My Ancestors

I'm still plodding on with the family tree. I've managed to go back to my 11x Great-Grandparents. The aristocratic connection is looking more and more dodgy every day, so I have omitted it from the tree. Today I compiled a list of surnames of all the ancestors I've traced so far. By a quirk of fate I could have ended up with any one of these surnames:

Baird
Bestweeke
Bloor
Blower
Bold
Bowman
Brown
Bryan
Camm
Cheetham
Chevin
Cockayne
Cook
Corah
Correy
Frew
Gillitt
Hanna
Harrison
Holland
Howitt
Jackson
Kerry
McCarroll
Millward
Old
Oldershaw
Pountain
Severn
Taylor
Vessey
Wardley
Wheatley
Williams
Willmott
Winfield
Wood

I have got back about as far as I can now on my mum's side. It's bothering me that I haven't been able to make any progress on my dad's side as the Irish records are not online. I'm especially irritated because the whole purpose of looking into the family tree to start with was to find out about his dad. Hm, perhaps time to hire a professional genealogist. I wonder how much they cost?

The weather has been horrendous this last few days. Apparently the Rainy Season is here already, two weeks earlier than normal. We also have a typhoon due to hit Honshu sometime tomorrow. So I guess the message is, "Stay at home this weekend". However, I have been out most of the day in the thick of it. I met up with an old friend in Shibuya and had a very nice day despite the horrible weather.

I am now back at home and taking it easy. I know I should be cleaning, but I don't have the energy. I just want to relax and take naps. The drag is that if I don't do the chores today, I'll have to do them tomorrow. So time to get myself into gear, I suppose.

Sleep Deprivation

I am absolutely knackered this evening. The kids at the elementary school are getting up earlier and earlier. This morning they were out there playing drums from SIX THIRTY AM! What kind of crazy time is that? They pounded drums and yelled until 10AM, then stopped, but I had to get ready for work at that point, so I couldn't even take a nap. This sleep deprivation will kill me. I just don't understand why that bleeding school puts so much emphasis on teaching the kids how to make barbarian noises for sports day - what is the point of wasting all that time just to teach children to make a noise? Why can't they play sport QUIETLY? Why does it have to be accompanied by drums and yelling? Those stupid bloody teachers need a good punch in the head, and if I don't get some sleep soon, my temper will be so far off the chart that it'll be more and more likely that I go round there and punch their lights out.It is raining tonight, so I am hoping that it will pee it down tomorrow morning and keep those little bleeders indoors again.

I had a good day yesterday out at Aoyama Gakuin University. The campus I went to was miles away from Aoyama - on the Yokohama Line right out in Kanagawa - but the campus was beautiful and leafy and very very modern (only opened in 2003). The lecture went well, the students seemed keen, and the staff were lovely and gave us chocolates. I will be out there again in three weeks (unless I have died from sleep deprivation, or am in jail for shoving a bongo up an elementary school teacher's anus).

Watched the first two episodes of "The Singing Detective". It really is good and I recommend you watch it.

Insomnia, Brass Band, Cactus

I am knackered today. I haven't slept very well for the past couple of nights for various reasons - another spate of aftershocks, temperature fluctuations (me and the weather), husband playing the bloody electric guitar and the school down the road starting their band practice in the playground at the crack of dawn every morning. As a result, I feel like death warmed up. I have had a couple of naps today, but they have left me feeling dazed and confused rather than refreshed. I hope to get a good night's sleep tonight, but I won't. I know that as soon as the sun comes up, those bloody kids will be out there in the playground again, beating drums and marching up and down to their brass band. Only it doesn't sound like a band - more like a herd of elephants dying slowly of prolonged constipation. They don't seem to have any idea of noise pollution in Japan. Tokyo is the noisiest place I have ever been to. One day, I may just have to go out to that playground in my pajamas and stick the teacher's trumpet up his anus. That might make an impression. Still, at least things have improved from ten years ago. Back the same school would prepare for the annual sports festival for three weeks beforehand and they would play the music from Dragonball over the loud speakers in the playground so loudly that it was maddening. To give you some idea how loud it was, if you stood next to our television and turned the volume up full, you still would not be able to hear the television. They wonder why the kids here are losing all sense of responsibility and respect for others, but it is it any wonder when their teachers behave in so thoughtless a manner? They are just copying the selfishness of their elders. What they need is a good kick in the nuts.

I mentioned I bought a cactus the other day. The good news is that I haven't killed it yet. It has managed to survive a whole week on my balcony so far. I have named it Wilbur and taken a few pictures (of course). Right now, Wilbur has three large and beautiful flowers and is adding a little exotic glamour to the gray concrete drabness of the veranda.

I found a fun site for old TV programmes online, and one thing led to another, and I've been watching a few shows on youTube. The first one was some compilation of the Kenny Everett Video Shows, which was fab, and then I struck pure gold and came across the full series of Dennis Potter's "The Singing Detective", which I never saw the first time round, but which my dad was always raving about. I have watched almost all of the first episode tonight and I'm praying I'll have time to watch the whole series before it gets taken down for copyright infringement.

Anyway, to bed and a decent night's sleep before those little brass band bleeders are up again. I'm going to pray hard for heavy rain to keep them inside until at least midday.

I had a very nice couple of hours in Koishikawa Korakuen yesterday. For those of you who don't know, it is an Edo Period garden next to Tokyo Dome. According to the guide pamphlet, it was started in 1629 by the founder of the Tokugawa family, Yorifusa, and was completed during the reign of the second clan ruler, Mitsukuni. Mitukuni admired Chinese culture and the name of the garden, Korakuen, means "the garden for enjoying power later on". He took this name from the Chinese text, "Gakuyoro-Ki", by Hanchuen, in which it says "There is a need for those in power to worry about maintaining power first and then enjoy power later."

