Little House in the Paddy

Moving out

2011-11-16T18:10:00.004+09:00

Dear readers,

I’ve been wondering what I should do with this blog. Right after his death it felt appropriate to tell his friends and you readers about what had happened to him but I feel I cannot remain here too long. To step forward in my own life, I think it will be better to create my blog. I also didn’t want to see my name shown as a writer which should be his name.

So I’m going to set up my own blog separately so please drop a comment if you are curious. I won't publish your comment if it includes your email address. If I don’t know you please introduce yourself with a few lines. Thank you for supporting me everyone and hopefully I’ll see you somewhere soon.

posted by Edera

Be kind to yourself

2011-11-06T20:08:00.008+09:00

A-chan, a daughter of my close friend, came from Kawasaki for an overnight stay. She brought me a book written by a female monk. Actually it's her talk transcribed into a book. I'll translate some sentences that I liked.

Us sent into this world to be here means that we are making somebody happy by just being us. To make someone happy, we ourselves have to be happy. When we stand near someone who is happy, we feel the warmth as if it's reflected on us.

....

You should love yourself. Even though you don't like your flat nose and small eyes, they belong to you and you are the only one who exist in this world. You need to praise yourself to be surviving with those!

She is talking to people with lots of humour obviously. Yes humour is another hint to make our lives more cheerful.

posted by Edera

Internet friendships

2011-10-30T17:30:00.007+09:00

When Iain started living in Japan he faced lots of problems with my two daughters who naturally didn’t welcome him at first and then there were all sorts of culture shocks. Hot sticky weather was annoying him in summer with unpleasant insects and creatures. Our house doesn’t have a central heating system so he complained how cold it was in winter too. He also greatly missed English diet, especially pies and cheeses that were seldom found here. Above all, the language barrier really frustrated him. He was in dire need of talking to people in English with similar background however in this rural part of Chiba-ken it was difficult to find such friends easily.

One way he used to keep himself sane is to register himself in those sites which offer opportunities for people looking for international friendships. I knew he was communicating with quite a few people however until recently I hadn’t known that he was writing to some of them almost every day. Well he was a letter writer all his life so it wasn’t a total surprise. In one site, somebody who learned of Iain’s death left a very kind message on his page so I’ll copy it here – I hope she will not mind me publishing this. I corrected some dates and hid the name of the site and his pen name.

OPEN LETTER TO VISITORS OF THIS PAGE:

I am shocked and deeply saddened to report that Iain, or '***' as he is known here on *** , passed away on July 14 of heart failure. He was hospitalized five days after feeling under the weather, and while there took a turn for the worse.

I was blessed to have known Iain and befriended him on ***, developing a fun and inspiring acquaintance with this cheerful, outgoing, learned and very wise man. In hearing of his death I became all too conscious of the sanctity and fleetingness of life -- apparently Iain had simply gone to the restroom, come back, complained of breathlessness, and died within an hour afterward. One minute he was here and the next - gone. Just like that. Despite my shock and genuine sadness at the loss of such a cool guy, my heart was lifted in knowing that Iain is reported to have died peacefully. It's a comfort.

Let's take a moment out of our busy, crazy lives and reflect on the things that matter. Iain had celebrated his 64th birthday mere days before his death; he turned 64 on July 5 and died on July 14 -- but anyone who knew him or corresponded with him, or even visited his blogs and sites of personal activities in which he took part, knew that he led a very full, active, interesting life! :^D Iain had his hand in everything :) So he is truly a powerful example that it's not how many years in your life, but the quality of life in your years ... Iain did tons of living in six decades, and I'm sure the peacefulness with which he passed away was due to an inner knowledge that he accomplished much and truly, genuinely LIVED. He was an inspiration to me while alive, and even more so now that he's gone. I miss him.

Thanks for everything, Iain . . . thanks for being you. Blessings and light on the next phase of your spiritual journey! :)

from a friend

posted by Edera

100th day memorial gathering for Iain

2011-10-22T22:29:00.003+09:00

Friends from Naruto Vocal Ensemble and Jadebros gathered at our house yesterday evening. They are such nice people. I'm sure Iain was absolutely happy surrounded by all of them. I won't describe what it was like, I'll just put a photo that my daughter took then.

posted by Edera

Synchronicity

2011-10-17T15:46:00.003+09:00

I'm sure lots of you have experienced synchronicity in your lives. It happened a lot to me and yesterday afternoon it happened again.

I had been to a local festival which was really good - the weather turned beautiful with nice cool breeze. Lots of artistic activities there, you could paint shades of green on long white cloth hanging from trees, you could make an instrument using dried bottle gourds and other natural materials. There were a lot of stalls selling home-made cakes, soup and packed lunch. Open-air cafes and tiny bonsai shops. In an open field there was a stage built with local cidar trees and you could enjoy listening to live music and dance performances. It felt a bit like 1960's hippie fair although certainly no dodgy stuff here in leafy Chiba-ken.

Back home I suddenly wanted to talk to someone in English. Recently I was thinking that I was really in need of speaking to someone in English on a daily basis. There is something in English that liberates me in some ways. Well in other ways English could be restricting not because of its grammar but due to my lack of vocabulary.

Anyway a friend's name landed on my head - he was Iain's close friend and someone we often met in the U.K. but for some reason I hadn't got in touch with him after I came back here. "Yes!" I thought, " I'd like to talk with him!" Opening Iain's address book I dialed his number. His wife answered and we said hello to each other. Later he was on the phone. Surprisingly, he told me that he had just started writing an email to me at that time! We do have telepathy don't we?

posted by Edera

On days of sorrow

2011-10-10T20:33:00.003+09:00

Yesterday when I was sorting my things out, I came across an old notebook I kept thirty years ago. It's my scribbles from a lecture on Philosophy of Education. On one page there is a poem by Juukichi Yagi. I'll copy it here in Japanese.

かなしい日はかなしみのみちをゆきくらし
よろこびの日はよろこびのみちをゆきくらし
たんねんに　いちねんに　あゆんできたゆえ
かすかなまことがみえてきた
じぶんでみつけねば　だれも力をかしてくれぬ
このひとすじのたびは　つらかったが
こわたれぬせかいがすこしみえてきた
かたじけなさ

I'm not good at translating poetry but I'll give it a try.

On days of sorrow I live in complete sorrow
On days of happiness I live in absolute happiness
I have walked step by step with simplicity and diligence
so now a hint of truth is in my view
Nobody lends a hand if you do not find it by yourself
This travel on a narrow path has been difficult but
I have a glimpse of an unbroken world
with gratitude

The lecturer told us that it was necessary to concentrate on the sadness and it was important not to change it into grumbling or hatred or any other emotions. Without realising it, when we are sad, we might end up complaining bitterly about something which actually should not be the issue. Nobody will be able to cure your soreness in your heart however at least you can give a cry. You can express yourself. The best thing is that you remain 'clean' and 'pure' in your own heart, which in itself might move someone. Keep your mind concentrated. Don' be bothered by what your other emotions say.The most wonderful thing you can do to people is to really be one in yourself.

posted by Edera

A fig cake for Iain

2011-10-06T18:06:00.004+09:00

Around lunch time a friend visited me. She is someone Iain and I always thought of as our family. So I relate to her as my sister. She made a very nice fig cake for us. She also brought me some lunch. The cake was on the altar for Iain for a while and was eaten by us.

The photo is a bit blurred but I cannot take the picture again because it's gone!

posted by Edera

"Another wonderful day with you."

2011-10-05T03:31:00.009+09:00

Just to tell everyone that I'm surviving okay. It's really hard to lose someone so caring and supportive. Iain was indeed the sun of my life. It feels like the world is in the shadow all the time now.

Iain had been always positive. He was very good at encouraging people as well. Maybe I had relied on him too much for being happier. I'm also an optimistic person basically but now I have to learn to live cheerfully without him.

The other day I was remembering the phrase he once suggested me to say when I woke up in the morning. He said, "Why don't you say 'Another wonderful day with you' to me?" I kept saying that for a while but then sadly the habit slipped away.

Indeed those days were wonderful days with him. If you are happily living with someone, husband, wife, partner, children, friends or pets, it'll be nice to say this every morning because it really is another wonderful day with them.

Well - even if it's quite hard to live with them it's nicer to say "Another wonderful day with you." rather than "Another horrible start of the day with %&'$#!" isn't i? Actually come to think of it, maybe one summer morning Iain thought about the unbearable heat and humidity, disgusting Japanese food and then his unkind wife and he almost said to himself, "Another hor.....!" and then stopped and thought about a positive way to put it, eh?

posted by Edera

Imi-kotoba -words you should avoid to use in certain situations

2011-09-22T06:34:00.005+09:00

In the Japanese language, we avoid using words related to death and also numbers that have the same sound as the words associated with the image of death. The famous ones are 4 and 9. In Japanese 4 is pronounced ‘shi’ which also means ‘death’. 9 is pronounced ‘ku’ which also means ‘suffering’. So there usually are no room number 4, 9 or 49 in hospitals and hotels.

In wedding parties people try not to utter the words incurring the image of separation. If you are a parent and when your child is about to take an entrance exam you, as well as others, will try not to use words like ‘fail’,‘slip’ or ‘drop’ etc.

Taboos in English are not quite the equivalent of these – euphemism is an option to avoid shocking expressions however actually I think everything is much more open to talk about in England. People seem not to hesitate in talking about all kinds of human activities happening around them where Japanese people will be careful not to. We tend to talk about things moderately and there is a thing about ‘shame of the family’ here, so people especially avoid talking about something bad that happened to your own family to others. However that’s not the case in the U.K. Well at least that’s what I observed with Iain and his friends. Sadly my Japanese-ness stops me from going into further details at the moment!

posted by Edera

Open day for Iain

2011-09-19T09:34:00.003+09:00

Yesterday afternoon I opened the house for my students and their parents, but it was mainly students and their mothers of course being in Japan - never a father! - who came and offered incense in washitsu (Japanese style tatami room). Some offered food, others offered flowers. All of them gave a donation to the Stainmore Railway Company - so Iain would be very pleased about that.

In the school room, I set two pcs on the table. One pc showed the websites that Iain created in those two years. The other showed the slide show of Iain’s portraits since he was about twelve years old. I have some other photos of him at different ages so, for his 100th memorial day, I’ll scan them and compile them in a file.

The nice thing about today is that a friend helped me all afternoon. I’d kind of thought she was a ‘cool’ person but actually, she has been very warm and kind and has supported me greatly by just being there when I needed help – like today. Another nice thing is that some students really missed Iain and shed their tears looking at the slide show. I hope he knew he was loved so much when he was alive.

posted by Edera

Lupin the kitten

2011-09-18T08:02:00.005+09:00

This is our new cat Rupan, sitting in our messy washitsu. Well for English readers I'd better write Lupin but, in Japanese we only have an 'R'! We are famous for not being able to pronounce London properly. Most of us say Rondon. So, you'll hear “Herro Rupan!” instead of “Hello Lupin!”, but that’s Japanese for you. Hope you’ll be very kind and give collection to their English… oh, sorry, I made a mistake myself, I should have said correction!

From the name, you would imagine it's a boy cat but actually it's not. My elder daughter Chihiro rescued her while I was in England. The kitten could barely see due to heavy mucus and was too weak to eat anything. Chihiro took her to the vet and luckily she survived. She seems to be around 8 months old but I'm not sure. She has beautiful green eyes and a very interesting triangular mark on her dark face. Her behaviour is completely different to other cats that we had kept before. Very timid, never tries to run outdoors. It's so interesting to see the way she plays with a hair band too. Do you see it just in front of her in the photo?

Why did Chihiro name her Lupin? She thought the kitten looked like both a thief and detective! Don't you think she has a bit of a suspicious look? In Japan, there was a cartoon called "Lupin the third" on TV a while ago... I don't know if it's still on air. It's based on the gentleman thief and detective story written by Maurice Leblanc. Younger people may only know today’s animation, which is often the case when a hero from an original story develops into a manga character. I feel like pulling my hair out whenever I see Winnie the Pooh in Disney animation because that’s NOT the Pooh that I know from the original book. Maybe it’s wrong to expect animated character to be the same as the original. Maybe it’s only me. Perhaps I’m already too old to appreciate Disney characters. Everyone in Chiba seems to love Disneyland and its characters. When people are so excited about it, I cannot say I'd rather avoid such things so I just sit and listen to how long they had to wait to take a ride on Splash Mountain and how much they enjoyed taking pictures with Micky Mouse….oh dear.

posted by Edera

Tsuki-meinichi (Monthly memorial day)

2011-09-14T08:40:00.004+09:00

14th today.Two months have passed since Iain’s passing. In Japan with some religious families, a family monk visits the family on Tsuki-meinichi and recites a scripture. In our house, however, no monks will visit us because Iain’s tie is with a Buddhist Abbey in England. So my daughter and I offered incense by ourselves and recited the scripture of great wisdom both in English and Japanese just like Iain and I used to do in the morning.

Sometimes we did it before breakfast, other times after.Looking back it was the only quiet time in a day and I’m really happy that we kept doing it together. After the recitation Iain will offer the merit of recitation for the benefit of our home and for the people in our thoughts and for every sentient being. Then we smiled “Good morning, love!” to each other, which made us feel happy and made us get on with our work all through the day. Well, actually we should have done three bows but Iain never insisted on that one, maybe it would have been too much for his heart.

posted by Edera

A behavioral difference between the U.K. and Japan

2011-09-11T19:18:00.006+09:00

I’m telling you only from my own experience. There will be various kinds of funerals held in both countries, so please do not generalize what I say.

Today I’ll tell you just one observation. A big difference is about the family and relatives look at the deceased or not. In Japan, definitely yes but in England it seemed not always. In my experience in various parts of Japan, if a person dies in a hospital, he/she is usually carried back home or a funeral place or a temple. The deceased will be laid on a futon bed. Family and relatives will sit near the deceased and spend a night with the incense lit all night.

So I imagine, if you are English, you will find it rather scary to take a look at the dead person especially if you don’t know the person well. It might just give you repulsive feeling. With me as Japanese, when I see the face of the deceased I always have the impression that the face is the most peaceful and relaxed. I feel it’s better to see the beautiful face because it actually calms you down rather than upsets you. Imagination gives you worries, threat and fear but the reality gives you peace of mind, clarity and stability.. that’s how I feel at the moment.

posted by Edera

Grandfather's watches

2011-09-09T10:56:00.011+09:00

Was Iain's grandfather a collector of watches? No, not really.

Back in Kirkby Stephen, I had a very limited timescale, but I tried to take a look at as many things Iain had left as possible. In the attic, there were two huge boxes of watches, clocks, springs and various parts and tools that used to belong to Iain’s granddad. After he retired from his job as a signalman, he mended people’s watches and clocks as a hobby.

I couldn’t manage two but I did take out the contents of one box and took pictures to keep the memory there and I kept imagining his granddad fixing them with great care...

I wonder if some of you have the same kind of collections from your grandparents.

posted by Edera

Letter of Complaint

2011-09-05T20:50:00.009+09:00

When I was struggling with myself not knowing what to do with pain and sorrow in my heart, I remembered a book titled "What to do when someone dies" which had been kindly given by the Abbey. One chapter was telling me about the grief process. It says that the different stages of grief that a person may go through include shock, sorrow, anger, apathy and depression before the process of recovery can begin.

I haven't written much about anger in this blog but naturally I did feel angry about myself for not being able to help Iain and about the doctor who saw him first. I went to see the doctor a few days after the Buddhist funeral and afterwards I decided to write a letter of complaint to the PCT. I'll copy it here in the hope that this helps someone somewhere in the world.

Dear Sirs,

I’m writing this letter on behalf of my late husband Dr. Wilfred Iain Thomas Robinson.He died of a heart failure on the 14th of July, 2011 in Cumberland Infirmary. He was 64.

Iain was taken into the CCU at the above hospital on the 12th in an ambulance. The attending doctor at the hospital diagnosed that Iain had had a minor heart attack several days before. Suffering from severe pain in his left arm on the night of the 7th, he saw Dr. A at B Medical Practice on the 8th and was diagnosed as having a frozen shoulder. Iain told me that he explained to Dr. A that in addition to the pain on his left upper arm, he had a slight chest pain on his left side as well. When I met Dr. A and talked with him on the 2nd of August, he told me that he did not remember any of the conversation. On top of that, he said that he was not aware of Iain being diabetic. I understand that this information is in his medical file easily available for reference. There is a possibility of misdiagnosis due to carelessness and negligence.

