Anyone for tennis?

Shimaji-kun is at the vet's today for his neutering operation. I'm not sure that I would have had it done from choice, but it is an essential part of getting him into a permanent home I'm afraid. Let's hope he is OK and that it doesn't quieten him down too much.

As he won't be with us at 'Little House' much longer he has been getting spoiled rotten, even to the extent on Saturday night of letting him have a 'sleep over' with us in our tiny 'munchkin-size' bed. He frequently comes and snoozes with me for an hour after lunch, but this was the first time he spent the whole night with us and he was very happy. Every time I woke up the purring sound had relocated to another place around me - small of my back, down around my feet, behind my head etc.

But the real laugh came in the morning. He nagged us for a feed around dawn but then came back in for another snooze. Of course after a while he got bored, and to pass away the time while his humans snoozed on he began the "John McEnroe Game" of trying to bat around the little knob on the end of the lamp switch cord above the middle of our bed. To get a the necessary altitude he was taking a bound from the floor onto the counterpane, bouncing once and then leaping high to swat the string. The airspace above our bed was filled with high-flying feline furballs. It felt like we were in a 'Wallace and Grommit' cartoon.

When this didn't produce the effect sought for after a while he switched to the "Leap from the Bookshelf Game" using the textbooks heaped on the window sill on my side of the bed as a springboard for some acrobatics. But about the third somersault he landed heavily on my stomach and two seconds later found himself sitting on the cold landing floor outside our closed door. And that was where he stayed until breakfast time.

Shimaji-kun again

I have had a couple of friends asking me about the 'state of play' with Shimaji-kun. What is going to happen to him? So here we are. Getting to be a big boy isn't he? Amazes me that a cat can grow so much in seven weeks. Since Mika-chan rescued him in early December he seems to have grown to twice the size.

If we could think of any practical way for him to live with us we would certainly keep him for good. We have both fallen completely in love with him. He is a wonderful cat, friendly and loving and very intelligent. Very demanding too, he is a really 'rough' boy and demands hours of play. Like a dog he drags the bit of string with a tissue tied on the end that we use to play with him across to wherever you are sitting to insist on a game. He is incredibly fast and a ferocious hunter - he can pounce on your ankles from two or three metres away in a second. All in fun of course, but that doesn't mean that in the excitement his teeth and claws never draw blood. When he gets a bit TOO enthusiastic you have to grab him by the nape of the neck and give him a good 'talking to'.

But it is just impossible for him to live here of course. Our present lives are too complicated, spread across two continents. So we have to find him the best home we can.

He has already had the two inoculations that he needs against feline AIDS and the rest of those awful diseases cats can catch, and next Monday he is going to be neutered. We'll give him about a week after that, and then when he recovers he will go and live with an American friend of ours called Jim who is a big cat lover himself and already knows him. We will be bereft without him here for a while but we know he will have the best of homes and also two female cats for company there. Also in the longer term he's in a safer place in the country with lots outdoors to occupy his active mind. I just hope he doesn't miss his foster mum and dad too much when he first goes there.

Language of Flowers

Started the car engine tonight on my way up to Landrome to buy something for lunch tomorrow and there suddenly was the familiar sound of Vaughan William's 'English Folk Song Suite' blasting away over the rice paddies on our car stereo. Bizarre. Edera must have been listening to the CD when she turned the car engine off.

I could almost see the score before my eyes, even though it must be almost half a century since I last played the 'second horn' part in this music in our school orchestra. Some memories are deeply etched. Actually it is one of my favourite Vaughan Williams pieces.

It was the middle of the third movement - 'Folk songs from Somerset'. And the melody was the old song "Blow Away the Morning Dew." A lively tune and an engaging song which tells the story about a too innocent farmer's boy who "kept his sheep on the hill" like they do. Early one morning in May he meets the girl of his dreams and she is delighted to meet him. It all seems too good to be true ...

"Cast over me my mantle fair
And pin it o'er my gown;
And, if you will, take hold my hand,
And I will be your own."

It turns out that her daddy is rich and also he is on more than just a promise here ...

"As they were riding on alone,
They saw some pooks of hay.
O is not this a very pretty place
For girls and boys to play?"

Ah! But sadly it seems there is a lot of stuff his dad never explained to this farmer's boy. He puts women on a pedestal, doesn't know that they have the same feelings as he does. He is pretty clueless about what to do in these circumstances and his new found friend is none too happy about it. So ...

"But when they came to her father's gate,
So nimble she popped in:
And said: There is a fool without
And here's a maid within."

