steepholm

There are many things about the monarchy that are annoying, but (almost) more annoying still are two of the weak arguments regularly used to justify its existence.

1) "Would you rather have Boris Johnson/Donald Trump as your head of state?"
No, of course not. But the proper comparison is with presidents whose role is essentially ceremonial, thus: "Would you rather have Michael D. Higgins/Frank-Walter Steinmeier/Sergio Mattarella?" To which the answer is "Yes, in a heartbeat." Instituting a ceremonial presidency isn't some impossible, never-achieved circle-squaring political conundrum - they exist today, quietly and unproblematically, in many European countries. They're not only more democractic, they're much cheaper - which leads me to...

2) "The monarchy pays for itself through tourism."
I actually thought this one had died out, but then I heard Piers Morgan using it the other day (I had unwisely clicked on a link). There are two answers.

First, the statement is simply untrue. Yes, many tourists visit Buckingham Palace, etc., but there's no evidence that they do so only because there's occasionally a royal in residence there. Far more visit Versailles, for example, and, indeed, far more tourists go to France than to the UK overall - which, if the presence or absence or a monarch were the only factor in their choice, would suggest a rather sanguinary policy pointer for the UK Tourist Board (to which proponents of this argument seem oddly happy to delegate responsibility for the constitution). But of course, very few people decide which country to visit based on whether they have a monarchy. Even supposing that a few do, the idea that the extra tourist income generated by this eccentric group is enough to pay for the costs of the monarchy is, well, unconvincing.

Second - aren't you ashamed of yourselves? You claim to support the monarchy, and many of you will be pledging allegiance via your TV screens, smartphones and other portable devices to Charles III as your personal liege lord on Saturday, presumably in the belief that his being in the position he finds himself in means that he has been ordained by God, or (if you want a more secular version) by History, Tradition, the Will of the People, or whatever abstraction you find more inspiring. And yet, when asked to justify your position, you can do no better than cite an obviously fallacious argument about tourist income. Even if the argument stood up, wouldn't it reduce the solemnity and dignity of the institution you claim to care about to a mere money-making scheme and the UK to John of Gaunt's "pelting farm"? It's actually rather disgusting.

As you can see, there is something atavistic in my republicanism.

I'm starting this entry (though I may not have time to finish it) at Chopin Airport, Warsaw, where I arrived at 5.30am, just in time for the sunrise. And if I used the toilet shortly after arrival, I'm sure you won't think so little of me as to imagine that I did it purely to justify a Kinks reference in the post title.

This will be a fairly brief entry, perhaps, because my last few days in Tokyo mostly involved meeting friends and eating nice food with them, which was fun for us but may leave you pressing your faces longingly against the computer screen like Victorian waifs looking through the windows of the Ritz, although some other activities got slipped in too.

My lodging for the duration was the Prince Hotel in Sunshine City, Ikebukuro, which I chose expressly to gratify the Pokemon love of C and W, for Sunshine City is home to a Pokemon Centre of renown. In the event, they had to make do with pictures of me indulging in all things Pokemonic, although a few little souvenirs may have insinuated themselves into my luggage. Anyway, here's a glimpse for those who share their taste:



The first meal was with Yoshiko and her two daughters, whom I was meeting for the first time, at a very nice washoku restaurant. We had an excellent evening, the only downside (if you can call it that) being that Yoshiko, who'd originally booked the restaurant with C and W in mind as well, forgot to reduce the order, with the result that the already-generous meal was far too large. Still, you can't have too much of a good thing, apparently, because it remained stubbornly delicious.


Still unaccountably slim after the meal

The next day Yoshiko and I went to see an exhibition being held by an old senpai of hers, a history professor who after retirement turned - very successfully - to pottery. Despite my own father having been a potter I don't profess to be a good judge, especially in the land of wabi sabi (when is something just pretending to be crudely rustic and when it just, well, crudely rustic?), but I could see it was very good - and the old gentleman himself, now in his late '80s, was remarkably genki.

Then on to meet Yuki, who last year introduced me to monjayaki and had kindly offered to take me to her favourite restaurant in that line, in Koiwa. Luckily, this gives me a chance to show any monja newbies photographs (which in my excitement I've forgotten to take in the past) of the life cycle of a monjayaki:



The day after that I met up with Satomi and we visited Tokyo Tower, where I'd never been but had long wished to visit, not least because of its prominence in Card Captor Sakura. If you want a picture mixing different cultures (but with a red theme) it's hard to beat the foot of Tokyo Tower (itself of course a rip-off of the Eiffel Tower), koinobori, a London Routemaster bus and a van selling takoyaki. Such is Tokyo.



