Bolton Castle

One of our destinations last weekend was Bolton Castle, high on the south side of Wensleydale between Leyburn and Aysgarth. I have a very vague recollection of visiting the place when I was around seven, and more than half a century later it doesn't seem to have changed much.

I really liked it. I felt that it should have at least three stars in any guide book. From a distance it looks like it should still be occupied by some fabulously wealthy and powerful aristocrat and it is only when you get up closer that you realise that in fact the place is 90% ruins, although not actually as yet completely wrecked.

The Scropes. They were a dodgy lot in English history. Sir John ended up playing off both sides during the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536 and had to flee to Skipton Castle to keep out of the way of Henry VIII's troops but somehow he wriggled out of it all afterwards and got back into the monarch's favour. Then his son Henry Scrope served as gaoler to Mary after she was defeated at the Battle of Langside in 1568, and she was imprisoned in the South West tower at Bolton for six months until Elizabeth I tightened up on her security and moved her south to Tutbury. In Wensleydale for the first time she seriously learned the English language, and compared with her later life her summer here must have been a happy one.

The Scropes made some dodgy choices in the English Civil War too, and as a result the castle was 'slighted' and during the last 300 years has become even more ruinous.

Nice place though, a kind of 'informal' castle, genuine and yet slightly Disney, you can fool around there, they don't take history TOO seriously it seems and what is particularly fun is that the one tower still habitable with cream teas feels like it is 'clinging on' as an island of civilisation in a sea of ruin. And if you don't suffer from vertigo and are reasonably fit once you've see Mary's bedchamber you can go on up to the roof and get an amazing view of the valley. Well worth a detour, as Mr. Michelin would say.

Aira Force

During our travels at the weekend we ventured over Kirkstone Pass across from Ambleside and down to Ullswater. It is years - perhaps forty years - since I last travelled that road and I'd quite forgotten just how steep the gradient was there and what a tricky drive it was. But the traffic wasn't busy despite the weekend visitors and the weather was absolutely brilliant, one of those rare 'perfect' days that we all come to remember the Lake District by.

Driving up Ullswater we stopped at Aira Force. The waterfall is about half a mile up the hillside from the car park and things had changed a lot here during the decades since I last visited the place. Back in the 1960's I think that all this land was part of a private estate, and you had to pay an entry charge, but now it all belongs to the National Trust and you only need pay for car parking. Back then you approached the falls by walking up through the huge meadow that runs up from the lake shore where Wordsworth wrote "I wandered lonely as a cloud..." , but now an access path has been engineered up through the woodland in the ravine which makes for pleasant walking but without the wide views OUT across Ullswater.

If you have never been to Aira Force it is worth a trip. There are two small stone bridges across the beck - one high above the lip of the falls which gives a dizzying view down the gorge, and one crossing below which gives a good view of the falls and upper bridge. I must hunt out an old photograph that my grandfather took of this location about ninety years ago and see how it has changed.

This place has a special family link for me because I know that my grandmother's ashes are sprinkled here somewhere. It was her favourite haunt, and I was here with them in the summer just before she suddenly died. My grandfather told me that she had asked him to sprinkle her ashes there and that he did so in the summer of 1960, but I don't know exactly where. Looking at the spot now I guess it was probably from the top bridge, and that over the years she has been carried downstream and into the lake she loved to sit beside brewing a cup of tea on her primus stove.

Flock in the road

Here's a cheerful sight spotted this evening along the main road between Leyburn and Aysgarth - a flock of sheep being moved by a shepherd and two sheepdogs along the main road from some outlying pasture back into the village.

Edera was excited to see it all because it was quite a novel experience for her, this kind of thing doesn't happen back in leafy Chiba-ken, nor in Hiroshima. She jumped out of the car to take this picture. And I was equally happy to be stuck behind the flock because I suddenly realised just how long it had been since I had last had this experience. Time was when you couldn't move around here without finding yourself either muttering under your breath while trailing a flock straggling along the road or alternatively suddenly needed to slam on the brakes as you confronted a milling woolly mob hurrying towards your car bonnet.

But it is years since it was a really everyday occurrence, I wonder why that is. The 'foot-and-mouth' epidemic in 2000 must have had something to do with it, but in truth it was long before that when these flocks on the road began to get scarce. The decline of hill farming in the 1970's and the pace of modern traffic must all have had something to do with it.

Still, here we are, two circling 'collies' and much waving of arms to keep the flock headed in the right direction, the Yorkshire Dales at its best. One little detail of this which I had forgotten was how excited livestock in surrounding fields became when this kind of movement took place. A bunch of cows in the field on the south side of the road were crashing along following the 'action' on the main road on the opposite side of the hedge, as much novelty as they had experienced in months.

Good to see that if you are driving up Wensleydale this kind of stuff can still happen.

Birkett Common

After a week of glorious sunshine here it was a bit of a grey day yesterday - inevitable that the weather would change with Edera arriving I suppose. But not TOO chilly - and then in the late afternoon the sunshine returned and we felt encouraged to take a second walk and also give her a little driving practice on English roads and in a car with a gear change. Scary stuff, but no almost no traffic and absolutely no roundabouts (unknown in Japan!) so not as scary as it might have been.

For a walk we took a quick hike up to the summit of Birkett Common in the evening sunshine. It is a large hill (or very small mountain?) at the entrance to the Mallerstang Valley with a fine view in both directions of the higher Pennine ridges. It is also a place that always interested me for two very different reasons. Firstly it has its own railway tunnel - the Settle to Carlisle line runs under the ridge here and from the lofty heights above you can watch the trains approaching from Appleby or Garsdale and follow their progress for miles. This was an even more interesting pastime in the days of steam trains of course when their progress along the valley was marked with a plume of smoke and steam.

