Zatsuroku

That's Japanese for "miscellany," or so Google tells me, and who would know better? I have quite a lot of odds and ends left to report from my trip to Japan, though I've been home for nearly two weeks and will be flying to Canada on Sunday (weather-gods willing).

Many of the oddities that one notices in Japan are social, differences in the way people move and behave within society. Social space and touch are prime examples of this. All humans (at least in large cities) project an "I am alone" field when they are forced into close proximity with strangers. It's what lets you share a park bench with somebody without having to hear their life's story (garrulous drunks and Forrest Gump not withstanding). These fields are different between Westerners (by which I principally mean Anglo-Saxons) and the Japanese. Our fields say "You are not really here, you cannot touch me. I am safe." Japanese fields say "I am not really here, I will not touch you. You are safe."

Body contact is another prime example. We all know from films that the Japanese bow constantly, instead of touching, and that is actually true. The Westerner in an interacting group of Japanese (at a store, for example) is reminded sometimes of a flock of pigeons all nodding and ducking at each other. The depth of the bow is significant and finely calibrated: whether from the head or shoulders or upper body or waist; whether a subtle nod or a full right-angled bend. When I saw what I presumed to be the first presentation of a new boyfriend to the girl's parents, they bent about 30° from the shoulders, but he bent stiffly from the waist, and went so far down that his head nearly bumped the table. The opposite is also surely true: that one can express a subtle but biting snub in giving a shallower bow than is appropriate. It strikes me that the Japanese have a far greater bodily facility for expressing social relations (for want of a word), there isn't nearly that much variety in handshakes even if you count the doublehanded or biceps-clasping options.

I was never on a subway train in central Tokyo in rush hour so I didn't experience the "pushers" who force people onto the trains, but buses and subway in Kyoto were dense enough. There too, social space is very different. The Japanese differentiate between intentional and accidental touching, in a way that we don't. The head-to-toe all-around full-body contact that you get when 50 extra people get on to a bus that was already overfull by my German standards, is perfectly acceptable in Japan. Because it's inevitable and in a way impersonal, it doesn't count as contact. As a consequence, it's acceptable to push your way quite forcefully between people to get on or off of a bus.

There would have been bloodshed on a New York city (or German) bus before it got to 80% of the density that I rode home from Ginkaku-Ji in, because we don't distinguish between somebody deliberately pressing against us and somebody who is forced against us by the people behind them: after a certain point, it's all offensive to us.

But intentional touching is taboo in Japan, whereas we allow it (depending on context and the bit that gets touched and what we infer to be the toucher's motives). I realized this on the bus, after it started to empty out. At one point we went around a corner at speed and hit a pothole. The bus rocked and a schoolgirl near me staggered and started to fall. I reached out to catch her, then stopped myself in time. She recovered, simply bumping into her friends who simply stood still and broke her fall. I'm sure that she would have been shocked and offended if I'd grabbed her arm, whereas a German or Canadian would not. They would understand that I acted to save them from harm, and would be pleased and grateful.

I'm afraid I mislead you when I stated that Japanese is read from right to left. That is not generally true. Normally Japanese is read from left to right, so the streaming-text signs in the Shinkansen were correct. The exception to this is fascinating. Single-horizontal-line Japanese is read right-to-left when it is a religious inscription in a temple or shrine! The reason for this is that the inscription is visualized as an entire page of text (which is read in top-to-bottom columns, from the right margin to the left), and the single line of characters represents the first character of each column of that conceptual page. So you read at the right margin a column of one character, then move left and read the next column, and so on.

Somebody commented on an earlier post (perhaps in the bowdlerized version under my real name on Faecesbook) that the Japanese are very ecologically-minded, and in regard to water usage that may be true; though paradoxically water is one of the few natural resources that are not scarce in Japan. They have a very different attitude to paper, wood and plastics. Take as an example the little moist hand-wiper towelettes that we typically know from airplanes. Almost all restaurants and cafes in Japan will give you one of those before your meal or snack. I gradually became very uncomfortable with this because of the huge amount of waste it generates. Consider: The wrapper weighs say one gramme, so each thousand people who use one generate a kilo of plastic waste. The population is 127 million, and let's say that on average every fourth person uses one a day; this is probably a low estimate since I was given up to five of them per day. That adds up to 32 tonnes of plastic waste every day, just from the wrapping around moist hand-wipers. Factor in the towelette itself, plus the meta-packaging that those packets are shipped in, plus the carbon cost of delivering the packages and collecting the waste … I don't see how that can be sustainable, or why this status quo should be maintained.

Disposable (wooden!) chopsticks are another example. I read that twenty-five billion pairs of them are used and thrown away every year, "enough wood to build 17,000 houses" it says in the Lonely Planet guide (which by the way I can recommend). How many trees per day does that equate to? I got sick of that almost instantly, and bought a rather nice pair of chopsticks and a carrying case, and earned amused and curious glances by producing them in restaurants for the rest of my stay.

It's getting too cold to type (the boiler/central heating unit is being replaced as I write) so I will post this and update it later on.

