Reflections on Food

Looks like a doughnut, crispy and delicious ... but then it has curry in the middle😮

Breakfast most days came from the konbini because we got up so early, onigiri mostly and little crispy croquette things, some days steamed buns with pork filling.

Other favourite konbini finds were these edamame snacks:

We aimed to try and eat different every day ... sushi, ramen, rice, and miso soup with everything.

For the authentic Japanese experience we had bento boxes on the Shinkansen. I picked the one on the right ... picking each thing up and wondering what it was.

Monkey was keen for me to try Yakiniku, tabletop cooking at its best, just order plates of meat and cook it yourself. 

After our boat trip down the river and a visit to the Ghoul Museum we had wild boar and venison burgers at the cafe:

In Kochi we had the local speciality, Katsuo no Tataki, seared tuna, cooked while we watched:

and it was my favourite meal of the trip, utterly delicious;

Eating udon, prior to going to the Udon making workshop:

Eel is the speciality in Kawagoe but we didn't manage to have any while we were there so we had some in a lovely little place in Matsuyama ... served in beautiful lacquered boxes:

Monkey had a sudden need for pancakes. We spotted a place by the roadside and did very precarious U-turn ... and it was worth it.

Last night ice-cream selfie at the Tokyo Sky Tree

Go to Japan ... eat food ... enjoy.

Reflections on Japan

When you plan something for as long as I planned my trip to Japan the comedown was always going to take a while. We packed every day with interesting and delightful experiences and I came back knowing it cannot be the only time I visit. As a place Japan manages to feel both familiar and utterly different. I was very keen to follow Monkey's advice so as not to be seen as a 'bloody foreigner' by doing stupid, disrespectful things. I confess, I did not manage to speak much Japanese.

Some things will get their own post but this one is an overview of the trip, not necessarily highlights. We tried not to be distracted from what we were doing or seeing by taking too many photos, allowing ourselves to just look and enjoy. 

After a couple of days in Kawagoe and Tokyo we took the Shinkansen to Hiroshima. This was the one place I had very much wanted to visit and really the only tourist stop, though it feels weird to call the Peace Memorial that. It was utterly overwhelming to see the shell of the building and to learn more and understand the impact, both immediate and long term, that the bomb had on the city and people of Hiroshima. The building was iconic even before the war and it marks pretty much ground zero of the explosion and was one of only a few brick structures that remained standing, and after much local debate the city decided to retain this stark reminder of the bomb's impact as part of their commitment to strive for a peaceful future. The Peace Museum tells the background history and then tells the stories of many of the people whose lives were affected, some who died and others who survived. Some of it is quite graphic and not for the faint hearted or those who want their history nicely sanitised. 

From Hiroshima we travelled to Onomichi which is the start of the Shimanami cycle route across the inland sea. This was taken from the top of a small cablecar and looks across the sea towards Shikoku (though I think all the islands are in the way). Mountains were quite a big feature of our trip.

Over two days we cycled about 100 kilometres stopping off half way on Omishima at the Miyaura-Goten hostel, eating wild boar curry and watching the sunset behind the mountains. It was a wonderful traditional old building with 'shoes off by the door please', sliding doors, futons and tatami mats. It was just the kind of place I had hoped to stay since the rest of the time we had boring modern hotels.

The final stretch across to Shikoku is the Kurushima Kaikyo bridge which is 4km long:

We then travelled to Matsuyama to hire a car and spent the next week exploring the island of Shikoku.

We had meals in random roadside restaurants:

Saw the Pacific Ocean (from the other side):

We took tea in the teahouse in the Ritsurin Garden:

Made udon noodles:

Made paper at the Paper Museum:

Crossed the vine bridge in the Iya valley:

Got used to the squatty toilets:

Learned quite a bit of Japanese history, such as the significance of Sakamoto Ryoma:

Saw some castles ... and learned more Japanese history:

Saw lots, and lots and lots of cherry blossom:

... and very much admired the lack of rubbish anywhere that people happened to be gathering:

Walked the very narrow pavements without incident

Travelled by Shinkansen, train, bus, tram, bike, car, cablecar, chairlift, 

riverboat and ferry (back across the Seto Inland Sea to Naoshima):

Spent the night Japanese style:

and visited lots of onsens ... but you cant take photos inside so here is the outside of the Dogo Onsen, one of the oldest hot springs in Japan, claiming a 3,000 year history:

And I didn't use a knife and fork for a fortnight ... but more of that to come.

