steepholm

I hear that Ireland has introduced a 2Km limit on how far one can go to take a Covid constitutional. I imagine most people have some bit of countryside or park within that kind of radius, though a substantial number won't. Bristol is well served, with many large parks and surprising fingers of countryside that reach deep into the folds of the city. Here is Purdown the other day, for example, a 10-minute walk from my house, albeit up a suitably cardiovascular hill:

My work rate seems to be slowing exponentially, even as the casualty count increases (or "ramps up," as Boris Johnson would no doubt say, with a fist pump). The advantage is that I still have plenty to keep me occupied, at least. But I do get distracted, whether it be by watching poor blind Jessie wandering about the room and bumping into things randomly like a furry Roomba (I'd love to get her a guide puppy, but fear it would not be a long-term solution), or the realisation that I should really be packing for Kyoto. As a way of cheering myself up about the latter, yesterday I constructed my very own Fushimi Inari Taisha:

I considered putting Jessie in a red bib like one of the shrine's protective kitsune, but refrained. Some things are better left to the imagination.

My lockdown regime, generally speaking, will involve a daily trip to Tesco - via the hilliest route in this hilly city, so as to get my cardiovascular system going, i.e. a footpath over the railway cuttings of St Werburghs. However, although supermarkets are booming (and, to be fair, their logistical expertise and the labour of their workers are what's holding this country together right now, along with the NHS), I don't want to let the Gloucester Rd wither on the bough. Today I had to walk down it anyway, to fetch some medicines for Jessie, and took the opportunity to buy supper at the fishmonger - now using such extra measures as six-foot-distant customer-queuing positions painted in yellow on the pavement, and contactless payment through the window glass:

A minority response to the lockdown has been to go on an arson spree. I saw a burned out electric bicycle on the footpath to Tesco yesterday; and today I read that arsonists have burned out two Iceland food delivery vans in Bristol, while Asda has been similarly targetted in Weston-Super-Mare. I'd suspect a motive of letting the old folk starve, had the skateboard park under the M32 not been torched as well.

Where have I been, you ask? Well yesterday morning I was standing in the rain with 20,000 other people, trying to catch a glimpse of Greta Thunberg, who was visiting Bristol. We were both too short for direct eye contact to be possible (I'm sure she was disappointed too), but I did hear a few words over the tannoy - luckily saying things I'd heard her say before, so I was well able to fill in the blanks. My camera, held aloft, was able to take in these shots - unsatisfactory from a photography point of view, but pretty representative of what I could see:

I tried to get a glimpse later, during the march round the (otherwise eerily traffic-free) city centre, but the queen had many marching in her coats, and that trademark yellow sou'wester was to be found on multiple backs.

Afterwards College Green was reduced to mud, which many people antagonistic to GT suggested entirely knocked the bottom out of the thesis that there was a climate crisis, but happily a fund-raiser to restore the turf was started just as quickly, and has already raised almost £6,000. Now, let's crowdfund Planet Earth!

Two days ago I was in Oxford, where I saw an external PhD student at Brookes, then went to the Other Place to hear Maria Cecire talk about her new book, which has a notable intersection with Four British Fantasists. Her old supervisor, Carolyne Larrington, then took me, her and Neil Philip (whom it was very nice to meet again after a 12-year gap) to St John's SCR - the kind of place where tea, sandwiches and cake (I had a rhubarb slice, being a sucker for tart-sweet combos) magically precipitate themselves gratis at four every afternoon for the consumption of the fellows. Not quite Pullman's chafing dishes and poppy heads, but definitely tending in that direction. I prefer rhubarb to opium, anyway.

On Sunday, I took a walk round Eastville Park boating lake with my daughter and her boyfriend, neither of whom were aware of its existence, despite its being only a twenty-minute walk from our house. I only discovered it myself a couple of years ago - it's rather well hidden despite its size, in a fold of the park that makes it invisible from almost anywhere. But Bristol is scattered with such places - it's a slow-release city that keeps you full for longer. (Cf. Bath, with its empty calories.)

And then, on Saturday, I went with Ayako and Moe to Gloucester Cathedral (my first trip, absurdly), to look at the Harry Potter cloisters, now washed clean of messages about the Chamber of Secrets being open, but still of considerable interest as the birthplace of fan-vaulting.

And that was my week in review. Today, Brighton and my brother's birthday celebrations!