In retrospect the symptoms that Iain experienced were that of a heart attack or angina and it is well recognised that people with diabetes are at high risk of ischaemic heart disease and that they can present atypically. Frozen shoulder is common in people with diabetes but is not usually of sudden onset and it is exacerbated by lifting the shoulder but not associated with chest pain.

The possiblity of angina was not considered by Dr. A as no ECG was performed nor was an examination of Iain's chest. It is possible that if an adequate examination had been undertaken the heart attack would have been diagnosed earlier. If this had happened, Iain's chances of survival would have been increased and he may have been admitted earlier to hospital and received treatment for his acute coronary syndrome which could have enabled him to have undergone angioplasty. Unfortunately Iain was not given this opportunity as Dr. A failed to listen fully to Iain and fixated on the wrong diagnosis.

Before my husband died, he had shown dissatisfaction about Dr. A’s diagnosis and attitude on three occasions. First, he told me he was not impressed with the doctor right after he saw him on the 8th. Next, Iain told his priest about it on the phone on the 12th. Thirdly, Iain told me about making a formal complaint about the doctor when I visited him at the hospital on the 13th. He felt that he was not properly heard. Therefore, I have good reasons to believe that this is what he would do if he were alive today.

To keep my mind in peace I would like you to investigate Dr. A and require him to really reflect on his own practice.

Since I am traveling back to Japan for several months on the 31st August, I will appreciate it if you could contact me as soon as possible at the above address or by phone on xxx. After that date, please write to me to my Japanese address.

Yours sincerely,

(signed)

posted by Edera

Weeping a lot

2011-09-05T12:34:00.003+09:00

Telling people about Iain's death is much more difficult for me here than that in England. It’s probably because I do so in my own language. Words directly connect to feelings and it takes more energy to utter each word since each brings with it vivid memories. Or it’s perhaps the way we talk to each other – it feels much ‘wetter’ here. Friends moan as they remember him and try to encourage me which eventually makes me cry as well. Generally I feel it’s okay to cry openly here.

Maybe it was okay to cry in the U.K. as well but somehow I felt that I had to show strength in my behavior. I thought British people find it a bit embarrassing to encounter emotional gestures. “Stiff upper lip” was the phrase Iain told me to describe the English attitude. A nice thing in Britain is that people always hug each other. When it’s difficult to speak and if you only want to share the feelings or encourage the person, hugging is great. In Japan we seldom hug but we remember together, shedding tears and talking.

Yesterday morning, I felt exhausted after talking with four people although I was happy to know how greatly Iain was missed by them. When they left, I suddenly found it very hard to be on my own. I rang my friend to talk again. But I couldn’t cry much because I knew it would give her burden. I looked for help on the Net and found a site full of letters written by widows to their lost husbands. As I read them I wept and wept, shedding abundant tears. Some of them had almost the same experience as mine. After about an hour of good crying, I felt much better. It helps a lot to let go of your feelings.

posted by Edera

Good bye to Kirkby Stephen (for now)

2011-08-30T15:32:00.008+09:00

Just a short note to tell you that I’m leaving our Kirkby Stephen house this afternoon. The flight back to Japan is tomorrow, which coincidentally is the 49th day after Iain’s passing. In Japan we regard the day as the end of mourning. It feels as if Iain had known about this and had planned everything for me accordingly.

I’ll start working as soon as I get back to Japan. With my jet-lag the blog post might be a bit irregular but I'll keep writing!

Wishing you all the best.

posted by Edera

Stainmore Summit sign erected

2011-08-28T07:39:00.006+09:00

Quite an emotional day today. First we saw the grand re-opening ceremony at Kirkby Stephen East Station. Then we drove up and spread Iain's ashes on the hill where his granddad's ashes had been scattered. In the afternoon, we went on an exceptional trip on a double-decker to Stainmore Summit and to the south abutment of Belah viaduct.

In the evening, three young friends of ours cooked beautiful Thai curry and soup with rice. Thanks Luke, Charlotte and Becky!

posted by Edera

Serendipity

2011-08-25T07:18:00.003+09:00

With Rev. Mugo I’ve been experiencing things happen serendipitously. It happened when she was with us in Japan. It’s like a magic hand picking out a few pieces from different places and then we find something fitting together we had not anticipated. Sometimes I felt as if a missing piece of a jigsaw suddenly appeared. I guess after all it’s her virtue and also these things happen not coincidentally but as a result of her careful observation and thoughtfulness.

I cannot describe those occasions at this moment as I’m in the middle of sorting things out. Today I’d like to tell you a little exciting experience from yesterday. As we had arrived a bit too early for an appointment, we decided to take a look at the famous Blackpool Tower. Then Rev. Mugo shook her magic wand and we found ourselves sitting at a table in the Tower Ballroom! Middle aged couples were enjoying dancing to music played by an electronic organ on the high stage which sometimes sank and came up again - for players to take turns I guess. Although I don’t know how to dance formally, I like dancing in my own way so I had to restrain my feet from moving.

There is a Hans Christian Anderson story of a girl who wore red shoes to the church. One day she went dancing leaving her sick mother behind. Then in the ballroom her feet never stopped dancing and she had to have her feet chopped off. This really scared me as a child and only the fear remained not the moral of the story. Dancing girl with red shoes on, and the bloody scene stuck in my mind. Afterwards I couldn’t remember the reason why she had to face such a fate.

Do you have this kind of experience? You only remember a part of the story because it was so shocking and don’t remember the cause. Too much impact doesn’t work for small children I guess?

posted by Edera

Running on the water

2011-08-24T05:07:00.013+09:00

This morning we went to Blackpool. (For the benefit of Japanese readers, Blackpool used to be a very popular seaside resort famous for its tower and the ballroom underneath it, called the Tower Ballroom as well as the illuminations in the autumn.)

I can imagine my junior high school students asking, “Ballroom? Room for baseball? Or basketball? Room with lots of balls? “ Well in this case it means a huge room for formal dancing. This ‘ball’ came from Latin word ‘ballere’ = to dance.

However what I’d like to tell you today is that I saw a young man running on the water! I’d never seen such a thing before, certainly not in Japan.

First I saw someone in a plastic sheet or something but suddenly it became a big ball covering him up and he was standing on the water. I was so curious that I went there to take a close look. By then he was already out of the ball however Rev. Mugo talked with a man who was mending holes in another ball and she asked if it was possible for a repeat performance. He was once again sealed into the ball and there you go, he was running and splashing on the water. Afterwards we talked to this cool young man.

His name is Daniel. According to him a lot of children try running on the water during this summer. It’s only £5 for ten minutes. Why not try once? If I had been wearing a T-shirt and shorts, I definitely would have given it a try! Iain would have approved.

posted by Edera

Needed, train spotters

2011-08-23T05:59:00.004+09:00

Here are a couple of sample pages from Iain's diaries and notebooks. Train spotters! Are you able to tell me what these figures mean? The one above is from 1961. On 14th April he wrote, “Up at Stainmore early.” The one below is from 15th August, 1974.

posted by Edera

Three day boy - mikka-bozu

2011-08-21T05:02:00.004+09:00

If someone dies, those who are left are left with his or her belongings. If the situation allows I’d keep everything as it is so that I could feel Iain’s presence in the house at all times. However as it is not the case, Rev. Mugo and I have been sorting things out these past two weeks. Parting with his clothing was the most painful. Going through his albums was rather interesting since I see his life before we met. However he was the main photographer in the family so he wasn’t in the pictures very often. He had visited a lot of places in Europe and the U.S. I didn’t throw away any albums.

Finding his diaries from here and there made me smile a lot. I was happy to think that I was able to read more of his writings. However he only kept the first week of January in most cases.

In Japanese, mikka-bozu, that was him. Mikka means three days which refers to a fairly short time and bozu means a male monk – it also means a boy. Three-day monk. In Edo period (1603 to 1868) there were men running away to a temple to get away from hard farming life. Some of them might have committed a crime, others just wanted to receive free food. However when they found monks’ life too restricted and severe they would ran away again. So people laughed at them and called them three-day monks.

Nowadays this expression refers to somebody who can only keep doing things for a short time. You are easily bored and get lazy. I am one of them and I’m not laughing at him at all and also, to be fair, one year he wrote up to the end of January! It’s just that the fact that he had kept all those diaries with only a week’s entry and all the pages blank for the rest of the year seem a little funny to me. Sorry Iain!

I think he really wanted to keep records of his daily life. After the Internet came into our lives, the blog space seemed to best fit his needs. He really enjoyed it and he kept it for six long years fairly well! Hmm..maybe what he needed was readers in those days eh?

Do you also find typing on the computer much easier than actually writing down in your diary?

posted by Edera

The Alexander Technique

2011-08-20T03:16:00.001+09:00

Have you heard of The Alexander Technique?

I had no idea what it was like but when I heard that it was a method to help let go of your unnecessary tensions and also to live in this very moment, I suddenly got very interested. Kate, a friend of Iain’s has been learning the technique and she is going to graduate from her course at Christmas this year. When I asked her to show me a little bit about the technique, she said okay and visited me yesterday.

She explained to me the general idea of this technique then I lay flat on the floor and she showed me how to let go of all the tensions in my body. She did this by gently helping each of my limbs to stretch long, especially so with the neck because the head is very heavy.

Rev. Mugo was out all day. When she came back and saw me washing dishes, she said “I can see the effect on you!” Indeed I felt much lighter in myself. My headache was gone and my stiff neck was gone. It was like magic. I felt much better, and actually I was so relaxed that I went to bed before 8 and slept until this morning! Somehow I haven’t slept enough recently so it was good to catch up.

About 16 years ago, I came across something a little similar in a workshop called “Kenji no Gakko” (School of Kenji Miyazawa, a storyteller and poet born in 1896. He was a sincere Buddhist.) However I didn’t dig into it any further at that time. I wonder if those people who held this workshop had learned something from the Alexander Technique.

I wrote this blog to show my gratitude to Kate. Thank you Kate!

posted by Edera

Back gate mended

2011-08-18T05:19:00.008+09:00

Seeing is believing. I know we Japanese are infamous for constantly taking photographs wherever we are however I couldn’t resist taking these photographs today because the way the door was mended was so super smooth and it was a wonderful job.

Two senior monks visited us today. In the winter the back gate swells with the damp and it won’t open. Rev. Mugo and I wanted it to be fixed but thought it would take a long time. However when they took a look at the door one of the monks said “It’s a piece of cake.” And within perhaps ten minutes, the door was taken off its hinges, a chunk sawn off the bottom of it and then screwed back on again.

The first picture is the very tidy tool box belonging to one of the monks which impressed me greatly. The next one is him taking the door off.

Very many thanks!

posted by Edera

Our breakfast

2011-08-17T05:48:00.010+09:00

Looking at this photo, did you think I eat spring onions for breakfast? Yep! But not as they are.

Before I tell you about our breakfast, can I ask what you eat for breakfast? Tea, toast with butter? Weetabix?

Back in Japan Iain and I had three choices; rice and miso soup, porridge on busy mornings, and homemade bread with bacon and eggs to please Iain since he became homesick for a British breakfast from time to time. We don’t have black pudding in Japan, though!

Here in the U.K., Rev. Mugo and I are enjoying brown rice and miso soup almost every morning. We have got Italian brown rice which is easier to cook than Japanese brown rice. The miso was brought from Japan. It goes without saying that Rev. Mugo is a vegetarian so I don’t use any fish stock to make miso soup here. We just boil lots of vegetables and add miso at the very end of cooking. We have so much fun out of it. For topping I sprinkle chopped negi in Japan but here we use chopped spring onion. At first I was using leek but spring onions also taste wonderful. They are so nice I can survive without negi, I suppose.

posted by Edera

Two more things to keep me going

2011-08-16T22:16:00.004+09:00

I would like to add two more things that helped me keep writing.

As I wrote in my previous post, Rev. Mugo has been helping me to write about what had happened. Who is Rev. Mugo? Did I tell you about her before? Iain became a Soto Zen Buddhist in the U.K. and Rev. Mugo is his teacher. I am really grateful to him for having kept his practice in his group here in the U.K. and for having maintained his close spiritual connection with Rev. Mugo for over twenty years, a close one in the last ten years. Without him, Rev. Mugo wouldn’t be here.

Another thing is that writing in a language which is not quite mine has enabled me to express difficult things because somehow it makes me sit straight and I have to try to be logical and more objective. Writing in English makes sense because not many of Iain’s friends will read Japanese. However I’m scared to think what kind of impressions native English readers receive from my writing. Rev. Mugo says my English is back to front and too many commas! I know I sometimes miss out articles because we don’t have them in Japanese. Well, I can try to be more creative and make it upside down sometimes? Just joking.

As somebody kindly commented, I know that Iain had an amazing style of his own sprinkled with vast knowledge of - well - almost everything. However it made his writing difficult to understand for non-native speakers. Our students often told me that reading Iain’s blog was quite a big task for them.

So let’s assume there may be good things as well in my simple English, eh?

posted by Edera

Writing about difficult things

2011-08-14T22:18:00.004+09:00

I thought I would never be able to write about the 14th because as you can imagine it was such a traumatic experience, and it still is.

"I don't think I can write about that day." I said to Rev. Mugo. She seemed to accept that however within a second she said, “At least you can write about that cat!” I paused for a moment and said “Okay, I think so.” Yes, I thought, at least I can write about the ginger cat.

I wrote only a few lines about the cat. I didn’t want to remember that day not to mention writing about details so I stopped there and thought, Right, this is today’s post. The readers after all are all kind people. I’m sure they know the difficulty and they will understand.

Added to this, in Japan, on such occasions, remaining silent and not being talkative is supposed to be good manners. So I sometimes feel when writing this blog I’m doing something very unusual for a Japanese person. Actually for anybody who has just lost his/her partner for that matter. Am I a weirdo? Would Iain have written his blog if I had died suddenly? Maybe. Maybe not. Can people write about horrible experience so quickly afterwards? It took my father fifty years before he could start speaking about his experiences of the atomic bomb. He was in a crowded bus going towards Hiroshima city centre when the bomb dropped. He was 14 years old. I wonder how I am able to write this now. For what reason, and for whom?

When I read aloud my post to Rev. Mugo (I always ask her to listen to me reading what I have written), she seemed to be waiting for the next sentence. Realising I had stopped writing, she said, “So… what happened then?” I talked about what had happened. “Then you can write that,” she said kindly. So I typed a few more lines. This is how we proceeded. When it came to the point that was so painful to remember I couldn’t even talk, and cried. She was sitting next to me and I could feel she was experiencing my pain through her own body. Slowly we proceeded, with her never pushing me to write further and telling me that I didn’t have to publish what I’d written. She suggested however that writing might help me, as well as others. Some time after we started, she got up and moved away from me and sat on the floor leaning against the wall. I think she did this to avoid any sense of my feeling pressured to keep writing and also so that we could face each other while we were talking.

So I started to tell her what had happened. Often I hesitated to describe something intimate and said “I don’t know how to write about it.” At one time I even said, “Maybe I’ll write only up to here and the rest I can write some time later.” She nodded with a smile and somehow her being there kept me going. I think sharing this whole experience was very difficult for Rev. Mugo. She was realising empathy and patience by means of her existence.

After struggling together for an hour or two – again I lost track of time – the previous post was completed. It was done only with the support of Rev. Mugo, I can’t imagine me doing it on my own, alone. Actually we hugged each other after posting it on the net.

In deep gratitude to Rev. Mugo.

posted by Edera

Day 8 - 14th July

2011-08-13T06:22:00.003+09:00

Thursday, 14th July

I received a phone call from the Cumberland Infirmary, Carlisle at around 2.40 a.m. The voice at the other end of the phone said, “Your husband is very unwell, please come immediately.” I rang Peter with trembling fingers. Peter is Julia’s partner, they live together in Preston with their one-month-old baby. Peter was kind and encouraging and spoke with a steady voice saying they would pick me up as soon as possible. Around 3.30, with my heart racing, I waited outside our front door. Then a cat appeared from the dark and snuggled against my legs. When I sat down on the doorstep she jumped on my lap which was very comforting. She was purring softly and when I looked at her face, I thought she looked quite like our old cat Tora. At that moment I had a slight fear that Iain was visiting me to say good-bye.