Incomprehensibly miraculous

I liked the way that the train company has lowered it's expectations of human behaviour; the 'quiet coach' is now renamed the 'quieter coach' in the hope that people might be able to just keep it down a bit.

Network Rail on the other hand are my new favourite company as when I went to the loo on York station I found this wonderful *FREE* sanitary towel dispenser in the ladies. How excellent is that. I mean I don't need them any more, but hurray for progress. 

I have been up and down the country, and then down and up the country in the last ten days and was looking forward to a little calm relaxation for the last few days of my leave but tomorrow I find myself getting the middle-of-the-night coach to London to keep Monkey company while she gets her VISA FOR JAPAN!!! It's been a frustrating six months that she should have been there enjoying all sorts of wonderful experiences, but they finally opened the border again on 1st of March and with any luck she might still see some cherry blossom. 

Also so much for all the blog posts I was going to get written (travel time can mean plenty of reading time) but this is due back today so will just get the one done.

I have followed Oliver Burkeman's column in the Grauniad and he has written lots of books, of which 'Four Thousand Weeks' is the most recent. Four thousand weeks sounds like a lot in one way, but hardly any in another (it is only an average, I plan on having well over 5000). I liked this book because it is more about having some perspective on our ideas about time and how we use it, rather than yet another time management tome. I am not one of those busy busy people anyway. I fritter my life away in huge swathes some times. I can't remember what I have done with the last decade. And I have developed my 'saying no' skills over the last year. I noted when I looked at my payslip yesterday that I have earned less this year than last, and that's because I have done less overtime, taken my days off and enjoyed them. But I do still worry about wasting time and that I should have some kind of long term plan with things I want to achieve. Along comes a book that basically tells me not to stress about it. 

He talks here about how people try and 'clear the decks' of all the small clutter of life before they feel about to apply themselves to the big important projects:

"One can waste years this way, systematically postponing precisely the things one cares about the most.
What's needed instead in such situations, I gradually came to understand, is a kind of anti-skill: not the counter-productive strategy of trying to make yourself more efficient, but rather a willingness to resist such urges - to learn to stay with the anxiety of feeling overwhelmed, of not being on top of everything, without automatically responding by trying to fit more in. To approach your days in this fashion means, instead of clearing the decks, declining to clear the decks, focusing instead on what's truly of greatest consequence while tolerating the discomfort of knowing that, as you do so, the decks will be filling up further, with emails and errands and other to-dos, many of which you may never get round to at all." (p.50)

I liked the book because it is a philosophical musing on existence as much as it is advice:

... but now here comes mortality, to steal away the life that was rightfully yours.
Yet, on reflection, there's something very entitles about this attitude. Why assume that an infinite supply of time is the default, and mortality an outrageous violation? Or to put it another way, why treat four thousand weeks as a very small number, because it's so tiny compared with infinity, rather than treating it as a huge number, because it's so many more weeks than if you had never been born? Surely only somebody who'd failed to notice how remarkable it is that anything is, in the first place, would take their own being as such a given - as if it were something they had every right to have conferred upon them, and never to have taken away. So maybe it's not that you've been cheated out of an unlimited supply of time; maybe it's almost incomprehensibly miraculous to have been granted any time at all." (p.66)

This one drew my attention because it coincides with my own feelings about parenting and children. Too much parenting focuses on what the child will become and does not allow them to just be, though it is just as applicable to adults:

"In his play The Coast of Utopia, Tom Stoppard puts an intensified version of this sentiment into the mouth of the nineteenth-century Russian philosopher Alexander Herzen, as he struggles to come to terms with the death of his son, who has drowned in a shipwreck - and who's life, Herzen insists, was no less valuable for never coming to fruition in adult accomplishments. 'Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up,' Herzen says. 'But a child's purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn't distain what only lives for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment ... Life's bounty is in its flow. later is too late.' " (p.132)

And this, most of all, because it proposes the idea that a life well spent does not mean you have to achieve something significant, and it is the one I felt that I really took to heart from my reading:

"No wonder it comes as a relief to be reminded of your insignificance: it's the feeling of realising that you'd been holding yourself, all this time, to standards you couldn't reasonably be expected to meet. And this realisation isn't merely calming but liberating, because once you're no longer burdened by such an unrealistic definition of a 'life well spent', you're freed to consider the possibility that a far wider variety of things might qualify as meaningful ways to use your finite time. You're freed, too, to consider the possibility that many of the things you're already doing with it as more meaningful than you'd supposed - and that until now, you'd subconsciously been devaluing them, on the grounds that they weren't significant enough." (p.212)

He ends the book with some questions and some points of advice but also with a quote from Jung that says, to paraphrase and abbreviate, put one foot in front of the other and quietly do the next and most necessary thing.

Stay safe. Be kind. Relish the miraculous.

Growing and making things part five-ish

Quite by accident, although I had made a list of a few yarn shops, we came across 'Stephen and Penelope's', a delightful little shop on Nieuwe Hoogstraat. They have the most fabulous selection of hand dyed yarn from all over the world. I wanted something local however so I bought some Undercover Otter (what a brilliant name, would love to know the story behind that). The little ones are for very expensive hexipuffs and the big hank for some random project I will give due consideration to.

I came home and set too with a vengeance to finish a few projects. My 'Lost in Time' shawl is now done. I can't seem to get a photo that shows the colour very well, but you get the idea. 

The Nori dress is making excellent progress, 

but only because I ran out of yarn for the Lilliana blanket that will be a present for mum and dad. This is a little sneak peek because I know mum comes and reads my blog sometimes 

(look away now mum):

The tomato plants in the porch were slowly giving up the ghost. I have continued to pick the tomatoes as they ripened over the last few weeks so I plucked these remaining fruits and then put the plants in the recycle bin. It has been a very satisfying exercise to grow them and I will start earlier next year. I think I just about covered the cost of the plants.

Anne Frank Huis

I find myself at a loss to explain how important our final evening in Amsterdam was to me. I first read Anne Frank's diary when I was about eleven or twelve so I feel like I have been waiting forty years to go and see the 'house behind'. I read the book again twenty years ago when the definitive edition was published, and then again a few weeks ago before our trip. I am distraught that I cannot find my original copy when I still have a shelf of other books from my teenage years.

The book endures because it is so well written and so intelligent. It is not the diary of a child, recounting events and complaining about the food, it is her inner life, her thoughts and feelings and is reflective of her own thinking and behaviour. Her growing up was not put on hold by the terrifying situation they found themselves in, it carries on regardless, and her writing became an outlet for everything she was going through. The things she writes about the other people are not merely factual but gives us insight into their characters too, and her descriptions of life and the atmosphere in the secret annex are mature and perceptive beyond her years. I don't often think of a particular book that everyone should read it, but if it is true of any book then it is true of this one. Her diary makes Anne a real person in ways it is hard to explain; no, there is no museum for any of the other people who's names appear in the deportation list with Anne's, but her diary ensures we are reminded that they too were all human beings with lives, loves and hopes for the future, her humanity reminds us of theirs and helps diminish the anonymity that accompanies numbers like six million.

Here from Saturday 7th November 1942:
"It's different with Father. When I see him being partial to Margot, approving Margot's every action, praising her, hugging her, I feel a gnawing ache inside, because I'm mad about him. I model myself on Father, and there's no one in the world I love more. He doesn't realise that he treats Margot differently from me: Margot just happens to be the cleverest, the kindest, the prettiest and the best. But I have a right to be taken seriously too. I've always been the clown and the mischief-maker of the family; I've always had to pay double for my sins: once with scolding and then again with my own sense of despair. I'm no longer satisfied with the meaningless affection or the supposedly serious talks. I long for something from Father that he's incapable of giving. I'm not jealous of Margot; I never have been. I'm not envious of her brains or her beauty. It's just that I'd like to feel that Father really loves me, not because I'm his child, but because I'm me, Anne." (p.62-3)

This from August 1943, under the title 'A daily chore in our little community: peeling potatoes!':
"We go on peeling. I glance at Dussel out of the corner of my eye. Lost in thought, he shakes his head (over me, no doubt), but says no more.
I keep peeling. Then I look at Father, on the other side of me. To Father, peeling potatoes is not a chore, but precision work. When he reads, he has a deep wrinkle in back of his head. But when he's preparing potatoes, beans or vegetables, he seems to be totally absorbed  in his task. He puts on his potato-peeling face, and when it's set in that particular way, it would be impossible for him to turn out anything less than a perfectly peeled potato." (p.130-1)

From a long entry Saturday 15th July 1944; it feels amazing that Anne continues to feel hope in the face of what they have been through:
"It's difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It's a wonder I haven't abandoned all my ideals, they seem absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.
It's utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death. I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too will end, that peace and tranquility will return once more. In the meantime, I just hold on to my ideals. Perhaps the day will come when I'll be able to realise them!

Yours, Anne M. Frank" (p.330)

The Anne Frank Huis has had a long journey from the empty shell it was when Otto Frank returned to Amsterdam in 1945. In the 1950s it was nearly demolished but money was raised and the building was saved, and along with the one next door, became a museum and International Youth Centre. Over the following decades it was restored and renovated. The museum, I felt, struck exactly the right balance between being about Anne and being about the Holocaust. The rooms in the annex are quite separate from the museum with it's displays and audio guide; they are simply empty and subdued. Despite the steady flow of people through the space it had an atmosphere of quiet respect. I was glad that they chose not to 'reconstruct' the rooms as they were. It reminds you that the people are gone. It is not some kind of quaint 'how people lived in the olden days' space. It was a hiding place, a refuge from almost certain death, a suspension of life for the inhabitants. 

The annex was stripped bare after the arrest of the occupants, all that remained, and are displayed in the rooms, are a few books, a corrected piece of Margot's 'homework' and a shopping list. The pictures that Anne had stuck to her bedroom wall have been restored and returned to their original position. I cannot find a picture of the girls' height markings on another piece of preserved wallpaper, that show Anne grew 13cm during their time in hiding. It is on the wall of the Franks' room, along with a small map that Otto was using to track the progress of the Allied invasion. It is these tiny details that make these rooms so meaningful. You are not visiting to see how they lived, the diary tells you that, what you are asked to do is imagine their situation, their daily fear of discovery, and their fate. Our only disappointment was to find that because of ongoing building work the original of Anne's diary and other writings had been replaced with facsimiles. 

Monkey and I outside 263 Prinsengracht.

For more remote readers, you can take a virtual tour of the house at The Secret Annex Online.

This piece of film from 1941 shows Anne looking from the balcony of their apartment, it is the only known moving image of her.

Vincent

Wednesday took us to the Vincent Van Gogh museum. His works are among the most recognisable and influential in the world. We waited patiently for a view of the Sunflowers, it was surrounded by a group of schoolchildren. It is worth waiting for. The gallery was busy but not crowded, I think we were glad to have avoided the height of the tourist season, it must be impossible to see anything sometimes. 

As a gallery it shows how art should be exhibited. The galleries were themed and there was adequate but not excessive explanation of the artworks and artists. 

A gallery of self portraits showed the progress of his style and techniques. 

(These are photos of the postcards I bought, you can't take photos in the gallery.)

Self Portrait with Straw Hat

Other galleries gave examples of other contemporary and influential artists and discussed the impact that these relationships had on Vincent's development as an artist.

red cabbages and onions

Being able to look up close and see his brushstrokes and the use of colours gave me a new appreciation for his work. I was stupidly disappointed not to find all the most famous of his paintings that are the familiar ones; Starry Night for example has been in the Museum of Modern Art in New York since 1941, but I found I was much more fascinated by the small inconspicuous paintings, like these shoes:

Shoes 1887

The Potato Eaters was quite an early work that was not well received, being considered too dark and full of mistakes, but Vincent himself was pleased with the representation of peasant life that he had achieved. It is now considered one of his most significant works. Although his paintings were exhibited he notoriously did not sell many works during his lifetime and was supported by his brother Theo who believed passionately in his art. After both their deaths Theo's wife Johanna and then his son Vincent Willem took on the task of promoting his art. His nephew was responsible for pursuing the project to build a gallery for Vincent's work, culminating in the Van Gogh Museum that opened in 1973.

The Potato Eaters

The time he spent studying and painting in France and then the decline of his mental health are documented through his works. The last year of his life was an incredible prolific period. In spite of his decline it was art that he focussed on, continuing to paint while in hospital, often copying other artists work or working from his own old sketches. Vincent has become this image of a tortured artist, but I was certainly left with the impression that he was a tortured soul for whom art was his only escape. I love the way he signed his paintings simply 'Vincent'.

Ears of Wheat

The museum also tells the story of his life, including examples of his extensive correspondence with his family that you can listen to. I love it when you are able to get to know the person and not just the artist. I took this photo of the display about the postal service of the time:

The tea towels were ridiculously expensive, so I bought cushion covers as our souvenir.