steepholm

A week has passed since I last posted here. If I've remained silent that long it's not because nothing has happened, but because many things have, which tessellated so efficiently as to leave few crevices of time in which to write them up.

First, let me mention the very pleasant evening I had in Fuse, less than 15 minutes' walk from my Osaka AirBnB, with my friend Irina and her fresh-minted husband Marko. Marko, an excellent cook as well as an Olympian kendo contestant, rustled up some delicious pumpkin pasta, and Irina read tarot for me - oddly enough, the first time anyone has ever done this, despite my having so many witches among my acquaintance. Altogether, a good evening.

Shortly after that, though, I was on my way (via Mishima) to Fuji-Q Highland, where I stayed a night in search of Thomas the Tank Engine memorabilia - for Fuji-Q is home, not only to one of the world's most intense roller coasters, Fujiyama, but also to Thomas Land, a theme park within a theme park.

On the way there, I celebrated the Tokaido Shinkansen's 60th birthday by way of a commemorative ekiben:

The day was rather wet when I arrived, and my window (orientated towards towards the mountain) showed nothing but grey. Fuji was not receiving visitors:

View of Mount Fuji from my hotel window

I comforted myself that, should the Big One happen while I was there, at least the drizzle would help put the fire out. (I know that's not how volcanoes work.) Meanwhile, I had a very nice pizza at the hotel's Macaroni Restaurant (I recommend the fennel sausage). According the hotel website, the pizza was cooked over wood harvested from the slopes of Fuji itself, but honestly it was hard to tell.

The following morning, Fuji had decided to show herself, and did so in various modes and moods over the next few hours:

As you can see, Fuji has many cloud coats, but unfortunately no snow at all. It's the latest in the year that it's been snowless since records began, apparently. Meanwhile, I didn't have to wait for Fuji-Q Highland to see Thomas merchandise. The convenience store in the hotel (which contained an alarming instruction at the bottom of its shopping baskets)...

.... also had a stock of such typically Sodorian items as Thomas chopsticks and Thomas furikake.

Most excitingly, there was even a Thomas-themed room directly opposite mine, which I was able to sneak into the following afternoon when they were doing the cleaning. Don't you yearn to stay here?

(Okay, me neither.) I won't spam you with the many, many Thomas-related pictures I took inside the park itself. I'll just add, for variety, that despite not being by any means a roller coaster afficianado I did have a go on the notorious Fujiyama - largely because you're only allowed to do so if you're under 65, and with just 3.5 years left it seemed necessary to give it a go. Also, I'd paid for a ticket, after all. No loose objects allowed on board, of course, so no photos, but this is what I was up against:

I can't pretend that no pang of regret assailed me as I crested its perilous ridge, but despite the 3.5 G-force and a few rattled bones it wasn't as bad as the numerous warning posters had suggested. I'm glad I did it once and have no desire to do it again, as the wise are supposed to say of climbing Fuji itself.

I then spent five days in Tokyo, based in a budget hotel near Shinjuku station, which suited me well enough despite its budgetness. I'd love to tell you about it all in detail, but essentially it consisted of meeting various people (academics and ex-lodgers, primarily) for lunch or dinner, as well as giving a couple of lectures - or rather the same lecture twice. (It was on giants in Victorian children's fiction, if you're interested.) Here's a breakdown:

30th: Dinner with Haruka and Yuko in an Omotesando izakaya (mostly seafood, but also chicken thighs of miraculous softness)
31st: Lecture at Taisho University in Sugamo, lunch there (fish) with Yoshiko and her publisher Manabe-san, dinner with Satomi (meat 'n' mochi gratin) in Nishiogikubo
1st: Meeting and lunch with Hiroe in Yokohama University's bright and shiny Minato Mirai campus (salad and Provencal friands), tea with Yuki in Iidabashi (just coffee for me), dinner with Miho, Hiroshi and their dog Chubby in Nakano (oden and yakisoba)
2nd: Lunch with Rei and Shuzo in Kanda (moussaka, blue cheese and apple pie), catching up with conference and attending reception at Kyoritsu University in Jimbocho (various).
3rd: Keynote at Kyoritsu, lunch with Hiroko in Jimbocho (chicken curry), lavish post-conference party back at Nakano (various and plentiful)

.