Sad. Now you see it - now you don't! And to rub his nose in it all a bit and conclude the story with the required moral her parting comment is ...

"We have a flower in our garden,
We call it Marigold:
And if you will not when you may,
You shall not when you woulde."

The marigold. Symbol of affection, also pain and grief. The language of flowers

Five Green Bottles

I've just been teaching some of our younger and more brazen students here "Ten Green Bottles" so that they can sing it at our 'happyoukai' Open Day at the end of February. They are a rough and noisy lot so I thought that it might be popular with them, I mean it isn't one of those melodies that Bach wrote some fancy variations on is it? Plain simple fare. I'm trying to teach them a nice 'Estuary English' pronunciation, like they came from Dagenham or somewhere, it goes with their style. "Ten Gleen Borrels 'angin on a warl .." I was picking out the melody on my melodion but next week I'll practice it and vamp it up a bit and then they will like it even more and sing even louder. Until they are put on stage in front of the firing squad anyway.

I was explaining to them how we liked to sing this in the back of the bus on geography school trips coming back from places like Leith Hill and the Mole Gap. It was very popular on golden summer days of yesteryear because it used to drive the teachers crazy, all that 'gormless' repetition - "999 green bottles ... 998 green bottles". However at the 'happyoukai' we will sadly be limiting ourselves to only five green bottle iterations due to lack of time and space.

Archaeologists of the English language like me notice something especially interesting about this doggerel. I mean - green bottles don't "hang" on a wall do they? They "stand" on it. A sure sign that this is a pretty ancient rhyme that has transformed over the centuries from something quite different which we have now lost. It was probably bawdy in its day - weren't they all? Some drunken fletchers after the Battle of Agincourt were probably chanting the same tune to scare the local French girls. But you can never dig up what those originals were, they have long gone over the great cliff at the edge of the world and off into the void I'm afraid.

Milkman

I'm just lying in wait for the 'return visit' of the local Meiji milkman. He was around here last week. It seems that he came while Edera was out on Friday but it was after lunch and I was upstairs taking a nap and so never heard a thing. Lucky for him!

He first called about two weeks ago and left some 'free samples' for us of his wares. He was hoping to see the lady of the house but she was teaching and so he had to make do with my ugly mug and unkempt hair instead. Actually we bought milk from him for a while about two years ago but after a couple of months we plucked up the courage to cancel the order. We were ending up with an army of small full bottles of unconsumed dairy products clogging up the whole fridge. Being so kind hearted E had taken pity on him and put in a regular order but it was just something that not only didn't we need but which was a positive nuisance to have around.

Japanese milkmen bear little resemblance of their UK forebears of yesteryear. No milk floats, crates of pint bottles and white and blue uniforms. Here I'd guess they are all on some kind of a franchise. They turn up in their car looking sad and they go for 'niche' dairy products like milk with loads of sugar (sorry! 'glucose'!) added.

I think that is why he turned up again like the proverbial bad penny a couple of weeks ago. Falling sales, wife and two kids to feed, nothing is like it was in that franchise brochure and Meiji sales promotion way back when. He needs more customers fast and who better than that kind hearted couple who used to buy from him before.

A serious miscalculation there, wasting his time I'm afraid. Shelling out money for stuff that you don't need and which fills your fridge severely curtails empathy. He would have been better off selling 'hope' or something intangible that you didn't need to keep in a cool box.

A £1000 fine

A while back someone here was telling me about how they had been reading a book written by a Japanese guy living in England. He liked the place, but some things struck him as a bit weird. One of these was that our green and pleasant land was plastered with notices of prohibition which warned you that if you did something wrong you would be fined £1000.

I had to smile. It is true. I often see it. Drop litter and get a £1000 fine! Don't complete this form by the correct date and get a £1000 fine! Ride a bike on this footpath and get a £1000 fine. Of course hardly anyone, ever does get a £1000 fine, it is just our culture. Officialdom in the UK doesn't feel that it is doing its job unless it is threatening you will a £1000 fine. We love to threaten in England, it is our way, it comes from the days when we used to beat people in schools for talking in class and even before that.

In Japan this isn't part of the culture at all; here admonitions to conform hint at dark warnings not to do things because officialdom finds them 'unacceptable' In the old days it wasn't a good idea to do things that the local samurai bureaucracy found 'unacceptable'. Nobody was warned twice.

This British £1000 fine mentality goes right back in history. When railways first began in the 1820's you could be fined five shillings for trespassing on the tracks or if you preferred it you could be transported as a felon to Australia for seven years. By the time railway companies were making those lovely cast iron notices in the 1880's the penalty had become forty shillings with an alternative of three months imprisonment. Forty shillings in 1880 was two weeks wages - in other words about the equivalent of £1000.