Here in the birthplace of Chatterton I had a rather Leech-Gatherer-esque conversation today, with old Mr Ford the clock mender of Gloucester Rd. I've not been much of a customer over the years. If he replaced my watch battery occasionally that was about it, but when I cleared my mother's house last year I discovered the rather handsome little Swiza mantel clock that used to be my grandmother's. It was missing a few parts, but I hoped that Mr Ford would a) find it interesting and b) be able to fix it.

I took it in December last year, and at that time he stiffened with interest. "The best brand there is," he declared, "but they've been out of business these thirty years and parts are hard to find. Perhaps my brother-in-law can find some on the internet," he added doubtfully, before leaning forward, his face suddenly avaricious and hungry, like Bilbo's in the film of Fellowship when Gandalf tries to take the ring off his hands: "Unless you want to flog it?"

I said I'd see if he could get the parts first, and slipped out of the tiny shop and away.

Today I went to see how he'd got on, but it was no dice, alas. "Would you still be interested buying it?" I asked, remembering his former enthusiasm. "I would, but I'm 90 years old, I have the flu, and I'm going to be packing it in soon," came the lugubrious reply. He then started a predictable but gloomy story about how his children weren't interested in the watch-and-clock trade, how no one appreciated a clockwork motion in these digital days, and how that was a crying shame - which I could only agree with, though as guilty as anyone. He opened his shop in 1954 - a lifetime ago, really - but the trade was dying, and most of the people he had known and cared about (including his Scottish wife, who used to call him an "English bastard") were long gone.

To be honest, he wasn't quite as stoical as Wordsworth's leech gatherer, but I liked him much the better for it.

Tomorrow will be Storm Ciara, but today my daughter, her boyfriend and I took a very pleasant walk in Leigh Woods. It affords a different view of the ever-photogenic Clifton Suspension Bridge from that which has occasionally graced this journal.

Alternatively, here is said boyfriend in full Caspar David Friedrich mode:

Meanwhile, my desultory quest (if a quest can be desultory) to find Welsh-Japanese connections has thrown up this rare sighting of The Mabinogion on the anime Love, Chunibyo and Other Delusions.

If you're wondering about the connection between that cover and the legends of Rhiannon, Bran, Pryderi and pals, I have to report that there is none. But that's sort of the point of this rather charming show. They didn't even try to translate 'chunibyo,' I notice, but the word literally means "illness of the second year of middle school" and refers to tendency of some people at that age to become absorbed in fantasies in which they have special powers, etc. By the time they graduate they have usually been persuaded to participate in the approved fantasies of adult society - but are they are happier for it? Find out on Netflix, at least for a while.

Finally, my friend Haruka, who has been duly applying at half-yearly intervals since at least 2017 for a UK working visa (a few winners are chosen by lot every six months) has finally had her name pulled from the hat, so will be coming here for two years - which I feel almost as happy about as she does.

Remember that bit in Nineteen Eighty-Four where Winston Smith tries to see O'Brien's four fingers as five? It's especially hard, I think, because fingers are countable objects. Had fingerness been a graduated quality, it would have been relatively easy to move from seeing a small degree of fingerness to a larger one, just as the boiling frogs of legend think their bath is tepid. But O'Brien wasn't trying to make it easy.

All kinds of political analogies spring to mind, but this is a linguistic post. Yesterday, as I wandered round Bristol city centre, I made a point of trying to see the green traffic lights as blue - which is what they're called in Japanese. Partly this is because the Japanese language traditionally chops up the colour spectrum differently: the word for green (midori 緑) is of relatively recent date, I've heard, and in the old days blue (ao 青) used to serve for both, and still does in certain contexts. But actually the lights (at least in the UK) are a pretty bluey-green (or greeny blue) anyway, so the Winston-Smith shift wasn't hard to achieve, and soon I was able to train my brain to see them as blue first. It was kind of fun, as a psycho-linguistic experiment while shopping.

I have far greater difficulty seeing the orangey-yellow lights as amber. They have none of amber's lambency, which is its distinctive quality as a material. And, as a colour name - well outside the world of traffic lights, who uses it? How did such a hifalutin colour name get attached to such a quotidian object in the first place, in fact?

Well, that was a very Japanese and yet quite Bristolian day. It began with my walking to a disused church near my children's former primary school, the site of many a school disco and bouncy-castle party in those days, but today home to the "Bristol Japan Cultural Showcase 2018" - an opportunity to load up on Umaibou (the chicken curry flavour, if somewhat caricatured in design, lives up to its name in taste)...

... and other snacks; to have people doing kendo shout Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: to try my clumsy hand at calligraphy (can you guess which is mine and which the actual calligrapher's?...