On the morning of the 4th I caught the shinkansen back to Osaka, and went straight to the suburb where my friend Caron Cooper was giving a scone-making workshop. Caron owns Fosse Farmhouse, the B'n'B near Castle Combe that was used as the model for the anime Kiniro Mosaic, and many of her guests over recent years have been KinMoza fans on pilgrimage. This event was especially for those fans, and she was using my former lodger Ayako as an interpreter. Two of her other helpers were nieces of my friend Noriko, to whom I'd also introduced her, so I felt I had a bit of a stake in the event. Anyway, Caron did a good job of recreating rural Wiltshire in suburban Osaka, and the scones were excellent.

And so, "home" to Higashiosaka and my own little AirBnB. Today, I did almost nothing at all!

Drama is conflict, so the saying goes; by the same token, intellectual argument is powered by misunderstanding - one of Earth's few truly renewable resources.

Just this morning I saw not one but two misinterpretations of things Japanese by Westerners. I mention this not to be smug, for I've done as bad and worse on many, many occasions, but because misinterpretation is productive in a way that pure understanding is not. Could anything be more fatal to conversation than complete agreement?

First, we have the Welsh YouTuber (now resident in Japan) CDawgVA (aka Conor) visiting Dreamton with Chris 'Abroad in Japan' Broad. If you want to know about Dreamton, then by all means check out the blog I made when I visited three years ago. It's a 'Cotswold village,' based in part on Castle Combe in Wiltshire. What was interesting was that Conor had somehow got the impression that it was meant to be a Welsh village, and thus judged everything he saw by whether it felt authentically Welsh or not. Interestingly, quite a lot did - although he was a bit bemused by the absence of Welsh dragons amid the superabundance of Union flags. A clincher seemed to be the name of the restaurant, the Pont Oak. 'Pont' of course is Welsh for bridge - but, as the owner of Dreamton explained to me three years ago, she called it that to mimic onomatopoeically the satisfying sound of something being placed (plonked, if you will) precisely in its correct position.

Then, this morning on the Facebook M R James Appreciation Group (where I am a keen follower) someone posted this ad, with the caption: "Ghosts for the Garden." What the ad shows, of course, are luminous versions (why??) of kodama, or tree spirits, as imagined in the Ghibli film Princess Mononoke. But yes, it's not hard to see how they could look like (cute) ghosts, if squinted at down the wrong end of a cultural telescope...

First things first, yes of course it's an attempted coup, and has been for some time. The era of British sakoku may be about to begin...

...however, the coup has not yet succeeded.

Also, as though to close out a more civilised era, yesterday I went to the Cotswolds again, in company with a small posse (here seen relaxing in Castle Combe), including my Japanese teacher, Kei, and the two latest recruits to Fosse Farmhouse:

My main reason was to retake a picture of Bourton Model Village, my previous ones having turned out to be too low quality, but we did quite a bit of supplementary sightseeing, topped off a visit to Broadway Tower, a first for me, where we got a bit distracted by this magnificent herd of red deer...

Quite a set of antlers, no? When you have antlers like that, you don't really need to try to get academic articles published. For the rest of us, however, it's a different story. I sent my revisions off today.

When I lived in York in the 1980s it was already very much a tourist city, especially in summer, and perhaps the most tourist-thronged street was The Shambles, with its picturesquely overhanging gables that (so I was always told) had shaded the meat in hot weather in the days before refrigeration. For The Shambles was traditionally a street of butchers, as the name implies, although by my day there were only one or two.

I've no idea whether The Shambles was a direct influence on J. K. Rowling when she created Diagon Alley (have you?), but it's probably the most famous street of the type that she clearly had in mind, if I can put it thus circumspectly. York, however, nowhere appears in the Harry Potter books, and has not, as far as I know, ever been mentioned as an inspiration.