Today if you cross the railway on a level crossing you will see some bright red notices installed by Railtrack and guess what. If you trespass on the railway you will be fined £1000! So watch out!

Maiden run of '63373'.

I at last squeezed some time in today to get the 'motion' together on the 'O'Gauge Q6 that I've been working on in my spare time over the past couple of months. A very fiddly job, all those 12BA nuts and bolts and tight tolerances but here she is at last on her 'maiden voyage' around our garden running under her own power. There is something wildly exciting about building a locomotive from metal that actually 'goes', I just can't describe it.

Now all I have to do is some fine adjustments, run in the drive mechanism and gears and then strip her down and paint her in best Bible black. Even in the Edwardian heyday of the North Eastern Railway before World War I when they painted practically everything that moved in expensive lined green enamel these engines never warranted anything more exotic than plain black. The 120 locomotives built to this design spent half a century chugging with heavy mineral trains between the mines of West Durham and the coal staithes along the Tyne, Wear and Tees, surviving on this work right to the end of steam in Britain in the 1960's.

Taking this picture today I was reminded of the lovely glass plates taken by the North Eastern Railway's own professional photographer back then. The first 'build' of any new design was smartly finished in lined grey undercoat and towed to a location to have a 'side on' official photograph taken. Engines built at Gateshead got towed out to Jarrow Slake because of the neutral background of the River Tyne. Engines built at Darlington got photographed in front of a whitewashed fence at Stooperdale. My Q6 'official photograph' was in unfinished brass and was taken by the flower 'planter' outside the teaching room window, with the cat as an audience.

When painted the engine will carry the British Rail number 63373. The full sized 63373 was built at Darlington in June 1917 and spent most of its working life around Middlesbrough and Thornaby. It did make one eventful trip in April 1955 to Kirkby Stephen where it was 'shedded' for a few weeks to haul freight trains to and from Tebay. On 20th May 1955 running tender first in tandem with sister engine 63355 hauling a train of 'empties' it jumped the track at speed at Smardale, joined the birds and headed down a steep embankment into a field. The engine crews were lucky to live to tell the tale and the powerful Q6's were dispatched to Darlington for repair never to be seen in Cumbria again.

Let's hope that 63373's little sister is better at staying on the rails eh?

Snow deaths

They were saying on the NHK news this evening that since the beginning of December 41 people have died as a result of the severe weather that is affecting most parts of Japan. And that figure excludes casualties of road accidents, it includes only deaths due to the weather itself, either through exposure or because of personal accidents.

It seems that one of the biggest factors in the increase in fatalities is the ageing population involved. The worst of the weather is hitting the Sea of Japan coast along the north and west sides of Honshu from Yamaguchi-ken right up Akita-ken. This area always gets the heaviest snow from Siberia,but it is also the part of the country that is seeing the fastest depopulation as numbers dwindle due to the plummeting birth rate and what young people are left locally head off for employment in Tokyo and urban Kansai. Those left are the elderly and often live alone and it is this older generation that can now be found in winter months climbing up ladders to try and shift the huge weight of heavy snowfalls of the creaking roofs of houses. This year there is so much snow that many are falling because they can't see how much the drifting extends beyond the gutter and they step off into space thinking that there are solid tiles under their feet.

The danger is that once you have fallen off you are likely to suffocate under deep snow on the ground. People are being urged to wear their 'keitai' mobile phones around their necks rather than carry them in a pocket so that they are to hand to make that emergency call, and local action groups are urging people only to clear roofs in pairs or groups so that there is always someone around to do some digging out and summon help when it is needed.

Something in the air

Shimaji-kun is still one 'disturbed' young pussy cat this morning, it is quite stressful to watch him and at the same time so interesting. I think that the female on heat that is the cause of his problems must be the beautiful 'White Cat' that is one of our regular bunch of outdoor cats. She was around here before breakfast this morning lurking on the decking near the shed and looking for an early feed in the cold weather. Her appearance in the vicinity was matched by much caterwauling and jumping at window panes in the teaching room. Something in the air.

I have been struck this last month by Shimaji's general amazing sense of smell. He can pick out fish being taken out of the fridge in the kitchen from the other end of the house, and be there in seconds. This ovulating female must be leaving gonadotropic hormones in the neighbourhood air but as she usually hangs out at least 100 metres away it can only be at a concentration of one or two parts per billion in our teaching room. But it is more than enough to drive him crazy though - and I do mean crazy! Like a light switch. Last night he was tearing around the place so violently that he knocked a chair over.