Fukuoka - eighth day

I'm trainblogging live on the Shinkansen, on the way to Fukuoka to have ramen noodle soup for lunch with a new friend from SL. How cool is that? [This was written on Sunday, but I was too tired to post it when I got home.]

I'm actually using my laptop on my lap, for perhaps the first time ever: there is a tray at each seat, but the spacing between rows is so remarkably wide that it's too far away to use as a base for typing. The Shinkansen is a strange beast to European eyes: it feels like a hybrid cross between a train and a widebody aircraft. It's nearly a metre broader than the ICE, with five seats across (3+2) and an aisle that is also significantly wider than ours. All seats face in the direction of travel (like Amtrak and VIA Rail in Canada, they swivel so they can be reversed at the end of the line. That means that there are no facing groups of seats, as in the ICE: I guess people travel alone or in triads at most, or they simply sit apart.

I had an unusual and rather charming dream early this morning: I was giving sex lessons in mime to a pair of shy but enthusiastic Japanese teenagers. The richness of my gestural imagination amused me, I was chuckling as I woke. The chuckles faded when I realized that it was 3:30 am, but that's another story. (It occurs to me to wonder whether this observant meta-self enjoying the entertainment was "lucid dreaming" or just me slowly waking up. I've heard the term often but never really arrived at a definite understanding of it.)

The Bishonen phenomenon is something typically and strangely Japanese. It's not cross-dressing and certainly not transgender, they dress male and don't appear to be gay (insofar as I would be able to detect the local clues and cues which are probably quite different to Europe or America). It seems to be almost a kind of cosplay, a joy in playing at a particular style of looking good. As far as I can see they are treated as normal guys by society and by their almost-always-female companions (who are usually equally well made up); I probably wouldn't detect sneers or rude comments if they were expressed without gesture and in a polite tone of voice, but the fact is that I've never noticed any kind of reaction to them at all.

Hiroshima. A brand-new city, obviously and unusually. I suddenly feel very obviously Western, though nobody seems to care.

I'm figuring out a few things about the language, both spoken and written. One oddity is that although Japanese is read right-to-left (ads, posters, most signage) or in top-to-bottom columns from right-margin to left-margin (books, newspapers, magazines, handwritten menus), single-line electric signs scroll from left to right! It must be very hard to read. There's no good reason for it, the text could just as well be set to scroll rightwards. (Yes, most such signs are bilingual, but English and Japanese are never on-screen at the same time; it could easily be made to switch direction when it switches language.)

I'm amused to note that there are exceptions to the linguistic rules here too, for all the claims of simplicity and straightforwardness of pronunciation. It is said that n is the only consonant that can exist on its own without a vowel (it has a conceptual silent vowel: Shinjuku is a four-syllable word); but the ts pairing is common and not intervowelled (e.g. Fujitsu). Actually, having written that I now wonder whether that is perhaps just an artefact of transliteration: whether there is in Japanese phonetic script a specific character for that pair. This is perhaps my long-awaited "Lost in translation" moment: not being unable to order food and drink, but being unable to satisfy my geeky curiosity.

Also, u is so clipped as to be almost silent unless it's a consonant-less syllable, e.g. Fukuoka is pronounced "F'k'oka." Ei and ai are barely distinguishable from plain "e" and "a:" the trailing "i" is just a grace-note, a barely-vocalized upward inflection. I confused everyone by making three syllables of the name "Eiko," when it's properly about two and an eighth. Another common mistake, from sheer linguistic habit, is to see ing as a single syllable, an English diphthong, whereas it is really the core of three syllables: Ji-n-gu.

Kokura, and we have reached the sea. Half an hour to go. The Shinkansen doesn't mess around, some of these station stops have been barely a minute long.

There is a conductor (who is evidently not a ticket examiner) who walks back and forth in search of something to do. When he walks from the front of the train to the rear (facing us) he enters the car without fuss; but when walking from rear to front (with his back to us) he pauses as he reaches the head of the car, turns around, and bows to us before proceeding.

(Later, homeward in the dark at 5:30 pm.)

Well, that was fun. The noodles lived up to their billing, and Fukuoka seems a nice enough place. Far fewer temples than in Kyoto, and fewer older buildings generally, probably because it was bombed and burned flat during the war. The city has something of an inferiority complex, apologising for not being as exciting as Tokyo or as historically-cultural as Kyoto, defensively proud of its (for Japan surprisingly high degree of) multiculturalism and multi-ethnicity. Being at the far end of the train line in a highly centralized country is probably plays a role in that.

The Tojoji shrine/temple (have to check which is which) surprised me: It was clearly buddhist, with golden statues of the Buddha and lotus blossoms etc; yet it also had what I thought of as Shinto elements, like an orange-painted pagoda and little guardian-stones (have to find out their proper name) wearing red bibs. Perhaps it's multi-denominational? or perhaps the divisions are less hard and fast than I thought.

I didn't get to see the famous thousand-armed Buddha (aka Kwan Yin), nor the statue of the reclining Buddha (one of only two in Japan, it says here). Next time.