So, with the recent Cotswold project in mind, it's interesting to see just how complete the Potterification of The Shambles has been. There are now no butchers at all, but you can see...

...The Potions Cauldron...

The Shop That Must Not Be Named...

...The Boy Wizard...

...The World of Wizardry...

... and several other shops that have some kind of Pottery merchandise. As in the Cotswolds, the Mobius loop has closed: the original has become the copy, and vice versa. When Haruka sent a picture to her sister, she replied by asking whether it was a film set.

Who, after all, is to say that it isn't?

Oh say, have you seen the model village at Bourton-on-the-Water? It was built in the mid-1930s by a local publican and recreates the village as it was at the time in Cotswold stone, at a scale of 1:9.

At the entrance to the village, there's a large picture of Gulliver, striding through Bourton:

Being, as you know, interested in the Cotswolds' children's literature connections, I wanted to know about the origins of this picture. It clearly wasn't recent, but did it go all the way back to the village's construction, over 80 years ago?

I asked the owners, but they had only recently taken over and didn't know. So, I searched online, and found that the Gulliver analogy at least went back to the early days, as in this British Pathé film about the project from 1938, titled "Lilliput Village":

Not only that, it turns out that through the '50s and '60s the pub that owned the village printed and sold this pamphlet:

The pamphlet is the story of the village, as told by Gulliver himself, who has travelled into the future and encountered Mr Morris, "the genial host of the Old New Inn," whose brainchild the project was. Unlike the original Gulliver (who took a dim view of "projectors"), this one is most impressed, and describes the village's various charms in detail, concluding with the following thought experiment:

I tried to project myself into the mind of such a model maker and thought how he must be always living in two worlds at once — the actual and the miniature. How he must subconsciously be changing from the powerful Brobdingnagian when in his own workshop to the apprehensive Lilliputian when he battles in the vast world of reality.

This kind of thing is very apropos for my own project of course, and a voyage to Japanese Tripadvisor convinced me that many Japanese do indeed enjoy the experience of being a giant in the model village and juxtaposing it with that of the larger original. (Mise en abyme fans will be pleased to know that the model village contains a model of the model village, which in turns contains a model...) They write of feeling "feeling just like Gulliver" (すっかりガリバーになった気分だ).

For yes, in case you were wondering, Gulliver is well known in Japan - the only real country that Swift's Gulliver ever visited, after all. So well known is it, in fact, that in the 1990s they made a (short-lived) theme park near Mount Fuji, Gulliver's Kingdom. (If this link gives you an error message, reload it.)

Recent conversations revealed that the image of Gulliver tied down by the Lilliputians had misled not one but two of my Japanese friends into believing that the story of Gulliver was that of a giant - a figure more like John Bunyan.

But of course, to the Lilliputians, that was indeed the case.

A little while ago I put this photograph on Facebook:

I'd been idling next to a kitchen shop, and on the van parked outside there was a Before and After picture of their work. To be perfectly honest, neither is much to my taste, but still, as I said on FB, I couldn't see why After was better than Before, or why anyone would spend significant sums to change from one to the other.

On FB some agreed, some demurred. One person suggested that the Before picture was dated. This may be true, but it's not a word I've really ever understood. Is 2018 not also a date?

Attitudes to the past are astoundingly inconsistent, of course. I often wish I'd photographed the jar of Tesco pasta sauce I once bought that boasted, on different parts of the same label, both of its "New Improved Recipe" and its "Traditional, Authentic Taste" - but similar examples abound. In the case of houses, it seems to me that there is a clear divide between different rooms. No one walks into a living room with an original Elizabethan fireplace and oak beams and complains that it is "dated," although once they might have. On the contrary, they'll praise its atmosphere and take good care of its original features. Kitchens, and to a lesser extent bathrooms, are a different matter. But then, even within bathrooms, a stand-alone Victorian, cast-iron lion-foot bath is an enviable item, as long as it's plumbed in; a Victorian water closet, not so much. This was where British hills in Fukushima jibbed, I remember, not quite being able to bring itself to install an authentic British toilet, despite having sent to England for all the other fittings:

Contrast Dreamton, which won out in the bathroom authenticity stakes. I don't appear to have captured it, but I think the toilet there was even operated by a chain, which took me back to my childhood:

(My main memory of the chain in the first house I lived in is that it was too high to reach, so my father added a loop of wire to the bottom - wire thin and sharp enough to cut cheese, or so it seemed to me as I dangled from the end of it by my thin fingers.)

Anyway, the bifurcation of attitudes regarding different rooms, and the desirability or otherwise of modernness in them, has led to a lot of temporal inconsistency within houses. Happily my own small house, here in the orphans' graveyard, was only built in 2006, so it's not something I need to worry about. Everything is magnolia but the mould.

What is the most beautiful village in England?

When I was a child, at this time of year we used to make an annual trip from Hampshire to north Wales (via Wolverhampton) for our summer holiday. Our regular route, the stops on which are as engrained in my memory as those to Santiago de Compostela on the mind of any pilgrim, included the north-Cotswold village of Broadway. I remember my mother mentioning that it was said to be the most beautiful village in England, though on what authority I don't know. It turns out that she was not alone in saying so, though. Thumbing (via Google) through The Great Western Railway Official Guide, 1909: Holiday Haunts, England and Wales, Southern Ireland, and Brittany, I see that the same claim is made there, and treated as something of a truism, or at least a familiar notion.

However, Broadway is not without its rivals, and these days its "most beautiful village" claim appears to have been largely eclipsed - it has to make do with being "the jewel of the Cotswolds" instead.

Meanwhile, on 8 August 1890 William Morris remarked in a chatty letter to the designer Kate Faulkner that Bibury in the east Cotswolds was "surely the most beautiful village in England, lying down in the winding valley beside the clear Colne". This casual remark has been relentlessly leveraged ever since, in Bibury and beyond. I find it referenced from the early '20s right up to late Pevsner:

William Morris, who knew England well and this district intimately, for Kelmscott lies not many miles away, declared that Bibury was “ surely the most beautiful village in England." Probably every Gloucester man will agree with that sentiment. (The Architect and Building News, 1922)

The village of Bibury was "discovered" by William Morris, who called it the most beautiful village in England . (Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England Vol. 40, 1970

Nowhere is that letter quoted more than in Japan, where Morris is held in high regard (I'd say he's more famous there than here, in fact). It crops up in many a Japanese tourist guide, of course, but also in more unexpected places. For example, the website of the Hotel Monterey Grasmere, which (as you will remember) contains a replica of Brockhampton Church, Herefordshire, on its 22nd Floor (or 21st, British style), levers it in in garbled form, even though Brockhampton is not by any means in the Cotswolds:

The design imitates the churches of the Cotswolds, described by the renowned designer William Morris as the most beautiful in England. Our chapel recreated the beauty of the Cotswolds, from its rolling green hills to its traditional arts and crafts culture.

Yesterday I saw an itinerary for a two-week homestay being undertaken by some Japanese school children in the Cotswolds, and the first day's activities were described thus:

7月23日
１３．００－１８．００
コッツウォルズの村巡り
コッツウォルズ地方を代表するを村々を巡ります。
伝術家ウィリアム・モリスが「英国で一番美しい村」と称賛したバイブリーなどを巡ります。

23rd July, 13.00-18.00
Cotswolds Village Tour
We will tour representative Cotswold villages.
We will visit Bibury, which the poet William Morris praised as "the most beautiful village in Britain", and so on.

In Japan at least, Bibury has no rival, but in 1962 the English Tourist Authority put the cat among the pigeons by holding a competition to find... the most beautiful village in England. The winner? Step forward, our old friend Castle Combe, in the south Cotswolds. It too is often referred to by this title, although according to this 1993 article the poll was actually a fix, "dreamt up by a senior BTA official who had a friend in the village". The whole article makes it sound very Midsomer Murders.