So just one molecule of female scent has the capacity to complete unhinge a young male, trigger all his fiercest desires. Scary. It all feels a bit like watching one of those David Attenborough 'Wonders of Nature TV programmes. It is like the legendary movement of a butterfly's wing that creates a hurricane half way around the world.

The other interesting aspect of all this is that, inch by inch, his attention is becoming focused on the mystery of the 'front door'. Apart from his trip to the vets for inoculation he hasn't been outside since he arrived in December, nor has he shown the least interest in finding access to that exterior world which I suspect only features in his mind as a terrifying place dimly recalled from his time as a solitary kitten out in the rice field. Women seem likely to be about to change all that for him though. Watching his relationship - or lack of it - with this 'exterior place' you can't help but wonder what similar 'safety boundaries' curtail your own experience without you even knowing that they are there.

Puss in love

Good grief! Woke up this morning and drew the curtains to discover that the first snow of the winter had arrived in this part of Kanto during the night. Only a couple of centimetres and the sun was already shining - apart of course from on our dark Dickensian little danchi. Here deep in the shadow of the cedar forest where it stays shady until nearly lunch time at this time of year. We are the positive 'Hokkaido' of the district here, frost and snow linger long on our balcony after the warm sun is airing the futons on the other side of the river.

No sooner up and about than it became clear that things were stirring with the cat, and not all was well. Usually twenty minutes mad play are enough to get the worst of the crazy kitten energy out of his system after breakfast but today there was no satisfying him. And as soon as we settled down to do other stuff the 'play with me or I'll wreck the joint' strategy began in earnest, with pens, erasers and even the little timer we use in lessons flying off the teaching desk. And he caterwauled non-stop for half the day.

Yep! Only five months old but it is obvious what his problem is I'm afraid. A pussy in love. Somewhere out there in the chilly neighbourhood a female has come into season and he is looking for a girlfriend that will have his kittens I guess. I'd hoped that we would have him safely neutered before all this kicked off but no such luck eh? He spent the day glued to the glass of the French Window and then came and sat on my knee for a while and snuggled mournfully against my chest and looked at me with those big sad eyes. I'm not a woman and not even a substitute for one but a bit of comfort from a fellow creature, even as grey and bad tempered and ugly as me, was welcome.

It must be tough to be so love smitten when you are young and corralled indoors. I seem to remember it all myself though it has become a hazy memory burnished to a patina by the rose-tinted hue of passing decades.

Square Images

I was really interested this morning to come across some photographs on the 'Guardian' arts website by a so far 'undiscovered' twentieth century photographer. Her name was Vivian Maier and she worked as a nanny in New York and Chicago, following her interest in taking street photographs on her days off. She died two years ago in poverty and obscurity. Now her collection of 100,000 negatives, which turned up in an auction, is impressing students of the history of photography and urban history. You can see some of her work here.

I guess, apart from the quality of the work, it caught my eye from two different perspectives. Firstly it is just such an absorbing record of twentieth century street life in American cities, you are led directly into the reality of 'downtown' in the 1950's, witness events without explanations. As a photographer of cities myself - I took more than 10,000 pictures of Chiba in the years I was walking my streets there - I love the sense of being parachuted into other urban places and times. These are just the kind of pictures I would have wanted to have taken myself if I had been there, then.

But the other thing that is so interesting about these images is that the are taken on old '120' roll film and so the pictures are square. I can't read the badge on her camera but I guess it is a battered Rolleiflex. In the 1960's I had the loan of one of these cameras for a while and it was just so different to use compared with modern 'SLR' kit. The square format - and the fact that you are looking at the image you are taking downwards on a small frosted glass screen - all contribute towards a sense of being utterly separate from the scene which you are recording. Also a 'square' format is now something that is strange to us, we are used to seeing the world recorded in a 'landscape' format and pictures of people in a 'portrait' format and it is easy to forget that these are just cultural filters, our eyes and brain don't really experience the world reduced to these conventional relationships/

Struggling with the manual

I have had my nose into new software here most of the day. If we are going to run a more complex business together - which seems to be increasingly the plan for us for 2011 - then we have to get a much better grip on book-keeping and accounting. It would be nice to have some new business ideas too of course! - but at least if we only succeed in making 'small potatoes' at the end of the day then it is important to count them properly.

Amazing what is out there on the internet in the way of free software in the business start-up area now. I last took a look at small business book-keeping software about 15 years ago as part of a project at work and it was all very 'clunky' and very pricey too. Now you can get really sophisticated free-ware.

