Mmmm.... furniture

The desk and swivel chair I ordered from Muji finally arrived today. I felt very manly assembling it by myself. I'm really happy with the way I've transformed my room but I kind of feel like a one of those Doozers from Fraggle Rock, constantly building, putting all this effort into something knowing that an earthquake might come and knock it all down. Then again, having said that, I have a big solid desk to hide under now!

Commercial Break

And now, in conjunction with LivingRoomHo productions, ashureidozo.blogspot.com brings you



Give your pubic hair that just-got-out-of-bed look!

The Plot Thickens...

Well, well, well, I take it back - our homeless friend does have a job. I asked him, but he said it was a secret. So I asked Kogo later, and it turns out we have a whore living in our sitting room.

Oops sorry, I should say "male host" or something. So that would explain why he's asleep half the day and then goes out only for a couple of hours between 10 and 12 at night to "work" and yet can afford to live in central Tokyo. Ever since Kogo told me this I crack up every time he mentions the guy's name - I can't take this blond bimboy seriously knowing he's out shagging desperate young Japanese girls every night. There's so much potential for fun here:

"Oh, you look tired! Hard day at the office?"

And it turns out that the Vitamin C shower contraption belongs to him! One day he said "Kogo, do you mind if I change the showerhead?" and that's what appeared! And apparently he doesn't go out if his hair is looking wrong. What a LOSER!!

Showering in Orange Juice

My first 48 hours here has already thrown up the typical range of weird shit that you could only find in Japan.

I was having a shower this morning when I noticed that the handle on the shower head was a little unusual. It's transparent and and has something that looks like crystals in it. Then I saw it says "Vitamin C Shower" on the side. Okaayy...

Meanwhile, I have gone to great lengths to personalize my white cube of a room. I'm finally indulging my long-cherished dream of building furniture out of those slot-together compressed cardboard tubes you get from Muji. Maybe you can't get them in England, but they feel as hard as MDF and I've got myself a nice sideboard now.

Tokyo desu

Well, here I am. Check-in were amazing to me: despite their super-finely calibrated scales showing that I was in fact a whole 10kg over my limit, the woman was like "Well, your luggage is a little overweight, but I'll let it through anyway."

Any hopes of making it through the subway without sweating like a beast were shattered when I hauled my bags over a step and one of the wheels broke off. So the next half hour was spent dragging what felt like a dead mule behind me. Thankfully the trains from the airport to my flat were fairly direct, and there were lots of escalators, so it could have been worse.

My flat is pretty cool and my flatmate Kogo is SO NICE!! Not only does he actually talk to me but he's got a sense of humour too! Such a vast difference from that butter-monitoring, empty package-collecting freak amongst freaks that I had to live with last year. Still slightly traumatised from the Japanese co-living experience of that time, I tentatively asked Kogo about rubbish recycling rotas and he just looked at me and was like "whatever." I could have hugged him.

However, we have a homeless person living in our sitting room. It's the guy who was in my room before me (and still was when I arrived, which kind of pissed me off). He's staying here for another week or so until he can find a new place. But I wonder how quickly he's going to find a new place when all he does is sleep all afternoon and watch TV all evening. He's one of those 20 year old, hair-dyed-white, sullen Harajuku boys who needs a slap. Even though I don't really have one myself, I really feel the urge to shout "get a fucking job and get out - you don't live here anymore!" at him. Anyway, he should be gone soon.

Bye-bye

So that's it: packed up, ready to go, 7kg overweight on baggage but hoping check-in won't notice. Currently looking at the five-bodied behemoth that is my luggage and genuinely concerned that I won't be able to haul it through the Tokyo subway without sweating like a Western barbarian. Can't remember if any of the stations I'll be using have lifts between the entrances and the platforms or not.

So farewell London, despite all my relentless bitching over the years, I really will miss you.

Banal British Chat

I read an article on the BBC news website about an American woman being granted a rare tourist visa to visit North Korea, which you can see here. I had up until the other day been very up for going to North Korea, to experience the bizarre anachronism of life there, but then I saw a documentary from Dispatches the other night which showed recent video footage smuggled out of the country by members of a fledgling resistance, and I've changed my mind entirely.