A word of warning about JapanRail passes as I change trains in Shin-Osaka. The pass seems to be a steal: a week of non-Nozomi, non-Green carriage travel cost me 250€ plus 35€ handling fee, which I'm told is not much more than the cost of a single return trip from Kyoto to Tokyo. So if you plan to go farther than that or more often than once, it seems like a real bargain.

There are several kinds of passes, which let you on different types of train and classes of carriage. In my humble opinion the Green (first class) carriage pass is in itself unnecessary, "ordinary" carriages are good enough; however it does let you take the Nozomi trains. Given that these make up the great majority of intercity trains, the convenience of travelling whenever you like may be worth the difference in price. In the current case it would have meant two fewer changes and being home nearly an hour earlier.

Olds

As in, not news.

That was a pretty long and busy month, in a long and busy half-year or so since changing my working arrangements with G and U.

During that month, a friend was murdered, shot down in the street by his disappointed lover. We weren't particularly close, he was the owner of a pair of my favourite restaurants, but we'd known each other in that way for nearly twenty years. It was something of a shock.

But who the hell carries a gun around with them anyway? Quick poll: do you know anyone who regularly carries a gun (other than those who have a professional reason to do so, like on-duty soldiers and cops)? I don't, at least I believe and hope-to-god that I don't. I think I would stop associating with someone whom I discovered to be a gun-carrier.

While I was writing, a plumber arrived to fix my 28-year-old misbehaving heating/waterheater, which has been broken for several days (I wasn't the only person to have a four-day long weekend). It's fixed for now, but is officially moribund and will need to be replaced in the proximate future. I shall write to the landlady outlining the situation and asking for advice.

Spring arrived while I wasn't looking. I remember walking home at night and seeing bats for the first time, several months ago now, and thinking that I should blog about that, then getting home and doing other stuff* instead. The swallows arrived a few weeks back, probably while we were finishing up the competition, but I missed their arrival.

That's interesting: I am certain that I saw the first bats of the season, and yet I am equally certain that I didn't see the first swallows of the season. In both cases the externals are the same: look up, no X; look up again, X. What makes me think that the swallows had been there unseen, or conversely what makes me sure that the bats weren't? Perhaps this: that bats are nocturnal, had they been out earlier I would have seen them; swallows are diurnal, so my seeing them is conditional upon my being about in daylight. No, that doesn't explain why I was certain that they had been here before I saw them. Perhaps I'd heard them unconsciously and registered their presence.

* If you thought "he means Second Life," pat yourself on the head.

Interlude the second

I'm not finished with Israel yet, there is at least one more post in the works. In the meantime, I've been re-reading Evelyn Waugh's marvellous Brideshead Revisited. This book has gone through a complete cycle of affections with me: when I first discovered this novel as a student in England, I loved it and re-read it many times. For some reason, probably a slowly arising general discomfort over Waugh's often caustic wit, it drifted out of favour for a few years. I tried again in the early Eighties, and disliked it: it seemed dated and contrived, full of unloveable characters and improbable incidents. I put the book down after about fifty pages and left it for two decades.

Then I moved to Germany, and it was out of reach and forgotten until a friend brought me a box of my books (one of many from an attic in East London, where the rest hopefully still remain), which proved to contain my copy of Brideshead. I remembered my vague distaste and didn't pick it up for years, until I returned from Israel last week. I'm enjoying it again, and I think I know why.

When I first read the book, I associated with Charles Ryder, the narrator and not-exactly-hero as we met him in the initial pages: I too was freshly arrived at University, feeling exhilarated and also vaguely out of place, excited by the people I was meeting and the unknown worlds opening up to me. When I read it again in the mid-Eighties, there was no character of my then-current age and station to identify with, except perhaps the prig and bigot Brideshead himself. Reading it again now, thirty years on, I can again associate myself with Ryder, this time with the older, wiser and sadder narrator. Or perhaps I was just unfair to it the second time around.

Anyway, here's where I am right now, at a paragraph that brought a lump to my throat and a certain moisture to my eyes. (WARNING: This is a pretty serious spoiler. Those who have not yet read the book should stop reading now.)

"Poor Sebastian!" I said. "It's too pitiful. How will it end?"

"I think I can tell you exactly, Charles. I've seen others like him, and I believe they are very near and dear to God. He'll live on, half-in, half-out of the community, a familiar figure pottering around with his broom and his bunch of keys. He'll be a great favourite of the old fathers, something of a joke to the novices. Everyone will know about his drinking; he'll disappear every month or so for two or three days, and they'll all nod and smile and say in their various accents, "Old Sebastian's on the bottle again," and then he'll come back, dishevelled and shamefaced, and be more devout for a day or two in the chapel. He'll probably have little hiding places about the garden where he keeps a bottle and takes a swig now and then on the sly. They'll bring him forward to act as a guide whenever they have an English-speaking visitor, and he will be completely charming so that before they go, they'll ask about him and perhaps be given a hint that he has high connexions at home. If he lives long enough, generations of missionaries in all kinds of remote places will think of him as a queer old character who was somehow part of the Home in their student days, and remember him in their masses. He'll develop little eccentricities of devotion, intense personal cults of his own; he'll be found in the chapel at odd times and missed when he's expected. Then one morning, after one of his drinking bouts, he'll be picked up at the gate dying, and show by a mere flicker of the eyelid that he is conscious when they give him the last sacraments. It's not such a bad way of getting through one's life."