Then on to Tokyo TeamLabs Planets in Toyosu, not to be confused with Tokyo TeamLabs in Odaiba, which I visited last year. Though, to be fair, there was definitely some similarity. The TeamLabs Planets difference was the (almost literal) immersion involved, which meant that when you were walking through a pond of koi and sakura, you were wading not just though a hologram but actual water, virtually up to the knee. That was a pretty amazing experience, although not easy to photograph, sadly - at least in comparison with the various rooms of lights, lasers and mirrors, and even they were more effective as video. But the crowning glory was the "dejeuner sur instagram" effect conjured by dangled flowers in the final room. Anyway, here's a small selection from a dazzling display:



The next day I left Japan, but not before enjoying some fine dining at Eatrip in Harajuku in the company of Toki - without whom I would never have found this incredibly well hidden garden restaurant in the middle of one of Tokyo's busiest, indeed most frenetic, districts. In return I showed her nearby Alice on Wednesdays, which she'd never visited. Fair exchange is no robbery.



"Japan, once again you have pleased us."

Yes, I know I went to the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, Tokyo, the other day, but I couldn't resist the opportunity to go and see the new (indeed only partly finished) Ghibli Park near Nagoya, too, since it was 'on my way', more or less, from Odawara to Kyoto. (The makes it sound like a casual, spur-of-the-moment decision, but in fact snagging the tickets had required a degree of cunning, forward planning, and Japanese language skills.)

The first thing to say is that Ghibli Park is big - or rather, that it's spread over a large area, comprised of the Expo 2005 Aichi Commemorative Park. So far, the main attraction (and the one I had a ticket to) is the Ghibli Grand Warehouse, but eventually it will consist of zones built to resemble the milieux of various films. A couple have already been built - for example, Whisper of the Heart (pictured) and My Neighbour Totoro, but it's very much a work in progress.



The other thing that's different is that in Aichi, unlike Mitaka, photographs are allowed (with some exceptions). Indeed, the place seemed to be set up for photo opportunities in some respects. Here, for example, are a few scenes from the Arrietty section, where you too can see things from a Borrower's point of view. (Generally I try to exclude people from my photographs, but in this case I left one or two blurry ones in for scale.)



For all the money they spent on this, however, I was surprised that Ghibli didn't invest just a little extra in checking the English translations of their signs. The Japanese here reads "The House Under the Floor", alluding to the Japanese title of The Borrowers, The Little People Under the Floor. Would it have been so hard to look up 床 in a dictionary?



Anyway, there were lots of fun things to see, including replicas of (e.g.) Yubaba's office and the Philosophy Club from From Up On Poppy Hill. There was even a catbus, which (unlike the one in Mitaka) was open to adults to enter - somewhat uncanonically, but who's complaining?



As I was wandering around randomly, I came across a doorway marked おしまい (oshimai), which for some reason I absentmindedly read as "sisters" (which it admittedly can mean) rather than "exit" (which in context it obviously did mean). Intrigued, and thinking I might find something related to Mei and Satsuki, I wandered in, and found a series of rooms set up for visitors to pose in iconic scenes from various films. This was really the highlight of the place, or would have been if I'd had someone with me to photograph. As it was, though, I did get to catch Shita from Castle in the Sky, thanks to a kind fellow visitor:



It was only when I got to the very last room (which was actually the first), containing the train from Spirited Away and a chance to cuddle up to No Face, that I realised my mistake and that I'd inadvertently jumped a forty-minute queue of Japanese people waiting patiently without. I was of course duly abashed, though after all my torii-gate queueing of the day before I might have skipped it otherwise. "May one be pardon'd and retain the offence?" In the age of digital photography, the answer is Yes.

Oh yeah, to justify my title, here's the tempura and rice I had yesterday in Nishiki Market - but in between were visits to Nara and Fushimi Inari Taisha, and they will have to wait a little.

Via a strange chain of events, I'm back exploring Japan on my own* - at least for the next couple of weeks. It wasn't meant to be this way.

It was three and a half years ago that I first laid plans to take my daughter and her boyfriend on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday to Japan, as a way of a) being nice, b) getting a store of happy memories to while away my stay in some future nursing home, and c) showing my appreciation of them (and especially her, of course, because she's had to put up with me for much longer).

That trip was kiboshed a few days before take-off by Covid-19 and the consequent lockdown. I got my money back, but it was a great disappointment, and it was only last year that I thought it might be possible to revive the plan - which I did, booking various hotels, a ryokan, activities, and contacting friends in Japan. It would have been a lot better than plan A.