Castle Combe's rival on the other side of the M4 may be only 30 miles away, but there appears no sense of dissonance, or really of rivalry - they both get more visitors than they can easily cope with (their combined population comes in at under 1,000).

Who is the better judge of such matters? William Morris, or the demos? Why do people feel the need to decide such a thing at all?

(Other most beautiful villages in England are available.)

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".

There are few things more depressing than writing up a blog of one's exciting adventure abroad after one returns, jetlagged and deflated, to one's own home and pile of utility bills. Therefore I do not propose to put myself through that, but will post the last substantive account of my Japan adventure this very day, prior to my return on Monday.

Since I came back to Tokyo I've been mostly engaged in seeing old friends, going to Cotswold/Britain related places, and taking part in various events, primarily a four-day Contents Tourism symposium at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, although I also gave talks at Taisho, Seisen and TWCU universities. Rather than give you a blow-by-blow account, here is a fun photo gallery of some of the sights I've been to.

( Wild Things and Wide Eyes )

I spent five days in Odawara (or rather in the suburb of Tomizu), and I don't propose to anatomise them here, partly because I've fallen lamentably behind in this account, and partly because some were spent in such unphotogenic pursuits as writing. However, those were punctuated by some interesting expeditions, and I'll try to give you a flavour of them.

( Oh, oh, oh What a Lovely Odawara )

Fukuoka was a bit of a self-indulgence - that is to say, my visit there was a day off from the Cotswold project, and really just a chance to revisit my haunts from the enjoyable few days I spent there two years ago.

When I say that Fukuoka reminds me to of Bristol, I don't want to overstate the matter - they're really very different cities, and Fukuoka is actually ten times bigger in terms of population (though it doesn't feel it), but they're both ports, both slightly removed from the spheres of the mega-cities. Whatever the reason, something about the cut of Fukuoka's jib reminds me of home.

The other reason I wanted to go was the Moomin Cafe, which I'd somehow managed to miss last time despite its being in the Canal City shopping centre, where I spent most of my time. This time, therefore, I booked into a hotel less than five minutes' walk away, and went directly from check-in. Luckily, I arrived in good time to meet up with some old friends:

Having eaten a Snoopy-shaped rice set the day before, this time I gobbled up a Hattifattener (Nyoro-Nyoro in Japanese). The eyes are olives, in case you're wondering:

I'm not normally a fan of shopping centres, but Canal City always charms me. Perhaps it's the hanging gardens, or the fountains? If Babylon had had a branch of Muji and a taste for J-Pop, it would have looked like this.

I wandered down to the dock later, which I'd read was quite a buzzing place, but I was surprised to find that by 6.30 it was pretty much shut. I did go up Hataka Port Tower, though, and looked at the island-dotted sea in the company of a family of Korean tourists, before gently moseying my way back into the livelier part of town, where I ate tonkotsu ramen and mentaiko at a yatai - which is perhaps the most quintessentially Fukuoka dining choice ever. (Mentaiko, by the way, is a pollock-roe-based sausage, and curiously addictive.)

I've spent so much of this trip in the company of other people that it was really quite strange to be alone for any time. Not unpleasant, but I was looking forward to getting to Odawara, where I was to stay with my friend Haruka, her mother Yuko and the rest of their family (including adorable toy poodles) for a few days, partly preparing the various papers I was due to give in Tokyo.

So, let's hop on the last shinkansen of this trip, with an ekiben in hand. In honour of Kyushu, I chose the famous kurobuta of Kagoshima - although, out of respect to my project, I should note that these quintessentially Japanese pigs are actually of English descent, having been bred from a herd of Berkshires.

Not many people know that, and fewer care, but I am of their dwindling number.