... of course you can); and have a go at ikebana, which was rather more successful:

I also got to talk Japanese to a lot of new people, of course, which is always fun. I don't think I embarrassed myself.

The plan was to walk from there to the city museum, about a mile away, where there's currently an exhibition of Hokusai and Hiroshige prints. However, the ikebana people kindly wrapped my effort in cellophane and gave it me, which (considering I was also carrying a couple of bags, including a PhD thesis) was a little cumbersome. I couldn't simply dump it in a bin en route, though, after they'd been so nice, and besides, I was genuinely quite pleased with my effort. Before long I walked past a shop called Kimonokimono, which turned out to sell... well, yes, kimonos and lots of other Japanoiserie, all very good quality. On impulse I offered the shopkeeper my ikebana, which he accepted and quickly put in place among his stock (arranging it rather better than I had), which seemed an elegant and appropriate solution to the problem:

Unencumbered, I made a quick detour to the Bristol Porridge Project for lunch - something I'd been intending to do when opportunity arose. I went for the "Crazy Clifton Combo", with toppings of cacao nibs, cinnamon spiced apple, dates and cranberries. Not half bad for £3, and I'm definitely going back.

The Hokusai and Hiroshige were as good as one might expect: the Tokaido trail and the views of Fuji in all seasons and weathers. I was just as intrigued, though, by the museum's collection of late-seventeenth-century Japanese pottery, imported at a time when the supply from China had been interrupted by civil war. I don't think I'd been aware of the sakoku-era fashion for this ware:

Then to Coffee #1 to drink tea and read the PhD thesis (on Irish children's literature) before a walk home in high winds that made the plane trees on Welsh Back gong the sea's sound through puffed cheeks, and drove white horses across the floating harbour.

But only the one in St Werburgh's has one, as I discovered this lunchtime.

"Every Railway Tunnel Needs a String Quartet" (Watch on YouTube)

Here's a view of the audience, both well rapt and well wrapped, it being nearly October. Those distant figures at the far end of the tunnel are graffiti artists. St Werburgh's is always in artistic ferment.

Finally, a topiary pig, to underline the point - if there was a point:

St Werburgh's, over and out.

If there are any Aardman fans here, feel free to flick through my Flickr account, where you will find ample photographic evidence of my trip to Cribbs Causeway (Bristol's very own out-of-town shopping centre) last week, in part to visit the Gromit Unleashed exhibition, in which all of the Wallace, Gromit and Feathers McGraw statues previously scattered throughout Bristol for the summer are reunited in one place. I'll start you off with a couple of faves, concentrating on allusions:

Star Trek

Where's Wally?

Monsters Inc.

Alice in Wonderland

But there are plenty of other themes, too. What will next year bring?

Or, if your bent runs more to haltingly delivered lectures on children's fantasy literature and the end of the Great War, with particular emphasis on memory and repression, you may like to hear the podcast of the lecture I gave last week at Exeter University as part of The Empathy Effect, a project I'm involved with. (The link's at the bottom.)

Before last weekend sinks too far into oblivion, I will mention here that I spent it very pleasantly being visited by Clémentine Beauvais. I've visited Clémentine in York a couple of times since she took up her lectureship there, but this was her first time in Bristol, so naturally we did the things that everyone has to do on their first visit, such as pose by the Suspension Bridge.

Another tourist regular, but one I'd not indulged in myself for well over a decade, is the SS Great Britain, Brunel's great trans-Atlantic steamship, which sits in Bristol harbour. The whole Brunel experience has been considerably souped up since my last visit, including the introduction of nineteenth-century smells into the passenger cabins. One can also dress up, and pretend to be wishing a tearful goodbye to the old country from the deck, or perhaps tot up the accounts in Mr Brunel's stovepipe hat.

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Or indeed pose under a ridiculously large simulacrum of the great man's head.

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In a chamber within this gargantuan noddle one can experience being "Inside Brunel's Mind", a six-minute show full of sounds, flashing lights and smoke meant to convey the impression of being a multi-tasking genius. It's always interesting to see how people try to convey the experience of being very clever - the graphics in Sherlock are another example - but I wonder whether they ran their conclusions past any bona fide brainboxes to make sure they'd got it right?

While you ponder that, here's a picture of some pain perdu, à la Dr Beauvais.

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Bon appetit!

Today was fresh and showery, but when not showering Bristol city centre was looking rather lovely, and all the pennants on the ships and boats were straining for the sea.

In between various necessary tasks I walked around, collecting more Aardman statue sightings:

( The Wallace Collection )

It's strangely calming to come down to a city centre and find boats and sunshine. Maybe it's not Venice, but Bristol has its own charm:

If you want a soundtrack for this post, you could do worse than this.