Except, on Sunday W discovered that he had lost his passport. He was mortified, but there was nothing to be done about it - we all turned his house over, and found nothing but a pile of zilch. There was no time to get a replacement. And, because my daughter couldn't stand the thought of sending W fun photos of me and her doing things he was left out of, she ultimately felt she couldn't come either. We're going to try again in 2024, with no chickens counted till we touch down safely in Narita.

However, I'd already got lots of things in place, and besides, I was hardly going to turn down a holiday I'd booked and paid for and had set aside a fortnight of annual leave for. So, I've come alone. And I fully intend to have a great time, though the knowledge that I should and could have been doing it with C and W will no doubt shadow me throughout. There are so many things here that I'd love to be able to enjoy for the first time, if only vicariously through them and their reactions. Such is the vampirism of experience.

Here I am yesterday in Shinjuku Gyoen, being brave and thinking about the transience of the sakura, which indeed bloomed early in Tokyo this year, and is now well past full bloom.



All the same, I dipped deep in the pink waters of the cherry blossom well. There were quite a few people in Shinjuku, but this was nothing compared to the scene in Nakameguro later, where I went to see the blossoms lit up along the Meguro River. Considering that they've been in bloom for well over a week, it was heaving - although I think it's rained quite a few days recently, so perhaps they were saving it up for Friday evening. A festive, indeed, festival atmosphere reigned.






Then today it was the Ghibli Museum with Satomi and her partner Akira (whom I was meeting for the first time) and her friend Chisato, who wanted to meet me because of my critical writing, especially on Diana Wynne Jones, of whom she's a superfan. As always, the inside of the museum must remain a photograph-free mystery, though we got a photo with the Laputa robot on the roof. The short film which visitors are allowed to watch - Yado Sagashi (Looking for a place to stay) was being shown for the first time today, as Satomi pointed out, so we felt honoured. It was a really charming, Going on a Bear Hunt style story of a young woman's journey through several terrains, with all sound effects produced by various human voices:



And so to a lunch of monjayaki and okonomiyaki, a tea of matcha floats and shiratama, and a supper of sushi at Satomi and Akira's, all punctuated with some very pleasant Kichijouji moochery, including to a second-hand bookshop where I bought a reprint of The Butterfly's Ball. Altogether it was a lovely day, and although I'm too tired to sum it up in more than a bland phrase, it was a lot better than that suggests.



Not much to report yet by way of cultural observaions, but I will add that I noticed on the first evening I got here that only about half the people in the street were wearing masks. The following morning, however, about 90% were. The Japanese government has encouraged people to stop wearing masks outdoors, but this observation suggests that a lot of the masking is provoked by considerations of sontaku rather than health. No need to wear a mask when you think no one's looking, or are too drunk to care what their reaction might be!

* Except for a wide variety of friends, who'll be making guest appearances in the days to come.

Well, no one's been asking my opinion of the latest Roald Dahl controversy, so here it is. Or rather, here they are, for I have several.

First, context. Here's a link to the original Telegraph article, which lists all the emendations. Let's just acknowledge that the whole issue has been very consciously taken up by the Tory press as a culture-war issue because they have nothing but culture wars on which to fight the next election. Their own deputy chairman has said as much. So, expect a lot more of this sort of stuff, wherever they can find it. Even Rishi Sunak has weighed in. Clearly, Dahl is the new J. K. Rowling in terms of right-wing white-knighting.

As for me, although I've edited an academic collection on Dahl, and almost the first thing that happened to me on arriving at Cardiff University was being involved in a conference to mark his centenary - Cardiff being his birthplace - I've never been a particular fan, either now or in childhood. As a stylist he seems uninteresting, and his humour just wasn't to my taste, though clearly it appealed to many others. (I'm not even a huge fan of Quentin Blake's illustrations. He's one of those figures, like Anthony Browne and Charles Keeping, who seem universally beloved - and indeed they may all be lovely people - who somehow don't do it for me. But I am not a very visual person. My loss.) Unfortunately, what I do like about Dahl is intimately connected to his less pleasant qualities - such as the comment on Mrs Winter, the teacher in The Magic Finger who is made to grow a tail by the protagonist-narrator: "if any of you are wondering whether Mrs Winter is quite all right again now, the answer is No. And she never will be." I've got to admit that I did laugh at that.

So anyway, I have a number of hats.