But also this is an area of big geological interest because it has a major fault line running through it - here represented by the Dent Fault. This is a fracture in the earths crust which at one time was as dodgy as systems like the San Andreas Fault is today, but luckily all this was happening back in the Paleozoic Era between 250 million and 400 million years ago. These days,a part from the occasional small 'cough' the faults are dormant, but the evidence of past upheaval is all around to the experienced eye of a geology student - limestone beds tipped up a steep angles and strata running almost vertically down the hillside.

When I lived south of London in my teenage years I would sometimes head for the Geological Museum library in South Kensington and pore over the detailed 6" geological maps of this area surveyed back in the nineteenth century and beautifully hand tinted in watercolours. But now I prefer prowling around on the real thing in the evening sunshine, the place hasn't lost any of its charm.

Post no Bills?

Since I got back to England I've been trying to get some posters put up and displayed for our three choral events next month, and I'd forgotten just what a miserable struggle this can be here. Basically few people seem to want to know you unless you are someone 'local' that they know promoting something very conventional.

Back in the 1990's I was involved in the day to day organisation of a local Buddhist meditation group in Lancashire, and getting any publicity at all for public events such as talks or day retreats was like getting blood from the proverbial stone. Places like Health Food stores and generous organisations like the Religious Society of Friends were usually very helpful. But the local Lancashire Library Service operated a complete ban on our posters. Ostensibly this applied to "any political or religious organisation" but unsurprisingly posters for local church fetes and the like were always displayed, somehow exempt from this prohibition.

Trying to distribute posters for our choral events in Lancashire and Cumbria over the last week I haven't been refused by anyone anywhere but there has often been some vague caveat along the lines of "Before we display this it will have to be approved by HR" (Sainsburys) or "We may only be able to display this for a few days due to lack of space" (local *Community Office*!). Even the local tourist office here happily took a copy but for reasons best known to themselves haven't put it up.

I recognise this kind of stuff for what it is now, just dishonest dissembling from people who lack sufficient integrity to say 'no' to your face. they take it and then just chuck it in the bin after you've left, your efforts (and 50 yen per copy( wasted.

But why? A concert surely isn't a particularly controversial thing. What don't they like? Music? Foreigners? Someone they don't know politely handing them a poster?

I don't know but there is something depressing about it all. In Japan it doesn't happen. Our local supermarket will happily display anything like this that you give them on their community notice board. Actually in terms of advertising it is largely ineffective medium, few get noticed and it is much more important in the UK to get something in the local paper. But it is that sneaky sense of rejection. People blather on about the importance of 'community spirit' but then don't facilitate it themselves. If people rehearse for months and travel half way around the world to put on a show for free "We may only be able to display this for a few days due to lack of space" from the staff of a so-called *community office* might not be an appropriate response.

Anyway, rant over. Mustn't let it get us down, some people have gone out of their way to be helpful, bless them. And I'm sure it will all work out.

Smardale Gill

A few miles from here there is a very beautiful stone viaduct, that crosses the valley of Smardale Gill. It was built in 1860 to carry the new railway from Kirkby Stephen to Tebay across the gorge, and it is a very unusual bridge in that it doesn't simply cross from side to side at right angles, as most such viaducts do, but is a kind of 'S' shaped layout which transferred the railway - running here quite deep within the valley - from one side of the ravine to the other while continuing to run in the same direction as the river.

The whole area is quite unusual because this is what geomorphologists would call 'superimposed drainage'. Tens of millions of years ago the river started life on a much higher land surface and since then the hills have worn away and left a lower ridge which this river valley slices neatly through like a saw cut to link areas of lowland to north and south. The railway engineers loved this kind of landscape feature - they could follow the gorge with their tracks and save tunneling and steep gradients.

When the railway was built in 1860 it was very important to the industrial development of northern England. Cumbrian haematite iron ore was carried east to the furnaces on the River Tees, and coke from County Durham was carried west to Cumbrian furnaces. But as those old industries were abandoned so was the railway and in 1962 it closed. Luckily thanks to local initiative this beautiful bridge, and two others in the area, were preserved and now there is a fine six mile hike through the gorge along the old track bed, mostly now through nature reserves. It is a wonderful spot to spend an afternoon - so remote and peaceful.

One thing always strikes me when I see this bridge and that is its width. It was built by the engineers to be wide enough for two tracks because they were sure that traffic would soon grow and they would need the line extra capacity but it never did, for the whole 102 years it was in use there was only ever a single track across the viaduct. But ironically two other viaducts that they built on the east side of Kirkby Stephen a few miles away at Merrygill and Podgill were built for one track but they soon had to widen the bridges to two tracks at considerable expense.

It just goes to show, whatever projects you get involved with in life you can never really 'second guess' what will actually happen. You just have to do your best and then be prepared to be flexible. At least the contractors work at Smardalegill has survived for 150 years and looks just as beautiful and 'classy' as when it was built.

Vesuvius Rumbles

Budget Day in the UK. I haven't got the TV on yet, I'll maybe look for a summary of it all around four o'clock. I have just taken the 'gamble' of moving some more savings from yen into sterling though, just on the hope of a 'bounce' later in the day. Thanks to Gordon Brown I seem to have become a currency speculator, in a zero interest world it is the only hope of keeping your savings even vaguely intact. The days when you could put your money in a 'high yield' savings account either in Britain or Japan and sit around and twiddle your thumbs have long gone.

I'll pop the 'champers' and caviar back on ice though and hang up my top hat just long enough to say that I'm starting to feel more and more like an 'Old Tory' these days. They say that, don't they - the surest indicator of getting old is that you sound like the Old Tories you despised as a youth. It isn't a good sign, is it?