From Osaka I took the shinkansen to the southern island of Kyushu and so to the onsen resort of Yufin, picking up my friend Chiho en route at Oita. I hadn't seen Chiho for two years, except at the end of a Skype line, and it was great to be with her again.

Of course, my main reason for being in Yufuin was to visit the Cotswold-themed attraction, Yufuin Floral Village - but I naturally took the opportunity to book us into a ryokan for night - the absence of which from any Japan trip would be like a gaping wound.

( Yufuin with Me? )

On the morning of 19th May I met my friend Eriko at Osaka station and together we travelled to Kyoto, and thence to nearby Kameoka. Eriko is an anthropologist, whose speciality is magic. Having spent a long time studying the strange tribes of Glastonbury, England, she published a book on their religious beliefs (グラストンベリーの女神たち). Since we met through

mevennen last year, we've discovered some overlap in our research interests, so when I invited her to come with me to Dreamton as my companion (and occasional interpreter) she kindly agreed. So it was that we climbed up into the hills around Kameoka (albeit in a taxi), and eventually arrived at a strangely British looking hamlet...

( Dream on... )

On escalators, you generally stand on the right (except in Japan where you stand on the left (except in the Kansai region where you stand on the right (except in Kyoto where you stand on the left))). What could be more logical or straightforward?

Now that we've got that straight, we're ready to repack our bags and head out west.

( To the Land of the Setting Sun! )

I'm not going to linger over the events of 12th May - not because they were unmemorable, but because it was mostly a day of a) meeting old friends and b) giving a lecture, and also because I didn't take any photographs during that time to amuse you. In short, I went to Kyuritsu University in Jimbochou to give a talk on the Cotswold project to the membership of the Japanese society for the study of British Children's Literature (or Children's Literature in English - the Japanese and English versions of the society's name differ subtly). I had a very nice lunch with Miho and Satomi, and afterwards met many other friends who have occasionally appeared in these pages, such as Mikako, Yoshiko, Akiko, Naomi, and the rest. The lecture went fairly well, I think, although I ran out of time before I ran out of material, and then most of us went on to a local izakaya, where (joined by Hiroko) we ate and drank to saturation. Altogether a good day, if not a photogenic one.

The only unplanned thing I should mention is that, on the way to Kyuritsu, I stopped at Meguro to look at the hotel Meguro Gajoen, which was used (so Miho had informed me) as one of the models of Spirited Away, and was in any case well worth a visit in its own right, especially the toilets. I always feel a bit self-conscious going into a hotel where I'm not actually a guest, so I didn't take any pictures - and the toilet would have been a particularly problematic place to start snapping - but I can certainly confirm that it's quite an astounding building, even if I didn't (in the ten minutes available) notice any obvious Miyazaki references. If you'd like to see more, check out this blog, especially the toilet and waterfall.

It was there, lost in admiration of the ceiling tiles, that I accidentally left my tablet computer, on which I had been anxiously checking the subway times. I was halfway back to Meguro station by the time I realised my error, which necessitated my running back down the hill, bearding the reception staff in their den, and then bursting into the toilet, quite unlike the demure creature who had been there 10 minutes before. Luckily, the clientele of the Gajoen are not only rich but also honest (a rare combination), and the tablet was lying neatly on a side table, as if expecting me.

But the main business of this post is British Hills in Fukushima. This was (and at the time of writing still is) the first stop on my "Britain in Japan tour", a 90-minute shinkansen ride north-ish of Tokyo. I stopped at Shin-Shirakawa - a fairly small town/city - and a while later a green shuttle bus arrived to take me (and several Japanese people) the 40-minute hairpin drive up into the mountains, nestled amidst which was this oasis of Britishness.

Could those hills be British? Read on...

( An insupportable number of pictures below the cut )

I have long associated a certain kind of market hall - usually dating from the 17th or 18th century, and with an open, pillared area beneath the first floor - with the Cotswolds. It's certainly rich in them, as here in Dursley, for example:

Or here in Chipping Campden:

There are also fine examples in Tetbury and Minchampton, and perhaps other places too.

