Holiday

I'm demob-happy today, which when you consider I'm only going to York for the weekend is probably something of an overreaction.  It just goes to show you have take your jollies where you can when you're a man of a certain age.  In my 20s, I'd need to be flying to New York and a tear-up at Studio 54 before I got excited.  As much as I love York, it's unlikely to be overrun with former members of Chic, or Bianca Jagger on a horse.

As tradition dicates, I've spent a king's ransom on nibbles and drinks for the one-hour and fifty-five-minute train journey that one has to endure in order to get there.  If things go according to plan, in a little over two hours' time, I should be drunk and pretending to read a fashionable and difficult novel.  Yes, I wear round glasses.  What of it?

Fie Another Day...

Well, so much for that theory.  Mrs O and I had planned to go to the RSC in Stratford on Saturday.  That meant our getting up at the ungodly hour of 7am on a Saturday morning.  This we did only to discover that the Chiltern line, which we were slated to be travelling on, was fucked and that buses were replacing trains.  This made the journey to Warwickshire a 3-hour slog, so we demurred and declined in that order.  And to add to the misery, we couldn't shift our tickets prior to curtain up, so we lost the money and weren't able to exchange for another production.

So that blew Saturday out of the water.  I ended up mooching around the house, and then doing my usual Denmark Street thing.  For new readers, I should point out that when I can alight on something constructive to do of a weekend (so that's most of the time then) I hang around the guitar shops of Denmark Street in central London, itching to try out equipment, but too nervous to do so.  The reason for this nervousness on my part is due to the knowledge that I have no intention of buying any more expensive guitar hardware.  I'll then overcompensate furiously for the benefit of the staff, who couldn't care a tinker's cuss anyway.  I'll pull faces, ask intelligent questions and even make notes in my diary.

I need to be more brazen.  I might opt to have then chiseled into the granite of my headstone when the time comes: "Needed to be more brazen."

Man up Friday

The back's a soupçon better today, which is just as well because I was in danger of getting downhearted by it all.  Well, I mean to say, it's day two ferrchrissakes.  The best years of my life are being eaten up by this boring condition.

Still, onwards and upwards.  It's off to Kings Cross straight from the office this evening for the two-hour journey to York.  I've procured a massive picnic to see us right en route.  Better that than worrying about being stranded by "a jumper" outside Hitchin.  That's happened before.  And when it does, market forces turn all the travellers against one another.  

Last time it happened, some old hands dashed-off and emptied the buffet car of booze before the engine had even struck the poor unfortunate in question.  The tell-tale urgent braking was enough to alert them to the imminent impact.  It was ten minutes before I realised something was seriously "up".  I trotted off to the buffet car for a soothing 12 cans of bitter, but the cupboard was bare.  A very dark and introspective two hours followed, which I'm sure would have been grist to the mill for Arthur Miller, but which for me was nothing more than a prolonged opportunity to confront my sober unconscious mind.  I did not like what I saw that night, friends.  No, I did not.

Anyway, no danger of that tonight.  We've half a case of Tattinger each if needs must.

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!