Indeed.

Tel Aviv miscellany, part two

Being a further round of meanderings and babblings from the southeastern shores of the Med.

Sitting today at my favourite cafe (I already have a fav. cafe, the imaginatively named Espresso Bar on Dizengoff at Ben Gurion; I have breakfast there every day and sometimes an afternoon/evening latte) it occurred to me that there are no mosquitoes in TLV. The explanation is simple given a moment's thought: their life cycle has an aquatic phase that requires pools of stagnant water, which are not common in deserts. Call it an unexpected advantage.

Thinking about being an obvious tourist, one subtle clue is the matter of facial hair. There are only two styles of facial hair to be seen in Israel: either completely clean-shaven (not even what the rest of the world would consider fashionable stubble) or else a ZZ-Top diaphram-length full set. My soul patch is even more exotic than my pale skin.

I am (pleasantly) surprised by the secularity of Tel Aviv, I was expecting something rather more like my uninformed notion of Salt Lake City or the backwoods of the Bible Belt. The overtly religious are a minority here, the great majority wear no signs of religious affiliation that I can recognize.

I wonder what percentage of tourists to Israel are Jewish? Pretty high, I'd guess. My impression is that many, perhaps most, tourists do speak Hebrew. Sitting next to a table of touristy-looking people debating local politics in German, addressing the waitress in Hebrew and English, brought this to mind. I don't know why I should be surprised, given the size and historical age of the Diaspora it does seem pretty logical. Thinking back to my flight from Munich, I would say that the great majority of passengers were Jewish, and many of them were overtly religious in the way that the locals are not. (My friends nod and tell me that TLV is not Israel, that the rest of the country views the city as a pit of depravity and temptation.)

The military is less present than I expected, although having said that I did notice a destroyer cruising a few miles off the beach and a patrol boat circling near the breakwaters and a helicopter flying up to the second airport by the harbour, while having my midday drink at a beach bar. I heard a pair of military planes fly over the city towards the Med last night, about two minutes apart, flying fast and high in the darkness. Soldiers in uniform are a common sight, the train from the airport to TLV was full of kids going home on leave (with their guns on their laps pointing casually at each other); but again there are fewer of them than I had expected.

The local corvids are the same slim-bodied grey and black crows that I first noticed in Russia. The local pigeons are very pretty, reddish and beige-grey. Sparrows abound, of course. Haven't seen any rats yet, though I am told they are also common. (Eh, it's a city. What do you want already?)

Munich

Just a quickie to fulfill my NaBloPoMo obligation. Slightly drunk after an impromptu meal in a local gallery, quite happy after an evening of discussing American politics and Italian wine.

Five down, twenty-five to go.

The daily dull

I'm going through a phase of dullness. Working, drinking cappuccino (not (yet) Yogi tea), eating and sleeping some too, hanging around in Rose Street and Second Life. Business as usual, you might say. I hope your lives are more interesting.

That is all.

Well, perhaps a tiny bit more, equally dull but in a different way. I wrote about the smell of Frankincense, and how it was not quite what I was after. I happened to walk past the friendly neighbourhood hippie-goods emporium again on the weekend (which I have done twenty times or more since writing that piece), and on an impulse went in and described to the owner what I was looking for. We talked about the alternatives and possibilities, and then she pulled out a packet of quite different stuff, handmade in Bangalore and specially imported by herself, and handed it to me: a present. "You are a regular customer, you're always coming in and buying things here." I found that very odd, because in my eyes I am hardly a customer at all. In the nine years that the shop has been open, I've twice bought silk scarves there, one CD and a book (all as presents, I now realize), and each time she has given me some little takeaway including once making a present of a little Ganesh figurine that I wanted to pay for. I feel vaguely guilty about taking these things, and wonder how she can make a living by giving away her merchandise.

The new incense is warm, vaguely sweet and fruity, and is burning in Rose Street as I write. Hopefully it will drive away the bad vibes and stink of architectural modelmaking. It's called "Satya Sai Baba Nag Champa", made in Bangalore by Shrinivas Sugandhalaya; no website, photos of the packaging will be forthcoming.

Trivia, Thursday edition

Winter has returned, it is clear, sunny and cold again. Relatively cold, of course, a mere -1°C; not to be compared with Canadian winters. But there was ice on the Feuersee again as I walked past it this morning.

Not much new. Working in Rose Street, enjoying the view of the neighbourhood. G reminded me again yesterday that they might have to rescind the offer (that I may work here) if their business picks up so far that they need to hire someone, or equally if it drops so low that they need to rent out space. I find this on the one hand understandable but on the other somewhat shitty, because it suggests that they did not intend the offer very seriously.

The search for a new apartment continues. I have learned a bit about where and how I don't want to live. Call this a "work in progress."

Reading, cleaning, using my new toothbrush (more about this later). Life goes on.