Hat the First. As a children's literature teacher, silent emendations are bothersome. From now on, for example, if I want to teach Matilda, I'll have to check whether my students are reading the 2023 edition (in which she reads Jane Austen) or one of the earlier ones (in which she reads Kipling). I'm aware this is a niche problem for a niche demographic, however.

Hat the Second. As someone with an academic interest in reception history, the emendations and the row they've engendered are quite interesting. I'll certainly be using the article I've linked above in classes.

Hat the Third. As a parent and general reader, I'm well aware that this kind of 'updating' goes on, and has for decades if not centuries. Looking down the list of emendations, I see some that have an obvious point and others that seem silly or senseless. But I'm aware that this is a reflection of my own sensitivities and blind spots. If I'm more sensitised to racism than sexism or fatphobia, for example, then this will affect my view of what seems like overkill or conversely complicit. Bearing that in mind, I'd find it hard to divide those emendations into sheep and goats, as it were - but an absolutist stance seems no more satisfactory.

Hat the Fourth. As a children's writer and someone with many friends in that field, I can't shake the suspicion that children's books get this kind of treatment more than books for adults, and while there may be good reasons for this (adults are generally better equipped to take an author's prejudices and cultural/historical situation into account) there are also bad ones that rub a raw spot (children's books are insignificant as literature and can be mucked about with sans cultural loss). Of course, adult books are sometimes amended in this way too - it's currently possible to buy Joseph Conrad's The Nice Guy of the Narcissus on Amazon, for example - but it's undoubtedly rarer.

The online dislikers of Dahl seem to have settled on two rather contradictory positions. One group thinks that the books should be amended, and that this fuss is just an opportunistic culture-war issue (in which latter contention they're certainly right). The other, that they should, as it were, have a Do Not Resuscitate order placed on them and be allowed to slide out of print, to replaced by better, more recent books. I have sympathy with both positions, but both make me uneasy, perhaps because both assume the integral relation of books to a capitalist/market model. On the one hand, the publishers amend books (and the Estate allows it) so that they can continue to make money out of a very lucrative author. On the other, reading - viewed as a zero-sum game - allows for only a certain number of books to be 'in play' at one time (those Waterstone's tables only have so much space!), and Dahl's are seen as hogging shelf-space at the expense of younger pretenders.

So, what's my opinion? Having taken all these factors into account and done the sums, I think the end result is that I don't feel strongly either way. But at least my indifference is sophisticated.

Well, I've neglected this journal for a month, so this is a very quick catch-up.

First, I turned 60 and got my first free prescription since before Mrs Thatcher came to power - yay! We (me, my daughter and her boyfriend, plus my brother and sister-in-law) spent a frosty-but-bright weekend in a hay barn in my home town - a wonderful, if indulgent, couple of days.



We also took the opportunity to scatter my mother's ashes on top of my father's, only four years or so after her death. On the way home we drove through the New Forest, and visited the graves of both Alice Liddell (Lyndhurst) and Arthur Conan Doyle (Minstead), so you might be forgiven for thinking it a morbid time, but it was quite the opposite.



Oh, and last week I went to Dublin to examine a PhD (a good one, happily, so it wasn't at all awkward). The viva took place in the house where Oscar Wilde was born, now a part of Trinity College - which was kind of neat.

Last weekend my friend Clémentine visited for a couple of nights, which will be the last time I see her before she gives birth to her second child, due next month. Considering her condition she was incredibly willing to walk long distances, both at Wake the Tiger and the Bristol Light Festival.



And that brings me more or less up to date. Oh, but I'll add that this morning I finally got around to playing with ChatGPT. I wanted to test its political awareness. As I think you can tell from the screenshots below, it's pretty woke:

Well, I followed Covid, after a two-week gap, with a flu chaser. Apart from a bout of heatstroke in Japan in 2017, and a weird series of nosebleeds in Japan in 2018 (see a pattern here?), these are my first illnesses for goodness knows how long. I assume that Covid lowered my resistance generally.

Since I'd been vaccinated against both, I'd like think that both were milder than they otherwise would have been, but neither was pleasant.

Anyway, in the stilly watches of last night I started pondering the way languages get mixed up in number systems. First Japanese, with its weird mixture of native Japanese and Chinese-derived terms that vary according to context, in ways that no doubt seem obvious and natural if you're brought up in the language but otherwise very arbitrary. And then English, which is much the same except that there we're dealing with an even more bizarre mixture of Old English, Latin and also French.

Anyway, I got to wondering about the etymology of the word "first", which I realised with embarrassment I didn't know anything at all about. It didn't "feel" like French or Latin, but neither was it connected to its corresponding cardinal, "one". Why don't we say "oneth", or similar?