What about outside the Cotswolds, though? I know there's a similar structure in Faversham, but apart from that is it a Cotswold thing?

On a similar note (and if you saw me ask this question on FB recently please walk on by), are you aware of any UK placename that uses the suffix "mead" or "meade", outside Devon, Dorset, Hampshire, Wiltshire, Somerset and Gloucestershire? It has to be a name of long standing, not one invented by a planning committee in recent decades (cf. Thamesmead). I'm aware of Runnymede.

As you might possibly have guessed, my Cotswold project has taken a slight Harry Potter detour. I visited Dursley "to see what was wrong with it" a few years ago, as you may possible recall from these pages (although I can't find the entry right now), and more recently I've taken the obvious next step and looked up the surname distribution. Since the surname "Dursley" derives from the town "Dursley", you won't be surprised to see that the main hot spot is Gloucestershire:

Dursley Distribution, 1998

JKR was born in Yate (19 miles from Dursley) and grew up in Tutshill (27 miles from Dursley). Coincidence???

Call that a fridge?

That's a fridge. (I think we may have overdone it.)

In other news, it turns out that I was mistaken in an earlier entry, when I assumed that the pub shown on one page of the Ancient Magus' Bride manga was the same place as that shown on the following page. I went to Broadway a couple of days ago to photograph the Horse and Hound (so that I wouldn't have to rely on Google images), but when I tried to find the view that corresponded to this image -

- I discovered that it didn't correspond after all.

So, like any good manga detective, I started showing the picture from the manga to various people (publicans, Tourist Information staff and a Police Community Support Officer were among my nonplussed interviewees), taking my search from town to town and village to village. After Broadway I tried Chipping Campden - a ridiculously beautiful place - and Moreton-in-Marsh before finally getting a tip-off that there might be a pub answering to that description in Burford. To Burford then I came, and behold, I found the Mermaid Inn:

It was only afterwards that I realised there was even a dog in the right place.

This makes it very clear that the animators were working from the manga drawing rather than real life or a photo, because they've modernised it considerably, getting rid of the pointed arch in the doorway and replacing the ancient windows' stone tracery with wood, metal or plastic, or so it seems:

In short, the mangaka was in Broadway and Burford, but the animators were only in Bourton-on-the-Water. Case closed.

Three Interesting Sylvanian Facts, via Wiki:

1) The original name for Sylvanian Families was: "Pleasant Friends of the Forest Epoch System Collection Animal Toy Sylvanian Families" (森のゆかいな仲間たちエポック社システム・コレクション・アニマルトーイ・シルバニアファミリ). Why didn't it catch on?

2) It's based on 1950s Britain. (Bonus fact: the character Hello Kitty is also meant to be British.) I think this was fairly obvious, but perhaps not so much when you consider the name of the US reboot: Calico Critters.

3) In 2006, the characters in the toy line were chosen to be the mascots for the Japan's National Federation of Workers and Consumers Insurance Cooperatives. 78 million units sold that year.

By the way, did you know that the Japanese produced an anime based on the adventures of Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot? They stuck fairly closely to Christie's plotlines - except for adding a regular character in the form of plucky young sidekick Mabel West and her pet duck, Oliver.

Sit back and enjoy the seamless genre-splicing:

Watch on YouTube

As regular readers will know, one of the more fun jobs involved in the Cotswold project is that of tracking down the locations of various places shown in anime. A few weeks ago I posted about Chise and Angelica's shopping trip in The Ancient Magus's bride, which involved a couple of shots from Bourton-on-the-Water.

After those shots, we see the two sit down at what looks like a café:

Later shots show that the café is situated by a river, much like the one in Bourton:

Horse and Hound view of river from pub - anime

However, I was unable to track down the café using Google, so gave up for a while. The other day, though, I got hold of the relevant volume of the manga. The anime is pretty faithful, and the episode is similar - except that, in the manga, they are clearly visiting a pub, not a café:

The name of the pub is visible, too - the Horse and Hound. It's not an uncommon name, and the Cotswolds is hunting country, but it didn't take long to track it down:

You can see that the anime has taken the manga picture and adapted it, perhaps changing it into somewhere a bit less alcoholic because of the age of the audience?