For the last few days since starting to write this record, I've been remembering Iain's face when I saw him for the first time after he died. It was quite some time after the nurse told Julia and me before she led me to the room where Iain lay. We were both very upset and cried a lot. Now I think the nurse was waiting until we became calmer. Julia went to feed the baby and I was asked if I wanted to see Iain. When we were first told of Iain's death it was like a terrible explosion, not wanting to believe what we'd been told was true. We were in turmoil. When I eventually arrived at the room, it was very hard for me to walk at all, I found he was in a quiet and calm place.

When I entered the room, I called his name several times and of course there was no answer. I cried and I could hear the nurse sobbing behind me. I touched his face and held him but was afraid to touch his body as it was covered with a white cloth. The nurse said, “It’s okay” drawing back the cloth as she spoke and then left. I stroked his left arm and hand. Again I looked at his face - his eyes were slightly open, his green-gray eyes very clear and gentle. His face looked so very calm and peaceful. The worries and pains of the last months and weeks had all faded away. I have to say that after he finished his thesis he started to look rather old and tired and lines were deep on his face. When I saw him that morning after he had died, he looked much younger and beautiful. This sounds as if he wasn't good-looking however he was.

I walked to his right hand side and held his face again, l lay over him with my ear to his chest. Gradually I started to hear a steady heartbeat and I wished it was his heart beating. But when I touched his chest it was not moving. It was my own heartbeat. I stroked his right arm down to his hand, touched his fingers and hugged him again. He was still warm and it was hard to believe he was dead. It was only that he was not moving, he was not responding to me which confirmed that he was not alive any more. I must have been there for some time with him, maybe an hour.

Peter came and stayed a while and left, the nurse came back and asked what I wanted to do. She genuinely said I could stay as long as I wanted to. I would have gladly stayed there for two or three days however I thought I should move, with Peter and Julia waiting for me and with doctors and nurses working, if I stayed there I would be an annoyance to them. The nurse took me to the room where Julia was waiting for me. We had another cup of tea, we couldn't utter a word at all. We were still in shock. After some time Julia asked, “What do you want to do now?” I asked her what the room was for. She said it was the nurses' room. "Well then we have to go. We cannot be in their way,” I replied.

Peter drove us back home, he was so good and made us toasts with butter and jam. He said, “We have to be practical. Food is to our body like petrol is to a car.” I think nobody was hungry but we just munched through. It was around nine in the morning. Actually I really don't know what time it was. I lost track of time.

posted by Edera

Day 7 - 13th July

2011-08-12T04:12:00.004+09:00

Wednesday, 13th July

On the 13th I took a 12.30 train to Carlisle. The visiting hours were from 3 to 4.30 but I couldn’t wait any longer. In the train, I looked up the meaning of CCU with my little electronic dictionary. Iain had told me that CCU meant cardiological something. However, what I saw was quite a shocking term in Japanese. Kanjo Domyaku Shikkan Shuchu Chiryo Byoto. It is a place where patients with problems with their coronary artery and are at high risk stay. They are in an intensive-care ward. When I realised the seriousness of his condition, I wept - luckily there was no one sitting beside me. However, I quickly stopped thinking of the worst and tried to think positively. I said to myself - surely Iain will be okay. He will never leave me alone.

At the station in Carlisle I took a bus to the Infirmary. The hospital appeared to be a nicely busy place, by that I mean staff were going about their business briskly - with a good attitude. The entrance was spacious and full of light. Lots of people were walking around on the ground floor so it almost felt like a shopping centre. There was a café on the first floor and it looked cheerful with visitors and patients chatting over a cup of coffee. The CCU was on the second floor. It was, I think, only 2 p.m. but I went into the unit. Iain had told me on the phone that nobody would stop me from visiting him even though I would be a bit early. As I walked around, I felt uneasy again since all I saw were people in their 80's and 90's who looked really frail - but then I realised I was in the wrong unit. I should have turned right and gone through the opposite door to the CCU!

Eventually I found him sitting in a chair beside his bed, with an insulin drip attached to him. He told me he had to be on a drip 24 hours a day. Thankfully his blood sugar was now being held under control. He reasoned that the shock of the heart attack made the blood sugar so dangerously high. Sitting with a book in his hand, he looked much better than I last saw him. I often felt that his face was rather red, but now his colour looked fine. I brought a chair for myself and sat close to him.

The room was bright with sunshine and the air was pleasant, I thought the windows were open as the blinds were moving, but I'm not sure. The room might have been air-conditioned and there might have been a draft. There were, I think, three other beds, two of which were empty. A man was sitting on the next bed, a really big man, he appeared to be a similar age to Iain and he too was on a drip.

Iain said he felt fine, and had no more pain in his arm, shoulder or chest. He'd had his heartbeat checked the day before and they would do an angiogram the next day. (As an aside he remembered that in his childhood he used to have arrhythmia.) There was a plan mentioned to take him to a Newcastle Hospital the following day to do a 3-D analysis of his heart. But he wasn't sure if it would happen. The good news was that the damage due to the heart attack was to the lower part of his heart and not the upper part. We both felt relieved because this indicated that he'd only had a minor heart attack.

On the table beside him was a thick booklet. It explained how to recover from a heart attack, and mapped out in detail the step-by-step process that a patient must follow. It encouraged people to regain confidence after the shock of having a heart attack. The message was to increase physical activity gently day by day. On one page, it said that the heart is the strongest muscle in your body. I read this sentence aloud to him feeling encouraged. I thought, from now on we really have to live a less busy lifestyle. And I have to watch him more carefully, to make sure our daily routine included adequate exercise.

While we were talking two medical people came to see Iain. The first one, an ultrasonographer, an Egyptian perhaps. I helped him draw the curtain around Iain’s bed. On the screen I saw his heart pumping away. When I saw his heart beating so strongly I childishly thought his heart was strong and I asked, “Is his heart okay?” To this he replied, “I cannot tell you, the doctor will need to take a look at the ultrasound.” After he went, Iain chuckled and said “I smiled when you asked that question – actually that is the question you can never ask a doctor. He cannot say, can he?” And I felt ashamed of myself asking such a silly question.

After a while a diabetic nurse arrived. She explained to him that it was now necessary to change his diabetic medication. Iain now needed to have insulin by injection and she showed him how to do that. It was a bit scary to see her using a syringe on herself to demonstrate how to give an injection. Iain's dad used to do insulin injections on himself, so I thought we would get accustomed to doing this too.

The bell rang and it was time for me to leave. I asked what he wanted me to bring the next day. He said “My mobile phone, please!” Since a nurse came to take his temperature and so on, we both threw our kisses to each other and I left. Actually I wanted to kiss him but I hesitated to do so in front of the nurse. I said "See you tomorrow!" not knowing that was the last moment to see him alive.

posted by Edera

Yesterday's lunch

2011-08-10T07:04:00.007+09:00

Another break from the past. Rev. Mugo cooked a beautiful lunch both yesterday and today! The green salad tasted superb. A neighbour kindly gave us broad beans; Rev. Mugo boiled them, mixed them with broccoli and pasta then topped the salad with spring onions. There was a hint of Japanese-ness in there. For the dressing she used soy sauce, mirin (low-alcohol rice wine), rice vinegar, mustard, oil, salt and pepper. For dessert we had strawberries with custard and double cream sprinkled with walnuts. Mmm.. lovely.

posted by Edera

Day 6 - 12th July

2011-08-09T05:48:00.004+09:00

Tuesday, 12th July

Iain usually checked his blood sugar before each meal. We were scared to see the figure sky rocketing. Normally it was between 9 to 13 however it rose to 23.8 before breakfast on this day. We both knew this was very serious – if it’s not regulated high blood sugar levels such as this can cause damage. So we knew we had to see a doctor quickly. The earliest he could make an appointment was at 11.30. Given his condition I wondered why he hadn’t asked to be seen earlier but Iain liked to wait his turn.

At eleven I drove him to the doctor. After waiting for some time Dr. Burnett saw him. She listened to him very carefully and checked his blood pressure and pulse. She then palpated him, listened to his heart using a stethoscope – both on his front and his back. Then she asked for a urine sample and told Iain to go to the waiting room. In ten minutes or so his name was called and a nurse took an ECG. It was not the first time for Iain to have his ECG taken. So he looked relaxed and when finished he joked about how timid he felt to peel off the electrode patches because it hurt.

The doctor took a look at his ECG and pointed out irregularities in the curves and said, after explaining a few things, “This is a 999 job.” She said, “You look amazingly well for a patient in this condition.” We listened to the conversation with the parmedic. “Yes, he is breathing.” “Yes he is sitting, and smiling!” Then she gave him aspirin with a glass of water, brought an oxygen tank (which was empty) then brought a smaller bottle and put an oxygen mask on him. Iain was smiling.

At this point we were both worried but not excessively so. He looked calm and fine. As I said he was talking and smiling. Also we had had so many experiences with his mum being taken into hospital as a precaution. She is diabetic, actually both of his parents are diabetic.

In about twenty minutes an ambulance arrived and took him to ‘Carlisle Hospital’. He smiled good-bye to me from inside the ambulance. He told me later he was worried about me. I found out later that he had been driven at high speed up the motorway to Carlisle with the siren going and the blue light flushing. He was indeed in an emergency case. After the ambulance left, I hurried back home to pack his pyjamas and underwear as the doctor told me to bring some. She kindly offered to take the bag to him since she said she lived near Carlisle.

After I came home I looked for the phone number of Carlisle Hospital. First I checked the Internet but then there was no such institution with that name. So I rang the GP to ask the actual name of the hospital and discovered that it was the Cumberland Infirmary.

In the late afternoon I talked with Iain on the phone and he sounded well and perfectly normal – as if nothing had happened. He told me that his blood sugar was under control, the pain had gone and he felt better. The attending doctor told him he had a minor heart attack on the 7th or 8th, which was before he saw the doctor who diagnosed a frozen shoulder! He said, “It was a good job we went to the doctor again today.” We agreed. During the conversation he reported on various tests he had and was going to have – possibly in Newcastle since they have the necessary equipment there. There was every expectation that he would be discharged in about a week. Iain had some instructions for me; to update this blog to explain his situation and to bring a book he had bought recently. I asked him where he was. He said, “Nurse base D in the CCU.” At the time I didn't know what CCU meant.

posted by Edera

Day 5 - 11th July

2011-08-08T05:57:00.004+09:00

Monday, 11th July

In the morning Iain said he felt fine so we decided to go to the National Railway Museum in Shildon. We quickly had breakfast, packed lunch and left home at 8.30 to reach there well before 10. He always made sure to arrive much earlier than the appointed time. It’s because even if the car breaks down there would be plenty of time to make it in time. I drove there with his navigation.

We checked in and scraped rust off from an engine, well properly speaking in Ian’s terms a Fletcher 901 Class 2-4-0 No.910 (I think). He walked around the engine happily and took a lot of pictures. We had lunch and worked until about 3.30 p.m. I was quite tired by the time we finished so he drove us back home. While I was cooking dinner he came to the dining room and said how nice it smelled. I was happy to hear that although actually he ate only about half of the hamburger steaks. That night, he started to feel pain on his left shoulder near his neck. He said the pain in his upper arm seemed to have gone down towards his hand and we wondered what was going on. During the night he woke up several times and at one time when I touched his head, I thought he had a temperature. Stupidly I thought it was caused by the cold. That night he was restless, and breathless at one stage. When he slept he snored and sweated a lot. He asked me to press his left arm gently and when I did he said that felt really good. I was worried and wished the morning would come quickly so that we could go and see the doctor.

posted by Edera

A Break from the Past

2011-08-07T06:10:00.005+09:00

Today I’d like a break from the past. Here is a photo from our walk yesterday.

You can see the stream running through limestone rocks. It’s an amazing view and this is one of the places where Iain used to walk as a child or a young man. I can see now why he became a geographer. Ewbank Scar is an interesting name. It sounds like lots of sheep falling off the cliff!

Rev. Mugo has been kind enough to take me on a variety of walks in the late afternoon whenever possible. I suppose it’s a burdensome task to look after someone who has just lost her husband yet she’s been so good to me. Thank you Rev. Mugo. I cannot say that enough. Also, thank you Iain. Because of your Buddhist practice you knew many people, and they have been so kind to me. Last but not least, thank you readers for your support. If you have your own blog, please let me know. I’d like to read yours as well!

posted by Edera

Day 3 & 4 - 9th & 10th July

2011-08-06T05:42:00.002+09:00

It seemed he was getting better over the next three days.

Saturday 9^th

On Saturday the 9^th, Iain said he was okay to go to the Kirkby Stephen East station to attend the annual general meeting in the morning. We went there together. He explained that he had a frozen shoulder and therefore was not able to do any physical work for a while. I think he was feeling quite guilty about not being helpful. Once he was involved in a project, he wanted to be responsible. When he saw all the others working hard with the engine and building the platform, how could he say he could not even look after the shop because of a pain in his arm? He didn’t like to be a sissy. After lunch I drove him back home and he stayed there for the rest of the day. I returned to the station and continued to paint woodwork. When I got back home I was also a bit tired so I think we had an early night.

I cannot remember when but at some stage he explained to me that he must have caught a cold on Tuesday night. He got wet before he took out his rain jacket from his backpack. So we both thought he was feeling so tired because of the bad combination of cold and frozen shoulder.

Sunday 10^th July

On Sunday the 10^th, the pain in his arm seemed to be reducing. We both went to the station at nine in the morning. I told him to rest at home but he came anyway and helped in the shop. Quite soon he went back home and later picked me up at around five o’clock. When he walked into the station he talked with someone first and then found me painting in a room. As we said good-bye to people he realised that he couldn’t find his car key. So we had to walk back to the station to look for it. Eventually he found it in the staff room. He said, “I didn’t leave it there. Somebody must have picked it up and put it on the table.” It was rather rare for him to lose his car key, even for a short time.

Back home, I remember him saying, “I don’t know why I feel so tired. Feels like all I want to do is sleep.” Before he went to bed, however, he was hunting for his boiler suit in preparation to go to Shildon the next day to scrape a steam engine. This engine was to be exhibited during the Stainmore 150 event in Kirkby Stephen East station.

posted by Edera

Day 2 - 8th July

2011-08-04T18:44:00.004+09:00

Friday, 8^th July

First thing in the morning we visited a doctor in Brough. I drove him as he could not use his left arm. On top of worrying about him, I was nervous because it was the first time for me to drive in the U.K. this summer. Most family cars in Japan have automatic transmission and we don’t have roundabouts except very rare local experimental ones. Also, on the motorway we drive at 60 to 80 mph but in my rural life in Chiba, I only drive at 30 to 40 mph. Luckily I practiced driving our Corsa around the hills near Kirkby Stephen with Iain last summer, so it wasn’t that I could not drive.

As Iain walked towards the passenger seat, I noticed that he was walking very tiredly. When we got to the doctor, we waited much longer than the time Iain spent with the doctor. I sat next to him on the left in the waiting room. There was a cheerful man and he seemed to know everyone who came in and he chatted joyfully. When Iain was called, I asked him if I should come with him but he said he could go on his own. How I wish I went along with him then, even adding a few words might have changed all the situations. I thought it would take a long time. However, he came back fairly quickly, saying that he had a frozen shoulder and had to keep warm. It was a relief to us. We waited again before he was given an arm sling.

As we walked back to our car, he muttered that he wasn’t impressed with the doctor. When I asked why, he said the doctor did not take any notice when Iain said he had a slight pain in his left chest wall.

Looking back, he must have been feeling something dodgy going on in his body but at the same time, he was relieved to hear that it was just a frozen shoulder. Me as well.

He didn’t receive any treatment nor was given any medicine, so when we got back home, he asked me to go to the chemist’s to get pain killer called Co-codamor and a tube of backrub to ease the pain. When I rubbed the heatrub on his arm, he said it felt so warm and nice. He rested in a chair in the front room for a while and then spent the rest of the day reading or sleeping either in the chair or in the bed. I brought him drinks from time to time. I was willing to carry his meals to him but he insisted on eating at the dining table. He loved to watch the news while eating, too. Actually he always watched the BBC news which repeats all the time, so I once complained to him saying that the opening music of the BBC news was rather disturbing to me. The music makes me feel something horrible and urgent happened. But then it became a joke between us and he would hum the music before he turned on the TV and we would laugh together.

posted by Edera

Day 1 - 7th July

2011-08-04T04:29:00.008+09:00

The funerals and ceremonies are over. People who knew Iain have said good-bye to him and things have to move on. In my heart, though, like everyone else who has lost their beloved, there comes a momentary grief welling up and tearing my body apart. I wrote “A New Beginning” yesterday and I am trying to put myself more in the future rather in the past. However, there are things that I still want to come to terms with : how Iain died and why he had to go at 64.