Well, it turns out that not having an ordinal version of the number 1 is pretty common across Indo-European languages - why, I don't know. As for "first", the "st" turns out to be a superlative suffix, the whole thing being something like "the most fore" or "forest" if you want to be confusing - i.e. the one at the front. In German, meanwhile, "erst" does something similar - but using the cognate of our "ere" [=before]. Erst is thus a cousin of "earliest".

This may not be news to you at all, or very boring news, but I found it occasioned a general sliding of the number tiles in my brain into a new configuration, and I rather liked the sensation.

The next question, of course, involves "second". What is that Franco-Latin cuckoo doing in the German nest of English-language ordinals? Well, according to OED:

Old English had no proper ordinal for the number two (like German zweite , Dutch tweede , French deuxième ), the sense being expressed by óðer (see other adj.); this being ambiguous, the French word found early acceptance.

This make sense, I suppose, but I'm getting the impression that Old English was culpably negligent in such matters.

You may remember my reporting on Francis Galton's experiment (ostensibly concerning research into heredity) which involved his creating a pocket device with a little hole-punch that allowed him to discreetly rate the attractiveness of every woman he met. I speculated at the time that this might not have played too well with his wife, Louisa.


What I hadn't realised was that he also made observations on Louisa's own family - which happens to be mine too - although these were rather less obnoxious in character. He reported to Charles Darwin in 1871 that Louisa's father, George Butler (for more on whom, see here), had a peculiar way of napping:

[He] used to take after dinner naps in his arm chair, during which he had a strange habit of raising & laying his forearm across the top of his head,—whence, as he nodded, it dropped in front of his face, striking his nose as it fell, usually awakening him with a start. The bridge of his somewhat prominent nose was frequently sore & sometimes raw from this curious habit.

What was interesting to Galton was that this quirk was not confined to George. His son Montagu, and one of Montagu's daughters, had the same habit - and in another letter a few years later he was able to confirm that the same was true of the child of another of George's children, Spencer. He thereupon produced the following map of the heritability of napping with one's arm on one's head:



Here, he puts George at the top of the tree, but there's no particular reason to suppose that the arm-napping mutation started with him. Perhaps it was also to be found in the descendants of George's brother Weeden, my own great-great-great grandfather?

Now, I don't nap in this way myself (though I do often assume this posture when lying in bed), but I'm sorely tempted to do a round-robin of my various cousins.

On the other hand, Francis, perhaps Montagu et al. got the habit from observing their respective parents (or uncles or cousins)? And perhaps it just isn't very unusual in the first place? Maybe you should think about things like that, before you go bothering Mr Darwin?

Further research, and a grant to match, are urgently required. Meanwhile, I'm more pleased to have inherited the ability to nap at will from my maternal grandfather, a skill most pleasant and profitable for sailors and academics alike.

I find the kanji 株 (pron. 'kabu', though sometimes 'shu', 'kuize' or 'kabuta') very interesting. It has numerous meanings, including 'share' (as in company shares), 'strain' (as in a strain of bacteria), and 'stump' (as in tree stump).

What's interesting about it is that, in English, the word 'stock' has the same set of apparently disparate meanings. You can buy stocks in a company, heredity is often referred to in the same terms (plant stocks, etc.), and 'stock' is a word, albeit obselescent, for tree trunks too - as in Milton's 'When all our fathers worshiped stocks and stones'.

Behind all these various meanings of 'stock' I think it's possible to trace the image of some kind of branching family tree going back to a common root. A financial stock, for example, can be seen as a slip taken from the root stock of a company - if you want to look at it like that. That's fairly interesting in itself, but it fascinates me that the same set of connections was made not once but twice, in English and Japanese. Coincidence? Or was there some influence? I don't know, for example, whether share trading was a thing in Japan before the Meiji era. If not, that use of 株 may have been modelled on English usage.

St Ives is a town almost entirely composed of beaches, harbour, and secret alleyways carved from granite, that lead to the beaches and to each other. I'd not been there for over ten years before this last weekend, when I treated my daughter and her boyfriend, and my brother and his partner, to a few days in the middle of this stony maze. In the past, when school holidays meant that visits there were in August or July, the narrow streets were continually heaving with our fellow emmets, but I highly recommend a late September trip with beautiful weather, if you can get it.



In the background of the last picture is the Godrevy Light, which was of course V. Woolf's, and justifies the title of this post, for I am now back in Bristol and about to dive headfirst into a work awayday, with all that that implies in terms of sea and sand.