear protectors eh? What did you say? Still it beats laying crazy paving in such weather, that would have finished me off.

One of this new batch of images is included here. I took it in August 1978 at the engine shed at Vacs, a town on the bend of the Danube just north of Budapest. I won't bore all you non-railway 'buffs' out there with all the gruesome details but basically it is a MAV (Hungarian State Railways) Class 424. Very beautiful and well designed locomotives. My friend's wife's dad worked at this installation, and somehow I got to walk around the place, take lots of pictures and actually I even got a short footplate ride on this engine 424.341 Steam locomotives were still at work in Eastern Europe then, but a year later they had all gone in Hungary.

There is a lot of 'atmosphere' here. I especially like that 'period' red star on the smokebox door. Like something out of a novel.

424's played a big part in that trip. Somewhere, I think it might have been near Debrecen, I ended up by chance trailing one across country on a local train in the hire car I was driving, one of those Ladas that looked like Fiats. It was a hot sunny afternoon and for ten miles or more we kept pace with that local passenger train heading north across the dusty plain. Later I filmed them in the suburbs of Miskolc. I was probably lucky not to get 'pulled over' - Hungary was already a liberal country in the 1970's but railway photography was still a somewhat dodgy interest.

Sadly because of a health problem I somehow lost contact with all that. But after east Asia I still think Hungary was one of my favorite places and my daughter Julia, who goes frequently on business, loves it too. Even the railways have 'style'.

Dusk visitor

A new visitor here yesterday evening. Our adopted family of 'outdoor cats' was making a racket behind the house just as it was getting dark so I went out so see what was up. Two of them - the 'Father Cat' and a one-year-old that I call 'Titch' - were doing the usual 'sitting on the wall' routine but being very vocal about it.

Then I saw the reason why. I noticed along the back of the house this small furry bundle heading in my direction. All of twenty centimetres long and climbing over every half brick like it was a mountain. If you are only that size then I guess it is. I'm not sure what was in progress, , the cats were at least 50 metres from their usual refuge on the waste ground near A-san's house, but my guess is that the two older cats were showing the baby where the 'Little House' food bowl lives.

Edera rescued the kitten and before we took him/her home we got this quick picture. Not my usual quality I'm afraid but I didn't want to scare him/her with the flash and also he/she has an eye infection which would make direct flash even more disturbing.

The two grown up cats were appalled at the little one being picked up by humans of course but they hovered close by. Afterwards for some reason I was struck yet again by the importance of 'non-verbal communication' - just how do cats communicate around this without words? And how do we also do that? If we can't use words how do we share meaning? There is a whole layer of it going on in our lives that we can't easily describe because it is 'pre-verbal'

Uh! And a baby cat to touch and stroke! I felt like I was mainlining a love drug.

And at the same time that sense of fearful vulnerability. How can such a small, weak yet insatiably curious animal make a way in this saha world? Already at five this morning I heard the anxious mother off again in search of wandering children, now that they can move around there will be no rest for her. But of course in the bigger scheme of things these kittens are no more nor less vulnerable than you or me.

Purple headed mountains

I'm making a bit of a 'drive' here at the moment on scanning in old family photographs because I've promised to take my mum one of those neat electronic photograph frames back to England for her birthday. You know the kind of thing, you can get around a thousand photos on the memory card and play them non-stop to your heart's content all day. Drive yourself nuts - if you aren't already eh?

Yesterday's batch included many of my grandparents' holiday 'snaps' from the early 1950's. There is something peculiarly interesting for an 'anorak' like me in working through them all, the task appeals to my policeman's mind. Some are pretty easy to identify, you can't mistake Skiddaw in the background and just how many photographs of Ashness Bridge can you take in one lifetime? If it wasn't for the photographic technology you could reproduce some of the pictures - the lake steamers on Derwentwater and Windermere for example - if you went there this morning armed with a digital camera. Nothing has changed in the view except the clouds.

Other pictures are unidentifiable - at least for me. There is a sequence of the pair of them walking in the hills but no clue as to where - someone might spot it but you'd have to know the skyline.