Changing gear from my usual diet of databases and web sites though I have found myself stumbling. Today I spent nearly two hours struggling with just one bit of functionality before I cracked it. There was nothing intrinsically complex about it, it was just that the way it worked was not intuitive unless you were a book-keeper. It was the mechanics of splitting one payment to post parts of it in two separate accounts. The obvious way to me was to put the total line first, and then the two sub totals. But not to the software developer.

There is quite a good manual for all this and I read that page about 30 times getting crosser and crosser. But eventually by trial and error I stumbled on the right way. The problem with the manual was that it too was written by someone who already knew how to do it. To write a proper manual you have to either be very gifted at thinking in other people's shoes ore even better just watch a beginner and see what happens.

A lesson I'll remember if I'm writing any 'help pages' myself in the near future!

Comparisons in History

As a long time student of modern Japanese history I have been struck this week by some of the chilling similarities apparent between the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson and the events of the early Showa era here in Japan during the late 1920's and early 1930's.

The exact mechanisms at work do differ but perhaps not by so much in a wider scheme of things as you might expect. A time of serious economic crisis, and a tendency to scapegoat groups perceived to be the source of the problem running out of control. Representative politics is increasingly drawn into disrepute, politicians are perceived as venal, self interested and liars. But that is only a first stage - those who don't have legitimate political power but who do have weaponry then begin to believe in one way or another that the time has come to "defend our country against our government". There is one significant difference of course - in Japan in the Showa era it was the army that had all the guns; in the United States it is millions of disaffected citizens. And in Japan it was the Emperor himself who represented the purity of the notion of 'our country' at risk from the political class, not 'our enshrined constitution'.

And then the assassinations start. It is an effective political strategy. Dead opponents don't ever argue back. Who cares about majorities if your opponent is alien, evil? If you believe they represent a deadly threat to all you hold dear then what is wrong with using deadly force to eliminate them?

In the United States we have also already seen senior military figures in charge of foreign 'adventurism' being drawn into the picture in the same way as happened in Japan 90 years ago. Stanley McChrystal was successfully fired by the politicians. But who can guess where the senior players in the American military and 'security' might stand if called on to defend the federal administration against fellow countrymen revolting against what they see as a deadly threat to the 'American Way of Life'

Of course, I'm just sketching in a few of the similarities here, there are big differences too, you could write a good book about it.

But there certainly are some very worrying similarities.

'Coming of Age' the four legged way.

As a postscript to my blog yesterday on 'Coming of Age Day' I see that a piece on the Guardian website today is referring to the extraordinarily low birth rate in Japan. The 'real Japanese population' (and hello statisticians everywhere!) of ethnic Japanese began to decline in the late 1990's with deaths outnumbering births, but the tendency was disguised in absolute terms by higher non-ethnic birth rates (Filipina mums and Japanese dads) and the impact of the limited in-migration (mainly of people like me - spouses and students)that Japan allows. In the last few years though the decline has been absolute, people have just largely stopped marrying and having kids. There are less than half the number of 20 year old's around the place than there were 30 years ago.

One outcome of all this is that people in general keep many, many more cats and dogs. It seems that there are now six million more pets in Japan than there are children. You can see why - they don't cost a fortune to look after and educate for a start. And they stay small and loving and generally undemanding. Most of these pets fall into the small and cute 'kawaii' category. These are not beautiful traditional tail-wagging Japanese dogs like 'Akitas' and 'Chibas' that will drag you a couple of miles on walks every day and curl up in kennels in all weathers. These are miniature dachshunds and toy poodles dressed in suits who live in condominiums on the twentieth floor and get pushed around the DIY store in trolleys designed for kids.

Now it seems than on the second Monday in January millions of childless pet owners are celebrating 'Coming of Age Day' for all their pets that have made it through the first year with ceremonies and gifts. No doubt too that soon there will be more pets arriving at the age of majority than kids. Perhaps they too will be given the vote. As long as they are ethnic Japanese pets what possible objection could there be?

'Coming of Age' Day

'Coming of Age Day' here today - a day just for you if you are twenty years old because officialdom has set it aside as a special holiday to mark your reaching of the age of majority. When I first came to Japan it used to be held on the 15th January but under the 'Happy Monday System' introduced in 2000 so that we would benefit every year from the unimaginable luxury if three days off in a row it was moved to the second Monday in January.

