Haneda at Dawn

I wasn't allowed to take pics out of the plane window during landing, and they always come out awfully anyway...but you should have SEEN the sunrise as we came down into Haneda - it was totally sci fi. A red band of billowy glowing clouds high above us, a white band just below, and blue-grey puffy big clouds underneath as if they were holding us up. Hee! Sunrise is always a dynamic time in stories. The light and the clouds seem to develop so slowly and with such intensity, like the moments of meditation before an explosive fight. 

Just before we touched down, we flew over the sea where I saw a fleet of little fishing boats coming back into port (it was 4.45am). Each boat – and there were about 30 of them - looked the same, like grey lego bricks on a blanket or something. But I could see them slowly advancing on the coast together, some with their lights still winking, some not.

What a first sight! Back on the ground, no sooner had I left the airport than I saw a building which convinced me I was in some '70's vision of the future' alternate universe...

...or at least it did once I got closer to it than this.

Cute Eggs

I just have to say I have the cutest desktop wallpaper in the world!

Word Bird Flies to...

Yep. It has finally happened! I am on the way to Japan. A trip I've talked about for so long – months, YEARS even - that almost every detail felt strangely hypothetical. My flight ticket and insurance were booked, ICC's wonderful Matt S had organised an internship for me with Wish!, a great Japanese company whose director is also a fan of Noh Theatre. I'd been invited for drinks, dinners, parties are being thrown in my honour. But it STILL felt completely unreal. Well, it did, until I tried to actually pack my suitcase. Here is about half of the ton of stuff that ended up going in...

Then, I had to fit in the really heavy stuff: books, books and more books. I pack books and music like some other people pack pairs of shoes; I am physically incapable of going anywhere without them! I gave myself a pretty free rein. Which is why my bag was quite seriously overwight this morning when I checked in at Heathrow. And also why Sam and I are both now just a little bit shorter in height, but longer-armed, from lugging the stuff from home to the Heathrow Express...

In total my luggage weighed 45kg. Here is a more detailed estimate of the proportion of Books to 'other stuff'' in my luggage right now:

My beautiful edition of the Tale of Genji was 2 kg all on its own...

My Penguins: a book about Oriental music, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon and Japanese Noh Dramas, the latter edited by the same guy, Royall Tyler, who translated my Genji. Another two kilos.

I've had not a MOMENT to read fiction for about a month now, and very much looking forward to settling down wth these books if I ever have any free time.

My Japanese dictionary, textbooks and practice sentences took up about another five kilos. I wonder if it's the same for everyone at the beginning of learning a language – lurching between feeling pretty good about things ('I know a new grammatical structure, hurrah!'), and total despair at lack of ability to actually USE the language even as far as answering a simple question ('I said it fine in my head, I did!'). At the moment I'm bricking it: on the plane to Tokyo after 2 hours sleep and not much more each night for the past two weeks', I can't remember a single word.

Childrens' picture books to use as visual aids for my Wish! Internship – lots of board books, hadback picture books and comics. The only one I actually NEEDED to bring was Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar, but in a fit of thoroughness I brought along about another 10. Another 3 or 4 kilos.

Sheet music: another one or two kilos.

So, a third of the weight of my luggage is books. But I STILL forgot the two most important: phrase book and Tokyo guidebook. Doh!

Pop-up!

For lots of people the term 'pop-up' brings good things to mind: surprises, nice restaurants, fun books. Not for me. What I SHOULD get is 'cool things materialising for just long enough to seem to exist but then running off and hiding again which makes them seem even cooler'. What I actually get is...an image of a big, ugly  Jack-in-the-Box. Not cool, not hip, not stylish...just a teeny bit scary, but not in a way you could, like, admit. Great.

So, I wasn't pre-disposed to like the 'Pop-up  Festival' held in London on the second weekend of July. There were 'jack-in-the-box' ish things about it: the forecast was brilliant but it managed to be stifling hot and rainy at the same time. The tents were all full of pushchairs (and there weren't very many tents)...and in the main arena (Corams Fields park near Russell Square) there was only ONE storyteller...whose mic didn't work properly! Wow.

Over the road in the Brunswick Centre, though, things started to look up. Not only were there lots of free chocolate brownie tasters - one of the few nice surprises I can think of - but there was another stage with a guy telling all the best bits of the Odyssey to me while I munched away at a bacon sandwich.

Oh. AND I booked my flight to Japan. Hahhhhh.

FATE and the Dread Pirate

Floating Letters

Last Sunday afternoon, at the ATP Festival I'll Be Your Mirror, in a rose garden down a tree-lined path by Alexandra Palace, there was a fountain. The pond around the fountain was completely ordinary, except that it had a Portishead 'P' floating in it. It was a hot afternoon (honestly, it really was!), and I started thinking about letters and words floating around, not just in ponds, on fridges and in dictionaries you look at when you're drunk, but the way random phrases or words sometimes seem to leap into a bit of your brain and get stuck there, knocking about, until they decide to drift off again. That's been happening to me even more than normal lately, a surfeit of stories and Japanese language drills spilling over from one brain 'room' to another totally unrelated one. On the one hand, it's annoying; on the other, inspiring!

We were hoping that I'll be Your Mirror would introduce us to lots of new and brilliant bands...but the narratives - side-acts, almost - ended up being the best bits. Alan Moore speaking beat poetry with guitar and silent film accompaniment

and an orchestral piece commissioned to give a new heart-wrenching sting to the 1928 silent French film of Joan of Arc. Wow!

The music was a bit give-or-take, so on the way back home, a bit squiffy from a day of standing about and drinking beer like it was lemonade, Sam and I decided it would be a good idea to go and listen to MORE music. Peggy Sue were actually better than any other non spoken word band we'd seen that day. Goes to show, I guess, that going to bed early and sober isn't always necessarily a Good Thing.

Here is hand stamp proof that I really went to both things:

Iceland, Iceland!

I have now, finally, been to Iceland! Five glorious days in the Icelandic countryside, most of it on horseback, talking to people who love stories nearly as much as I do.

I couldn't quite resist playing the triumphant viking dressed in men's riding chaps (you had to be there...)

I actually did get on a horse, too

The horse I rode the final two days, Eyra, liked to pose