So please forgive me to go back to the past for some time.

Today I’d like to write what happened on Thursday, 7^thJuly.

I can’t recall the exact time but I think it was around 9.30 p.m. Iain said he had a severe pain on his left upper arm. He had something similar in 2005, and I myself had an acute pain in my left elbow last summer which lasted for about a week, so we assumed the pain was caused by inflammation in his muscle. The previous day, we did Morris dancing in Barnard Castle, so we thought that was it. I wasn’t sure if he should keep the arm cold or warm. I helped him change and he laid himself in the bed quietly. At around 10.30 p.m., he went to the bathroom and coughed badly. It sounded so bad when he came back to our bedroom, I asked him if he needed a bowl in case he felt like throwing up. He immediately said “No, no, it’s okay” to that and went back to sleep. In hindsight, I think he had a minor heart attack at that time. However, as he had already had an occasional cough since I came here on 23^rd June, we again thought that he caught a cold, after getting wet in the rain on the 5^th when we joined a group called Lakeland Voices, walking up the hill in Arnside and singing various folk songs. Yes, that week was very busy. Iain had penciled in lots of programmes for us to enjoy ourselves. He really wanted to find activities that we could have fun together in the North.

posted by Edera

A New Beginning

2011-08-02T21:05:00.006+09:00

Twenty days have gone by since Iain passed away. It has been the hardest time I have ever had as you can imagine. However, your kind words encouraged me a lot and I would like to thank you all for writing to me with messages of sympathy.

I’m in Kirkby Stephen with Rev. Mugo now and I will be here until the end of August. Amazingly she flew from Oregon as soon as she learned the news, and was with me the day after Iain’s passing. I don’t know how I would have survived without her support.

Does this surprise you if I said that these twenty days completely changed my view of British people? Before, they were nice polite yet rather distant people to me. They continue to be nice and polite, however, now I experience them as reliable and warm-hearted as well because I have become closer to many.

Maybe this is not surprising at all, since most of the time when I was in Britain, usually two to four weeks a year, I met people only ‘through’ Iain. He would deal with business matters and among friends he would be the centre of the conversation. Thus there were few natural occasions when I would speak to them directly in my own right. In these twenty days since his death, however, I have had the opportunity to talk with Iain’s friends and family and in a certain way, I have stepped out from being in his shadow here in England. They have shown me extraordinary kindness. And not only them but also business people such as the solicitor and the estate agent! Everybody has been deeply sympathetic and I don’t feel it to be simply just a kind gesture.

It may sound strange to say that I feel happier now. Not because Iain is dead but because I have become much closer to people, got to know people better. This would have happened, I’m sure, should I have lived with Iain here permanently, which we planned to do from spring next year.

Little House in the Paddy is the place where Iain shared his ideas and kept records of his life in Japan. Writing for it was usually his first job of the day, with a cup of coffee beside him. Even when he was taken into hospital, he told me to let readers know what had happened. He would be glad, I think, for me to keep posting. The ideas will be very different, because it’s from me.

Now is the time to tell my side of the story about life in leafy Chiba-ken!

posted by Edera

Sad news

2011-07-18T08:47:00.000+09:00

This is Edera again. I’m very sad to tell you that Iain passed away early morning on the 14th July – within nine hours after my previous post. According to the certificate, left ventricular failure and myocardial infarction caused his death. He went to the toilet, came back, got breathless and within an hour or so, he died peacefully as if he were sleeping - this is what Julia and I were told by the nurse who looked after him on that night.

I will try to write some more about this soon.

Best wishes,

Edera

The writer in hospital

2011-07-13T18:57:00.002+09:00

For regular readers who are waiting for Iain's new post, actually Iain has been under the weather for a week and was taken into hospital yesterday. He will be there for a week or two but I'm sure as soon as he is back home safe and sound, he will try to describe details about his experiences in the hospital! Sadly I might have to stop him from typing too much although warm encouragement is always welcome!

Thank you for all your kindness and support you have given to him reading his blog and please wish him a speedy recovery.

Best wishes,

Edera

Accustomed things, unaccustomed people and places.

2011-07-07T07:20:00.004+09:00

Sixty four yesterday, not that I seemed to get more than about fifteen seconds to reflect on the fact. The pace of life in our household as so many tasks for our grand railway reopening at Kirkby Stephen pile up on my desk is witnessed by my neglect of 'Little House' over the last couple of weeks. But hopefully the pace will slacken off once the last of the publications I'm working on is 'put to bed' at the printers.

I'm not counting on it though. Yesterday we got Edera's new blue overalls at a local builder's merchants - from Monday she will be helping bolt back together a steam locomotive at Shildon and getting a coat of paint on it.

Still it is fun. And I'm not complaining. AND yesterday I did get a break in the relentless routine, a trip down to Lancashire to see my grandson Tom and visit my mum and then in the evening some singing outdoors at Arnside along with my adoptive UK choir. We make a habit of singing in the open air on Tuesdays after some vigorous hill climbing.

It is about at the limit of my physical fitness. A scramble up Arnside Knott would be pushing the boundaries for me at the best of times at the moment but pausing for some four part a cappella singing on a rainy evening on the way verges on the bizarre. It is fun though, doing accustomed things in unfamiliar places with people you don't know yet.

One thing is sure - singers are singers the world over. If you are into singing you can always find someone to do it with.

'Hoss' Update

2011-07-01T05:55:00.005+09:00

Feels like it is 'Hoss Report' time again. We took a walk up the river today and here are the TWO foals snooping around now in the field by the footpath.

Hoss No.1 is the foal I featured here about a month ago. As you can see she has grown to twice the size at least but still has that lovely white blaze. She's a chicken, but curious; interested in anything edible looking thrust over the wall by humans.

"Do they bite" asks Edera ...

"Of course not my dear. Goodness me no!"

But in the same field now is foal No.2, born about ten days ago. Still a bit shaky on the legs and with that delightful 'bounce' like a March hare. About the size of a golden retriever, perhaps a bit bigger and yet doesn't stray far from mother, who of course knows best.

Let's hope that we get the chance to watch these two grow up over the rest of the summer eh?

Graduation

2011-06-29T06:07:00.004+09:00

Over to Durham today for my Graduation Ceremony. I finished my thesis fifteen months ago but somehow it took a long time to sort out examiners and I missed the deadline for last summer's event. Not that it made that much difference - with completing most of my studies 7,000 miles away in Chiba I didn't really know any of my research contemporaries much.

Always a good 'bash' at Durham, it is held in the Cathedral and of course it isn't the first time I've attended a 'congregation' there. Back in 1968 I was awarded my first degree in the same ceremony; I have absolutely no recollection of it at all. But I'm sure that we were all about 6" shorter than the current crop and much weedier and less mature.

Bill Bryson was Chancellor this time; it is his last year in the job so I was lucky to have had him to confirm my Doctorate.

I have a lot of complex feelings about it, too much to explain here. Strange to think that there is no further 'formal' step in education. Bizarrely, as 'Dr. Robinson' I somehow qualify as 'fully educated' and I won't ever be back. Of course I'm likely to go much deeper into two or three or the academic themes that have really interested me, but now as a fully qualified scholar.

Edera wore one of her kimonos today. Great! We really cut quite a couple in our own eccentric way. What a pair we are.

Earthquakes on Radio 4.

2011-06-23T07:31:00.001+09:00

A mad rush today to get the place nice for Edera arriving tomorrow. Not that it was THAT messy you understand, but I wanted to give it a bit of a Spring Cleaning.

Listening to BBC Radio 4 as I set about the bathroom I was drawn into a science programme about the March 11 earthquake. A British geologist was questioning some of his colleagues in Japanese universities. It proved to be pretty alarming listening, and somehow confirmed suspicions that I already had.

With the newest equipment that seismologists now have available the way in which the tectonic plates moved was captured and measured in huge detail. We are accustomed to thinking of earthquakes happening at one 'epicentre' but this quake was along a very long front - more than 100 kilometres from north to south. It moved 20 metres laterally and 7 metres vertically. With the force of the quake and the two big aftershocks we experienced in Chiba this doesn't surprise me, we were much closer to the strongest tremors than the initial data seemed to suggest..

But here was the scary bit. This big movement transferred crustal stress from the north of Japan to the area off the coast around Chiba, Tokyo and Kanagawa. So actually far from de- stressing the crust it significantly increased the risk of another very large quake exactly in the area of Japan that we live in.

I had wondered about this - the endless 'aftershocks' we have experienced seem to show little sign of subsiding, it is as if central Japan has become completely unstable. While we used to get 10-20 quakes a year now it is more like 10-20 per month. It isn't good news eh?

Relative Values?

2011-06-19T05:13:00.002+09:00

I see that Debbie Reynolds Memorabilia Auction is in progress in Hollywood today. Darn it - I meant to slip over and make a few bids but my engagement diary is just too crowded this month. The prices looked promising though - maybe I should have a sale of my own more 'iconic' goodies eh? Now there's a word that we love these days; when I studied art it just referred to old Greek Orthodox religious paintings.

Anyway on the 'plug' the BBC gave the event they were taking about the anticipated prices for various items which will, I am sure, be wildly exceeded today. And the thing that really amused me were the relative values of a couple of the items.

That guitar that Julie Andrews played in 'The Sound of Music' for example was down for an estimated $20,000. Good wholesome stuff and you could also bid on that tweedy dress for the same price.

On the other hand the white dress worn by Marilyn Monroe in "The Seven Year Itch" - you know, the one disarranged up by the wind blowing up through the grating - was estimated to be worth around $2 million.

So, there we have it, it's official. The erotic out-prices the wholesome by around a hundred to one. I'm not surprised.

An end to solitude

2011-06-18T06:54:00.003+09:00

Six days now and Edera will be here. An end to solitude. I have been on my own here eight weeks now and that is the longest we have been separated since 2002 I guess. Even when I was still working in the UK I always managed to get to Japan once in every three or four months.

I enjoy being on my own though - at least for a while. There is something pleasant in the contrast between being outside the house and involved in many activities and projects and then coming back here and being solitary. The experience of new rhythms has secret pleasures, I find I work harder, concentrate harder. I quite like my own company.

And then the pleasure of being back into a relationship at every level. In a way the isolation just emphasises and points up the pleasure of being back as a couple together again. Always something new too, people can change quite a lot in eight weeks.

Anyway there is all the practical stuff now. Get the vacuum cleaner out, polish the furniture, do the shopping.

Breaking the news

2011-06-16T05:07:00.004+09:00

Down to Lancashire today to see how everyone was getting on now that they have had a couple of days to settle in back at home. Just fine; the midwife had been shortly before I arrived and there were no problems with Tom and his mum at all.

Immediately afterwards I drove across to see my own mum to let her know that she had become a great-grandmother. I would have done it at the weekend but I just didn't have the energy. In the last six months she has slipped a lot mentally and lives in a fantasy world of her own some of the time. But happily she was switched on enough this afternoon to grasp the details of it all, take in the news at least for the moment.

But she doesn't seem to have got it in any context. We had to make the rounds of the residential home to break the news to everyone about her new 'status' but it never occurred to her to ask when she might get to see the baby.

The thing I slightly worried about beforehand was that she might react negatively when she heard that Tom had my father's name. But no, that angle just didn't occur to her at all, he seems to be long forgotten. There was only the happiness of the news of a new generation which for this afternoon brought some sunshine in a fog of confusion. Good.

Dog sense.

2011-06-15T06:40:00.004+09:00

I haven't seen Thomas over the last couple of days - I have been giving them all time to settle back into some semblance of routine at home again. But I did get a chance to talk to Julia on the phone tonight and ask how things were going and also how Hector, her miniature long haired dachshund, was adjusting to the new member of the family. He is doing just fine, I knew he would, he is a sensitive and loving dog with a good sense of humour and a real gentleman.

I think it is really great for dogs and babies to grow up together. Right dog of course, and with some careful supervision. When Julia was a baby we had or old cocker spaniel 'Crackers' and she was just brilliant with both the children, a furry bundle of fun, energy and enthusiasm, you could never have asked for a better dog. As Julia grew into a toddler they were constant playmates. They were almost exactly the same age, they were born in the same month if not the same week. That dog was like a second mother to be honest.

So we will see how Hector gets along. He's a mature dog already, no puppy. I'm looking forward to seeing the pair of them together tomorrow afternoon.

Some first impressions

2011-06-13T23:35:00.002+09:00

Well three days a grandparent already. Thanks for all the messages and congratulations I received over the weekend, I don't think I have had as much mail since ... um, let me see ... everyone wrote to me to check I was OK after the March 11 earthquake I suppose.

I wouldn't say my experience of grandparenting is extensive yet but of course that won't stop me pontificating on the topic so here we go.

First off, I'd forgotten how heavy babies were or perhaps I have just turned into a complete weakling at last. Anyway this one is darn heavy when you cradle him on your knee, after about ten minutes your biceps ache and you are rummaging for a pillow to support your elbow. It doesn't help any that he is so utterly relaxed and laid back that he sleeps like a 4kg. rag doll. Still, better that than bawling eh? He is actually a very contented baby.

The other thing that really strikes me already is how 'familiar' he is, there is no sense of strangeness there for me, it is almost like I have always known him. That surprises me a little. When both my own children was born I was struck by how 'separate' they seemed. Not in any sense of isolation but just that they were 100% 'other beings' from the first second. Perhaps that is a matter of age, the difference between being in your 'twenties' and being in your 'sixties'. When you are younger the 'all is different' seems to prevail. When you are older the 'all is one' becomes not simply just a theoretical possibility but a very direct aspect of all lived experience.

Someone said to me "now that you have a grandson you will have to look after yourself better - you have a responsibility there." And it is true eh? Butter cut back on the snacks at least a little and walk a bit faster for the exercise. I'm the only grandfather he has.

Thomas Robert Halstead

2011-06-11T19:08:00.002+09:00

Long awaited arrival of our grandchild yesterday evening.

Everyone is doing just fine.

Thomas Robert Halstead. His names are those of two of his great grandfathers, so they follow in a family tradition.

Don't be surprised if 'Little House' proves to be a bit erratic over the next few days, although I will write here when I can.

The Face of Moss?

2011-06-09T11:20:00.000+09:00

Looking for a blazer on the internet this afternoon. It is time to get serious in the sartorial department and I can't decide between pea green and crimson this year. Life seems to be full of so many hard choices.

But here's a thing that I did come across. Looking at their web site it seems that 'Moss' (a little bit of re-branding there eh?) are now looking for the the man that will be the 'Face of Moss' for 2012. "Be the Face of Moss!" It has a ring to it.

It is no secret that I have always fancied a second career as a male model and to be honest I think I have not only the talent for it but also the looks. Seriously though - couldn't you see me cutting a sharp and attractive figure on some big spotlit poster site in Slough or Leeds?

All I have to do is complete the application form, send it together with two recent photographs and my chest, waist and inside leg measurements in Imperial units and Bob's your Uncle. The photo shoot is during the week beginning 10th July in London. I have my ticket booked.

Singing outdoors

2011-06-08T09:10:00.000+09:00

Very pleasant evening last night. During the last week I have managed to make contact with a local singing group whose summer programme consists of weekly walks in the southern part of the Lake District during which they stop and sing at any attractive spot that they pass by. Yesterday I managed to get along to my first meeting.

I really enjoyed it, just what I needed after five weeks without singing. We met up at Rydal between Ambleside and Grasmere, parking up just next to the church and outside Rydal Mount, once the home of the poet William Wordsworth. From there we circumnavigated Rydal Water, a short and generally easy walk of maybe three miles although it involved one stretch of pretty steep climbing that had my heart racing.