It's no secret that Pyongyang is a showcase capital where only the most loyal supporters of the regime are allowed to live so as to give the best possible impression to visitors there. But elsewhere in the country, ordinary people starve while UN food aid is sold off at a profit, people who voice dissent are either publicly executed so as to set an example or sent to "re-education camps" where an estimated 200,000 political prisoners are held in what are effectively gulags from which they never return. It is not uncommon to see dead bodies lying abandoned in the street.

The BBC article was asking for readers' opinions, so I wrote largely what I've written above, questioning the ethics of visiting a country like this and that to visit Pyongyang knowing such brutality is occurring elsewhere is to participate willingly in the regime's propaganda. They don't seem to have published my comment, but they emailed me asking for me to take part in a pilot radio show for the BBC World Service and discuss these issues.

So I said yes, thinking that this could be a really interesting discussion and since it's only a pilot and not being broadcasted, if I screw up, then never mind. I spent some time this afternoon trying to remember stuff about the Korean war that I studied at Cambridge and was all ready to pontificate at 7.15 this evening, when they said they'd ring me.

They call and put me through to the show, which has the American woman and some photographer on it, talking about their experiences of the country. They asked me whether I had thought of visiting the North, and I replied that yes, I had, but then I saw the documentary and it changed my mind.

I expected a follow-up question to ask me why, but none came. Instead they asked the American what she thought of something else that was completely unrelated to what I'd just said. And then the presenter says:

"So as you all seem to have an affection for North Korea, my final quick question to the three of you is 'what do you think needs to be done to resolve the Korean crisis?' We're wrapping up now, so Ashley, ten seconds."

Ten seconds to resolve the Korean crisis? If only.

"Well, I think we need more dialogue and diplomacy from both sides and that the Americans need to be more positive in their approach... blah blah blah." Boring.

And affection?! I wouldn't say I have affection for a country that's repressing and murdering its own people on a massive scale, has its agents abduct Japanese schoolchildren off beaches and threatens to turn Seoul and Tokyo into a "sea of fire" with its massive arsenal of conventional weapons and/or nuclear weapons.

What a stupid show. I hope the pilot show crashes and burns and the series never gets the green light.

Bring it on!

After ten days or so of feeling up and down about going to Japan and being knackered out by the insane amounts of stuff I've had to do (not least my trans-european tap-finding mission), I'm suddenly feeling very upbeat about going! I started to pack properly tonight and I think it was the bonus of finding I will probably have no problem in cramming my tons of stuff to take into my 23kg baggage allowance that got the endorphins rushing. I'm going to celebrate with the last half of a tub of Ben and Jerry's.

It's been great to see everyone over the past ten days. Lots of love to you all!

Learn, damn you, learn!

Why is it that my parents cannot fathom the fucking VCR? Three weeks away in the US built up a lot of anticipation over the episodes of "Lost" that I'd missed. Number of episodes successfully recorded: Zero. And now I'm back from Berlin, with yet another episode unrecorded because my Dad didn't know how to recognise a tape at the end of its spool.

For the eight or nine years of having a VCR, I've been the one to record everything, and had to deal with my parents phoning me up in Japan last year to ask how it works despite me having gone through the manual with them in painstaking detail before I left.

Since a few months ago we've had a newer, slightly more sophisticated one, and I used the excuse of being too busy with exams to learn how to use it so as to FORCE my father to figure it out for himself out of sheer necessity (ie. otherwise it would have been a toss up between coming to my graduation or staying at home to watch Live8). And don't even get me started on the reasons why they decided not to buy a DVD recorder.

In some ways I long for a day when technology will reach that Star-trek stage where you can just ask an appliance to do something and it understands. But then I know that my mother would be like, "VCR, can you record Richard and Judy for me?"

And then half and hour later, "VCR, you know Richard and Judy is on in five minutes, don't you?"

And then six minutes later, "You're sure you've started recording?"

And the VCR would be chewing up the tape in anger...

Drip drip.

I return from Berlin empty handed. I couldn't find the kitchen tap that my parents had sent me for. That's not to say that I didn't try: I went right out into a bizarre ex-industrial suburb of dirt tracks that was like the forests of Norway except penned in by flyovers. Turns out the address of Herr TapShop or whatever he calls himself online is just a residential one and no-one was at home.