And then pictures like the one at the top, which reminds me of that verse "the purple headed mountain, the river running by ..." in the hymn "All things bright and beautiful". Where the heck is it? Not "The Lakes" I think, I would guess one of the sea lochs in the southern Highlands of Scotland. Unless somebody writes in here, or I happen to be driving by the actual view, I will never know.

But such views are milestones of my childhood. Ullswater, Buttermere, Crummock Water. The water lapping on the pebbles, scent of meths from the 'primus' stove. A cool breeze off the lake and the mystery of the eternal purple headed mountain from which I am separated by the water. Something that I can see but seemingly not touch. It reminds me of a part of the Chinese scripture known as the 'Sandokai'

"If from your experience of the senses basic Truth you do now know
How can you ever find the path that certain is no matter how far distant you may walk?
As you walk on distinctions between near and far are lost and,
Should you lost become there will arise obstructing mountains and great rivers ..."

I don't feel obstructed by this mountain or the water though and it does speak directly to my senses. I guess from the other side it looks different, they all do.

Just wish I knew where it was though.

One for arachnophobes

Spotted this guy (or more probably girl I suppose) lurking on the stairs last night. She's been around for a week or two - oh! And if you are planning on spending any time at 'Little House' soon I should say she seems to especially like our upstairs washitu (guest room). By tropical standards she might not be so big - only about the size of your hand - but she is big enough for me although very pretty. Completely harmless of course. I think.

May is the start of the dodgy season for many-legged fauna around here. Over the weekend I came across two mukade in the car port. These are poisonous centipedes and you need to be careful as they are pretty aggressive too and their venom needs urgent treatment as it can cause Korsakoff's disease and other complications and is occasionally fatal. Both of these were around 20 centimetres long, I managed to kill one but the other got away into the pile of garbage from building work which will now need some very careful handling.

The same day Edera got stung by a maimai-ga, the caterpillar of the Japanese gypsy moth. She was working on the rockery and of course she dresses up very carefully for the work by somehow one crept into the gap between her socks and her jeans. She was very lucky really - she didn't find it until she came indoors for a shower and just a couple of the hairs on its back brushed her ankles which caused some prickly pain but nothing else. In my Japanese natural history book these are flagged as 'dangerous' and every spine on their backs is like a small razor sharp needle loaded with poison.

So, that is the history of our relationship with small but very dodgy animals this summer so far. We don't have these hazards in England. Fancy popping round and giving us a hand with the garden?

The winter of 1962 - 63

I was scanning old photographs yesterday evening and here are a couple which made me feel happy as May in Japan starts to get towards the limit of my 'comfort zone' for heat and strong sunlight. Thankfully the humidiy is still low, although the 'tsuuyuu' rainy season is said to have arrived in Okinawa already.

These images must be of the winter of 1962-63 which in Cumbria was described as 'the Worst Winter of the Century'. And there certainly was a heck of a lot of snow. It came if I remember rightly in mid-January and it was more than six weeks before there was any kind of a thaw.

The picture with the dog - my grandfather's wire-haired fox terrier Shiela - is taken in the lane just south of Nateby village on the road to Mallerstang. It doesn't look like anybody will be driving any time soon down the road towards the 'Moorcock', as these drifts are two metres deep in places. The picture shows a problem which has always dogged the area in winter - dry stone walls make perfect windbreaks and so soon accumulate mountains of snow on the leeward side as soon as a serious blizzard gets started. Shiela must have been about ten years old at the time and looks like she has completely lost a young dog's enthusiam for the white stuff.

The picture with the locomotive - an LMS Class 8F whose number I can't make out - was taken at the Midland Station at Kirkby Stephen on the Settle to Carlisle line. The engine has been fitted up with a big plough which was kept for the purpose at Carlisle, and the crew have no doubt stopped for a brew and their 'bait' here before venturing south over Ais Gill summit to try and open up the line towards Leeds. Charging big drifts with heavy ploughs like this was 'savage amusement'; basically you backed up, opened the regulator to sprint forward at high speed and then braced yourself for the impact in the corner of the cab and clung on for dear life.

Another crazy load

Over to 'Joyful Honda' this morning for another load of crazy paving stones, and the inevitable happened. They had run out of the particular material I have been using, a rather nice yellow-ish metamorphic rock, and weren't expecting any more of it in stock. Luckily I am pretty well at the corner of the garden anyway, and I have about a dozen pieces in hand. But I still had to make an instant 'executive decision' as to what to use for the length up by the shed.

In the end I chose a grey slate. Edera is not so keen on it as she was on the first batch but I think it will look fine, in fact quite a nice contrast. The front of the house has a vaguely 'Cotteswold' feel to it but this new stuff will be 'Memories of Windermere'. It is that familiar 'Lake District Grey' that will remind you of a mother dove's feathered breast or a wet hike in Borrowdale depending on whether you are a person who sees life as half full or half empty.

Anyway it is all going to be much easier to lay. A whizz of cement underneath to nail it to the rough concrete foundation and then some of that 'magic sand to bed it in between the cracks. Ornamental sand to left and right and then there we are, job done, straight out of an Arthur Wainwright guide book.

I'm just going to get all this done here and then when I get to England in June I'm going to have to start there. Mind you, around where we live you don't have to shell out 980 yen for half a dozen bits of stone.

Crazy Paving

Yesterday afternoon I took a look at the strip of garden at the front of the house from our balcony. I wanted a 'bird's eye view' of how the crazy paving work was progressing and it looks neat eh? Of course it all still has to be pointed and and there is around three linear metres at the top of the picture before we arrive at the corner by the gate with the railway bridge, but now I have reached the concrete foundation that I laid some time ago and today it should go very quickly with Edera around to mix mortar for me.

I must have looked over this balcony many times in the last few years but the thing that especially struck me yesterday was the extent to which the shrubs on the right had grown. "Plants Grow!" It is hardly front page news is it? (Well, it might qualify in the 'Guardian' these days.) But it caught my attention because Kuu's kennel used to be just where that darker green conifer is, and he died four years ago in April. All physical trace of us evaporates that quickly eh? You would have a hard time trying to install a kennel here now for a grumpy old dog with a waggy tail that was a grand master at telling the time and demanding his walks as per his contract of employment. And when he died of a heart attack on the soft earth here this is where we kept him company in his last moments, I had to demolish that kennel very quickly to get him out when he had a seizure.

How come it all grew so much in four years? These kinds of measures of change and process are all around us and yet we never see them, our brains are hard-wired to absorb spatial rather than temporal perceptions.

Better get to mix some concrete. It has been really striking me doing this work how the ongoing histry of this crazy paving is likely to be a measure of my own days.

Storage

One angle on the sorting, cleaning and throwing away that I have been inflicting on myself recently is that I've found myself contemplating types of storage space much more. Certainly a part of the 'Belongings Problem' seems to be that belongings out of sight are out of mind. But it is more than that, there's an issue somewhere with the whole concept of several of the classes of storage we use.

Some forms of storage work well. On reflection I'm pretty impressed and content with bookshelves and the clothes rail in the built in wardrobe. Not only do they use available space efficiently but you can actually see what is there.

Other kinds of shelving ... so-so. The suitcases on the top shelf of the wardrobe are OK, as are the plates in the kitchen cabinet although you have to rummage around different stacks to find what you want

Drawers, they are the 'big issue' aren't they? Some drawers just about scrape through with a C minus. My underpants and socks drawer works after a fashion because there are only two kinds of objects in there and what with me not being especially choosy as a rule about which of these garments I wear I can just grab the first available pair. Other clothing drawers are not so satisfactory. Who the heck knows what is in those two sets of cheap plastic drawers at the bottom of the wardrobe? The ones we bought from Cainz Home a while back. Just a mountain of trousers and tee-shirts and sweaters pushed in there, like industrial archaeology or layers of the geological record. I even found a pair of trousers with an 84cm waist band a while back, must have been from my school days. By the way - where IS my school cap?

And desk drawers - or any containing stationery, medicines papers and the like. Good grief! Checking in my left hand drawer this morning the first three items I cam across were a magnifying glass, a Remembrance Day poppy and a North Eastern Railway guard's whistle (useful for attracting the attention of distant dogs). Even for the ranks of the disciplined, in which I am not to be found, they are generally just repositories for stuff you don't want to throw away just yet.

But 'storage systems' don't work either, do they? Just expensive toys, they bring an illusion of order to objects yet they actually represent even more clutter.

I need to sit in a corner and suck my thumb and think about all of this. I feel a headache coming on.

kimono wearing

Visitors to 'Little House' from Britain - and especially younger women - are usually very interested in kimono as a style of dress and sometimes end up making a few purchases. Edera is very useful to know in this department, she and her kimono-wearing friends know the places to find bargains and can also give practical advice when it comes to learning how to wear them. Without this kind of help and knowledge it is really impossible to know where to start, and there are lots of shops selling wildly unsuitable stuff to tourists from overseas as omiyage

Whenever I see 'Westerners' wearing kimono it raises all kinds of interesting questions for me. Basically I really like it, the whole style of the garment can look so beautiful on someone who is slim and has good posture, and it also needs a care and attention to detail that requires a particular kind of 'togetherness' and comfort about your body and movement. It also shows respect for a very beautiful part of Japanese culture.

And there is also the 'technical side'. Almost everything about kimono, from the origin and manufacture of the materials used and the meaning of the designs to the way the obi is tied and the accessories chosen is just so full of technical detail. To wear kimono knowledgeably and learn all the skills you would need to spend time living in Japan, and have a very large bank balance!

There must inevitably be - already must be - evolving styles and traditions of 'western' kimono wearing, just like there are undoubtedly western styles of Zen practice and evolving Japanese traditions of, say, oil painting or chamber music performance. You can't 'ring fence' cultural forms. Japanese people are enormously talented at absorbing and reinterpreting elements of other cultures in this way but somehow it is still often unusual to experience the opposite taking place.

Hotel Merry Christmas

I was over in Narita all day yesterday and had to take the road from Sanrizuka down to Highway 51. Just as you go down into town there is this 'Love Hotel' on the left which, for self-evident reasons from these pictures I guess, always cheers me up whenever I pass it by. I haven't used the facilities though - so far.

I've mentioned 'Love Hotels' in these blogs before. As an institution they developed not because we are an especially horny lot here in Japan, but more because homes serving two or three generations of a family with rooms only divided by paper covered sliding doors offer little in the way of conventional privacy. In recent years I guess college students - almost all of whom live at home with their parents (sad!) - have become an important clientele. One way or another you can 'take a rest' here for a couple of hours for the bargain price of 1990 yen it seems. For maximum discretion you even pay in advance using a 'slot machine' facility on the room door. So I'm told ...

I have seen several interesting 'themed' love hotels in my travels around Japan but this is the only 'Merry Christmas' one that I have come across so far. I'll spare you the many potential jokes on this theme along the "it is always Christmas around here" track. If I was going to go into this business I think I would brand my operation not just on the 'Merry Christmas' angle but also I'd get birthdays in there too so that I could use the "He'll think that it is Christmas and his birthday all rolled into one every time" punch line. But then I've already worked in the hospitality industry for years and we go in for over-kill there, subtlety is not our strong point. However I don't think 'Hotel Merry Christmas' is going to represent 'permitted development' in the Lake District National park any time soon.

Rabbit in the Moon

On our trip to Ohara on Sunday we called in at a little country temple which has some very beautiful carvings both inside and also outdoors on the bell tower - here in Japan usually a separate small structure which is often not much more than a roof covering the bell and striking pole. Around the base of the building was a frieze and most of the carvings there were of pairs of animals taken from Buddhist stories.

I especially liked the carving of the two rabbits shown here. In Japan and China we don't have a 'Man in the Moon' but rather a 'Rabbit in the Moon' I think that this legend must have originally come down from the Indian 'Jataka Tales' and in Japan you find it first in the early collection of folk tales known as the Konjaku Monogatari.

In the Japanese version of the story a monkey, a fox and a rabbit decided to practice charity in their lives sincerely. When a hungry old man turned up each of the animals responded in their own way. The monkey collected nuts for the old man to eat and the fox offered a fish that he had caught in his trap. But they both made fun of the rabbit because all he ate was grass which was on no benefit to the old man at all.

The rabbit thought that the only thing that he could helpfully offer to the hungry old man was his own body, and so he unhesitatingly jumped into the fire to cook himself. But it turned out that at the end of the tale the rabbit wasn't harmed after all. The hungry old man turned out to be the Buddha Shakyamuni, and he was so touched by the generous love shown by the rabbit that he drew an image of the rabbit and the smoke from the fire on the face of the moon.

Twelve Jizos

Down to O'Hara-shi yesterday. We have two visitors from England here at the moment, and we took advantage of the beautiful weather to make a trip to a few of our favourite spots in that part of Boso Hanto.

One place I always make a point of visiting on this coast in a small village with a tiny Buddhist temple perched on a rock just above the waves. Actually it is not really a temple, there has never been a monk in residence, more of a shrine with only one very small room. Even on the calmest and sunniest of days you can hear the big 'rollers' running in from the open Pacific Ocean onto the rocks and breakwater just below. One day I'll make the trip down there in a typhoon to see what it can be really like.

The legend around the founding of this temple relates to a ship carrying monks and bodhisattva carvings being shipwrecked on the beach here but all were miraculously saved. Over the centuries it must have served as a local focus for sefaring fishing families making a very hazardous living, and it is still maintained in meticulous condition.

Next to the entrance there is the usual line of 'Jizo' statues representing the Bodhisattva Kstigarbha, one for each of the six worlds in the Realm of Desire within samsara. Jizo's great vow was to protect and care for all beings in the Realm of Desire during that time between the death of the Buddha Shakyamuni and the coming of Maitreya, the Buddha to be. These Jizos stand in such an exposed place that even within a year their red 'bibs' have been bleached white by the salt wind off the ocean, they are both literally and figuratively 'protecting us from the edge'.

What I especially like about these statues is that the ones standing in front are all 'second generation' and 'late shift' technology, late additions, what my grandfather would have described as being on 'late turn'. The 'early turn' shift of medieval statues they replaced is so badly weathered that it is now hard to tell which Jizo is in which realm of existence any more. But anyway, those 'oldies' have been left there as a kind of 'sempai' generation of 'old hands' at the protection business lined up behind the 'new boys', a kind of additional insurance in the Mahayana scheme of things, twelve Bodhisattvas might be better than six in a tight spot. And if you live in a place as dangerous as this, which we all do although we might not notice it, you need all the Bodhisattva insurance you can find.

A bad experience at the British Linen Bank

I was rooting around in my desk drawer yesterday to check my bank cheque book details to send the account number and sort code to someone who needed to transfer some money to my account. It came as a surprise but it is nearly a year since I last wrote a cheque it seems, who needs to do it these days if you have an internet connection? I notice on my bank's web site that cheque books seem to be an increasingly 'optional extra' now, you have to actually request one even if you have what used to be termed a 'current account'.

Cheque books seem to be pretty well non-existent in Japan, you have to be either super-rich or a registered business to have one. But you can't pay on the internet so easily here either. Basically banks make their money every time you make a transaction - they will credit a payment to somebody else's account on your behalf and charge you for their trouble.

Looking at this little used cheque book made me laugh at the sudden memory of an early 'run-in' that I had with a bank in Glasgow when I first started working back in the 1960's. My salary then was something laughably small, I think £60 a month, and I had to wait a month for the first payment. I went along to the local branch of the British Linen Bank in Crookston to ask for an overdraft to buy some household goods - pots and pans and the like. I was hoping to borrow £15.

That gnome-like Caledonian bank manager was having none of it. It seemed that he needed a full 'business plan' before he could lend THAT much money and as a bearded lefty type I was obviously a bad risk in any case. I was shown the door in about fifteen seconds and had to live on packets of chips until my boat came in, in the form of my first salary cheque.

I got some pleasure from the knowledge that the British Linen Bank was taken over the following year, so I guess that guy needed a loan himself after that. I wonder what old-style Glaswegian bankers would make of the current state of play in the British banking industry.

Without a paddle

I managed to follow the 'Election Night Special' in the UK yesterday between mixing mortar and digging a trench. It is the 'norm' for me of course - this bizarre experience of passing involvement from a completely different time zone, cooking lunch as I listen to interviews in the middle of the night from elsewhere. And then yesterday evening as I worked out some final costs for the choir trip listening to the 'morning after the night before' stuff. I think I would find living in just one time and place rather dull now, everything is relative and it is nice to live that way.

It is certainly an interesting result.Seasoned political commentators at the BBC and 'Guardian' are lamenting the outcome as 'opportunity lost' from various angles and I dread to think what more right wing simplified spelling tabloids are making of it all. But personally I feel rather satisfied the result. The distribution of power mirrors the will of the electorate even if the actual arithmetic is not proportional. Nobody has a clear right to govern, everybody needs to be concerned with compromises and co-operation if they want to achieve anything. For once, for a moment at least, we have some politics that reflect reality.

Will it achieve anything? Who knows. Political activists will have to un-learn the lessons and instincts of a lifetime if there is to be any hope of moving on positively from this. Clearly they were never going to fix the system while it returned someone to office with the absolute power they craved. Now everything is to play for.

How often do we notice this though? The status quo remains the status quo until some major upset comes along and then things suddenly get unexpectedly out of control. After a long stretch of calm water the current takes over and like a raft bobbing around on a great river we head down the canyon rudderless and without a paddle and who knows if there will be Niagara around the next corner. Being powerless involves ... umm ... not being in control of events, uncertain of outcomes. Uncharted waters are, by their very nature, uncharted

Morning labour

We say that the British summer is two hot days and a thunderstorm, but so far we've had five or six hot and sunny days here during 'Golden Week'. This afternoon though comes the rain, if not the thunder. After a few days heavy manual work in the blazing sun I took the hint today and got up just after dawn to make the best of the cool morning air while mixing concrete and laying crazy paving. As it turned out though the sun hasn't been shining and the humidity has been rocketing and now after lunch I'm set to pursue some more sedentary work. That all works out just nicely, my paving would benefit from a good heavy shower.

I quite enjoy crazy paving, it is just such a 'mindless' occupation. There's an art to it all of course and the best looking job is the one with the most even cracks. So it is the ideal 'working meditation' - routine enough not to require much 'up front' intellectual effort and at the same time demanding mindfulness as each piece is chosen and laid and each mortar mixed.

The new path is starting to spread along the front of the house from the gate towards the school room window. We don't use the route much but it is nice to get those old carpet tiles taken up, and now the area will be fine to use for sitting out on breezy days in spring and autumn.

Part of this job has included interring Tora and Pero's ashes behind a low edging wall in the corner next to the mail box. A painful task, the hurt and awareness of loss is still pretty raw there even six months after their death. We recited the 'Adoration of the Buddha's Relics' yesterday and then carried them out. The little urns wrapped in white cloth that come from the temple have been sitting on the altar during since November and the cat's photos in front have been a familiar and actually rather cheerful sight at morning scripture recitation. In theory they should be buried after forty nine days but it has not really felt quite time. Now it does, it had to be done before I travelled to England next month.

Election roundup

So today is the UK General Election. Somehow I've been sucked into all this from the other side of the planet and especially through the 'Guardian' web site, but I try not to bring those concerns over into writing here in 'Little House'.

For me the experience of this last several weeks has been very painful. The internet has completely changed the whole context of holding an election because the sheer volume of 'grass roots' comment taking place inevitably gets fed back into the political process (whatever THAT may be). It is certainly a lot easier to express disaffection with the status quo without setting car tyres alight in the middle of the road although in practice the two may turn out to be complimentary.

This UK election has been the closest fought for years and there have been two particular aspects of it that I have found deeply depressing. Perhaps the thing that has struck me most this time is that so many people are simply 'tribal', seemingly incapable of any kind of reflection. They even see this as a 'virtue'. We have had an administration that has taken us into an illegal war, trashed more than half of our civil liberties and incurred astronomical public debts. And yet around 25% of the population will still vote for them because that is what they are programmed to do. Pure unthinking tribalism, a kind of intoxication. If you ever wondered why Hitler won the 1933 election look no further. We can all do it any time we like.

The other thing that has been very evident in the 'Guardian' web pages is the tendency to descend into abuse and hatred as any kind of rational argument fails, or maybe rational argument is simply ignored. Always a feature of elections of course and maybe I'm more sensitive to it these days but I have no recollection of it being anything like this before. People really do HATE viscerally , and they will use any verbal weapon that comes to hand.

It isn't good news is it? "As you sow, so shall you reap" doesn't just apply to the other guy. I have a feeling that we have a long way to fall before our feet touch anything solid, and when they do the impact will be very painful, perhaps fatal.

More 'savage amusement'

Early blogging today. Another spell of 'savage amusement' awaiting me out there after breakfast with paint brush and spade in the burning sun. Edera told me to go and find my straw hat yesterday after I'd turned a kind of turkey shade but I couldn't find one and had to resort to my best Lancashire cloth cap instead and no, I didn't take any self portraits. Today will be concrete mixing to get the foundations in for some crazy paving along the front of the house. I can't wait.

One thing I notice about these 'extreme sport' bouts of domestic maintenance and improvement is how quickly they find all those muscles that you haven't used for a while. Yesterday I must have done a few hundred 'squats' moving stuff around the place and then I also went up to 'Joyful Honda' for a car full of rocks and sand and cement. Despite the nice hot bath the muscles along the tops of my thighs were soon squarking away after I got into bed, and several times during the night I had to roll around to get them unlocked enough to get back to sleep. This morning they just look so darn 'manly' I surprise even myself! If I could get some body armour and a spear and one of those cute little gold tunics I could do a passable imitation of some statue of a Roman God with sinews like these. Of course I can do a passable imitation of one of those whenever the mood takes me anyway, but there is always room for improvement don't you think? It just goes to show that every cloud has a silver lining.

One thing I always notice doing work like this is how quickly the mind runs far beyond the body when it comes to setting boundaries. I'm digging the foundations and already in my mind the stone is laid and I'm half way through repairing the garden gate and the big planter near the school room. I also notice that 'women' (and we all know who I mean by THAT eh?) are more susceptible to this tendency than men. Their mouse-like minds scamper along without pause for breath.

That kind of thing is just bound to lead to grief, making it happen is 90% of the job and you can only do it at three miles an hour . So rest content with your tortoise pace and you will be a happy person.

Possessions yet again.

Back here again.Over the last few weeks possessions seemed to have loomed ever larger around the place. Actually this has been building up since organising the move into our English house during the winter and there has been a modest regime of shedding stuff in place since then. But lately for me this has become a much more central 'project'. Partly it is driven by the whole issue of having two bases, that practical angle of not being caught out with loads of stuff if suddenly we want to rent here or sell there. And partly it is the practicality of knowing what is where and what is supposed to be where. Do bank statements and university records live in Chiba or Cumbria? But this dicourse soon gets to be more existential once it 'kicks off' - this is not just an epistemological issue but in truth an ontological matter.

I think everybody must start asking these sorts of questions around this time of life. When you are younger and nest building there is a sense in which you want the place to be 'complete' and you keep on adding posessions and experiences into the pot. Especially possessions. These are 'souvenirs' of the most fundamental kind, something that you bought or acquired 'because you are here'. Soon the nest will be complete, or so it seems.

Then comes the morning after the night before. You have sobered up and you look around. The scales fall from your eyes. What the heck is all this 'stuff' doing here. Where did it come from and what does it mean. It is like a glacier, an avalanche. In an unknown but evidently rapidly reducing number of years you will die and so all this is now completely meaningless, a kind of archaeology of your life which is so often layers of 'failure'. However loudly you whistle in the dark something didn't happen, didn't work out and here - a layer of books or a file of papers. Here is evidence, the high water mark of a life that just went. Sometimes I feel like I'm living to solely provide a case study and documentary resources for social historians.

Then these belongings start to look like hot air balloons with the hot air all gone at last. Punctured, they have lost function.

This is far from "the whole history of my possessions" at the moment but it is a starting point.

Golden Week

Busy day here at 'Little House'. This morning we dropped off a visitor returning to the UK at Narita Airport and then headed for 'Joyful Honda' for some crazy paving and then to 'Cainz Home' for some exterior paint and a miso ramen lunch.

Yes, it is 'Golden Week' - the string of public holidays in the first week in May during which you either head off on a trip somewhere or, if you are poor like us, you sort out the DIY chores you have been putting off for twelve months. And it is certainly worth getting them done now, before the mosquitoes and humidity show up and take the fun out of working outdoors.

We've struggled for years with the odd crack and crevice letting in leaks, and this year we've decided to lash out and buy some rubberised paint. Luckily we have found the very shade used to paint the house the first time around. Basically the old place is just a 'two by four' timber frame covered in plywood. For added strength against quakes the structure is made as complex as possible like a nest of boxes, and there is also a much bigger gap (around a metre) than you would find in England between the joists of the ground floor roof and the upper storey floor. This all adds up to a very tough and light structure which is sadly a complete b*gger to paint. There are acres of wall where it is simply impossible to get a ladder near, but I'm not scaffolding this year. What can't be reached from a five metre extending ladder with a long handled roller will just have to wait for another time.

Anyway these days I'm not allowed up high by 'the gaffer' who, as you can see has no fear of heights and also long arms to reach into distant corners. At this rate we might be finished on the painting by Thursday if the weather holds, and then I can get on with some levelling and crazy paving laying. I'll be glad when the holiday is over!

Smokey again

I've had a few requests from readers who are feline fans for another picture of our new 'outdoor cat' Smokey. So here are a couple that she let me take this week. She wasn't especially keen on it - cats and dogs are often nervous of the lens eh? There was something afoot that she couldn't put a paw on and she doesn't like mysteries. Anyway she didn't dive for the gate when the camera came out so here we are.

I'm taking care when I can to not just feed her but also to sit beside her on the kitchen step while she eats. We discuss the weather, irritating males and the worries of having a bunch of kittens around somewhere. Just the usual dining table stuff you get with any woman, pretty boring. The intricacies of steam locomotives and the works of Henri Bergson don't interest her at all.

The picture above is her 'I don't know what you mean by that suggestion and I would never dream of doing that kind of thing with a man' pose that she adopts whenever I make some advances along the lines of 'how about some nice strokes or caresses behind the ears then gorgeous?'. Don't you worry, everything comes to him who waits.

This morning Edera was cooking something with fish in and I'm sure the scent was driving every feline within two kilometres crazy and we left the French Window open. Sure enough a small grey figure duly appeared on the threshold, sussed the place out and slipped silently into the room. But only about ten paces and after a minute she'd used up all her reserves of 'nerve' and headed back out into the sunshine.

'Gegege-no-nyōbō'

There we were glued to that 'soap' again this morning. How the heck has this TV programme come to so dominate our breakfast time routine. I mean, it is good but not THAT good. Maybe more to do with what the early married life of this young couple reveals about 1960's Japanese home life.

Of course this being NHK it is all located somewhere to the far, far left of saccharin and never remotely - you know! - explicit. Imagination is required. Not a single bra strap in sight, UK viewers of the BBC's 'East Enders' or ITV's 'Coronation Street' would roll around on the floor laughing at the innocence of it all. Japanese readers of 'Little House' will be familiar with this programme series as 'Gegege-no-nyōbō'. The true-life story line is set about 1960 and revolves around the marriage of a young one-armed Tokyo manga cartoonist (one of his best known characters is 'Gegege') to a lanky girl from the boonies of Shimane-ken (nyōbō is one of the Japanese words for 'wife').

What is partly gripping about the story so far has been the whole process of o-miai. 'Arranged marriage' is not really a good translation, 'arranged and formally supervised introduction' would be a longer and more accurate description. But sometimes it used to lead to breakneck speed nuptials, in this case five days from the first (and only) introductory meeting to the wedding ceremony. Ending up on the train to the other end of the country as the bride of somebody you didn't know this time last week is kind of 'intense'. The people I know who met their partners through such o-miai introductions certainly took their time over it.

The other astonishing thing to me is the sheer lack of daily routine physical contact in the relationship. This is just so interesting. In the mid-Showa era hugs R definitely not us. This girl extracted like a molar from her childhood background and boy wondering who the heck this woman is in his already difficult life certainly make a good job of starting to relate to each other, but at a distance of about two metres. Just when you think things can't get any harder and there are cockroaches in the sink and the kerosene has run out, then obviously what you really need is the reassurance of a nice comforting bow from your new soul mate. And when your heart is soft and tender what you might feel like doing is stealing a sideways glance at him or her from the next room through the crack in the sliding doors.

There we go. Different cultures. And I'm married into this one! Luckily times have moved on - we do occasionally manage a bit more in the way of demonstrative affection than bowing to each other across the empty rice bowls on the kotatsu.