Nowadays, it should really be called something like "the garden for getting away from crazy Tokyo on a Sunday afternoon". That's what I was doing, though I nearly didn't get there, because at first it seemed like the only way to the park from the nearest station was over a series of hideous pedestrian footbridges that my vertigo would never allow me to stagger over. Finally, after twenty frustrating minutes of wandering up and down around Idabashi Station, I managed to find a couple of zebra crossings that allowed me to get there entirely on ground level.

I spent a couple of happy hours there taking photos. The light was fantastic and I was excited to find an expanse of shallow water with stepping stones, koi carp and a duck. The reflections were great and the duck was friendly (or maybe just hungry) and came swimming over. There was also a brilliant red wooden bridge that stood out from the foliage and the surrounding rocks. I took quite a lot of pictures of that. Hidden away in some of the darker corners of the garden, I stumbled across some quite mysterious-looking monuments, inscribed stones and what appeared to be the ruins of a tiny shrine - only the foundations and some ancient stone lanterns and lion carvings remained. I also scored my first mosquito bite of the season.

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Earthquake update - over the last week, the aftershocks have started up again and then gone away again. Today, a friend of mine informed me that she had seen a TV show on the most dangerous areas of Tokyo to live in if "The Big One" hits, (or as she said, "WHEN the Big One hits"). Apparently, the most dangerous area is Koto, followed by Wakaba, and the most dangerous floor to live on is the third floor. I live in a third-floor apartment in Wakaba. Great. I told her this, and she quickly amended her comment by saying that it was only dangerous to live on the third floor if there were six floors in your building in total (there are four in mine) and that it was all the old bunka-jitaku (semi-detached houses from just after the war) that were dangerous. Wakaba is extra dangerous because of the very narrow streets. This area used to have a ninja school here, and the streets were as slim as possible to make it hard for the school to be attacked.

My final news for today is that I have bought a cactus. I am infamous for killing plants, but I saw this little cactus with flowers on it and figured that if it could survive the desert, then it could probably surprise me. If it lives long enough for me to get round to photographing it, I'll post a picture of its pretty flowers.

My Lovecraftian Ancestors

What happened to my last post? It seems to have disappeared. Oh well, maybe it will be back, maybe it won't (like many things in life, my health and enthusiasm included). I am finally on my weekend, and I am looking forward to some time doing the things I like to do. I have never enjoyed time off as much as I do these days. Every moment seems precious. Even cleaning the toilet seems like a treat.

I've been tinkering around on Ancestry.com again. The branch of the tree that is supposed to link us to the royals is turning out to be more than dodgy (one of my ancestors apparently giving birth at the age of 104 being a case in point). I am not sure I really want to be connected to all those traitors and murderers anyway (for that is all most of those old royals were. They only got to the top by being bigger bastards than anyone else).

The branch of the family I am looking at tonight is centered in the Nottingham, Lincoln and Leicester area. Ther family names are like something out of H. P. Lovecraft: Wheatley, Oldershaw, Jackson, Severn. I haven't found a Wilbur Wheatley yet (as in Lovecraft's story, "The Dunwich Horror") but you never know. I've traced some of my ancestors on this particular branch back to 1600. When I go back to Derby in the summer, I'd like to go to some of these tiny villages my ancestors lived in and look around. I think that would be pretty amazing. I especially want to go to Smalley, where the Kerry branch of my family seem to have lived for centuries. If there are any of them still there, they must be so inbred that they have fins by now. Still, looking on the bright side, that will make them easy to pick out on the street.

It's been a while since I posted. I haven't been in the mood. Or rather, I have been in too many moods, most of them too negative to want to write about anything. I feel somewhat better today, so I'll make an effort before the gloom descends again. The photo above was one of the several hundred I took at Ueno Peony Garden a few weeks ago. My friend very kindly gave me a ticket to see it. The night before I went, Tokyo was lashed by heavy rain, which resulted in many of the flowers being three parts pulverised. This didn't effect my photographic opportunities - I took pictures of them anyway, wrecked or otherwise. In fact, some of the flowers looked pretty dramatic, streaked with huge smears of pollen from the rain.

A while back I decided to start reading more classic literature. Most of the things I've read this past couple of years have come from the cheap bin at the Blue Parrot Bookshop, and they are typically Oprah Winfrey Book Club recommendations. So, I have started reading "Moby Dick". Herman Melville sure knew about whaling. As my friend said, "A novel is a story; an epic is a world - and this is an epic." I like the Lovecraftian atmosphere and the odd range of characters. Who knows what might happen, but I sense it won't be anything good...

I've also been watching a lot of DVDs recently. Patti Smith, Paul Klee (I like documentaries) and a couple of films here and there. I came upon an old version of Doctor Who with a completely mis-cast Peter Cushing in the title role. Now, I love Peter Cushing, and would happily pay good money to watch him paint a garden shed, but he should never have made this. Not even the presence of a young Bernard Cribbins and a fleet of bleeting daleks could save this film. I do like Patti Smith, I have to say. I could get on with her. I feel she is placid and wouldn't annoy me.

Life is pretty dull these days. I realise that somehow I have again ended up with no social life whatsoever. This is how it was four years ago, before I got my present job. Then, for a couple of happy years, I had a great time, but now I am back to a schedule of ten hours a day at the office and then a few hours free time alone at home at night and then cleaning and shopping and seeing no one except my husband at the weekend. It is thoroughly miserable and no wonder I have been depressed recently. People in Tokyo don't live, they just exist.

Anyway, I am tired, so I will stop here. Time to read some more Moby Dick and then get eight hours sleep.