Singing outdoors is really fun, our Japanese choir occasionally does it too. This excursion took in singing by the lake, by the river, in a large cave with splendid acoustics, near a dog rose tree and several places where the view was excellent. There wasn't a single piece of music that I knew, and no sheet music. So it was a case of learning as we went but of course most of the people there knew the repertoire and it was easy to pick up.

That might be the slight weakness in this for me - it is really good to sing like this AND I might soon feel the need for some more complex and inspired music too. But the two forms are not in conflict with each other. Maybe singing in future might take in this kind of outdoor seasonal delight in the summer months and something more serious in winter for me.

Fly flies by.

2011-06-07T04:42:00.003+09:00

A fly came buzzing through the kitchen this evening just as I was washing up after tea, and I realised that it was the first one I had seen around the house since I got back here from Japan five weeks ago tonight. Admittedly it had an overcoat and scarf on but there it was, beating its wings against the window behind the sink. A real insect. And now looking through the back room window towards the sunset I can set a couple more circling outside.

That's amazing eh? End of the first week in June already, and the little blighters are still keeping their heads down. Of course if you go for a walk later in the evening there are always midges down near the river and along the hedge-lined paths around here, even if the weather is cold or they need to dodge the rain. Those species rich hedgerows are ideal hunting territory for entomologists, the insects make a living around the leaves of the perennials under the hawthorns.

Even so you could hardly call northern England an entomologists paradise, I guess they are only around for only five or at best six months in the year. In Japan we have the horrors of being pursued by mosquitoes under the bedclothes at night even in December, there hardly seems to be a moment when you can let your guard down. And of course opening windows without insect screens in place is just asking for trouble.

So that is one thing to be said for living in Cumbria. Provided that you give the river a miss at certain times of the day you can live a gloriously bite-free life.

Almost a granddad.

2011-06-06T05:46:00.003+09:00

A bitterly cold day around here today - a sudden blast of Arctic air after a couple of days of really warm weather has had me getting my heavy jacket back out of the wardrobe. "N'eer cast a clout till May" be out is certainly good advice in east Cumbria and you can also extend that into the first week of June it seems.

Grandparent-hood is very imminent for me now. Julia's baby is due tomorrow on the sixth - in fact in Japan come to think of it, it already IS the sixth. Certainly at some stage over the next week or so the baby will be here.

It has been very much in my mind today - this invisible transition in progress. These are the last few hours where there is no explicit blood tie, no visible emotional bond. We don't know whether it is a girl or a boy. My Japanese friends find this very strange but both Julia and I would never want to know such a thing, when she was born we never asked either though we could have. It feels like an integral part of the birth that things have to move from the unknown to the known, a new person has to emerge "all at once".

I thought I might get a very strong intuition around this but there isn't one, nothing has come up for a clue for me. What will be common knowledge in a couple of weeks' time remains a total mystery.

So there is a certain kind of innocence in this moment, and also the last of something, of not being a grandparent. I suspect it is rather like being a parent again - suddenly everything is different, someone else to worry about. And yet not the same. I'll tell you when it happens.

What a laugh eh?

2011-06-05T05:36:00.002+09:00

Working in the shop at the station last weekend a customer was buying a jig-saw at the till when he spotted a 'specimen' embossed marketing copy Gibson's on the table ready for mounting on a display and said to me "Oh! Maybe I'll take that already 'made up' one - it will save me some time!" I wondered what Sue would say about it and how to wrap it up and said "I think I'll have to check if it is OK for you to take that one" and he looked puzzled himself and replied "I was only joking!"

Of course he was. Why would anyone buy an already made-up jigsaw?

Huh?!? That is about the tenth time someone has said "I was only joking" to me in the last fortnight. What happened to my English sense of humour? I can't spot when people are making jokes any more. Clearly I have lived in Japan far too long.

But here's the strange thing. In Japan I often make jokes and tease people and they also look puzzled. For example a while back we were discussing what the choir were going to wear for a concert and the ladies asked me "What are you going to wear Iain-san?" and I replied "I thought that my kilt would look nice". And they all looked puzzled until Edera mentioned "Oh! It is just his weird English sense of humour - take no notice!"

So there we are. It seems like I have a foot in each culture. I can chortle at kilts but jigsaw jokes leave me cold. I am mixed up. What a laugh eh?

Indictment

2011-06-04T04:58:00.003+09:00

I was watching the TV this morning and I found myself absolutely glued to the courtroom scenes of the indictment of Ratko Mladic. Did you see any of it? There was a kind of tension there that I am not sure that I could begin to put into words.

For a start the whole position of the accused, the 'strange' yet predictable dissociation with the proceedings. Insuperable force meeting an immovable object. It seems inevitable that there must be an absolute rejection on his part because if you admitted to yourself the validity of even a tiny part of those charges the sky would fall in on you. You can only continue to live from hour to hour by building an insurmountable wall to keep reality out.

How would you or I feel in the same position? It is a meaningless question, we never would be in the same position. To have such stuff on our consciences would make us crazy. But of course we are all potentially capable of such terrible acts, sucked into them by anger or fear.

And yet the really interesting thing is the awesome power of judicial process. Somehow it is underlined rather than diminished by a mild mannered Dutch judge politely checking each detail with infinite care, patience and courtesy. Going back half a dozen times to repeat the question until an answer comes which is clear at last, leaving no corner for doubt. There is no way that Mladic can step aside from or prevent this process of justice, no matter how he reacts.It has a diamond-like quality. So the conflict between the two has a kind of epic quality.

Foreign marriages

2011-06-03T05:42:00.003+09:00

There was an interesting discussion on Radio 4 today, it quite caught my attention and I settled down to listen to it. Three people were debating just to what degree we can ever understand other cultures which are not our own. The general consensus was that the answer was 'not much'.

But they also suggested that the deepest insights into other cultures usually come from those that are married into them and live as a foreigner in a foreign land. Although they may miss much of what goes on around them, such lucky people they suggested often see even more deeply into foreign cultures than those who have always lived bound within them.

How very true! I have often thought so.

The other thing that they suggested was that in marriages between people from different cultures you never really understand your partner. Like men and dogs, each builds a very happy and strong relationship with the other on the basis of many subtly false assumptions about what makes the other 'tick'. It is maybe hard enough to know someone in your own culture who grew up in the same area as you and went to the same kind of school and shared the same friends. But a foreign husband or wife - forget it! There will always be whole areas of their outlook on life that are a total mystery.

Again I think this is all very true. But it is not necessarily a bad thing - often quite the opposite; life is seldom dull. Maybe it is even often easier to get on well, be 'close', just because there are so many grey areas. And when you realise that you aren't really 'tuned in' to what is going on it pays just to shut up, shrug your shoulders and get on with something different which is no bad thing in any relationship. On the other hand if you don't have the ability to shrug your shoulders and move on you are surely doomed.

'Memorial' in Lancashire

2011-06-02T06:11:00.004+09:00

Down in Lancashire all day yesterday and I didn't get back until nearly midnight. My 'evening out' was to get along to the meditation group in Preston where I was a 'regular' all through the 1990's. There was a 'memorial' ceremony for one of the group members who died in May and I wanted to get to it.

Rosettta. She started to come regularly after I moved on from Lancashire so I never spent a lot of time with her but over the last ten years I must have come across her at least a dozen times either on meditation evenings I made at Preston or at the Abbey. A very kind, smiley, cheerful sparrow-like person, the kind of person that you only had to sit down with to start chuckling. On our altars for 'memorials' we always put a picture of the person concerned right in front on the Buddha statue and offer 'candles, incense, flowers and fruit'. Hers was a lovely picture but kind of serious, I never saw her looking so serious in real life.

The group meet now in a modern office meeting room just off the Guildhall Arcade and it is one of those places where a forest of smoke detectors and sprinkers mean that you can't even light a candle, let alone offer a stick of incense. We had to make do with a little flickery electric candle and just bow in gassho. But it doesn't matter of course, it is the open heart and intention that counts.

Listening to 'Thought for the Day' yesterday morning on Radio 4 there was a Buddhist from Bristol offering a short reflection and he quoted a poem about karma that I found quite striking. People often think of karma as 'fate' or even worse something judgmental like 'retribution' - that absolutely isn't the idea at all. 'Effect' would be a much better word to use. Well, darn me, by serendipity exactly the same quotation appeared in the Urban dharma Newsletter I had in my e-mail. It is anonymous and not even specifically 'Buddhist' but to trip over it twice in a day is something to notice eh?

Sow a thought, and reap an action.
Sow an action, and reap a habit.
Sow a habit, and reap character.
Sow character, and reap a destiny.

New 'hoss'

2011-05-31T05:09:00.005+09:00

Just been down the path to the river to see if that foal that I mentioned a couple of days ago was around tonight. Well, there she was OK, but sadly not at the bottom of the meadow by the path where I could have got some lovely portrait pictures. No, this equine family were all happy grazing at the far end of the field, so I just had to make do with some 'distant scenes' presented here. Better luck later in the week maybe.

So here she is. Scrutinising the pictures she does seem to be a 'she' doesn't she? But clearly a mare of independent spirit. That is hardly a surprise being brought up in the kind of 'big country' landscapes we enjoy around here. These North Pennine meadows look at their best at this time of the year - usually around 20 species of wild flowers and especially - as you can see - buttercups.

Little horses of course - like lambs and young rabbits - love to try out these 'VTOL' ('vertical take-off and landing') jumps. Here we go - how high can I fly?? Me? On a good day around 10 centimetres.

And just as I was about to head off mother and daughter both came over to the stable. Took no notice of me at all, I think they probably knew that it was nearly feeding time and were looking for some oats from the farmer. It must be a big responsibility to own and look after a horse. A veritable army of cats and dogs have looked for 'TLC' from me over the years but I was never responsible for caring for a horse. There is always a first time.

Shop work.

2011-05-30T06:31:00.003+09:00

These last two days I have been very busy managing the shop on my own up at the railway. To be honest ten hours continuous work each day has made me pretty tired, I'm not used to going at it like this without a break. But it has been fun, and probably establishes a pattern for me at weekends which will extend over the next month or two. Better get used to it.

It isn't like working in a 'normal shop' - perhaps a little more like working in a bar in some ways. Some shoppers - the ladies - are usually simply after the chutney or the crystal ware, and the kids are after the 'Thomas the Tank Engine' goodies. But the railway enthusiasts who arrive want to talk, they want to ask questions and also show off a little of their own knowledge of the history of the line.

So this work is turning me into a bit of a raconteur, I am getting quite skilled at providing anecdotes and information. And it is interesting to see the different ways in which they absorb and respond to this - always different somehow. But more of that another time, tonight I need a bath, a read and sleep!

New foal

2011-05-28T05:34:00.003+09:00

Doesn't that always happen. It was grey and windy when I took my teatime hike today so I didn't bother to take my camera with me. And then there in the small meadow on the left where the footpath heads down to the river was a young foal in the company of its parents. They were all happily grazing away with their backs to the wind.

It explained a lot - a local farmer and his brother have been toiling away for a fortnight working on the fencing in the evenings. I was rather puzzled as to what they were doing because there is a substantial if rather dilapidated stock-proof stone wall along that stretch already and there was no obvious reason to be carefully building a wooden post and wire fence just behind it. Now I can see why - to keep a clueless young foal safe from injury.

Very pretty, a light brown coat with a white 'blaze' on the forehead. Maybe two or three weeks old, must have been born at the start of the month. Cheeky little blighter stared at me as I headed down the path. I'll try and post a picture tomorrow.

The sight reminded me of a chilly but bright morning driving to work across Cefn Cribbwr Common down in Glamorgan maybe 35 years ago. Probably early March and around seven -the frost was just lifting but the sun was up. And then suddenly about 30 yards away on the right a hill pony mare was lying down on the grass giving birth to a foal. I pulled over and waited in the car in case there was any problem but the birth was almost complete and needed no support from me. Both mare and foal were up on their feet within a few minutes, extraordinary. First the mother and then the foal, still steaming with the wetness and the warmth of the after-birth on the frosty morning air as it wobbled on its legs for the very first time and the mother licked it clean.

'May' in flower

2011-05-26T22:58:00.000+09:00

This week the hawthorn trees around here have been at their best and I took my camera down to the big meadow below Stenkrith and on Tuesday got some nice pictures despite the gale blowing everything around. Actually I think the common hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna) in northern England is often just as beautiful as the cherry blossoms in April in Japan - it is just that we don't make such a 'big production' about it.

The best blooms tend to be on the oldest trees and the alternative English name is 'May' or 'Mayflower' although now it at its best in the last week of the month and the first week of June, This of course is because of the famous 'eleven days' that were taken out of our British version of the Gregorian Calendar in 1752 - suddenly the 'May' was blooming eleven days later.

When I was a kid we used to get sent out to pick the 'haws' - the red hawthorn berries - from the hedgerows in September. In those postwar years they had some factory, somewhere, that extracted the cordial from them

Two boys and a 'Boxer'

2011-05-26T05:13:00.003+09:00

Something made me a bit sad the other day. I was heading off down to the river on my teatime walk when I spotted two boys around nine or ten years old with a large 'Boxer' dog in front of me. Then, just as I was closing the gap on them this rather elderly looking canine took a big - and very loose - dump on the road just next to the wheel of a shiny 4x4 at the side of the lane.

Consternation. The lads looked all around and then saw me bearing down on them. No doubt that they were counting on their canine amigo to make it down to the woods before this kind of stuff happened. What nine-year-old is going to pick up that kind of a runny mess even if they do have a 'poop' bag in their pocket? You would have needed a pail of water.

Anyway one of them said very apologetically and perhaps a tad craftily "Sorry Mister we haven't got a bag!" Of course I just muttered something like "That's alright sonny, they have to do it somewhere" and strode by. I could almost hear the sigh of relief.

Did they think I looked like a magistrate or plain clothes policeman or something? "There's far too much of this kind of thing happening! Don't you know that this is a very serious offence with a maximum penalty of £1000 with up to six months imprisonment for any subsequent conviction!" There they were doing the dog a favour and then this turns up out of the blue. Or out of the dog I guess.

It was the look of fear on their faces that made me sad. When I was nine years old and I took the dog to the woods the dog just did it and nobody cared less. How did we become such an unforgiving 'puritan' society? Of course it isn't good to leave your dog's crap around for others to step in but why do we have such an urge to literally criminalise it all. I know all about toxocariasis and the rest of it but what sort of world have we created when nine year old dog walkers think that you might turn them in?

Tribalism, insight.

2011-05-25T05:54:00.005+09:00

A couple of things happened to me today that reminded me of Henri Bergson's book "The Two Sources of Morality and Religion". You couldn't say that either of them was in any way 'important' but they did seem to have 'significance' - like looking into a Bruegel painting.

On the way to the supermarket I nodded to the local vicar striding down the street hand in hand with his son. Later I was involved in a meeting across the Internet concerned with the administration of some temple business.

Yes, nothing 'special'. Just the mundane 'form' that the spiritual is haltingly expressed in. I can't recall any of the detail of Bergson's argument and it wasn't his most penetrating book. But it is subtle. The underlying argument is that there are two quite different sources of moral and religious 'behaviour' - polar opposites. One the one had a kind of exclusive cultural tribalism that is evident throughout the history of all the world's great religions and on the other the influence in the saha world of people with genuine and profound moral and spiritual insight.

Sometimes the 'forms' of religious institutions can seem prosaic, even jarring. Weakness abounds, all our feet seem to be made of clay. The contrast between postmodern Western societies and other vigorous cultures looms like a chasm, irascible humanists and atheists cheerfully mock the 'sky fairy' beliefs of others apparently completely ignorant of the consequences.

This question of 'tribalism' vs. 'insight' - are they conflicting opposites? Does the latter slowly ameliorate the former, modify behaviour? Or is this the image of the roots of the lotus growing deep into the mud and ooze of our monkey behaviour before blossoming in the sunlight? Dunno.

Stormy day today ...

2011-05-24T06:51:00.004+09:00

Stormy day today ... great! A real downpour in the morning an then at dinner time it dried up and the sun came out and the wind REALLY got up

"If the wind is before the rain,
Soon you may make sail again;
If the rain is before the wind
All your sheets and topsails mind ..."

So they used to say in the days of sailing ships. If you want me to bore you with the meteorology behind this folk wisdom drop me an e-mail sometime! But it is true, you always get the best gales after heavy rain.