Part of me wants to call this photograph "The Grand Unveiling", because I'm so pleased with the bride and the hotel both pointing at the same thing.

Part of me wants to call it "Sax Before Marriage", because I have a puerile mind.

Two new Gloucester Rd establishments visited in the last couple of days. One is called "Art and Chocolate", and consists of a single room, in one half of which a young bloke with a Spanish(?) accent sells artisan chocolate (I bought some ruby chocolate there, and highly recommend it). In the other half his half-Guatemalan half-Japanese friend makes and sells art with a Bristol theme (I bought a coaster showing the Suspension Bridge). The only connection between the two businesses is the friendship of the men involved, and their location.

A hundred yards north is "Per and Kor", a restaurant run by a couple - he's from Iran and she's Korean. They have a Persian menu and a Korean menu, and you can choose from either, or mix them up. When I went with Htay, for example, I had a kimchi starter followed by lamb, aubergine and split yellow peas. Both were delicious, and their dissimilarity was no drawback.

Time was when fusion restaurants were all the range, and such a restaurant would have looked for ingenious ways to serve up lamb and kimchi on the same dish - but perhaps we're entering a post-fusion age?

Two days ago I visited Lacock, about half an hour from here, hoping to waylay some Japanese tourists and ask them their impressions. I failed utterly, because I went in the morning, and they come in the afternoon - mostly. But I did talk to lots of shopkeepers, etc.

It was all for my Cotswolds project, of course; for, even though Lacock is really a little way outside the Cotswolds, it does tend to be included in Japanese language tourist guides, and sometimes even such august organisations as the National Trust appear to claim it:

National Trust bag on sale at NT shop Lacock

Anyway, it's a famously pretty village, so here are some pics if you like that kind of thing:
( Open the Chocolate Box )

Like Castle Combe, Lacock is frequently used in historical films and television programmes: it featured heavily in Pride and Prejudice and Cranford, and made appearances in both Harry Potter and Downton Abbey. Unlike Castle Combe, though, where media appearances are not made much of, Lacock very much sells itself on this aspect of its identity - along with its other claim to fame as the birthplace of photography. There's a Harry Potter-themed giftshop, for example:

And the NT shop sells several books aimed at location hunters:

I wonder why this difference in approach? Is it the presence of the National Trust itself? Or the fact that, although a small village, at 1,500 or so Lacock has a population almost five times larger than Castle Combe's?

Meanwhile in Bristol I've been having fun tracking down some of the 67 Wallace and Gromit statues scattered through the city for the 2018 summer "Gromit Unleashed" trail. Here are my two favourites so far: "The Howl" and "Gnome, Sweet Gnome".

I'm off to Japan on Wednesday. It will of course be just too late for Golden Week, which was deliberate on my part (since the trains and hotels are crowded then), but one day I'd like to see the carp streamers of children's day. That happens on 5th May, in other words today.

Instead, I enjoyed the sudden summer here in Bristol. I've been playing the field with cafés lately, and today (the weather being fine) my steps were naturally drawn down to the City Farm Café in St Werburghs, ten minutes' walk down the path from my house. Not only do you get to eat in the company of Jacobs sheep, etc., but you can do it from the comfort of the bole of an enchanted tree.

In the afternoon, the mixing of the rural with the urban continued in the form of Bristol's Jack-in-the-Green, who wove his way through the city followed by his acolytes, welcoming in the summer. In this video, he and his entourage are making their way up the Gloucester Rd., while I stand near a bus stop. Who needs the greenwood, after all? And as for matsuri, we have our own. Click to watch.

It's been ten years since Farah Mendlesohn and I last organised a Diana Wynne Jones conference in Bristol. Too long? Well, if you'd like to see another, here's your chance...

When I walked to Tesco yesterday I found myself sauntering past a very long queue of traffic trying to get into the Eastgate Centre, perhaps to stock up on last-minute booze - whereas I was only after soured cream. Detecting feelings of smugness, I prepared to suppress them in my usual authoritarian manner, then made a conscious decision not to, but rather - as an experiment - to view them positively, for all the world as if I were President Trump.

"There's nothing wrong with feeling smug," I told myself. "You deserve it. In fact, I think it's very brave of you to so honest about your feelings. Also, smug is so very in right now."

Didn't I do it well? I don't think anyone in the history of the world has been smug more expertly. But it hasn't changed me.