Coming over on the plane I was watching the movie 'Cabaret'. It is one of my favourites, it reminds me of my youth too. Not that I am old enough to remember pre-war Berlin, nor did I chase after American jazz singers, but I was a great fan of the 1930's poems of W.H. Auden and also of Christopher Isherwood on whose book 'Goodbye to Berlin' the film was based. And Joel Grey's performance as the sinister 'Emcee'! I must have seen that film a dozen times and I still love it.

That's the kind of feel that I get when I land at Heathrow these days, Britain somehow reminds me of Berlin in 1931, a society even spawning the same kinds of corruption but in different guises. There's that lingering sense that it is 'all coming to an end' somewhere. Nowhere is this more obvious than the way in which 'public money' - actually our money of course - is just squandered on completely useless things. The other day I heard on Radio 4 somebody talking about a job advert they had seen for a local government position paying £19k for a "Street Naming Executive". Yep! This guy or gal's job was to dream up (in reality probably just 'authorise') new street names in the town. And - get this - the position was to "join our existing and successful street naming team".

A society that can shell out that kind of cash to administer the naming of streets is going down for the third time, don't you think so? Vesuvius rumbles, the locusts are airborne, and there are four odd looking men on black horses wheeling into the front drive. We are dead in the water, the cargo has shifted, the deck is already awash with breakers and there is a heavy list to starboard. We are doomed, every man jack of us, doomed. I'm not depressing you am I?

Steam Gathering

Up to the railway in bright summer sunshine for the 'Father's Day' special event today - 'The Railway' in this case being the project featured in 'Little House' before to restore the old station at Kirkby Stephen East and the various lines that lead west (and hopefully in time east!). The day was billed as a 'Steam Gathering' - not quite yet of full size railway steam locomotives but many other varieties were to be on parade.


And so it turned out. The glorious summer weather brought in a big crowd of ramblers throughout the day and there was much shovelling of coal, application of lubrication and noisy lifting of 'safety valves'. That wonderful smell of sulphurous fumes and hot steam oil. Is there anything to beat it?

No, there is not!

The main participants this year were two 1923 Aveling and Porter steam rollers, a 1907 Fowler ploughing engine and a 1926 Aveling and Porter traction engine. I can remember some of these beasts - especially the steam rollers - still at work about their mundane daily duties back in the 1950's. They were exciting to stand and watch then and they have lost none of their charm. Further up the site alongside our expanding standard gauge tracks kids were happily riding on a 7¼" gauge miniature railway, and the refreshment area in the old Gresley buffet car on the Darlington platform was doing a good trade.


I found myself wondering if traction engines and steam rollers have even been used in Japan. In all the historical photographs I have browsed over the years I don't think I can ever remember seeing a picture of one, but maybe a few were imported in the 1920's for use on the big civil engineering and river straightening schemes that took place back then. Certainly it is unlikely that the kind of traction engine that was used on farms in Edwardian Britain would ever have been a feature of Japanese farming, they would have been impossible to use in the soft ground of tanbo and in any case almost all farming back then was done by smallholders.

A really nice day out, and many more due this summer. Keep an eye on our ongoing progress up at the 'East Station' by linking up to our website.

Walking along the 'tops'

Got up onto the 'tops' yesterday evening for the first time this summer, although only for an hour. The road from here across to Reeth and Richmond climbs up to the county boundary with Yorkshire, and on a nice evening it is just ten minutes drive up to the top of the ridge from the house. From there you can walk south - although that is quite a struggle up the steep face of Fell End up to the long level ridge that eventually leads to High Seat. Or you can walk north, a fairly relaxed hike of about a mile to the summit of Tailbrigg Hill. That is my usual route.

This has to be one of the most beautiful views in England. The eye is always drawn first west towards the ancient field patterns on the Orton Fells and then beyond to the peaks of the Lake District. But look down the Vale of Eden north westwards and you can see the evening sun glinting on the Solway Firth and beyond that the hills of Dumfries and Galloway in Scotland. Due north is the Pennine escarpment - Hartside, Cross Fell, Dun Fell and Roman Fell, while just behind your back the streams drain down to the River Swale which leads to the Ouse, York and the Humber. From here in fact you can look out over a great slice of the north of England.

In the evenings (well, anytime) you have only Swaledale sheep for company, and also the curlews, lapwings and the odd skylark. My eyesight is getting beyond picking out skylarks high in the sky now, and the curlews are more frequently heard than seen. But the lapwings would be hard to miss. Somewhere hidden out there in the turf are their nests, and they want to make darn sure that you don't trespass anywhere near them which they do by putting on frenetic displays of flight acrobatics in exactly the opposite direction.

Sunny yesterday, but also chilly up at such a height as the sun went down. I'd thoughtlessly gone only dressed in a sweater (well - trousers too of course!) and I soon noticed the absence of a jacket. I should know better, even in June you can't take wild places around here for granted. Especially walking on your own.

River Loop

Couldn't resist going out for another evening walk yesterday - this time on a loop of about two miles following the right bank of the River Eden. I think maybe this will become my regular dusk 'constitutional' here when weather permits and it includes lengths of ancient footpath, a nice stretch through some mixed oak wood and then a 'home straight' through a long meadow by the river. Beautiful.

It all needs much more soaking up before I can begin to do it justice in words, but there were two aspects of the evening that especially struck me last night just having arrived from Japan a couple of days ago. The first and most obvious is that these photographs were taken at nine o'clock on a midsummer evening. Back at 'Little House' it would have been dark two hours ago, these wonderful long sunny evenings are something special to the north of Britian and Scandinavia. Nowhere else in the world does the mild winter climate created here by the Atlantic Gulf Stream facilitate temperate outdoor living so far north. In east Asia this latitude falls in Kamchatka, a thousand mles north of Japan in eastern Siberia. Not having experienced them for many years I realise just how wonderful our long June summer daylight hours really are.