The routine is that if you have reached your twentieth birthday by this date and so 'come of age' then you get dressed up and attend a ceremony at the city office and the mayor gives you a pep talk about being good citizens, remembering to vote and not drinking too much beer now that you can at last legally do so. It is a rite of passage I guess. And bizarrely the ceremony around here is held on the Sunday so that everyone in city hall can get the Monday holiday as a holiday.

Anyway this year it was my younger Japanese daughter Mi-chan's turn to wear the bright kimono that has been handed down through the family for this event and go and listen to the mayor. We went down to collect her from the 'Plaza' when the ceremony was over and the place was buzzing with a couple of hundred twenty year old's enjoying the sunshine in their best kimonos and 'recruit suits'. As you tend to live at home and travel long distances to study during your high school and university years here in Japan your best friends tend to remain the ones you made locally at 'Junior High' before you were sixteen, and that was evident from the noisy crowd milling around on the pavement. We headed off to a local temple garden for a few family pictures.

Japan has changed hugely even in the decade that I've been here and nowhere is it so obvious as in this generation who sometimes seem to share none of their elders' values. But to see this event is to appreciate the other side of that coin, there is still a relaxed deference shown to, if not exactly respect for, institutional authority. Can you imagine all the twenty year old's in an English town getting dressed up and going off for a couple of hours to hear the mayor's opinions on life and youth?

'Stocks'

I was looking on the Internet yesterday for somewhere to stay if I spend any time down in the Chiltern area during the summer. I was kind of curious to see how much it would cost to stop over at one of my one-time favourite haunts these days - the Stocks House Country Hotel near Tring - but it seems that the place is no longer a hotel. It has reverted to being a private mansion again.

Stocks House. A Chiltern country house set amongst beech trees. It used to belong to the novelist Mary Augusta Ward and her nephews Aldous and Julian Huxley often stayed there. Later it became a very select girls' school and then in the 1970's it was the UK base of the American 'Playboy' Executive Victor Lownes and became a 'Bunny Girl' finishing school legendary for its endless jacuzzi parties. One of the nice things about using it as a hotel was that you got to bathe in the vastly expensive and completely tasteless jacuzzi before dinner. Lovely!

When I often stayed over there twenty years ago it wasn't so expensive, quite a draughty oak panelled place with nice scrambled eggs for breakfast but too far off the beaten track to attract any serious customer interest and so cheap. Maybe you have to be an aficionado, have an eye for buildings of character with an interesting history, to enjoy such places. Two or three times a year I would hold a team meeting there and we could jacuzzi together and go for a walk around the little park between sessions.

Then when I left the company back in 2003 and the boss asked where I would like my team leaving do 'Stocks' was the obvious place. So I guess the old pile kind of followed me through my later career as a manager.

Not any more. A private house again it seems, no trips down 'Memory Lane' for me there I'm afraid. I've I'm looking to show any women a good time in my old haunts looks like it is going to have to be the Youth Hostel at Alston after all!

Rolled up newspaper

The kitten is upstairs enjoying a mid-afternoon nap on - or perhaps under - our bed quilt. I thought we might take some 'down time' apart as I spent half an hour around lunch time pursuing him with a rolled up newspaper around the lounge. I wouldn't really murder him of course, not unless it was a day with curried feline on the dinner menu board that is. Luckily for him it is 'beans' today.

What part of "Don't jump on the d*mn table!!!" do you think that he doesn't understand?

Still, it is probably good for my health to have these sudden and violent 'blow-offs' of adrenalin, you can spend your time being far too sedentary and good willed. All animals can be just as 'ornery' and confrontationally minded as human teenagers if they decide to be. Shimaji-kun seems to adopt a scorched earth approach to existence just as soon as he is denied anything he wants. And that makes me just as determined to impose my will no matter what it takes or what the consequences. Parenting 101 I would say, somewhere in the small print of the "Don't let the b*st*rds get the better of you" module.

The difference with cats is that actually all they ever wanted to do in their lives was jump onto your table. The are no alternatives in their practical consciousness to occupy their stubborn little minds.

Anyway it is fun yelling and feeling that surge of adrenalin and brandishing the rolled up newspaper. All a part of having a strong-willed young cat in the family. And then when we have got all THAT out of our respective systems we can curl in in a purring heap for a while and I can stroke him and he can lick me. SO that's OK.

Bonfire Night

I was writing a 'test piece' yesterday for a possible new 'mail magazine' web site that Edera and I are thinking of developing this year. The topic I chose, pretty well at random, was 'Bonfire Night'. We celebrate this in England on 5 November each year to commemorate the failure of the 1605 'Gunpowder Plot' to blow up the State Opening of the English Parliament. A group of eight Catholic gentlemen conspired to attempt to assassinate the Protestant King James I and his government and crown his Catholic daughter Elizabeth as queen.

It is years since I've read this history and I was surprised what a different 'feel' it has now compared with when I was a child in the 1950's. Back then it was a interesting if rather dark fable from the far past, although certainly in the North East fifty years ago 'Roman Catholics' as we called them were still viewed with suspicion - perhaps by then more a consequence of Ireland's neutrality in World War II.

Now it all makes so much more sense, because we have come once more to live in a world in which bombs and assassinations are commonplace again and routinely play a part in politics and to promote religious agendas. These eight Catholic 'recusants' in present day terms were simply 'terrorists' - it is amazing to think that the English government could have been so careless as to let them plant 36 barrels of gunpowder in the basement under the hall where parliament would meet.

Fifty years ago there was also something alarming and sinister to me about burning an effigy of Guy Fawkes on a bonfire, but again we can now hardly see a news bulletin except that we see some crowd somewhere burning effigies of politicians or setting fire to flags.

This vocabulary of anger and hatred seems to have changed not at all over the centuries. When we watch baying mobs setting fire to things on the television news we are looking at our own history too.

New house for old

Back on the 25th October I wrote about the demolition of a house at the end of the lane, bemoaning the sheer waste of building materials and effort that is so characteristic of the Japanese housing market. Here detached houses are sometimes demolished within 20 years of building and few survive beyond 40 years. Obsolescence is literally 'built in' through the use of cheap materials. Although substantial older family houses sometimes survive from the nineteenth century in the country, in cities you will have to search to find dwellings much older than 1970.

The house at the end of the lane was demolished by its owners and the site redeveloped. Although the floor area of the property was increased from about 70 to 100 square metres, depressingly they made no effort to enlarge their site and include a little garden although the plots on all sides were vacant and could be bought for a few thousand. They simply built a bigger property on the same area, which must now including their parking bay cover 90% of their plot.

So in two months a new house is built. In normally takes a couple of weeks to cast the new foundations and let them harden, and then the main frame of the house is up in a couple of days with the help of about half a dozen workers. After that, apart from subcontracting the roof, plumbing and wiring the interior fitting and external finishing is completed in about six weeks by two carpenters. It is all that fast.

This aspect of the perceived value of 'newness' related to residential property is something I just don't understand. People here value it in exactly the same way as they would with new cars - shiny and scratch free and everything 'works'. Actually our old Nissan 'Skyline' which is 21 years old must already have outlived many of the houses built back in 1990! And just like cars once you have lived in it then your house is 'second hand' ('middle aged' is the Japanese term) - used goods and so the capital you have put into the place is already diminished, you can never recover what you spent.

This is all so strange compared with Britain, where old houses are usually worth more, that it is hard for me to take in sometimes.


(pictures - top the new property this morning - above - the old property on 25 October)

'T2' takes shape

I'm busy in the workshop at the moment working on a new 'Gauge 0' locomotive. Actually it has been 'on the go' a couple of years- if you get focused on writing theses then other stuff has to take a back seat. But now I'm having a determined drive to finish this in the next couple of weeks, I just have to wait for some gears to arrive from England and also find some brass wire to use for hand rails which will probably mean a trip into Chiba. I want it finished because if possible I want a second model completed too before I head back to England in the Spring.

The original design - a North Eastern Railway 0-8-0 'T2' chugged around the Durham coalfields for sixty years hauling heavy train loads of coal. Working in this scale of 1:43 is a real pleasure - it is big and 'chunky' enough to result in fine results without ending up with too much 'watch making' and fiddling with miniature parts.

Making things in metal is just so much fun. I enjoy most creative forms - thinking, writing and making music - but to craft something in metal is quite a different kind of creativity. Things don't make themselves, you have to intuitively sense how to heat to apply to solder things together, how much to file or machine away to give just the right amount of freedom of movement. Often in assembly you need to make compromises between 'squareness' and creating a strong joint. There is always a stage when flux has run too far, something has warped a bit with heat and you need to recover a 'balance' in the work.

None of this knowledge comes from books - you can only learn by doing and making mistakes. And you need to understand the materials - what do brass and steel do.

This kind of physical creativity is just so different, you put yourself into it in a quite different way.

Nice messy bench in the shed eh? This is my way of working - once you start on a job be careful never to put anything away until you have finished or you will never know where to find it!