Today I decided to take a stroll around the zoo, an impulse that seems to afflict me only on New Year's Day, although this time I was in Bristol rather than Borth. I'd not been to Bristol Zoo for several years, and it was a rather nostalgic trip, which gave me a chance to compare meerkats, assess hippos, and so on.

The strangest part was the overhead conversation while watching the otters. A small boy - maybe four years old? - was there with his father. Looking at the pair of otters, he remarked: "I don't like the female otter." (How he could tell the difference is beyond me.) Not getting any reaction, he added after a few seconds: "I don't like girls."

"You do like girls," replied his father. "Because you got a princess dress for Christmas. And" - with a heavy emphasis - "you like wearing it."

It seemed a strange argument: does it really follow that a boy who likes princess dresses will also like their traditional occupants? Then I wondered whether it might have been partly for my benefit. After all, a few minutes earlier, when we'd all been looking at the golden lion tamarins and the boy had said the word "Fart!" very loudly, the father had apologised to me - so he was clearly sensitive to the way he was seen by others. If so, I suppose the first part - "You got a princess dress for Christmas" - was an example of what is fashionably called virtue signalling ("I am not one to force my child to conform to gender stereotypes"). But the second part - "And you like wearing it" - was a pre-emptive clarification, just in case I was a Mail reader ("Nor am I one to force my son to wear dresses").

From the boy's point of view, however, it must have all sounded like non sequitur upon non sequitur, though he was too polite to say so.

In recent months, as I've mentioned here a couple of times I think, I've taken to working at Coffee #1 on the Gloucester Rd. I like their green tea, and I've got to that stage now where they reach for it when they see me come through the door. That's good in a way, of course, but it occurred to me that I might be becoming predictable, and a while ago I said jokingly to the woman behind the counter, "I ought to have a catchphrase - like, 'Tea me up, Scotty!'"

To my surprise, she found this weak quip highly amusing, and in subsequent weeks I felt honour bound to quote it whenever she happened to be serving. After a while, though, for the sake of my sanity I thought I ought to vary it. "Greet me with green tea" worked for a short while; "The green, green tea of home" was even more ephemeral. I've been through quite a few phrases now, and it's getting desperate. I've got "A green thought in a green shade" saved up for next time, but I worry that eventually I'll run out of mildly amusing ways to order a pot of Jade Tips. Then I'll have no choice but to switch to Rooibos. The horror!

* * *

Obviously I can't help overhearing the people who sit next to me while I'm working at the cafe. It's not that I'm listening in, not at all.

So, today it was a man of about 35 and his 9- or 10-year-old daughter. I was drafting my Annual Performance Review document on a laptop a couple of feet away, but absorbing as that activity was I couldn't help but be struck by her loud claim to be able to "predict the past".

Dad, naturally, plodded out a few clichés about the unidirectionality of time, the meanings of Latin prefixes, and so on. (By this point I was trying to find a way to say how wonderful my teaching has been without sounding boastful - no easy task, as I've recently had occasion to observe.)

Finally, the father said in exasperation: "I refuse to believe that you have access to a non-linear, atemporal mode of being!" His daughter stared back mulishly across her babyccino. Relenting, he added: "Anyway, what do you want for supper? And don't say cheese and pasta!"

"Pasta and cheese," she replied.

Touché.

Bristol now has a cat cafe. I helpd fundsurf it about a year ago, and today I cashed in with a cup of tea and a brownie, and 9 rather adorable cats:

Of course, when I got back, Jessie immediately told me that there was catnip on my collar - but nothing happened, I swear it!

This, along with the recent addition of the Bristol Steampunk Museum, has brightened up the Bristol winter - but if you still doubt the city's charms, why not look at it through the eyes of a visiting Japanese film crew?

Bristol now has a cat cafe. I helpd fundsurf it about a year ago, and today I cashed in with a cup of tea and a brownie, and 9 rather adorable cats:

Jinja on my Mind

Agonistes Blues

Greta Love Hath No Man (but the rest of us like her)

Watchman

Waiting for the Storm to Hit

Don't it Make My Green Eyes Blue?

A Walk Around the Floating World

Every Railway Tunnel Deserves a String Quartet

From Aardman to Armistice

More Bristol Pictures - But This Time I Am Not Alone!

All Inland Cities Need a Floating Harbour

A Fortuitous Photo

Melting Pots and Infusions

A Tale of Two Villages

I Saw Some Grass Growing through the Pavements Today

Diana Wynne Jones Conference/Convention

Conversations Internal and External

A Brood of Brewed but not Stewed Studies

Cats, Punks and Castles, Oh My!

Cats, Punks and Castles, Oh My!

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