Tuesday 30 March 2010

Black-out

Yesterday there was a power cut. Ssschtum. Everything off. Nothing we could do. The van across the street beside the construction site looked the likely culprit. You never know when things will just cut out like that.

Tuesday 23 March 2010

It is now official

In early October, providing all goes to plan:

My Dad will become a Grandad/Grandpa/Papa C/Pops/Gramps;

My Mother will become a Grandma/Grandmother/Granny/Gran'Ma'Ma';

My Grandma will become a Great Grandma, again;

My Brother will become an Uncle;

I will become an Uncle;

My sister and her husband Matt will become Parents (yes, that is a capital P);

Life will become very different.

Wednesday 17 March 2010

National Archives




I was really excited to get out of the office yesterday for a visit to the National Archives in Kew. Bright sunshine for the second day in a row seemed to lift everyone's mood.

After registering for a Reader's Ticket, you can order documents. Then you wait 40 minutes for their retrieval, after which time and without any pen, pencil or erasers you can enter the Reading Rooms. You reserve a seat at a hexagonal desk and a locker corresponding to the seat number. That's where you find the documents you ordered.

So I found myself poring over letters and trade reports and court notes from nearly 150 years ago, from early Meiji Japan. It all comes bound in great thick leather binders that are literally coming apart at the seams and flaking. Some of the more delicate are housed in large, sturdy cardboard boxes.



I had to find stuff for work, so that the makers of a documentary about a Japanese hero called Sakamoto Ryoma could cook up their own version of truth, but I found myself getting a little distracted by all the stories and evidence and turn-of-phrase of late nineteenth century diplomats.

Letters began with things like, 'My dear Mr. Fletcher' and 'I have the honor to forward in triplicate the accounts of this Consulate for the period from 20th to 31st December 1867 and to request your sanction to the four items of expenditure stated in the list included in the accounts, the total amount of which is seventy-three dollars and forty-eight cents...'



...Sir, i have the honor to acknowledge receipt of your despatch of the 22nd instant, in which you...

...I have the honor to be,
Sir,
Your most obedient
humble servant...

Sir, British Consulate, Kanagawa July 16 1868

I have the honor to enclose translation of a despatch which I have received from the Japanese authorities at this port informing me that bands of ronins [sic] hostile to the existing Government are assembled at certain villages in the neighborhood between Hatchoji on the one side, and the line of the tocaido [sic] or high road in this vicinity on the other.
The Imperial forces, it is stated, are about to proceed against these armed bands but in the meantime the Japanese authorities state that it is advisable to abstain from making excursions into the country until peace shall have been restored...

...Copy
Translation
Sentence of Saegusa Shigeru a ronin
On the occasion of the English Minister going to Court, you having previously agreed with an accomplice, drew your sword, attacked him, and inflicted wounds. - In committing this at of violence tending to interrupt Foreign relations, just at the moment when the government is being remodeled, you have acted in contempt of the Imperial Court. For the heinousness of your crime, your name and swords are forfeited, an after being put to death by the sword, your head will be publicly exposed during three days.
Third month (27th March - 25th April)
(Signed) Board of Punishments
Translated by -(signed) Ernest Satow...

...being privy to the abominable design, they tried all the resources of friendship to dissuade the perpetrators from the commission of the act, but that in abstaining from reporting the matter to the Government they were guilty of a grave offense, for which they were condemned to perpetual exile to an isolated island...

And from Ernest Satow's diary, marked, 'Private' throughout:
...evidently with the object of ridiculing us out of our case, but he got a flea in his lug and shut up making most diabolical faces...

Monday 8 March 2010

Fresh starts

"'Girls, girls, inestimably foreign (un-American / complex), Japanese girls'

So ran my line of thought having first arrived in Japan. I was dining out with friends in what I later came to know as a yakitori-ya, but to me at the time was simply a low-ceiling, smoky chicken-stick frying joint, beneath the tracks."


In a preface to a collection of his earlier work, John Cheevers remarks that his favourite stories of his own were, 'those that were written in less than a week and that were often composed aloud.' He remembers exclaiming, "'My name is Johnny Hake!'", following up, "This was in the hallway of a house in Nantucket that we had been able to rent cheaply because of the delayed probating of a will."

And why not compose aloud? And why not?

Everything starts small and grows.

So it was that I exclaimed, 'Girls, girls, inestimably foreign...' That's as far as I got. I had the beginnings of a beginning line and for me that was enough to be muttering into the early spring air.

This was walking back from Sainsbury's towards home with loose thoughts to make an apple chutney, to eat with a baked potato some day.

Thursday 4 March 2010

Exit through the gift shop

We had an acronym at school that came into existence with the arrival of the then new Headmaster, and blossomed into fashion with his tenure. It ran, 'S.W.I.F.T.' The initials of the new Headmaster (known as, simply, 'The Master') were S.W. I'm sure you can fill in the rest, but here's a clue: 'F' didn't stand for 'friendly'.

It is a school steeped in history, with a military pedigree and strong ties to the East India Company. There's a quad. Actually, there are two, but one dwarfs the other so has assumed the name. The kind of place you don't realise how privileged you are to be there until you are long gone.

Anyway, that's beside the point. This acronym started popping up all over the school. Scrawled on walls. Burnt into the grass on the playing fields. Daubed inexpertly with fluorescent orange paint on the roof of one of the boarding houses (mine, as it happened). They forgot tin openers and had to open the tins of paint with slate tiles. They also forgot brushes, so had to kind of pour it instead of paint, but then they got caught.

The teachers were furious. Graffiti was not permitted. It was crude, cack-handed and heaped ridicule on the headmaster. Once, in the end of year school assembly (it was called, 'Lists' not assembly - there was a whole vernacular at my old school) above the headmaster a banner unfurled with the loud crackle of bangers, emblazoned with the acronym. He paused, looked up and carried right on with Lists. We all chuckled like, well, schoolboys. And girls, by that point.

Last night I found myself in abandoned tunnels beneath Waterloo station watching a pre-cinema release screening of 'Exit through the Gift Shop', a Banksy film. You could hear the same old clattery-clack of the trains, but the sound was somehow more intimate, it being above us not below. You could feel the trains passing too, it was like being within a heartbeat.

I'd had no idea of the sheer industry of Banksy, the level to which he's strived, employing all kinds of helpers and power tools and ingenuity to get his art on the streets, in secret. Nor did I know he'd traveled to the West Bank and sprayed up there. I hadn't really thought about it until Shepard Fairey spoke of the real power graffiti earns itself through the perceived power of seeing it everyone, one iconic image repeated again and again in different sizes all across a city in different locations: in Fairey's case, an old wresting legend with the word, 'Obey'.

So that's what you can do with street art with thought. I guess we didn't really think it through and execute it at school. I wonder if someone had, what the teachers would have said then (even they didn't like the Master).

Hoto Fudo




Who knows about this place??