Still, it was a very nice free trip to Berlin, which has to be the quietest, calmest, almost eerily empty capital city I've ever been to.

Better late than...

I've finally got around to finishing my albums of Cuba today, two years after I went.

This is one of my favourite pictures from that trip:

My Punjabi Friends

I saw Sarah, Jonn and Alana for lunch today, who having all moved south to study at Cambridge have finally been sucked into London.

We in London pride ourselves on our tolerance and diversity and it's so great to see people from Liverpool, Wolverhampton and Edinburgh moving to Tooting Broadway where they can thrive in our multicultural society. We may not understand their complicated names and strange foreign-speak, but by God, if they swear their allegiance to Ken Livingstone we can call them Londoners too!

And by popular demand, a guest appearance from an orange cat:

My wrinkly ankles rankle me

When I was in Paris I went to an exhibition of up-and-coming young artists at the Fondation Cartier. I was reading a statement by a 24 year-old Japanese photographer whose work I quite liked and she mentioned that she noticed the ageing of her body now that it takes longer for the skin on her ankles to get rid of the impressions left when she takes her socks off.

It's true! I looked at my ankles forty minutes after I'd taken my socks off and the traces were still there! At 24, the decay of ageing reveals itself in mysterious ways.

I read some time ago that a brand of Japanese jeans had made jeans for women which somehow contained slow-release anti-cellulite cream or something in the material. Perhaps they should branch out into socks.

(I'm laughing already at the thought of you all checking your ankles after reading this blog.)

A thousand shades of grey

The Evening Standard reported a gem today:

"The Met Office is to crack down on negative forecasts, banning terms such as 'small chance of showers' in favour of the more positive 'mostly dry'."

Interesting. The Standard then goes on to suggest that expressions such as "isolated storms" may be replaced by "hot and sunny for most," that "occasional showers" would be rephrased as "mainly dry" and that "often cloudy" could be expressed as "generally clear."

So, if this black-and-white principle were adopted by the New Orleans Met Office, I suppose last month's 80% flooding of the city by a category 4 hurricane would be expressed as "dry for some," would it?

Andy Yeatman of the Met Office says, "We have been doing a lot of work on how we can communicate the weather to people and the problem is that the weather is always different, so we want to try to cut down on the number of stock phrases that we use."

Good idea. Here are some suggestions:

"Same rain, different day."
"Sunny across the whole country, but that doesn't mean anything."
"The UV index today is high, as indicated by the red triangle to my left, and the red-raw flesh you will see about town today."

Mr Yeatman continues: "We are therefore issuing this guidance to all our forecasters, whether they are for television or the internet. We are asking them to think a little more about personalising their forecasts for their audience."

Alright! That's what I like to hear. Here is my personal forecast for British weather for the next decade:

"In its time-honoured tradition, the weather in Britain this decade will do everything it can to fuck you over. As I have experienced myself, there will continue to be spiteful days whereby the sky remains clear and sunny while you remain indoors all day but rains for the only five minutes that you go out to get the paper. Forget about seasons, this mish-mash of unpredictable weather is here to stay. At best you will get a few disparate patches of truly enjoyable weather here and there between the grey, rainy days and the intolerably hot ones; at worst you can expect the collapse of the North Atlantic Gulf Stream and the onset of a new Ice Age in north-western Europe."

My solution? Emigrate.

Dance, dance, dance

I went to see Sylvie Guillem dance at Sadler's Wells tonight, in another spectacular piece of modern choreography by Russell Maliphant. She's probably the world's greatest ballet dancer, 40 years old now but still outstanding. She will probably retire sooner rather than later, so I'm so happy to have seen her perform twice this year.

Incidentally, from the sublime to the ridiculous, Richard and Judy were sitting in the row behind me. Do they spend no part of their day apart?

I've always thought if I saw a cast member from The Bill it would mean I had lived in London for too long. There's still two and a half weeks for that to happen, but I feel God is somehow sending me a message through Richard and Judy, but I'm not quite sure what.