The only thing is, the Horse and Hound isn't in Bourton, it's in Broadway, some twenty miles away. And it's not next to a river, it's on the main street.

This hopping about isn't uncommon. In Kiniro Mosaic, for example, there's an episode in which Karen leaves her own large house, walks to her friend Alice's house, and on finding that Alice is busy goes to play alone on a bridge, where she has an accident. Eventually Alice finds and rescues her and they walk home together. Sounds straightforward, right? Except that... Karen's house is (as I recently established) Bibury Court:

Alice's house is in Nettleton, near Castle Combe, as noted in previous entries - that's about 30 miles south-west. The bridge that Karen falls off is in Bathampton, another ten miles in the same direction:

Finally, the two are seen walking back together along Arlington Row in Bibury:

In all, Karen has made an eighty-mile round trip. Really quite impressive!

I write this post (or at least, begin it) in Aberystwyth, where I have come to examine a PhD. I will have to turn to PhD-examining matters shortly, so may have to finish this later, but wanted to share a couple of photos of Brockhampton Church near Hereford, which I visited yesterday en route to West Wales. It's all part of the Cotswold Project of course, even though Brockhampton isn't in the Cotswolds, for this is the church that some years ago was (for a small consideration) replicated by a Japanese hotel chain on the 20th floor of an Osaka hotel. (I will, naturally, be visiting the replica in May.) And, on that hotel's website, the church is kinda sorta implied to be in the Cotswolds, by way of a William Morris quotation that was I believe actually about the village of Bibury rather than the churches of the Cotswolds, but hey:

This authentic looking chapel is surrounded by green grass and vivid flowers and illuminated from above by the extensive glass roof. The design imitates the churches of the Cotswolds, described by the renowned designer William Morris as the most beautiful in England. Our chapel recreated the beauty of the Cotswolds, from its rolling green hills to its traditional arts and crafts culture.

Here's a promotional video showing how the replica is used as part of the Osaka hotel's wedding package:

Watch on YouTube

The real church (I use the word with Baudrillard-esque knowingness), though it looks mediaeval, was actually consecrated only in 1902. It's the work of William Lethaby, an Arts-and-Crafts-inspired architect. Of course, it quotes lavishly from many earlier country churches, with its thatched roof, wooden tower and so on, so you might argue that it's no less "fake" than the one in Osaka, but either way the overall effect is beautiful, and Pevsner was rightly complimentary about it.

The view from the church is a little different from the one in Osaka, too:

The churchwarden, Brigadier Rodney Watkins, was kind enough to show me around inside and to give me some of the history of the place. I won't go into that here, but have a couple of tapestries made by the William Morris workshops, after Burne-Jones:

Amongst everything else, Brig. Watkins told me a story (possibly apocryphal but probably not) about a Japanese couple who were spotted drawing up to the church in a car. They got out, slipped into wedding gear, took a photograph of themselves in front of the church, then disappeared again. Can we doubt that they had been married in 20 floors up Osaka, and had come to the fountainhead to put the mother church's imprimatur on their union?

Then I set my sights to the west, and headed for Aber along the A44 - a really marvellous journey. It was late afternoon by then, and the winter light was slanted in that way that makes everything vivid and magical. Murmurations of starlings streamed from one side of the road to the other more than once at the level of my car, and sheep of preternatural whiteness strewed the hills. I was gurgling with delight, my joy mitigated only by the consciousness that such a wretch as I little deserved to witness such beauty, but what are you going to do?

Of course I can't show you any of that since I was driving, so you'll have to take my word for it, but if you enjoyed my pictures of honey-stoned Castle Combe the other week, perhaps you'll like half-timbered Eardisland by way of contrast, a small but worthwhile diversion from my westward road: