HAPPY HOLIDAYS

We are running late with all our preparations for Christmas because we had just over a week in Tokyo in mid-December. We arrived home late on Sunday night. Various stressful issues were waiting for me at work, and as a result, we only got the Christmas tree up and STARTED doing our Christmas cards on Tuesday evening. Apologies to everyone we have missed due to our being all sixes and sevens.

This was our first visit to Japan, and it was amazing. Five days holiday, two days work (cancer screening conference). We crammed a decent amount of tourism into the five days holiday. We stayed in Shinjuku, one of the several cities that make up the mega-city of Tokyo, within a couple of metro stops of the giant figure of Godzilla looking over some buildings into the street, the impressive Meiji Shinto shrine in several acres of parkland, the fish market, Tokyo Tower and the scramble crossing at Shibuya, reputed to be the busiest crossroads in the world. We also had a day visiting Mount Fuji, including a boat trip on lake Hakone, in which for a brief moment, the mist lifted, and we got the above sight of the mountain peeping through the clouds.

Japan proved a number of my expectations wrong. I had expected it to be ruinously expensive, but in fact food and drink were remarkably cheap. Although an enormous city of about thirty million souls, Tokyo had many pleasant and peaceful parks and green areas. Although we sometimes had difficulty finding a restaurant in which the menu could make itself understood to us and we could make ourselves understood to staff, the people were kind and polite, and did their best to help us. And there were streets around the fish market and Uena which had the traditional small shophouses, bars and coffee shops of old Asia.

There were another couple of bonuses. It was lovely that our son Tom came too, fulfilling his long-held dream of visiting Japan, he being a black belt in Jiu-Jitsu and an enthusiast of Manga, Animé, video gaming etc. Tom had a great time, and unlike Linda and myself, spoke a little bit of Japanese. It was also delightful that our pals from Atlanta, Bob and Irina, were also there. We had some very enjoyable sightseeing, eating and drinking with them.

As regards eating, I have one minor negative comment. The trouble with sashimi, the raw fish platter, is that everyone thinks that everyone else loves it. Thus, it is always ordered, and we all dutifully plough our way through it, feigning great enthusiasm. On the other hand, when we had breakfast around the fish market, where the fish had been only a few hours out of the sea, the sushi and sashimi were so good that even I, a doner kebab philistine, was knocked for six.

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There was a slight disagreement between myself and madam when we arrived back at Heathrow on Sunday night. As we waited an hour and a quarter for our luggage to appear on the carousel, I remarked that it was all too typical that the travel goes smoothly until you get back to the UK, and then everything grinds to a halt. Madam told me to shut up. Her perfectly legitimate point is that that sort of talk doesn’t help at all. She also notes that it makes me sound like a grumpy old man, and of course we wouldn’t want to give that false impression.

I still, however, find it immensely frustrating that the welcome to Britain usually includes a major delay or inconvenience. And this isn’t a political point, a right-wing-left-wing thing. I was a trade union officer for twenty-odd years and am still a committed socialist. However, there is nothing in Das Kapital to say that no-one should give a shit whether your luggage comes out on time. There is not a word in Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that dictates that the trains must always be late.

I am also often reminded that it is not the fault of the management and staff of the transport company, baggage handlers or whatever. When your train is half an hour late and there is still no sign of its advent, it is not the fault of the uniformed loafers beguiling the time chatting to each other on the platform, and monumentally put out when a passenger enquires about the likelihood of the scheduled transport arriving in the near future. Well, whose fault is it, je me demande? My knee-jerk reaction is that it is certainly not mine, but on more sober reflection, maybe it is. It is my fault for expecting transport to run smoothly when a lifetime’s experience tells me otherwise.

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Anyway, rant over. I am immensely privileged to have had this holiday/work trip in Tokyo, and I should shut my fat face. It is a tremendous relief to be finished with work for the Christmas season, and it only remains for me to say:

A HAPPY CHRISTMAS AND A GOOD NEW YEAR TO EVERYONE EVERYWHERE.