And the second big difference is the network of footpaths. Two of the paths that I used last night are 'ancient paths' - routes that have been by-ways for many hundreds of years. They never made it into cart tracks, let along into metalled roads, but they are walled and fenced and still look just as they must have done at the time of the Tudors or even the Plantagenets. And where these paths end there are ancient 'rights of way' across meadows to follow.

In Japan we just don't have any of this. Apart from mountain hiking trails almost all movement takes place along roads. Of course there are many narrow lanes that are pleasant to walk and also nobody would object to you walking along the dykes between tanbo but those don't really lead anywhere except maybe down to the levee of a canalised river.

So this kind of footpath walking is quite unique to Britain. Somehow we have managed to hang onto most of our network of medieval rights of way, and what a treasure that is.

Beyond that big back gate

Ventured out into the back yard of our new English house yesterday to hang out some washing. As we have (of course!) an 'inside toilet' now and we also don't use the coal house at the end next to the lane because we have central heating, there is no call for making trips 'down the yard' for the reasons people made them fifty years ago. Also the garbage goes out of the front door, so actually there is no reason at all to made a trip out there apart from putting out washing when the weather is fine.

Except for 'the garden' of course.

This lies beyond the yard wall. The previous occupants bought a section of the field behind the property, and you get to it by going out of the big black back gate and crossing a narrow foot access that runs along the back of our terrace of four houses. Just two steps takes you to the garden gate and the place has been levelled and seeded and is now sprouting a healthy crop of hay.

I paid this place no attention at all in January because the big black back gate was completely seized up and I thought that I might be needing to use a sledge hammer to open it. So I felt a bit of a fool yesterday when I tried the sneck and it just opened! Then I realised that in the winter it must have been iced up solid, frozen tight shut.

So I went out and took a look at 'the garden'. Hmm ... what to do with that? With just a fence and grass it looks a bit 'dog-runnish' but when you look at it, then it is bigger than you think. If we were living here full time you could plant shrubs, put down crazy paving, run an 'O' gauge railway around the edge, all the things that you do with gardens. Or maybe - and more likely - Edera would take it over, dig the lot over and plant rows of potatoes and beans and lettuce. But during part time occupancy - what to do eh? When she comes on Wednesday we'll have to talk it over.

Working in front gardens

Back in England then. The journey surely never gets any shorter but as flights go it was OK. I don't find flying this way across Asia so tiring as flying back to Japan, it is just one long, long sunny afternoon that takes in the entire length of Siberia followed by Norway. And Norway is a lot longer than you think too. Travelling west to east normally takes an hour less because of the jet stream tailwinds but because you arrive a day later it seems much longer.

This must be the first time I've been back here in mid-June for nearly ten years and I'd quite forgotten how long the days were at this time of year so far north. Yesterday I just crashed out after I made it back to our house, I lay down for ten minute's rest at 4:30 and the next thing I knew it was four hours later. But at nine it was still plenty light and warm enough to stir my bones and take a walk up the river. Wonderful quiet time of the day, just the sound of birdsong and the sheep champing away at the sward on a perfect warm summer evening. And then walking back down through the main street, people out tending their front gardens and passing the time of day with their neighbours. Probably I'll be writing a lot more about the old place during the course of a summer when I hope I'm going to meet many old friends too.

Actually I had a good laugh to myself walking down the lane in the dusk surrounded by so many gardeners because it put me in mind of listening once to the English poet and novelist Laurie Lee. He was reminiscing on Radio 4 sometime in the 1990's when he was a very old man but still living in his native village of Slad in Gloucestershire. His autobiographical novel 'Cider with Rosie' had just been included as a set text for GCSE English Literature examination and one day a bunch of teenagers on a school trip were walking through the village as he worked in his front garden. It seems they were all reading the book in class, and this was an organised school outing to visit the famous author's birthplace.

He leaned over the hedge and asked them if they had ever met Laurie Lee but the kids just looked at him with scorn, telling him that of course the famous writer had been dead for years. Then one of them thought to ask him if he had ever met the famous man himself "Oh! Sure!" Laurie replied, "He used to live very near here!"

I wonder if any of those kids ever 'cottoned on' later in life.

Case Packed Again

Case packing last night. The contents of mine could hardly be counted as 'normal fare', most people don't go around with woks and digital picture frames in their suitcase, or with fifty year old files of maps. One day I'll go to Ibiza and buy a floppy donkey I promise, come back with a flowery shirt and a sun hat. But for the moment I'm focused on moving hardware and books' as I already have a wardrobe full of clothes in Cumbria there isn't much point in carrying coals to Newcastle. Oh! But I have got a file full of music of course, and also the black trousers that I wear to sing in. Abandoned pairs of little worn black trousers are milestones in the history of my waist line. Somewhere I even have a pair from the 1970's with a 28" (70cm) waistline.

I was reflecting as I crammed the last few grams inside on just how much getting luggage into the UK has changed since my first taste of foreign travel fifty years ago. It is the 'Common Market' I guess. When I first began to make trips to France you regularly got turned over by Customs Officers both at Dover and Calais. In France they just did it to give us a hard time but British officials were obsessed with charging duty on anything over one bottle of wine and about five quid's worth of gifts. Everybody was questioned and only when they were satisfied that you were 'clean' did you get the required chalk hieroglyphic scribbled on you case (or in my case usually valise).

When I worked at Gatwick Airport every package tour flight from Malaga would yield enough contraband booze to stock a small Off-Licence. I wonder what happened to it all.

You still get checked person by person arriving at Narita but whatever happened in the UK? I don't suppose I've been stopped in nearly forty years, in fact I can't ever remember ever seeing anybody being stopped in the green 'Nothing to Declare' channel. Come to think of it I'm not even sure now where those all are on arrivals at Heathrow any more if you are transferring to another flight. More 'security' around than you could shake a stick at but customs seems to have become unfashionable.

This will be the last 'Little House' for a day or two. Tomorrow I'll be on my way to the airport around this time. Watch out for my first posting from the sunny UK!

Ocean Terminal

Wednesday this week we had to drive over to Makuhari to get an international driving permit so that Edera can drive our car in England. Of course there is still a little matter of a gear stick and roundabouts to bear in mind, but all in good time, don't you think? Anyway we headed off in the rain down the Higashi Kanto Freeway, an adventure in itself for us these days. I've just changed my diabetic medication and I didn't trust myself to drive so soon after pill popping so 'you know who' drove which made it all the more exciting somehow. I have gotten accustomed to giving VERY EXPLICIT DIRECTIONS now of the "In 100 metres turn right, turn RIGHT HERE" kind. You would love me next to you in the passenger seat, I'm a little treasure that any sensible driver would love to have on board. I can play toons with spoons too ...

I'm thinking of organising tourist excursions to the Chiba Prefecture Driver and Vehicle Licensing Centre because it is just all so interesting there, I can't wait for these kind of trips to turn up. And they do turn up often because you have to go for your new licence and a road safety lecture every two years. The building can't be more than about twenty years old because thirty years ago this bit of Makuhari was about ten fathoms down on the bed of Tokyo Bay. Maybe that is what accounts for the strange similarity the whole place bears to some kind of Ocean Terminal, a kind of Japanese Southampton or Le Havre. Whenever I go I expect to look out of the window and see a Cunard liner tied up in the car park. All aboard the 'Lusitania'

In fact thinking about it, it is Chiba's answer to Ellis Island. Every day waves of 'migrants' seeking a better life with a drivers licence descend on the place by the thousand, In the vast ground floor hall you have to stand in line, and not just one line but many, many lines, listening to instructions coming over the tannoy and shuffling paperwork from one bored official to another. Men in uniforms 'keep you straight' as you are processed. No room here for submitting payment over the internet and getting your licence in the post. Japanese bureaucrats want your 'meat body' - they want to see that you are you, check your eyesight for themselves and generally make a fuss. It all has some pre-war air about it, a positive festival of procedure and regulation.

Anyway - we got that permit after. Now Japan's answer to Sebastien Loeb is all tooled up and ready for the road. If you are anywhere near an English highway watch out for her going by

Car Ownership

Friday evenings at 'Little House' are always busy because we have a late class for three men - two company employees and a student - who can't get to a lesson any earlier. Usually Edera is teaching until at least 10:30 and recently I have been helping out with the later part of this class to give her a 'breather' after several hours of teaching. I try to pick a topic that will be of interest to three of them and then talk about it and introduce lots of new vocabulary. It amazes me what comes out of my head sometimes.

Two members of the class work in the car import trade, and last night I was talking about the differences that I notice between Japan and Britain in terms of car ownership and maintenance. It would make a very interesting social study. I think that all the biggest differences have come about because of the very different histories of vehicle ownership between the two countries. In Britain ownership of motor cycles was widespread after about 1920, and cheap cars after the early 1950's. In Japan there was almost no ownership of motor vehicles of any kind before the early 1950's, and car ownership didn't take off until the 1960's. In the early days in the UK almost everyone maintained and repaired their own motorbikes and cars, they couldn't afford the services of a garage mechanic. And so there are two generations of practical mechanical skills there that don't exist here.

Also, hardly any Japanese homes have garages - or in many cases even a parking space. So nobody here has anywhere to keep tools, or to do maintenance work under cover and with access to an electricity supply.

The result is that few people here have any knowledge of what goes on under the bonnet of their car, or interest in restoring and looking after classic cars. There is no national vehicle museum in Japan - the few collections that exist are mainly sponsored by a manufacturer and contain only their own vehicles. Japan is a country where the company is usually responsible for any conservation that takes place and there seems to be little place here for enthusiasts to restore and display anything. In part it is probably because people work such long hours - which is after all why we hold this class at 10:30 at night in the first place.

Stratford 1967

I came across this old polaroid photograph at the bottom of a box and it really cheered me up somehow. The 'Gang of Four' eh? Or actually three and a helf From left to right a half (unknown), Auntie Nora, Uncle Fred and Auntie Maud. And on the back is written 'Stratford, 1967'.

We know at once what mischief is in progress here. It is a Wolverhampton Primitive Methodists Chapel Outing. Nora is down from Keighley for a week or two and today is the highlight of the holiday. Undoubtedly a charabanc is implicated in the plot, there will have been a morning coffee stop somewhere around distant Redditch or Bromsgrove and now here we are in the fleshpots of Stratford itself ready for a rich diet of the 'Bard of Avon'. A trip to the birthplace, a walk around a church and fish and chips in 'Ye Shakespeare Cafe' followed by a pilgrimage out to Shottery to take in Anne Hathaway's Cottage. Maybe buy some china, another silver picture frame.

In a way the image functions as a time machine. The colours and cut of the clothes, Fred's hat, the pastel shades of the flower beds (I bet there is a 'floral clock' ticking away not far from here!) - and that Volkswagen 'Beetle' speeding past in the background. It is pure extract of 1967 isn't it? Maybe at the very moment this photo was taken I was walking down the road back to college for lunch in Durham, or washing pots and pans in some student 'vac' job in Gatwick Airport. Even the quality of the polaroid picture - always slightly out of focus, washed out colours, and so 'square' speaks of the era.

I wonder what the conversation was about on the bus. Harold Wilson? The latest in crime novels? (a favourite with my aunts!). We can be sure that not a single four letter word nor coarse joke would be involved, these three maintained such a pattern of pure and simple and yet good humoured living in the face of perennial hardship that amazes me now that I come up to a similar kind of age bracket how they did it.

What was in their heads? When the hymn books were put back on the shelf and the chapel lights were extinguished and they lay there in the dark what did they really think about all those big unspoken questions that occupy the 'wee hours' when the clock tick-tocks in the velvet darkness? They surely must have encountered them - they are my own closest flesh and blood after all.