I am trying to get in some serious walking to build up my health at the moment so I braved the cold gales this evening to do my usual 'small circuit'. I cross the river here and head around by the pasture and woodland paths to pick up the big meadow at the south end of town.

But tonight a few minutes after this we got hit by a terrific squall of hailstones blowing in over the Howgill Fells and I had to dive for cover under a hedge with three shivering sheep and a large shivering buck rabbit for company. It didn't last long and it was fun just sitting there admiring the bluebells and breathing in the scent of sheep and wet wild garlic.

Evening out

2011-05-23T06:11:00.003+09:00

Went into Kendal last night to go to a fund-raising concert. It was fun, and especially one duo who were both superb singers and very entertaining too. "Tongue Tide" - I hope that I get to hear them againsoon and hopefully when Edera is over here during the summer.

I can't put my finger on it but somehow, knowing only two other people, I felt hopelessly out of place at this particular 'do'. A very provincial English crowd , lots of nice folk there and of course everybody knew, if not everybody else, then at least a fair cross section of the rest of the gathering. Much smiling and greeting, pastel colours, cups of herbal tea and chocolate cake. I am not always a natural 'mixer' and it was the kind of event where it was easy to remain at the back of the room which is just what I did and where in fact I did have an old and close friend to chat away with.

Part of all this for sure was that I have become much more used to socialising in a Japanese crowd rather than an English one but what is the difference? It isn't that people are any more or less sociable, more that in subtle ways conversations are somehow rather more inclusive. In most respects the stereotype of 'groupism' really is just that but there is is surely often more of a tendency to embrace the presence of others at any social gathering than there now seems to me to be here.

I'll have to think about it. This contrast in social relationships is certainly going to be much more a part of my life in future.

Persistence

2011-05-21T06:40:00.003+09:00

A really nice surprise today. Heard a tap at my front door this afternoon and went to check it out and there was someone there that I hadn't seen since my grandfather's funeral back in 1987. As a child she was a friend of his when he still lived in these parts and someone that he was very fond of. I was meaning to look her up last summer but somehow time flew by. I'm really glad to be back in touch with her again now and I'm looking forward to her coming around to tea when Edera arrives here next month.

Thinking about it afterwards it was interesting that I recognised her immediately as soon as I opened the door - in fact recognised the back of her head because she was headed out of the gate with her dog thinking that I wasn't around.

I notice this so often with people that I haven't seen for a long time - despite the usual effects of ageing how little people might 'really' change in 20 or 30 or even 40 years. You come face to face with them again and so little has altered, not just in appearance but in so many aspects of character too. We may be best represented as a combination and dissolution of skhandas - nothing 'permanent' there, only conditions and outcomes - but in truth these things persist strongly and reinforce particular sets of inter-relationships for a long time. Thoughts and feelings too. It isn't that nothing changes, everything does. But there is a powerful persistence there too. This also extends to thoughts and feelings, a kind stream of constancy that runs through a whole lifetime or lifetimes.'The moving finger writes' ... and yet nothing is ever erased from the record.

Someone told me once of a guy in his sixties punching a former maths teacher in his eighties at a school re-union because after forty years he still felt so angry about the sarcasm the teacher had used on him in class. I can believe it.

One May Morning

2011-05-20T07:03:00.003+09:00

Travelling up from Lancaster tonight I was listening to a conservation programme about a woodland in Essex and it reminded me of a teenage adventure that I hadn't thought about in years.

Some lovely May morning when I was maybe thirteen or fourteen and lived in Ifield in Sussex I just couldn't stay in bed and so I was up about four and headed out for the woods. Beautiful day! And nobody else awake! That early morning was very still and within a few minutes I had already spotted a dog fox trotting in the sunshine across a field next to the lane.

Within a few minutes I was deep into the woods - a glade in a dense oak coppice. I'm not even sure if I could find it now but in these woods are some derelict seventeenth century 'hammer ponds' that were once used to drive bellows and hammers to forge iron using charcoal. And in one of those pond glades I managed to stalk two roe deer for maybe an hour.

It was just luck that I was down wind of course. And eventually they spotted me and bolted. I'll aways remember the sheer excitement of that second as they bolted and they and I crashed through the willow undergrowth. It must have been just how medieval villagers felt when they poached in the Lord's desmesne on similar mornings long ago.

Cat and Dolphin

2011-05-19T07:15:00.003+09:00

Of course any reader of 'Little House' knows that I'm a complete sucker for anything to do with cats and I was really fascinated by someting I saw recently on the internet - a cat and a dolphin having a bit of a 'love in'.

You can find it here. It looks like these two have been friends all their lives.

No need for comment really. Cats are so cool eh? And dolphins too of course. But if I had to choose which of them I wanted curled on my knee in front of a warm fire in winter as I sat reading a good book it would be the feline.

Half-Baked History

2011-05-18T05:27:00.003+09:00

I seem to have spent the whole day watching the Queen laying wreaths and planting trees during her state visit to Ireland. OK, that is a bit of an exaggeration, the 'box' has been turned off a lot of the time while I've been working here on the table. But when it has been on there seems to have been a constant procession of BBC and RTE presenters presenting half-baked synopses of alleged 'history' while our monarch wields her spade in some Dublin park.

Who is this 'Queen of England' that the Irish commentators love to talk about as some kind of a third party abstraction? The last REALLY English monarch we can point to was Richard III. He lost his throne at Bosworth Field in 1485. After that we had the Welsh Tudors followed by the Scottish Stuarts and then Dutch William of Orange followed by an endless procession of Germans Hanoverians some of which couldn't even speak English. After Victoria came Edward VII who was of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. It was only during the First World War - in fact after the Irish had cleared off and founded their own state good luck to them - that the penny dropped with our Royal Family that it might be a good idea to change their Teutonic name to something a tad more English like "Windsor". "Where the soup comes from", as Oscar Wilde once remarked.

And we learn today that the President of Ireland has a UK Passport because she was born in County Tyrone. In addition to her Irish one of course. Gordon Bennett.

Freedom from Anxiety

2011-05-17T05:01:00.003+09:00

At some stage during my studies someone said to me "read Ernest Becker's 'The Birth and Death of Meaning'" and I dutifully wrote it down and did get around to buying a copy but I'm afraid that it just lain on a shelf since. Never mind, my nose is well into it now. It is an truly exceptional 'read'. Published fifty years ago it offers what the author describes as an interdisciplinary perspective on 'the problem of man' . Certainly it pulls in much more of thinkers like Freud than I have seriously taken a look at before. One way or another it lands squarely on issues that have come up for me from quite a different direction for years.

One of the topics he explores in detail is the relationship between Freud's concept of 'ego' and anxiety. His argument goes that our 'ego' grows and gains power by putting anxiety under its control. It identifies what 'anxiety' is for the organism and then chooses to avoid it by building defences that handle it. We experience small doses of anxiety and these then 'vaccinate' us by producing defences that function like antibodies in our subconscious minds. Defence mechanisms such as denial - 'this isn't happening to me'; projection - 'that person thinking these awful thoughts is not me' and repression - 'that did not occur'.
But this 'freedom from anxiety' is bought at a high price, the restriction and avoidance of experience. Our lives become skewed to avoid anxiety by limiting action, we can't "just do it" any more, our ego staves off anxiety only by putting layer after layer of restriction on the way in we have capacity perceive and understand.

"Unwanted" Posters

2011-05-16T05:00:00.004+09:00

Local elections were on when we were down in Hiroshima at the beginning of last month. I have written here not long ago how deeply I dislike the indiscriminate use of load speaker vans over the weeks before elections in Japan. But here is an aspect that certainly most British voters would find strange and any Frenchman I'm sure would find positively bizarre.

About three weeks before the event the local city election office puts up these white plywood hoardings all around the place and, as you can see on the right, they are all carefully cataloged and "The Rules" are carefully explained to us by officialdom. Then each candidate can put up ONE poster in the middle of a space. It is intended to avoid unsightly (and untidy!) fly-posting and it does, nobody would dream of misbehaving and pasting posters to the wall of some underpass or actually putting up TWO posters. That would be a serious loss of face eh? Can you imagine some French communist party worker doing this in a seedy suburb of Lille or Marseilles? Ha! Ha! Ha!

Looking at thousands of these posters over the years has given me some deep and depressing insights into the nature of illusions associated with politics. Look at this crowd eh? Same smiles, same "determination to clean up politics" and "represent the interests of their constituents". Laugh! I split my sides! If I was an artist this would be the first picture in my little Hogarthian gallery of images collected under the theme of "The Politician's Progress: Going to Hell in a Handcart in Six Simple Steps". Different Worlds, Same Lies. Once you have seen a thousand posters like this who could possibly have any faith in political process any more? It has to be a triumph of hope over experience even to hang on to your breakfast. A kind of a gallery of the "unwanted", people the Sheriff definitely isn't looking for.

I know, I know, you are going to tell me that someone has to do it and there has to be a mechanism for choosing and that at least some people do a modestly good job. It is just seeing it all in one place, like having sixteen spoons of sugar dumped in your tea.

And maybe the most depressing aspect of all in Japan is that nobody would EVER dream of defacing one of these posters with even a small moustache

The Big Show

2011-05-15T06:52:00.004+09:00

Down to Harrogate today for a 'boys day out' with Pete at the Model Engineering Show. I have a bit of a soft spot for this event at the Yorkshire Show Ground because the first time I ever went there it was with my dad in 2004. But in the intervening years it has got a lot bigger, busier and - more expensive.

In general we are not an attractive breed we model engineering workshop denizens. About 98% male, 90% over 50, 85% bald and 100% obsessive, tribal, overweight and boring I guess. I couldn't help looking around the crowd and thinking "I'm not sure I like these people much, and I really one of them? But I guess I am!

There's an interesting trajectory that I notice around this scene. Thirty years ago it was a 'can do' pastime where people used ingenuity to engineer quite cheaply and cheerfully. But over the years it has got to be big money, lots of men with large pension pots and ambitions to tackle ever more expensive and sophisticated projects.

But now that tide is running out a bit, people aren't as rich as they were three or four years ago, we are slowly and inch by inch headed back towards 'making do' again.

Somehow I never got on very well in male society, I don't have the urge to exercise power, worry about the 'rules' and 'points of order'. I was never going to be chairman or president of anything. Also my workshop standards are a bit shoddy and I can't stick to one thing for more than five minutes. Apart from this I'm OK though.

Moon Viewing

2011-05-14T05:07:00.000+09:00

Down the river again this evening with only 'blackies' for company clucking in the undergrowth. It was late already, three parts dusk, one of those chilly damp May evenings with a haze of insects out over the black water. Quiet, very quiet

The half moon was almost due south and also high in the sky. At the end of one reach of the river, if I clambered down the bank, I could just see it reflected in the rippling water. First a luminous strand of cloud lower in rather 'brittle' tinted cerulean space and then if you looked deeper just beyond the pebbles and duck grass ... half of a moon. This is really to be absorbed - looking in detail.

Maybe our association with places central to our sense of identity - 'home' - is so powerful because it is such an immediate, close encounter, a coming face to face with 'form is emptiness, emptiness is form'. Somewhere the hard distinctions between 'our certain selves' and spaces we consider at the deepest level as 'where we are from' evaporate. If every aspect of a place, the moods of the climate and light and the touch of the wind on your face are utterly familiar then we don't focus so much on any boundary between self and other. There is no hard attachment to an objective view, we are content to just be there, absorb it and let it absorb us. Form in this case touches our skin, offers visual impressions, senses of odour, the interpenetration with sound and there is a flowing in and out.

No wonder our sense of 'belonging to home' is so powerful. It arises exactly in those dimensions in which we have the capacity to let go for a while.

Country sounds

2011-05-12T05:37:00.000+09:00

Somehow my energy is still low this week, but at least I am getting myself out for short walks in the afternoon. These are usually not ambitious, maybe just along the pretty stretch of the River Eden behind the town where there are a couple of nice benches to sit on. You can enjoy the sunshine there and the sound of the river partly hidden by a screen of young willows. An occasional excited canine splashes by.

Interesting how different country places are so characterised by different mixtures of bird songs and also how 'seasonal' these sound contexts are. Before I came away from Japan the 'urugisu' - the 'Japanese Bush Warblers' were already well into their distinctive spring repertoires. Sometimes these birds are called 'hanami-dori' ('Spring Flower-Viewing Bird') or 'kyo-yomi-dori' ('Sutra-Reading Bird'). On hot May days I can lie on the tatami and listen to them through our paper screens.

Along the river here the most characteristic sounds are of thrushes and blackbirds, always rooting around in the leaf mould under the shrubbery along by the pebble shore. The thrush especially by day and the blackbird either in the last light of evening or in the damp grey shadows of earliest dawn

Pour le Continent

2011-05-11T05:47:00.004+09:00

Sorting through some old magazines this morning I came across this image. I'm not so much intending to bore you with the 'hardware' shown here - the locomotive is Southern Railway Urie 'King Arthur Class' No. 765 'Sir Gareth' built in 1925 - but the context is interesting. The year is 1927 and this is is Dover West Docks, and 'Sir Gareth' is about to depart for London Victoria - another boat load of passengers arrived from France.

Who could afford to travel abroad back then? Certainly none of my forbears - not unless the ride was in a cattle wagon carrying a rifle and backpack. Today if you want to go to France or Belgium you go to St. Pancras Station in London and catch the 'Eurostar' and you can in in Brussels and indeed almost into Paris in the time it would have taken 'Sir Gareth' to haul you to Dover 80 years ago. But now most of our foreign travel is done through dingy and stressful airport lounges with endless security checks.

In 1927 unless you were making a long sea voyage from Liverpool or Southampton most foreign travel began at London's Victoria Station from where you caught the boat train for Dover or perhaps Newhaven. I rememeber it still being like this as late as the early 1960's when the relaxed way to head for the 'continent' was to take the 'Golden Arrow' by day or the 'Night Ferry' by night and take a leisurely six or eight hours to get there.

There was always something a oddly international about the platforms at Victoria, a reminder that some of these trains even found their way right onto the ferries with freight and passengers. Nowhere else would you ever see for example the blue and gold coaches of the 'Wagon Lits' Company. I once asked a ticket inspector if I could go onto the platform to take a picture and he looked shocked and muttered "If I let you on there sonny you would be in France already!".

Foreign really was 'foreign' in those pre European Union days and there wasn't much of it to Encounter in England. Hard to imagine now how Victoria could even have been so exotic.

Dreams and Premonitions

2011-05-09T05:29:00.003+09:00

It would be interesting to check amongst your friends and see just how many people had experienced what you could call a 'deja vu' moment related to dreaming. Dreaming is far from being consistent within the flow of experience and awareness is certainly far from being consistent too. So perhaps there is no transparent measure to be made around things that you seem to dream about first and then experience afterwards. But there is certainly some element of precognition or premonition possible there, even if it is circumstantial.

It is a matter of record in our family, for example, that my grandfather wrote to me a few days before my daughter Julia was born and said "Dreamed that the new baby was born last night and it is a girl - and she had red hair!" Of course whether such things are premonition or random circumstance is something else.

I went through a period like this in my early 20's. Changes to the entire geography of my life were reflected in dreams of almost Gothic psychic intensity which took place in a landscape of castles and islands that would have done justice to a Tolkien novel. But what was disturbing was that cause and effect began to be blurred, I got so that I was unsure whether these dreams were the cause or effect of 'real' changes.

Similar stuff has been coming up recently too, only dimly perceived but creating an uncertainty as to whether I dreamed about it or it happened first. Nothing serious, more like pages of a book falling open on your lap. The experience of other friends around my age suggests that the early sixties might be a fruitful time for dreaming like this.

Measuring bodies

2011-05-08T05:17:00.003+09:00

Remembering my 'big boned' Cumbrian ladies in the pharmacy yesterday has had me thinking about the wider aspect of 'ethnicity' within the British population. By 'ethnicity' I am not thinking of the changes that have taken place here due to immigration within the last sixty years but rather the evidence in the characteristics of the population of much earlier migrations and movements of people.

I was always very curious as a student about the variety apparent within the physical characteristics of the English population but back in the 1950's and 1960's it seemed never to be seriously studied. Even in those much less 'politically correct' days the fascination of eugenics for the Nazi movement in the 1920's and 1930's had made this an area that most scientists were content to tiptoe around. It has probably only got worse.