The Long Walk

Something 'tweaked' my memory recently and made me remember vividly a time when I was maybe fourteen and had a bit of a 'crush' on a girl. Not the first time of course, perhaps the fifth or sixth. But it probably was the first time where there was no pre-existing social bridge available - friendship between families etc. - to give me an opportunity and excuse to talk naturally to the object of my affection. If anything was "going to happen" with Nancy, then it was going to be a case of pure raw nerve and 'cold turkey' - if you can have cold nerves in raw turkeys. The classic "take your courage in your hands" situation.

Now during school hours she and I shared a classroom but of course she mixed with the girls and I mixed with the only two people that talked to me. But the big bonus was that her route home went along the pavement right outside our first floor maisonette and I would lurk in the shadows of my curtained bedroom every afternoon watching for her horn-rimmed glasses coming down the road. Ah! Sweet innocence!

Over a period of weeks I 'psyched' myself up to go and talk to her on her walk home. Can't remember now just exactly how it happened but one day it was a case of 'alea jacta est'- my resolve was resolved. No sooner was she past our garden path than I was down the stairs and out of the front door cutting a cool figure following nonchalantly in her wake.

It turned out that was the easy bit. Next came "The Long Walk". The really tough task was to close the twenty yard gap between us as she strode down the road towards Langley Green Arcade. But inch by inch with pounding heart that distance was reduced and in the end I was walking half a step behind and almost next to her and then amazingly (she being a very kind and compassionate girl I guess) we started talking.

Well all that was a very modest 'boy meets girl' situation fifty years ago and hardly the beginning of a very passionate relationship either, to be honest I don't remember if we got much further after than going around to each other's house a couple of times. But if I was grading it now I would still have it down as one of the top ten scary moments in my life because I was vulnerable. And I could take you exactly to the place where it happened. I think it still affects my reactions when I meet women for the first time too, I always try and made the entrance into conversation easy and relaxed.

Kitten in the House

This last few days of changed schedules and no students coming to the house has meant that we can spend more time with the kitten we are fostering at the moment. We seem to have ended up calling him 'Shima-ji' ('Stripy' would be a good English equivalent). He certainly has plenty of those.

It is the first time I ever looked after a cat at this young age - now around five months - and he is certainly a major handful of trouble. Must be the human equivalent of four or five years old. His time seems to be divided pretty evenly between sleeping on our best (and only) arm chair (actually one of those folding camping chairs with a little hole in the canvas arm that you can put a coffee cup into) with a cute cherubic look on hos face and then rampaging non-stop around the house like Attila the Hun sinking his teeth and claws into everything and everyone.

We started off being rather strict with him but it was a bad strategy, you just spend the whole day hollering at a flying bit of fur. Better to grade naughtiness and then only 'notice' and pounce on the serious sins. Table tops, piano and kitchen sink are out of bounds and curtain climbing discouraged but rummaging in the kitchen bin and attacking anything below knee height is now tolerated.

Cats have such completely different personalities. Compared with our two late cats he is incredibly strong and brave, nothing seems to deter him. A misjudged landing in the ofuro last night had him taking an early and unexpected bath and I had to fish him out quick but he was totally unfazed by the experience. These "attack" modes are of course all of learning to be a cat, his reactions are as fast as lightning, he would already make a formidable hunter. Nothing escapes his notice.

And then just when you think that if he attacks your ankle one more time you will throw him out of the window he curls up on your knees and gives you a "thank you daddy" kind of look and falls fast asleep purring loudly with pussy love and so happy to be next to your heart. Good grief!

He has to go soon though, after his second inoculation. I just can't see a way of managing him in our family life with the need to spend long spells in Britain in the future. Not easy.

Shibayama New Year

Across to Shibayama Noison this morning to welcome in the New Year. It is our usual family trip on 1st January, although I have managed to miss it twice in recent years through being in the UK on other business. Last year at this time I was moving house in very snowy weather.

Shibayama is a quite large country temple about ten miles north from here what goes on there must be pretty standard for New Year's Day in a country areas the length of Japan. We go and make an offering, say our own private prayers for the New Year and if we feel so inclined we ring the temple bell for a small donation.


We try and get there quite early because the traffic along the narrow farm lanes just becomes impossible by late morning, although the weather is always beautifully sunny. Some years we get dressed up, and Edera wears her kimono. Other years like this year we go more or less as we are. I love the crowd there, a perfect cross section of local rural life around here crowding up the stairs to make gassho in front of the altar and milling around in the alleys between the little booths that appear in the temple grounds to sell all kinds of stuff - but mainly food.

There is always something on your mind at New Year, something that you hope will turn out well in the coming twelve months. And for us it is the birth of our first grandchild, due in June but already very much in our thoughts.