I have become active in the Second Life community, as it were, by editing and adding to the various SL wikis, and have recently signed up as a volunteer mentor for newcomers. The idea is that we (mentors) hang around Orientation Island (the very first part of SL that you see after creating yourself) and the various in-world Help Island areas, and offer advice, encouragement, information and general guidance to those in need. This is very new, I have just completed the training, so I can't comment on what it's like to be one; but I as have been offering advice, encouragement etc. nearly from day one anyway, it is unlikely to be a great shock to my system.

Since you were wondering

Being the answer to an unasked question.

The nearest beach (defined as "access to salt water") is at Venice, some 430 kilometres away as the crow flies.

I really wished that I had been there today. It's funny how I get through winter without feeling the need to get away (except perhaps to Canada for some real winter), but when Spring comes I get itchy feet: I want warmth and sunshine and smelling-of-vegetation-and-flowers and I want them now.

Stuck in neutral

I seem to have nothing to say or do these days, now that NaBloPoMo is over and the translation has come to a natural break between the application itself (finished) and its associated documentation (the Münsters are considering how—technically—to proceed). I spend whole days sitting around drinking coffee and reading, or doing script-related stuff in Second Life.

Bought four cases of wine with G tonight, for his official birthday party on Saturday, at a local taste-before-you-buy place. Good fun, I came home slightly buzzed and ravenously hungry. Would rather have had olives after the wine, but found only chocolate. Ah well.

So as a kind of apology for my silence and blatherings here's some worthwhile stuff: thoughts on The End from Wil Shipley, some wonderful long-exposure night photos from Noel Kerns, and a very long but fascinating article by Errol Morris (yes, the filmmaker) about truth and photography, a geek's delight if ever there was one.

Blah, Saturday edition

Back from a 50th birthday party, the second in my immediate circle of friends; G's fiftieth is next week, there are two more before Easter, and mine will be in June. Odd how it happens that we are all getting older at roughly the same rate.

Slept very badly last night, went to bed with a headache that developed into a mild migraine: every time I moved my head in my sleep, a rush of pain and nausea woke me up. Bah. I believe it's related to stress and bad posture (caused by stress) from the meeting on Friday. Must find a way to deal with this. Another team meeting tomorrow, I am curious to see whether my "savage outburst" actually had any effects.

Good night, my dears.

Seventeen down, thirteen to go.

In which I heroically resist the temptation to do a one-word post.

Tired, headache, sore throat. Walked around town, shopped, drank cappuccino; met Sunday Painter and talked about age and the fading of hopes over a glass of wine. Then to the office for five hours' indecisive work on the competition. Bah.

Treated myself to a smoked-salmon and cream cheese sandwich for dinner. (What? as if you don't have smoked salmon in your fridge.) I shall now read blogs for a half-hour or so before bed, with a cup of hot chocolate.

But before I go, let me bring to your notice a recent Savage Chicken.

Three down, twenty-seven to go.

Sunday miscellany

I dropped in on G and U yesterday to see how they were getting on with their eight-day-old son Ralph. All seem tired but happy, and Ralph is as cute as babies that age usually are. He has a full head of black hair and his father's long fingers.

Afterwards, with G to that bastion of deutsche Leitkultur IKEA for shelving and glassware (me) and picture frames for sending to new grandparents (him). I shall put up the newly-bought sixth Billy bookshelf this afternoon, it should be enough to handle the overflow which currently lies in piles in front of the existing units.

After that, I spent more hours than I'd like to admit in Second Life working on scripts, chatting with M2 and—you'll never guess—buying a new avatar. This marks a transition in my Second Lifery, the first big-money purchase I've made there. (I can tell you, by the way, that purchasing virtual goods with virtual money is accompanied by just as much angst and doubtful hesitation as in the real world.) My alternate self is a close-to-lifesize, realistically four-legged black and white alleycat (not a furry).

The experience of buying this avatar strengthens my incomprehension (if that's the right expression) of the economics of SL. The avatar-maker, Nimbus Rau, spent nearly an hour talking to M2 and I (and another woman who wandered by) and demonstrating the various different avatars she'd built; at today's exchange rate, the avatar cost under US$3. That might just make sense in SL terms, she need only sell two avatars a month to pay her land-use fees; but an economist would call that a very poor use of her real-life time. Even McDonalds pays five times as much as that!

From a recent conversation

Sis: I'm sorry that I wasn't better prepared and you had to spend a day helping me clean the house.

Udge: No problem. To tell the truth I enjoyed it, I was having a Marie-Antoinette moment: "Hey, look at me pretending to be a peasant! Isn't it fun?"

Two ways of looking at Apple with apologies to Wallace Stevens.

1. Apple has only 6.3% of the US computer market (or is it 8.1%? who knows).

"How can they survive?"

2. Apple is the third-best-selling computer brand in the US, only Dell and HP sell more computers. Dell and HP sell across the price spectrum, from WalM*rt cheap-and-nasty to top-of-the-range. Apple sells only middle-to-top systems, with commensurate prices and profit margins. Apple has 29% of the market for top-of-the-range laptops, and laptops make up 64% of the computers they sold this year. And let's not forget the iPod (73% of the US market) and the iPhone (fourth-best-selling phone in the US) and the iTunes store (third-largest music retailer in the US, by golly, and about to sell its 4 billionth song).

My guess is that they can survive just fine.

In other news winter has arrived: the forecast is for frost overnight. I shall bring in the plants from the balcony summer office.

Sharkey

I still dream about London, after thirteen years in Germany; in particular and most often, this place. I spent seventeen years in London, and never lived farther than two kilometers away from the centre of this satellite photo.

Often in dreams I take the bus from Euston Station up Camden High Street, get out behind Sainsbury's and walk through back alleys to Parkway and thence home. Camden is the scene of more dreams than any other place I can identify, not even my childhood home in Toronto occurs more often.

I was there again last night, a complex dream of much travelling on many buses, which began with a trainload of us (don't know who we all were) stranded in the middle of the night at Marylebone Station. A friend came by with her husband and their baby, and invited all hundred of us to come to their house which backed onto Primrose Hill Park, via a long bus ride through Highgate and York Way. Their house had a huge, hilly, unkempt garden, we all slept outdoors on the grass or at tables and chairs. I met an old lover there, though I hadn't noticed that she had been on the train with us; I cannot now identify her though in the logic of the dream I knew her well. We slept wrapped in each other's arms, naked under the stars and not at all embarrassed by the other people (very unusual for my dreams, nakedness in public is usually traumatic). I was an architect in the dream, the friend whose house it was wanted my opinion on some matter, so I and my reunited lost lover, still wrapped in each other's arms, walked around her property which now backed onto the Thames at Wapping, then went back to the garden where dawn was breaking (though it had been midday in Wapping) and lay down again.

The mood of the dream, which carried over into this morning, was of contentment and peace: a dream of being comforted. Not just the influence of my lost lover, everyone there was a friend of mine and was glad to be with me. I wish I could work out who she was/is. She had a particular way of hugging me from behind and tucking her head below my left arm, which is utterly familiar, but I just can't place the memory. How odd.

In other news I had a made-up salad for dinner, not exactly a Niçoise: half an avocado, a romaine lettuce chopped fine, half a tin of tuna, 75g of white mushrooms fried and let cool to lukewarm, mayonnaise, salt and a sprinkling of cayenne pepper; served with tap water and a slice of four-grain bread. Delicious.

This salad is called "What's in the fridge that doesn't flinch when I reach for it?"

The title of this post is a tiny musical quiz: for two points, explain its significance. Only one hint: the year is 1984.

Trivia: Wednesday edition

Winter approaches. It's only 8:30 but it is already getting dark outside; it was so cold in the apartment today that I had to find a sweater. I shall go for a walk around the Feuersee after writing this, then early to bed (with the window partway open).

Spent the day working in earnest on the database, for the first time in a month, and was pleasantly surprised to see how good it is. One spends months buried up to the armpits in the oily, gritty, stinking mechanics of a project, focussing one's entire attention on a single ball-bearing here or an electric cable there, and quite lose sight of the whole, the complex and beautiful machine of which these are all merely components. Spoke to two customers about problems they were having with the database, one through the effects of an unexpected crash, the other through the consequences of ignorance and her refusal to remedy it. The expression "your own damned fault" rose to my mind but not my lips.

In other news let me recommend to your attention Jean's series of posts about her pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in 1996; insightful and moving, well written as always. My own trip (not a pilgrimage) tapered off inconclusively, as did my reporting on it here; I do have more to say and will say it, at some unspecified future date.

In other, other news this short film is supposedly funny, but I found it actually quite sad. [Updated] I'm not sure it was supposed to be funny. It's one of a series of five films (links on the same page above) and they're all pretty sad. Worth seeing.

Happy part two

So, where was I? Oh yes, happy.

I'm very pleased with Hamburg and my stay there. The city reminds me of London with all of its pleasant associations to my college years. And aside from that it is a very nice place in itself. The first thing one notices is that there are trees everywhere! Nearly every street is lined by mature trees (all exactly sixty years old, but that's another story); riding the bus or subway (mostly above-ground, often elevated on a viaduct) is like travelling through an inhabited park.

The near-omnipresence of water in Hamburg also appeals to me. Not just the Elbe and its enormous harbour complex, there is also a large lake, the Alster, in the middle of the city, fed by many broad, slow streams that are crossed and re-crossed by the elevated subways. And the waterways are used too: Ingrid and I sat outdoors at a waterside café for lunch last week, and counted three sightseeing boats and a half-dozen canoes and pedalos going past. Were I to move here, I'd definitely get a canoe and explore the water.

I told Ageing Yuppie my theory on the setting of the social tone in Hamburg; he thought for a moment then agreed with my analysis. It is a working city, a city of workers, and while it does have the small-c conservatism and mild anti-intellectualism that one associates with such places, it also has the active social conscience and the desire for order that one misses in cities like Berlin.

Interrupting myself for a moment, I am trainblogging again, writing in the train to Hamburg on a sunny and warm Sunday afternoon in late summer. I'm taking an earlier train than usual, which should get me there an hour or so before sunset. Perhaps I shall find a spot by the Alster and drink a beer or two there? I am debating spending the next two weekends here, or perhaps at the North Sea shore.

Immaculate blue sky, about 28° with a gentle breeze as we left Stuttgart; the forecast is for a whole week of the same. Woot. It's been six weeks since Siebenschläfer and the curse of bad weather has been lifted. The old wives' tales win again.

Signs of the times part N: from my seat, I can see seven laptop screens.

I am wearing my working glasses while typing this, obviously, but then I noticed that I was looking out of the window at the scenery while still wearing them. These glasses have changed my eyes! When I first got them I could barely see beyond two metres or so, my eyes wouldn't focus that far away while I had them on. Now I can focus adequately well off to the horizon through the uppermost 5mm or so. Amazing. (I can't see as well as with my normal long-distance glasses, and it is a strain to look far away; but it does actually work.)

To be honest, part of my happiness in Hamburg is due to Ingrid, who is a charming and attractive young woman; she's not classically beautiful, but she has a very interesting face and manner (and a marvellous body, with a very biteable arse). It's a pleasure to sit opposite her and surreptitiously watch her over the top of my monitor. We are alone in the office now (in our half of the office, to be pedantic: AY shares the space with a furniture-and-interior-design company) since the others have moved to the Speicherstadt as I mentioned to work on a different project. We are still in the old place because the tyrant client for the museum would be wounded in his godlike self-importance if he knew that his project were not the be-all and end-all of the office. He's the kind of arsehole client who will call up at 9:20 on a Saturday evening and fall into a screaming rage on hearing that the lazy worthless scum architects are not all in the office. Bah. Glad that we don't have anything to do with him or his project. Yet.

Sorry, I got sidetracked by scorn there. I was falling into a reverie about Ingrid. Pity that she's only about 28 or so; not exactly half my age but close enough that I hesitate. On the other hand, hesitating is my natural mode anyway, so what the hell. She lives in Altona, a western suburb of Hamburg that was once a separate town; it's near to the Elbe which has a beachlike sandy shore at that point. I discovered that the bus from the office to where I'm staying continues to the Altona train station, so we went home together on Thursday evening. I'd overheard her earlier on the phone with a male voice, cancelling a loose evening arrangement because she was tired; only after I'd said goodbye and left the bus did it occur to me that this might have been an excuse and that I should have invited her for a drink despite it.

It's odd, three months after the walk to Santiago de Compostela, I still find myself looking twice at people walking or cycling between the fields out here, wondering whether they are pilgrims. Talk about yer lasting impact.

To the north

Preparing an early lunch before going to fix a system problem in Hedgehog's gallery before taking the train to Hamburg for a short week (back Friday night).

This last day-and-two-halves has seemed like a week, I feel as though I've run a marathon and fought a pair of tigers and slept about sixteen minutes in total. Can't imagine why.

The possible job in Münster is now a very possible job. My contact must have speaks with his superiors © Peter Sellers, and it's all subject to non-disclosure clauses and contracts etc etc; but it looks pretty good. They don't want me to work in their offices, but are willing to pay an unsupervised hourly rate. Such trust! I really need this job. If it all comes off, the planned three months' work would triple my income for this year. Not that it's particularly well-paid, but because this been such a piss-awful year financially.

Actually, what does "well paid" mean? I'm bidding 20% under what is usual for the profession according to a few colleagues whose advice I asked, but it's still more than twice the rate I'll get in Hamburg this month. One of those colleagues said, "I try to figure out how much money my work will save the client, and that's what I charge them." It's an interesting idea, but doesn't always apply so neatly. The Münsters are happy to pay me a buttload of money because it'll enable them to sell their software in the English-speaking market, which will bring them in N buttloads of money. On the other hand, architects are paid a fixed percentage of the construction cost of the project, no matter now much work they have to do, which leads to the paradox that the extra effort you put into reducing the client's costs also reduces your income. It is not in the architects' interest to build cheaply, and it definitely is in their interests for the client to change his mind often and late because such changes are billable at an hourly rate. The commercial relationship between architect, builder and client guarantees hard feelings all round.

Title goes here.

Friday evening once again, the world has survived yet another week. I have mellowed out slightly after that last post, your empathy and some sound sleep worked wonders. Not that the circumstances have changed, but then again they weren't new last night either.

Working (really) on the database, had to write a new import routine for the vCard (.vcf) format to get a customer's data loaded. I discovered while doing so that there was a nasty error buried in some generic import code that I used in several places, so spent a few hours finding and fixing that. [Updated] just noticed while checking through the import, that I lost several important bits of information from a significant percentage of the records. Damn and blast, have to rewrite the routine again tomorrow.

Walked downtown in brilliant sunshine this morning for a cappuccino and conversation, rode the subway home to beat the rain. Ah well.

The swallows are still here; but I blush to confess that they aren't swallows and never were. They are Mauersegler aka common swifts. How embarrassing. Blushing apologies to all, and thanks to Arboretum for the correction.

Today's Friday Favourite is a song from a CD that I haven't played in a long while, which happened to be on in the background as I was working and which gradually worked its way into my consciousness. The song has a marvellous slow & cool groove, and nothing else, so I'd understand if it weren't to your taste; it may not be right for intently-listening-to as one does with e.g. Leonard Cohen, but I guarantee that if it were to sneak up on you from behind, your toes would be tapping and your head nodding. I am quite pleased that I thought to put this CD on after so many months if not years, I shall be hearing more of their stuff in future (though not in Hamburg).

Shabbat shalom, my dears.

Wrapping up, part one

I'm home in body but not yet in spirit, feeling somewhat lost and perpetually tired. I'm sleeping badly and irregularly, and at odd times; I need several daytime naps but fear that they would interfere with my night's sleep.

In short, I have jetlag. This is not unexpected, coming eastwards is always harder for me than westwards, and it has on occasion lasted as long as two weeks before I was fully back into the European rhythm.

What to say about New York? First, that as much as I enjoy the city, I remain glad not to live there. I find the relentless speed, the hurryness, to be exciting for a day or two, but after that it only irritates me. It's no wonder that people there get ulcers and/or spend years in therapy.

The Ring was very good, even the Wotan of the first night was much improved when he reappeared in "Siegfried" (most singers sang only once during the week, or took one major role and a bit part). "Siegfried" was excellent, better than I remember it from Baden-Baden. As happened in Toronto, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it: I usually experience it as the low point of the Cycle. These two performances have changed my opinion, it is a much stronger opera than I'd thought. I shall have to listen to the CDs a little more intently than I have done.

Presenting the Ring on four consecutive nights (as Wagner wanted) is in my humble opinion not a good idea: one has no time for anything else, and no chance to let the memory of music and staging sink in. The performances started at 6pm and went to 11 or later; by the time one had had a drink in the bar, slept and breakfasted, it was time to think about lunch (the main meal of the day) and immediately after that it was time to shower and dress for the next performance. I think it really needs at least one free evening between the operas.

The New York audience was appalling. People would continue to chatter after curtain-up until somebody shushed them, and always began to applaud while the orchestra was still playing even though many people shushed them. And a good half-dozen cellphones rang during every performance! What the fucking fuck? I can't understand the mentality of that: do people say "oh, my phone won't ring" or "they won't really mind if my phone rings"? Turn your goddamned phones off when you go into a cinema or theatre or concert hall; Christ, people, this is not fucking rocket science. And the coughing! it was a constant background hum through all four operas. Bah and boo and humbug. For shame, New York! not bloody good enough.

On the bus to JKF I lost the hat I'd bought in Lisboa to replace the hat I'd lost on the bus going there. Bah to me.

I didn't have a bowel movement worthy of the name during the entire week in NY, producing only a few rabbit pellets or at most a grape or two. This worried me to the point that I ate mostly salads during the final days, without apparent effect. You will be pleased to learn that my bowels are returning to their normal productivity.

What else? It feels strangely good to be back in a country of low-rise buildings, where the sky is a continuum around (!) the horizon (!!) rather than a stripe of blue between windowed walls. I hadn't been aware of missing the sky while I was there, but sitting on G and U's balcony yesterday afternoon I realized that I was delighted to see an expanse of sky and clouds again.

More later, some time or other. There will even be photos soonish.

One down, three to go

Das Rheingold last night was quite fine, other than a weak Wotan; this production is as good as I remember it being (we've seen this particular Ring before, in Baden-Baden in the Spring of 2004). The orchestra is not as well-trained as the Met's own under Jimmy Levine, but then again which orchestra is? The lighting is magnificent, much better than I remembered; it is both subtle and dramatic, washes of lovely colours which change slowly with the mood—or abruptly with the plot. Some of the costumes are also different to my memories. Which is fine, of course there would be changes in the course of three-year-long world tour and a changing cast.

The audience was surprisingly well behaved (for New York): only one cellphone rang during the concert, and there was little coughing and rustling to be heard. When I am Minister for Culture (which God forbid) I shall make Failure to switch off a cellphone an offence punishable by beating with rusty iron bars.

I'm finding it hard to make the time to get online, there is so much to see and do here, even if we are mostly just walking around, eating and drinking and getting a stiff neck from looking upwards. One change that registers with me is the decline of the central-Manhattan bookshop: there used to be a round dozen good (large selection of obscure and arcane titles, pleasant atmosphere, knowledgeable staff) bookshops in Midtown, but they have all gone. We found a Barnes & Noble, not bad as chains go, but in no way a replacement for a proper bookshop. Sigh. Replaced by fast-food chains and low-price computerish stuff (US$ 40 for a camera? how can selling that pay the rent on a Sixth Avenue store?)

I've been to the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue, of course I have. It's a heart-warming sight for an Apple fan: a very large store full to bursting with happy people playing with pretty stuff, and even buying things. The genius bar is a great idea, knowing that this service is available free surely takes away some of the reluctance to cross over to the light side. The store planners were clever enough to realize that they could not put in enough cash registers for all these shoppers, so there are staff equipped with portable credit-card-readers who roam the floors looking for customers who wish to buy something.

More later, perhaps.