Ninety nine percent perspiration

I filed my 300-word (phew) book review a moment ago, and the relief is palpable.  No, really, I could have weighed my anguish this time yesterday, such was its scale.  I shouldn't get too comfy I suppose.  There's still time for it to land back in my in tray with "not fit for broadcast" stamped across it.  However, I think I've cut my journalistic teeth sufficiently now that I could churn out another review that comes to precisely the opposite conclusions to the first.  I wouldn't lose any sleep over this mercenary about turn either.  I've been a hack (unpaid) for less than 5 five hours and I've already turned into Pol Pot.

I've now been overcome with that physical slump that follows moments of crise like these.  My ordinary duties look even more anodyne and pointless than they did previously.  I feel like a character in an earnest but shit modernist novel. 

I also feel hugely tempted to take my foot off the gas, but this is fatal for me.  I can in a fug and get depressed.  I need to apply myself.  I know all this stuff, and yet will I buckle down?  Almost certainly not.  There's a masochistic streak at the heart of the Irish male.  This explains the violent temper and drinking.

You can run from that gene pool, but you cannot hide.

Another Country

I happened across a fascinating documentary last night in BBC4.  It was the harrowing tale of Japan's worst-ever train crash, in 2005.  The material details of the crash were laid out, as one might expect, and there were interviews with several survivors and the families of those who died.

It was all elegantly and dispassionately presented, as good documentary always is.  Any pathos that emerges is wrought from the stories that are told; it doesn't need to be cynically prompted by music, insensitive prying journalism and/or mawkish cinematography.

One of the most intriguing things about the programme was its lifting the lid on Japanese inscrutability.  It's felt that a major cause of the crash was the intolerable pressure that train drivers are put under in Japan.  Timetables are cut several times a year, and extra stations commissioned to accommodate the insatiable demand.  But no quarter is given to the drivers, who are expected to magically summon extra speed without compromising passenger safety.

Former drivers spoke bitterly of the quasi-military disciplinary culture of the railways.  Drivers contrive to make their station stops by driving dangerously fast and braking dangerously late.  The results was this catastrophic crash.

What's interesting about this that it foregrounded for the first time for me that the Japanese are just like the rest of us.  That sounds a strange utterance, but I think it's a common assumption among westerners that the Japanese are like polite automatons, or cartoon characters.  They don't really have the same preoccupations, emotions and petty fears as the rest of us.  I never supposed for a moment that they were possessed of cynicism or bitterness.

They've always inhabited this human hinterland for me, the Japs.  I thought for years that, like dogs, they couldn't metabolise chocolate for example.  Turns out they love a Curly Wurly as much as the rest of us.  Fancy!