Ready to Board?

Around this time a few days before the long-haul flight to the UK I always have a sense of things getting out of control around the edges. My memory isn't what it was, and I really do have to plan fairly ruthlessly for trips to keep daily life working. Apart from the obvious things - you can't afford to be without a driving licence or a credit card (or even worse a PIN Number!) on a different continent, there are many less obvious items that you can't function without. Have I got the UK mains lead for my computer's back-up memory? Did I put my spare meishi (visiting cards) in the case? The new wok for our English kitchen?

This time the picture is even more confused because I need to remember so much paper work for the choir trip, and also things like music stands and my best black shoes, a whole host of things that I don't usually need to take with me. I should have made paper lists I guess, rather than relying on lists in my head. Still, my case is looking comfortingly full, and Edera will be following a week after me so if I discover any 'disasters' then there is a chance of recovery.

But this sense of 'out of control' is still strong, a routine feature of the last few days before heading to the airport. Things get 'fuzzy', there is a limp feeling around the wrists, my mind is numbed. Over the last decade I've flown to and from Japan at least twice a year and I feel that I know every inch of the Siberian tundra now between Vladivostok and Karelia, it isn't the dimensions of the event that concern me. Maybe it is simply a part of handing myself over to the 'fates' for the duration of the journey, placing myself in the hands of Kstigarbha as the patron saint of all on the road, Bodhisattva of the air lanes and runways. And also the impending change of culture, never to be underestimated although I always do. These days hitting Englishness is much more of a shock for me than hitting Japaneseness it seems.

'Singing Voices'

Most of yesterday morning was taken up printing, folding and stapling the programmes for our three choir performances in England next month. The local community affairs bureau in the City Office kindly let us use their big litho printer or we would have been at the job all day. This machine prints perfectly 'back-to-back' and runs through about a hundred copies a minute so it didn't take long to get the actual printing work done, it was the rest of the preparation that took the time.

Still, three of us made a good team. Edera collated and straightened the pages and F-san banged in two staples with a big long arm stapler and then I folded the B4 size booklet along the spine. As usual I was the weakest link in this otherwise totally focused and efficient operational structure. No matter how fast I worked the little pile between F-san and me grew larger, and then when I needed to nip out to the loo it had grown into a large heap by the time I returned. It gave the ladies a chance to show how much better they are at this kind of thing than I am, they could pounce on the remaining copies and sort them out for me as soon as they had finished their own work. Afterwards we headed off for lunch together in a Japanese-style restaurant out on the National Highway.

I put a lot of work into writing this programme! At eight pages it is more like a history book, I am getting to be a windbag (no laughter at the back there!). And it is very 'arty' - has a fine piece of calligraphy done by you-know-who on the front cover that reads 'uta go-e' - 'Singing Voices'. It is printed on a nice pastel green paper and we have 120 copies for each of the three churches we are singing in. Maybe we won't use more than 20% of them but let's be optimistic. Once Joe Public starts flooding through those doors there's no chance of printing more if you haven't got enough.

All this shows just how close the trip is getting. In six day's time I'll be on the plane. Scary.

Down in Barney Woods

No news that 'trees grow' I suppose - somebody, somewhere might have noticed this happening already. But I recently came across this old photograph just a couple of months after visiting the exact self-same spot exactly half a century later.

The place is Barnard Castle and this is the little valley of Kellet's Beck which runs for two kilometres up from the River Tees eastwards. The area has always been known to 'locals' as 'Barney Woods' and at this spot the valley turned north and was crossed by this small stone viaduct, known as 'Percy Beck Viaduct'. In my childhood this was mainly dense oak forest although this little stretch of the valley was filled with some large pine trees. It was a beautiful place to walk and play.

I don't know the exact history but I think the valley and woodland must have belonged to Lord Barnard, who leased the use of the place to the town council which maintained footpaths and footbridges. But around 1957 the trees in this upper part of the valley were felled down to this spot. Then work stopped, I think due to the death of the landowner, and the remaining woodland down to the Tees was not felled for another few years.

Suddenly there was a clear view of this lovely stone viaduct, for the first time in a century. But soon afterwards the valley was replanted with hardwoods, and within twenty years the view had entirely vanished again.

Percy Beck Viaduct is still there, although the railway has gone. Now some body's private drive runs across, from a lane on the right to a new house on the left. Like having your own personal bridge over a moat. But if you went to this spot the bridge is invisible. In fact it is so densely surrounded by trees and covered in vines and creepers that you might walk along the footpath that runs under the third arch from the right and never even know that the bridge was over your head.

Another trip to the dentist

Another visit to the dentist due on Wednesday. Peanuts - apart from making you fat - have an uncanny knack of pinpointing all those little molar weaknesses that you didn't really want to be reminded about. I seem to have spent hours recently with the tip of my tongue poking and prodding away in gaps and crannies. If I was more alert in this sweaty summer weather I might think of some analogy with the old Biblical 'mote and plank in eye' parable. It would need to involve tooth picks if I did though, best not go there eh?

Anyway it isn't that there is some crucial breakdown in progress, more a minor failing in the plumbing on one of my upper left noshers. But the first thought that popped into my head was "better get this seen to before I go to England ..." I had my first visit last week, and now I need a crown to be fitted.

Isn't that sad? Mukashi mukashi - once upon a time - us British would visit the dentist for some quality (and once 'free' under the National Health Service back in the 1960's) remedial dental work before heading off for 'foreign parts'. Britons headed for Japan would have had a 'check-up' to avoid the need to search out expensive probably inferior dental skills overseas if something went wrong.

Now that picture is entirely reversed. Here in Japan before boarding a plane I head for my excellent dentist knowing that whatever treatment I need will work out - with 80% of the costs covered by my State Health Insurance - costing around £15 per appointment in UK terms. In Britain - even assuming that I could find a dentist willing to treat me under the National Health Scheme - it might cost around eight times that amount for a 'course of treatment'. What went wrong?

In Britain before you can even get treatment you are going to have to go for a 'check up' which these days in essentially paying for an estimate for the rest of the work you need. The whole business of dentistry has deteriorated into a 'closed shop' of professionals and bureaucrats manipulating demand for treatment for their own advantage. In Japan they just get on with the job, there is no going back in six weeks time when you can next get an appointment

Working in the Conservatory

Although my grandfather spent his whole working life as a railway signalman - apart from a brief spell looking after farm horses as a teenager and then three years in the army in the 1914-1918 War - it wasn't his only source of income. He became involved in a number of what he would have called 'money spinners' which included at one time building radios. Back in the 1920's that demanded three separate skills - the knowledge to construct a metal 'carcass' for the components, being able to solder together a proper circuit, and also cabinet making - especially marquetry - to make those lovely old radio cases with places like 'Hilversum', 'Droitwich' and 'Athlone' on the dial.

This was the line he really loved and settled down to though, and he was very successful in making an income from it. Clock and watch repairing. Normally he worked in the front room at a roll-top desk which is still in use in my daughter's home, but if he was working on a bigger clock and it was a sunny day he would take his job out into the tiny conservatory on the back of his house at Nateby where he lived with his dog 'Sally'. There was a stone slab there that could be used as a bench to put a tray on, and you could take a dining chair out and sit in the sunshine with the door open and listen to the birds singing as you stripped a 'movement' down for cleaning or repair. The slab would also take a small portable vice, ideal for 'bushing' work.

Here he is happily working away in the sunshine in his tiny conservatory, probably around 1965. Good grief! Almost half a century ago! Looks like a square Smith's alarm with a metal case and the familiar watchmaker's eyeglass fixed to his glasses is swung up, not required until he needs to take a closer look at bearings and the balance staff. He is, of course, wearing a tie even though this is a casual morning at home - who knows who might call around later? My guess is that dinner is cooking on the Aga in the kitchen through a door to the right, there will be the sound of a pan lid rattling and probably the odour of a beef pie baking that the camera cannot catch. The dog is probably dozing on the rag rug on the floor at his feet.

And the yard broom and deck scrubber behind, used for sprucing up the yard once a week. My present UK home is just a mile from this spot!

Lunchtime visitors

Another update today for all cat lovers out there. Yesterday turned out to be a special day feline-wise. Just before lunch I heard a bit of a racket out on the decking by the back door and went down to see what was going on and discovered that I had four visitors hanging about out there taking advantage of the cool shade provided by my shed wall.

The mother cat - 'Smokey' - had shown up with her two 'teenage' children from last year, the dark male 'Titch' and the beauticul white female who takes a special interest in me but for whom I haven't settled on a name yet. But the real treat was that they had brought the new kitten across to see me too. Lovely!

I realise watching this 'gang' that I have never had any real experience before of a family of cats. And they really stick together as 'family' too. Pet cats are generally solitary cats, all their relationships are with humans. Our two were sociable enough with each other and over the years took more interest in each other's company, but essentially they were two 'solitaries' sharing the same space with the same humans. These cats on the other hand live their lives mainly in a cat world.


I was really touched by this visit because I could strongly sense how I seem to have passed some invisible 'test' with the bunch of them, I am a human 'trusty'. I feel that as a real honour. In fact when I went out to look a bit more closely at the kitten the mother cat barely stirred. The two younger cats are more wary, especially 'Titch' who always looks like he is scared the sky will fall in. But even he felt OK hanging around at a very small distance.

One thing I've learned with this lot is that stroking - important for me - is not a part (yet?) of their regular vocabulary. Once their stomachs are full they just want to 'hang out' and be sociable. So I settled down on the back step and we all just enjoyed the sunshine together with no particular objectives in mind. Whne it comes to learning to just sit around and see what turns up you can't find better teachers than cats.



Photos: Top; the beautiful white cat and her mum. Centre; The latest generation. Bottom; "Titch"

As in Plato

Another of last weekend's 'scans' records an early - in truth the earliest - intimate and fond relationship with a member of the opposite sex. The first 'Friendship Plus'. And no laughter at the back there, we all wore clothes like that in 1957. Do you think those shorts would still fit me? They must be around here somewhere ...

I always seem to have preferred the company of women to men, just like my father before me as I discovered much later in life though I never took the principle to the extremes that he did. In fact many of my most important relationships have been (and still are) wholly Platonic. And if they are Platonic then they are certainly going to be 'wholly Platonic', don't you think so? As hardly anyone has heard of the word these days, I'm referring of course to what many refer to dismissively as being 'just' good friends.

Anyway here we both are, ten years old and very happily just being together on the beach at Whitby. Jennifer and me. The memory of playing there on the sands is so strong it could have been yesterday; these threads of relationship permeate our lives, they are transformed but they are never discarded. I haven't seen her in fifty two years although rather by chance (and the power of internet databases) I do happen to know where she lives. It is less than thee miles away from where we both lived back then half a century ago. So I turned out to be the wanderer and she stayed at home and got married at twenty. I only include the picture here because I'm sure nobody would recognise either of us from the image now except ourselves. And from how I remember her I don't think she is ever likely to have become an 'internet person'.

The thing this picture raises for me is all that unfathomable 'road not taken' stuff again. Say for example I hadn't moved away from that area and at some time later during our teenage years we'd both ended up in the same club or church group or choir? If, if if. Would we have been happy people or sad people? Or both? Like some subtle alternate version of Hamlet's question, the interplay of currents of action and passivity. What comes to pass or doesn't often seems to be astonishingly random and arbitrary, a series of 'augenblick' moments some of which you are dimly or even clearly aware of at the time and others of which slide by like icebergs in the dark. That is one 'theoretical model'. And the other one is the 'fates' angle, the sense of the Eternal 'writing straight in crooked lines' which certainly does sometimes happen in my experience. Or perhaps both these versions of reality are true, either simultaneously or by turns. Does it matter?

Dawns again

I didn't quite get all written about 'dawn' yesterday that I wanted to deal with. A question that has interested me all my life is "what is the difference between dawn and dusk" and especially if it is possible to distinguish between the two on sight. In other words - if you are faced with a photograph of each, dawn and dusk, can you tell which is which?

And after a lifetime of research it doesn't surprise me at all that I think that the answer to this question is probably just "it depends".

I think that in maybe 80% to 90% of cases the answer is that you really can. Dusk follows the heat of the day, the surface of the land is warm and the lingering heat of the sun still produces convection currents that keep the air moving. And so usually in the evening water in the atmosphere is still in the form of gas and invisible. The light of the low sun penetrates the optically clear air, giving those wonderful effects of clarity that we see in strong horizonal sunshine.

But then during the night this water vapour condenses, mist flows down into valleys and hollows on the cool air. The real beauty of the following dawn is softness, the refraction of light and the layers of opacity which persist until the sun's warmth converts those water droplets back into gas. So provided that the temperature gradient between night and day is sufficient and the humidity level is significant and the air reasonably still you can always distinguish between pictures of dawn and dusk.

However when these conditions don't apply, then you can't distinguish. If the sun isn't shining and the day is cloudy, or it is raining, or if the wind prevents water vapour forming, then I think dawn and dusk look exactly the same. This also applies when the heat and lack of humidity is extreme - in the desert - and also often too in winter in the north when the lack of solar energy means that the air above the ground is always moisture laden.

It seems a funny question to have been asking myself for sixty years, doesn't it? But there you go. And somehow I'll keep on asking it, the contrast is important and interesting to me, and there is much more to this than you might think and it also relates to how our bodies work. And also a certain mystery - and probably that is because of that 'forbidden fruit' aspect of dawns that I mentioned yesterday.

Dawns

When I was a child there was always something very magical about dawn - a great unknown. It was the time of day that I never saw; school did not begin until nine and so even in winter the household was never on the move until after seven thirty. When you are in the care of your parents and grandparents you are part of a routine and in that routine for me there was no need to ever be out of doors, or even out of bed, when the first light of dawn came into the sky.

Also I think - certainly when I lived with my grandparents - people took an unconscious pride in keeping their children protected from something there. Being 'up before dawn' in the previous generation had the implication of hard work in factories or mines - to be on 'early turn' meant 4:30AM rising for a 6:00AM start. For them dawn wasn't associated with something beautiful and aesthetic but with tough working routines.

So dawn was definitely a mystery. Seldom - and only partially - experienced.

Through my own working life it inevitably became much more familiar. Memories especially of Tuesday morning drives to Bedfordshire starting at 4:00AM. In summer dawn would already have arrived when I left the house, but in Spring and Autumn it would show up around Staffordshire and in winter not until Buckinghamshire.

And being at the temple. Morning meditation at the Abbey begins in the dark but then imperceptibly the hall lightens and so comes the moment when the dawn drum is sounded and we say the 'kesa verse' together and put on our meditation robes...

"How great and wonderous are the clothes of enlightenment
Formless yet embracing every treasure
I wish to unfold the Buddha's teaching
That I may help all living things."

Flying from Heathrow to Tokyo dawn shows up somewhere over the Russian Far East, usually over the mountains around Khabarovsk but in summer often over the rolling tundra of the Aldan Plateau. With the plane speeding east towards the edge of Asia it arrives very quickly, usually from a hint on the horizon to sunrise with about fifteen minutes.

It has a special kind of meaning for me at those moments. A hint of a long journey coming to an end but also of the excitement of impending arrival in the 'Land of the Rising Sun' which somehow in this life has become one of my 'homes'.

'Combination'

Talking to three of our students a few days ago I realised that they had no idea what a 'motorbike and sidecar' was. In Japan the equivalent vehicle was the 'keisanrin' tricycle, which was much better adapted for carrying boxes of vegetables from the fields, and this was often their primary use. Also they didn't become widely available until the 1950's. In pre-war days few people were well enough off to afford just a solo motor-cycle. Even the contemporary sport of 'sidecar racing' doesn't seem to be followed much here.

Motorbikes and sidecar 'combinations' played a big part in my own younger life. Amazing now to think that one adult (my grandmother) and small child (me) could be crammed into that little sidecar space completely without benefit of a seat belt. The vehicle itself was just riveted sheet tin and canvas rigged onto a couple of metal tubes and bolted to the side of the motorbike frame. In an accident we would have stood no chance at all.

This was 816 BHN. In those days you could recognise where vehicles were registered by the last two letters of the registration and 'HN' signified Darlington. I think that there was at least one, maybe two predecessors to this 'rig' before the war, and one more after in which the same sidecar was bolted to a big 'Triumph Thunderbird'. When I was around eleven or twelve I graduated to sitting on the pillion of the bike and clinging to my grandfather's waist, this time without benefit of crash helmet although I sometimes wore a natty little World War I leather pilot's helmet and goggles. Just call me 'Snoopy' - and many do!

I've never driven a 'combination' but I'm told that they are not easy. A third wheel at the side is inherently unstable and you need to watch tracking for different reasons turning in either direction or it will just flip over.

Here are some pictures of one of the inevitable trips to the 'Lakes' for a picnic somewhere, sometime in the 1950's. The one at the top is Honister Pass between Borrowdale and Buttermere and these days you wouldn't find this road so quiet even on a rainy day in December I'm afraid, nor anywhere to park for less than a 'tenner' either.