And yet there ARE significant physical differences between local populations within the UK. It was obvious to me as a curious teenager and it is even more noticeable to me now when I land back here from Japan. On average for example people from Cumbria are significantly bigger and blonder than, say, people from east Kent. And that must be because one group has largely Norwegian ancestors and the others are descended from Jutes. Until the last century these gene pools were not much mixed; most people lived and married in the areas of Britain that they were born in.

I must take a good look at this area again and see if there is any active research. My bones tell me that there may not be, that it will be an academically unacceptable zone, but we'll see. You can analyse dialect and the way people speak - which amounts to the same thing - as much as you like. But the measurement of bodies is a whole other matter.

Personal purchase

2011-05-07T04:45:00.005+09:00

"Troubles ..." - as I never miss an opportunity to remind people -"...never come as single spies but in battalions". And that has certainly been the case this week. I'm falling to bits, every time I turn around something else doesn't work. Recently I've been getting depressed at just how much like my grandfather I have gotten to look but to be honest after three days of high fever since Tuesday I look even older than my grandfather used to. After the 'Listerine' on Wednesday and the antibiotics yesterday today I was so badly constipated that my teeth rattled at every stumbling footfall.

Inevitably the 'Green Tree Pharmacy' was full of three very large ladies who surely groomed 'hosses' in their leisure hours chatting with their chums in white coats behind the counter. It fell silent in there as I entered and they all looked suspiciously at the weedy stranger that had just ridden into town. Too late to ask to speak to a male assistant and anyway they don't have one so I took my courage in both hands, sneezed once and said in a loud and croaky voice "can I have some suppositories please?" You could have heard a pin drop. I felt like Oliver Twist.

But fair do's, that shop assistant was a cool customer! A 'professional'. Quick as a flash she came back "Certainly Sir! Are they for an adult or a child?" Now isn't that 'style'? I did my best to look hesitant, as if in doubt, trying to remember. "Um ... for an adult please"

And then after she had rummaged around for ten minutes under the counter ("Have you seen the price list Edna?") and decided that the 'big ones' were £3.35 for sixteen (and who the heck needs sixteen eh? there are always people worse off than you are ...) I was all set to make my escape.

I did wonder if I had the courage to exploit this 'third party' technique to the ultimate, perhaps with an outrageous "Oh! And a packet of those lime green ribbed condoms for my cousin Ivor, he wears the large ones" but of course I'm not THAT foolhardy. Usually.

Under the weather

2011-05-06T04:00:00.003+09:00

Not like me to miss posting on 'Little House' three days in a row. I was no sooner airborne from Narita on Monday than I started sneezing, and by the time I arrived at Heathrow the cough, sore throat and and 'snuffles' had all arrived too. Luckily I made it back here before the fever really took hold but basically I've just been completely laid up now for two days, scarcely the energy to get downstairs to make a cup of tea. Luckily though I got out to the surgery to get some antibiotics for my chestiness. If I hadn't done that then bronchial asthma would surely have set in by now too. All I have here now is a nasty cold coupled with severe jet-lag, but it is enough.

I always notice in periods like this how much my brain feels as if it has been reduced to scrambled eggs. Vocabulary slips away and the ability to concentrate and think sequentially evaporates. It doesn't take much to undermine conventional mental processes and that illusion of 'having a grip'. It is that Freudian distinction between 'I' and 'me' I suppose, all the 'I' functions become undermined as your capacity to concentrate is lost due to fever and with it goes the possibility of keeping a short leash on anxiety, you just have to sit there with who you are and feel rough.

I could have guessed that this would happen now, I seem to have had three months of continuous worry and anxiety and it weakens the body in a hundred different ways. You can keep a kind of a grip on it for a while but all those cracks and crevices let in a virus sooner or later, usually just when you thought that you had got past the worst of it.

Cats on a warm tin roof

2011-04-30T19:13:00.003+09:00

Heading out for our concert yesterday lunch time I had to smile as I walked out of the front door and saw this mob on the roof of the courtesy car that we have on loan while our faithful ancient Nissan 'Skyline' is in the 'mend'.

I think that all this crowd have featured on 'Little House' at some stage over the past few months so they need no introductions. But what was the attraction of the car roof I wonder? Probably been catching the morning sunshine and it is out of the wind. Their usual 'hangout' is in front of the flower pots in the lane outside Aoki-san's place. They took some gentle dislodging, they weren't inclined to move until we had finished loading up.

I love the way that a families of cats will all 'chill out' together, snuggling up to each other for warmth and company. Maybe it is something that we humans should learn to emulate a bit more.

I will miss the lot of them while I'm in England, but especially the one-eared mother cat who sometimes snores away at nights in the little 'lean-to' shed outside our bedroom window. She isn't particularly 'touchy-feely' with humans, just never has got the knack of it when she was younger I guess. She'll let me stroke her these days but she isn't what you would call 'keen' and I don't push it. We belong to each other anyway, who needs to touch? To be honest I think she is perfect just the way she is.

Spring Concert

2011-04-29T20:16:00.003+09:00

Public holiday here today and we held our Spring Concert over at our usual haunt at Hasunuma. It was a great day for it, sunshine and breezes and to be honest it was more of a party to see me off to England than a formal 'concert'. We did about a dozen items and then the recorder players had a turn and after a solo singer gave us half a dozen songs. We didn't really advertise it much and there were only about thirty there but it was fine. Here is a picture of us 'warming up' before the event.

Actually I think we much prefer these informal 'do's' where we just sing for fun, it gives the kids there a great experience of live music. And it feels like that over the years we have discovered a lot about the deeper meaning of making music and the quality of true harmony that comes out of it.

After the music-making we over we had a buffet tea and then I got everyone on their feet doing some 'Country Dancing - in this case the 'Gay Gordons' and 'Lucky Sevens' to the music of 'The Dashing White Sergeant' We rounded it all off by getting the audience involved in some singing. Lovely to see the young ones going at it enthusiastically.

Once everyone had left we tried a few pieces that some members will be singing later in May and just to give them a hard time I nagged three of them into singing Thomas Weelke's madrigal 'Strike It Up Tabor' with just one voice on each part. REAL madrigal singing! They were cracking. To be honest it was a wonder to hear, somehow we have reached a special place in our ability to sing together. Probably you only get a chance to sing with friends in this way once in a lifetime.

Always monogamy lurking somewhere.

2011-04-28T15:14:00.003+09:00

A few days ago I was talking about Matt Ridley's fascinating book 'The Red Queen: Sex and The Evolution of Human Nature" and since then I've been reading about all the neat things animals and plants do and the theories geneticists have about it. This last couple of chapters though he's been getting into human social behaviour and that is even more engrossing than the rhesus monkeys and starlings were.

Anyway last night I was reading something that really did get my attention. He was discussing the universal tendency in ancient civilisations for emperors to have large harems. In fact the actual definition of the ultimate autocrat in such societies is to have more women than anybody else. This is a universal rule from China to the Middle East to Central America. One of the Chinese T'ang Emperors is known to have had ten thousand wives. Now being a statistician this poses some questions in my mind, most of which (no laughter at the back there!) circle around the central one of what would would actually want ten thousand wives for. Beyond a certain number, maybe around a thousand or two, it surely all becomes a bit abstract.

But the interesting point in all this is that in ALL these civilisations there is ALWAYS a 'chief wife' because a clear distinction was always drawn between on the one hand the concept of primogeniture and inheritance and the transfer of power between generations, and on the other the wider motivation to spread your genes as widely as possible by having as many children as practicable. So within even the most spectacularly polygamous societies there is always a component of monogamy.

Well, I thought it was interesting.

'Little House' e-mail problems

2011-04-28T09:27:00.002+09:00

Several of you have written to me in the last 24 hours worried that you are getting messages from my Japanese ISP service that my e-mail isn't working. What is worse, bits of this message are in Japanese.

Just to re-assure everyone that if you do get this message in the next day or two not to worry - everything is working fine and I'm getting mail. The problem has been caused by the deletion of an old UK University e-mail address that had a forwarding arrangement set up against it. I have now hopefully cleared every link to it, and so it should not be causing any further problems.

Famous last words eh?

'Cheer up' they said, things could be worse ...

2011-04-27T21:57:00.004+09:00

I'll remember this March and April for a long time to come. They seem to have been one of those seasons when just when you think surely nothing else can come off the rails or go wrong then it does. I'll be glad to get on the plane for 'Blighty' on Monday, and I'm hoping things will start to 'look up'.

Tonight heading for choir practice someone reversed into me just by the level crossing. Nice lady and it was really unlucky for her and there wasn't much damage, a small dint in my wing and a broken indicator cover. I pulled out onto the main road behind her assuming that she had stopped to let an oncoming car through, and then darn me she suddenly reversed to park, a tight lock and she nearly missed me stopped there behind her but she didn't, just clipped me as she reversed into a space. It was so quick I didn't get my brain in gear fast enough to sound my horn. The problem was she had quite a high 4x4 and we have a very low saloon and somehow in the dark she didn't see us.

Someone called the police assuming that we had to have them there for the insurance and the local 'cruiser' took about 40 minutes to arrive. A nice policeman of around fifty took the details and fortunately for once I hadn't forgotten my wallet with my driver's licence and alien ID card. He was obviously interested to have an English 'client', a change from sorting out the local farmers eh? More an inconvenience than anything although we were nearly an hour late for our last choir practice before Friday's performance.

So that is my whole history of road traffic accidents for today. Let's hope that tomorrow I win the lottery, I must be due some of the other kind of luck some time soon.

Yodobashi Camera

2011-04-26T20:05:00.004+09:00

Over to the other side of Tokyo with Edera today to help someone sort out some business and then afterwards we headed to Akihabara to get a new Japanese computer. From this summer we'll be spending more time in the UK and running some of our business from there. It means that we will need to have a back up Japanese computer in the house because one thing is sure, there is nowhere that you can buy a computer with a Japanese keyboard in our part of rural Cumbria.

Akihabara -the 'Field of Autumn Leaves' It is the electronics capital of the world I suppose, a whole area of Tokyo devoted to the highest of hi-tech products. The area began to develop as 'Electric Town' in the 1950's around the old Technical University as a place to shop for radios and kind of took off from there. It took quite a bash three years ago when someone deliberately drove a lorry into the crowd and killed seven people, but it seems to have become an even stronger institution now as a result of that tragedy. Certainly if you ever come to Tokyo whatever else you do, don't miss it.

The first place we headed for was 'Yodobashi Camera', a vast six storey emporium and 'Aladdin's Cave' on the Showa Dori side of the station. And we soon saw a nice Toshiba model there which was just what we wanted although we felt duty bound to tramp around a few other shops to see if we could find a better bargain. We couldn't.

I really like Yodobashi Camera. Outrageously noisy and 'in your face' and so totally cheerful too, an army of really nice young well trained staff and just about every quality electronic and camera appliance that you could find anywhere in the world. When I first started going everything was in Japanese and English but now it is Mandarin that you hear walking around the place. Watch out Dixon's and Curry's and Computer World and the rest of you over-priced excuses for computer shops if this crew ever land in Blighty!

(ps. - Was that OK? Do we get the extra discount lads?)

Dentistry 101

2011-04-25T19:36:00.003+09:00

My last trip in this season's 'Drill 'till You Drop' dental marathon today and we arrived about 25 minutes early because there was so much traffic around that we couldn't get into the bank car park. Little Miss Fluoride was strapped into her chair for some deep gum hygiene within about fifteen seconds and I was beginning to think it was lucky that we had come early after all but it never works out like that does it? Forty minutes later I was still glaring at the kids in the playpen in the corner. Corner? Come to think of it that playpen takes up more space then the adult chairs and women's magazines together. Whatever happened to those sturdy old concepts like 'respect for the elderly' and - even more pertinent 'children should be seen and not heard'?

Anyway I got in there and there was a girl of about fifteen with 'under instruction' written all over her forehead and wearing 'L' plates on her crisp white starched dental tunic. Just out of dental school last month I guess. And I thought to myself 'Just when I thought nothing more could go wrong this week' and I suppose she thought 'Good grief! A mean looking old gaijin - just my luck!' Anyway we did the usual bowing and greeting and then she got the towel over my eyes and the sucker in my mouth and settled down to business while I listened to the Hawaiian music and thought of grass skirts and garlands of flowers.

But is wasn't so bad. No drilling thank goodness, just a cap to be fixed on and she got it done fine despite her nerves and trying it for size about 25 times before she was happy with the fit. Every time she got it in there I had to grind my teeth around 'katchi katchi kudasai!' while she measured my bite and then the boss was summoned for the final application of glue. I suppose you can only learn dentistry by experience like anything else - there always has to be a first time for everything.

Unfinished business

2011-04-24T20:01:00.003+09:00

Heavily into 'sorting out' in 'Little House' today, we need to make some major changes in how we are using space here and suddenly it all needs to be done before I fly back to England next week too. Suddenly this evening I'm really tired. Part of is surely the physical side, I have been on my feet all day and moving stuff around. But a part of it is emotional too, even 'existential' somehow.

I seem to have been wrestling with possessions for as long as I can remember, last year in the UK and now here. Heck! I was writing about this topic more than a year ago!

I think that one thing that I find about it that is even tougher than just 'letting go' of possessions is the constant reminders in files and boxes of my own 'failures' in life. You can't pick anything up without discovering in it something that you ended up never doing, never finishing or often never even starting properly. Moving to Japan a decade ago was in some ways a 'new start' and I seem to have worked my way through an impressive list of failures to do things since then. Still, at least I finished my Ph.D.

It all reminds me of that prayer which I think is by St. Richard of Sussex which has a bit in it along the lines of "it is not the beginning of a thing but the continuance of the same unto the end ..." Can't remember what the 'punch line' here was though. Brag about it in the pub afterwards? Collect my bonus? Anyway there was some advantage in finishing.

On the other hand surely everyone leaves a trail of unfinished business behind them. I'm sure if you looked in the archive of any famous person's papers you would find all manner of references to learning Swahili, learning to do hang-gliding or building model castles from match sticks. I am not the only one.

Not what it seems

2011-04-23T21:49:00.003+09:00

This last few days I have been re-reading the first part of Matt Ridley's book "The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature". It is a very nicely written work, a classic and skilful popularisation of a natural science, the most complex of genetic ideas expressed in plain language.

Understand is one thing, comprehend is another. That is a problem I often come across with this kind of 'plain man's guide'. The language has been skilfully dumbed down so that even I can understand it who never got beyond 'O' level science. The concepts of course remain as ineffable and sophisticated as they ever did before.

Reading a book like this is a surprise because there are always so many ideas that you THOUGHT were what modern science was about which were dumped as theories years ago. Ideas such as 'survival of the fittest' and that there is 'progress' in evolution for example. One of the basic questions he asks is why are some organisms sexual and some asexual - which has the advantage and why? All that stuff you were told about sexual reproduction being a better way of engineering genetic change - it just isn't true. Actually it isn't as efficient as asexual cell division for example. The truth of it is probably that it mainly has some advantages in respect of keeping ahead of parasites and predators.

The book comes to my mind because parking up the car tonight a few minutes ago in the dark the frogs are going nuts down in the paddies behind the house, it is THAT time of the year for them again. But the evening is very cool, almost cold. The frogs respond not to the temperature as you might expect, is is the length of the day and humidity that makes them horny. And other frogs of course. Same with the cherry blossom that was cleared off the trees by the rain last week. It isn't the warmer weather that brings out the blossom, it is the lengthening days. You just can't assume that the obvious answers are the right ones eh?

Hawaiian anaestheic

2011-04-22T19:02:00.003+09:00

Amazing just how tough some weeks can turn out to be, and this has been one of them, a real 'shiner'. Actually the two trips to the dentist's for deep fillings on Monday and Tuesday turned out to be 'light relief', a rare and welcome chance to relax and doze off in his 'high tech' chair for half an hour while he got down to some serious work on my molars. Amazing stuff these modern anaesthetics eh? "From where he's drilling now this should be total agony!" I thought to myself as I stared dreamily at the soft sunlight filtering through the pink flower-patterned roller blinds.

But it wasn't the choice of modern window coverings that was putting me at my ease, so much as the music being pumped through the audio system. Now that I have been there four times already at more or less the same time of the morning I am getting to know the melodies quite well. They are Hawaiian Guitar compilations, you know, that 'slide guitar' stuff that they used to play at the cinema when the Ki-ora and choc-ice attendant came around in the interval. Sorry - 'intermission' - let's not forget the magic of Hollywood. All those 'slidy' chords and vibrato.

We have been friends for longer than I can remember so I'll let you into a dark secret. I always fancied a Hawaiian girlfriend, very plump and with a grass skirt. Well built but definitely NOT the kind of physique for shovelling snow in felt boots with an overcoat with a red armband on. She could dance 'hula' for me and put a garland of flowers around my neck. You don't think it is too late do you?

Those loudspeakers

2011-04-20T16:45:00.002+09:00

Election time around here at the moment, and one of the things that I truly HATE about elections in Japan is the crazy and intrusive use of loudspeaker vans in the two week 'run up' to the election.

They are not 'vans' of course. Mainly 'people carriers' with a 'team' of around half a dozen supporters dressed in bizarre costumes; I have even seen Mickey Mouse and pink bunny suits around here. What they all share in common is the covering of large 'Votez!' signs, the fact that they don't seem capable of travelling at more than a snail's pace and that they are all equipped with multi-megawatt high performance amplifier systems.

But that isn't the worst part. Oh! No Siree! These mobile public announcement systems are manned by shrill middle aged women who shriek and babble meaninglessly for hours and hours. They Sound as if they are perpetually teetering on the edge of some almighty mind blowing orgasm, a fearsome climax which is compelling them to scream "Oh! Thank you! Thank you so very much! Remember us! Please be so very kind to us!"

You can hear these cars coming - which they do about every twenty minutes - at least a kilometre away. Three or four may be circulating the neighbourhood at any one time, their insatiable squeals echoing from our silent hills and forests.

What the heck is it all for? I mean - they really are just incoherent. All I can ever catch is "Thank you so very much!" Even knowing the names of the candidates I can't distinguish a word they say, one party from another. And if I could it would make me take a solemn vow NEVER to vote for anyone who could do this to the community. The patient and tolerant Japanese will put up with a racket that in England would bring out angry householders armed with pitchforks and cricket bats intending to silence their amplifiers forever.

Passing these cars on the highway the urge to wind the window down and give them a 'Vee sign' or worse is almost to great to endure. But I'm supposed to act with responsibility and dignity eh? I know, I know ...

Dark Secrets

2011-04-18T16:02:00.003+09:00

People in Japan see generally much more conservative about sharing personal information with friends and colleagues. In the choir for example I have one friend who very openly shares her feelings and emotions about things going wrong in the family and at work but actually she stands out a mile because she is the only person I know that does it. No surprise probably that she works in the caring professions and is very much a 'bunny hugger' kind of a person. Bless her.

This cultural difference really struck me when our cats died. Somehow nothing was said at choir for about three weeks and then after rehearsal one night I mentioned in passing to our conductress in an ordinay 'passing the time' conversation afterwards that I wasn't feeling much like singing because of the dead cats. Somehow within a few minutes it developed a life, a formality of its own, she promptly announced it and people expressed a kind of obsequious sympathy. It was OK but it felt like it hadn't been good to do, perfectly normal in British culture but something that here might have been 'private'.

The boundary between 'public' and 'private' is often very rigid in Japan. It is expressed in the two very common 'concept'words 'tatamae' - our public facade, and 'honne' - how we really feel. I am not sure that the boundaries are less rigid in England, we just articulate them differently. It feels like we are open, but in truth how many people do you tell even if you lose your job? Let alone someone in the family doing something bad and landing in gaol? We feel it reflects on us, it remains a 'dark secret'.

This last few weeks there have been many cases of children in elementary schools around Japan shunning new classmates who have been evacuated from Fukushima on the grounds that they are 'radio-active'. On my recent trip to Hiroshima I was talking with someone I know who is a 'hibakusha' - an atomic bomb 'survivor' who was within a three kilometres of the 'hypocenter'. He was telling me that for decades afterwards they were strongly advised never to mention it because people would discriminate against them, in fact he still does. So there is one 'dark secret' that still lives on three generations later it seems.

The Tudors

2011-04-16T08:52:00.004+09:00

This last few weeks I have been giving one of our students some lessons outlining the history of the Tudor dynasty. In one way this has been a bit of a nightmare because it has involved a lot of reading and also rooting around on the internet for material and images. But it has certainly been interesting, and a welcome change from some of the other stuff I have been writing. They say "a change is as good as a rest" - I'm not sure that it is true because I'm getting so that I don't remember what a 'rest' is any more.

Who can fail to be fascinated by the Tudors? All that history crammed into just three generations. It is the 'formative period' in the emergence of early modern England, there is so much in our national outlook that you can see originating at the this time. And if you are inclined to see experience in terms of cause and effect, karma and vipaka, action and result, then there is such a rich seam of evidence to explore there.

I think that is what has struck me looking at the evidence this time is the extent to which the character of successive players in this unfolding drama was influenced by the motivation of those who they followed. And so it all leads back to the grandfather and founder of the dynasty, Henry VII, and his life after he seized the English crown at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. He is the one I know least about, I always thought that he looks kind of 'devious' somewhere in the way that consummate politicians so often do. Maybe 'shrewd' is a better word. Francis Bacon wrote of him "what he minded, he compassed". Not a 'great' king perhaps but a successful one. His marriage to Elizabeth of York was a happy one and he brought stability to England after thirty years of civil war. In truth he consolidated his power by often being compassionate to many of his former enemies.

Maybe I'll write more about some of the Tudors here over the next few months ... and especially this aspect of 'continuity' that has really impressed me coming back to this period after so long

Yet more baseball

2011-04-15T11:53:00.003+09:00

Grinding my teeth at breakfast this morning ... Grrr. Yet ANOTHER action packed review of the world of baseball back in 1994. Another? For about the last three weeks now all I see when I turn the NHK BS News Channel on is darn baseball.

Seems that somebody at NHK has decided that the news needs 'turning down' a bit. After about ten days of appalling images from the Sanriku coast and incoherent TEPCO managers being harangued by Japanese journalists (I know! Incredible eh? Japanese journalists ...) we have clearly had our ration of nasty news for the foreseeable future. At least until there is some good news to report. Otherwise we might start asking awkward questions.

Of course not ALL news has vanished from the airwaves, that would be much too blatant. We get cheerful little pieces about dogs being rescued in mid-Ocean. And yesterday we had the Emperor and Empress making a visit somewhere up in Iwate. To be honest I was impressed that the had shown the 'savvy' and sensitivity to hold back until things were getting more organised, I'm not sure that it would have been so in the UK.

But with 80,000 people rendered homeless by hazardous levels of radiation in Fukushima where are the 'who is to blame for all this' features? You can only play the 'that's tasteless and not the important question for now' card for so long surely? Actually it IS the important question. This isn't the first tsunami to hit the Sanriku coast, there was a big one in living memory in 1933. And a bigger one even than this year's catastrophe in 1896 when 30 metre waves killed more than 30,000 people. And yet some politicians and bureaucrats back in the dodgy days of Ikeda, Sato and Tanaka still signed off on a project which they were told clearly was in a dangerous location, they simply discounted the record of disasters still within living memory. Tokyo needed the electricity. Actually they should have built it in Tokyo, it would have been safer there. But no doubt that was too close to their own constituencies and homes.

Yep! Let's find out who was to blame. Fear of being 'fingered' and serious disapprobation and condemnation is the only way lessons get learned I'm afraid.

What to sing?

2011-04-14T11:33:00.003+09:00

At the end of this month we have a 'Spring Concert' looming at Asobimura. It was set up back in January as I won't be around in Japan and able to sing with the ladies in the choir in public again before Christmas. We have been rehearsing in a pretty casual kind of a way which has been nice, really I think it will be more of a party than an 'event'.

With all the events up in Tohoku we did consider cancelling three weeks ago, but we have continued with it in a way as a small act of faith in the future I think, a kind of sense that things have to keep moving. Maybe it was around 60%-40% in the end, if you had asked us a few days before probably we wouldn't have done it.

We only have around 30 minutes of material and we were hoping that the men's choir would contribute a few items too but they didn't rise to the bait. So an impromptu recorder ensemble will perform a couple of items and I have to do a couple of solo English songs.

Just can't make my mind up. There will be some kids there so I think one might be "What shall we do with a drunken sailor" and then they can learn a bit about sea shanties and do all the actions etc. But the other one, I am torn between a song from Shakespeare or a folk song and the field is wide open. Any suggestions anybody?

Past my sell-by date?

2011-04-13T15:27:00.002+09:00

I was looking at the cap of the sauce bottle at lunch today, funny how sometimes almost anything seems more enticing than a meal-time conversation with 'You-Know-Who'. And there was the 'sell-by' date on the end to read, absorbing stuff. Although in Japan I think it is the 'use by' date and in Britain now you often see 'BBE' - 'best before end'

Interesting how quickly the expression 'past your sell-by date' has become a commonplace in the English language around the world. It set me thinking as to when the term came into general use. It wasn't so long ago. Perhaps the 1970's, before that food shops (and then they often still were food 'shops' with stuff behind the counter on shelves that you asked for and the assistant passed it down to you) used to rely on little 'date codes' stamped on products like bacon and pork pies. How 'fresh' is this item? Easy - it must be on display here only until 'QB5vNX'. Of course it must be OK because if it was already too old to be on the shelf or in the fridge the shop-keeper would obviously have thrown it in the bin already, wouldn't he?

Then the government introduced some legislation which insisted that the date on fresh food had to be - a date. The British Food Retailing Association fainted with shock. You couldn't do that, people wouldn't know what the date meant, they would make the wrong choices based on misinformation, would make crazy assumptions that dusty stale pork pies three weeks over date were probably not a good buy.

And even then it was only fresh food that was dated. Tinned stuff and sauce bottles? Don't make me laugh! Obviously that lasts forever. Whoever heard of throwing away a bottle of tomato sauce that had been in the pantry for years? You just gave the top a wipe with the floor cloth and carried on eh?

NOWADAYS of course with all these EU regulations you can't have a jar of pickles open for ten minutes without keeping it in a fridge and consuming it within 24 hours.

Anyway, a nice day yesterday and to cheer us up after more than 400 earthquakes in a month the blossom is out at last and clearly I'M not past my sell-by date which in case you are curious is 'KL51dM'. So watch out.

Innocence lost?

2011-04-12T11:57:00.004+09:00

Another five earthquakes since last night here, including a bigger one at breakfast time than the one that prompted the 'we are OK' message that I felt I ought to put out on 'Little Paddy' yesterday evening after reposts on the BBC. We even had a tremor that shook the surgery when I was in the chair at the dentist's this morning. She just paused for a minute until we both stopped moving around and got on with it.

Anyway I gave them a good laugh there. Seems that my mouth is a museum of dentistry, I am a walking repository of dental history. "Come and take a gander at this amalgam guys! I don't think they have used this one in Japan since before I was born!" Makes me proud of the sterling quality of dental work we received in Stockton-on-Tees back in the1950's.

I can really sense now the kind of longer term deep stress all these earthquakes are producing both in myself and other people. It is a completely unprecedented thing to have so many 'aftershocks' continuing for so long. I am no seismologist but it feels to me that this is more like an ongoing movement of tectonic plates in progress, more like a volcanic eruption than a single large quake followed by aftershocks. It is taking more out of people than outsider's realise. It could last for months or even years. Maybe we haven't even seen the worst of it.

One marker that I always follow is the value of the yen. It has declined a few percent this month, but finanical markets seem obsessed with calculating on the basis of 'known experience' - they are looking to the rebuilding after all this as creating more wealth. Because that is the way market analysts are trained to think. They believe their own mythology.

I don't believe it. We are all losing confidence in ourselves here, it will take years for things to get 'back to normal' whatever 'normal' might mean. I think that in years to come this couple of months will be seen as a major turning point in Japan's modern history, a kind of moment of 'innocence lost'.

Yet another quake

2011-04-11T17:47:00.002+09:00

Another large quake in these parts just after 5:00 PM but nothing of course like the massive one of exactly a month ago. It was Shindo 7 up in Ibaraki Prefecture about 80 miles moth of here, around Shindo 4-5 in our part of leafy Chiba-ken.

You can see the details here

We were coming back from our walk along the river and just arriving in our lane so I had the chance to experience this one outdoors. The neighbourhood cats were scared stiff.

Anyway no problems, just a few piles of stuff tipped over indoors.

You can hear the babies moving

2011-04-11T12:38:00.006+09:00

After writing yesterday about the 'Mother Cat' kipping in our garden to get away from the snoring and farting of Aoki-san's dog in his kennel at nights I had to laugh at this little scene unfolding in our front garden this morning.

Cats love garden railways. A nice high ledge running conveniently around the place where you can 'chill out' and watch unsuspecting intruders and potential prey from the vantage point of a high comfortable platform. This is the domestic cat's equivalent of the Jaguar's perch in a jungle tree or a cougar's eyrie amongst some high rocks.

Just as the morning was warming up (and it DID warm up this morning - lucky that I am off to England soon!) - then two of the rest of the gang turn up. And they don't just want to crowd you out of your solitary spot, they also it seems want to lie where they can listen to your babies moving around. Like right on top of you or next to your bum.

I had never appreciated until I got to know this bunch just how very affectionate cats are to the rest of the members of their 'gang'. This is nothing to do with feeling cold and everything to do with loving touch. Felix felix is a very sociable and loving animal to others in the group, it is just the way that we isolate cats and bring them up as 'solitaries' that makes them appear so. I can sympathise, I was once one myself.

Right angled scratch

2011-04-10T10:33:00.003+09:00

The mother cat was around early this morning looking for food. Recently she has taken to sleeping in the shrubs near our air-con extractor in front of the teaching room. I guess the milder weather makes sleeping outdoors on your own more attractive, no need to put up with the snoring of Aoki-san's elderly Akita dog. In winter all the cats seem to pile into his kennel and they sleep together for the warmth.

She is heavily pregnant now, no doubt she will vanish in a week or two to give birth under one of the sheds on the waste ground. I find myself contemplating it all often. Babies, babies, inevitably they will be born with some dodgy viruses, have short lives on the wrong side of the tracks living down around the feline poverty line, maybe get around to breeding themselves if the are lucky and then die. Birth, old age, disease, death. If you start to look at it objectively you wonder 'what the heck for'. just another case of the 'slings and arrows of outrageous fortune', nothing to see here, move along now. Wouldn't it be better if they just never were?

But you can't treat the saha world as an 'object' can you? It and you 'are', you are not separate, there's no difference at all between your experience and hers. You are both brush strokes in the same big picture, links in a single chain. This time it is you with the bag of dried cat food under the piano, another time who knows? The more you look into this the less it seems possible to articulate an 'answer'.

Anyway she gave me a laugh today. After eating she scratched a flea behind her ear and she was SO large with babies that her skinny hind leg had to kind of reach around the bulge at right angles to get to the itch. It did look silly. Full of dignity she gave me a withering glance and was on her way.

Missing small links in the big picture

2011-04-09T11:42:00.004+09:00

In every major disaster or crisis there are always so many little details that confound the impression and idea that things happen 'neatly'. They are small links missed in the big picture, evidence if it were ever needed that you can't ever make assumptions, everything needs confirmation.

The case that always comes to my mind is something that my history teacher at school mentioned to me once. It seems that about a week after the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo in 1914 some local mayor in a small mountain town in Albania turned out the local band to celebrate his birthday. In that remote place and in those distant times the news simply hadn't got through that Europe was being plunged into World War by his death. Nobody had told him.

A similar if much grimmer story was in the news here yesterday, a kind of Orwellian parable really. While the public version of reality has suggested that the evacuation of the 20km exclusion zone around Fukushima Daiichi reactor was complete long ago, it seems that Tokyo journalists have discovered a 75 year old man stranded in his isolated and cut off house within the danger area. Kunio Shiga said that he had been there since March 11th and had no idea where his wife was. The narrow lane to his house was blocked with mud, debris and the rotting carcases of dead pigs strewn up the little valley by the tsunami. His legs weren't up to walking out and his car wouldn't start. The surrounding area of Minami Soma was an empty wasteland whose only other living residents were those pigs which had survived the cataclysm and which were now noisily foraging for food.

Although the police in their white radiation suits had been in the neighbourhood searching for bodies it seems that they had missed his remote and relatively undamaged house in dealing with the bigger picture