Sons of Loki

Having assembled my life into a bunch of cardboard boxes, binbags, and guitar cases, my dad and I hit the road at about 9:30am and after an uneventful trip through the heart of England, we got to Leeds. Which is where we spent half an hour getting lost in Meanwood before finding Pickerings, my letting agent. Signed the contract, picked up the keys, and then another thirty minutes getting lost in Headingley before finding my house and my sister and Chris waiting outside.

My house is a lot further out than I thought – roughly halfway between Headingley and Meanwood, and a bit of a hike from the shops in Headingley. (Google Maps made it look practically next door to my old halls at James Bailie Park – which is sort of is, only not by car.) But it’s brilliant. I love it. Big, airy living room, a big spare room just dying to have a nice coffee table and big TV in it, nice old fashioned houses out the window, and a wonderfully creepy cellar that looks like some secret police’s secret interrogation room. (I love hidden rooms – you know, big spaces that no one goes in. Maybe it’s the mystery of it.)

Front room...

...and living room, for want of a better descriptor.

Can you spot what's special about this kitchen? (Hint: nothing is, it's just a kitchen)

THIS IS CREEPY

IT IS PAST MIDNIGHT WHY AM I TAKING PHOTOS DOWN HERE AAARGHH

OH GOD WHAT WAS THAT SOUND UPSTAIRS

and who's this groovy cat?

Anyway, we had a meal at a nice little restaurant nearby and a few drinks before retiring to my house – my house! – for bed. In the morning, my dad headed back for Norwich and I had morning coffee at my dining table in my house while listening to the Archers and then mopped the floors (they’re still ingrained with dirt, but apparently we’re just gonna cover it up with rugs, so that’s okay).

Down to IKEA, then. It’s the first time I’ve ever been to the Swedish furniture megastore, but it was quite a remarkable experience – I feel that most of modern culture can be explained by the cheap, mass-produced mass-market designs there. It’s brilliant. It’s cheap, but stylish. It’s stylish from being cheap. It’s making a virtue of a vice.

Bought a laundry basket (I do not want clothes strewn across my floor), a hanging clothes hanger thing, a few tealight holders (essential) and a nice full-length mirror for £15. Thus bought, we had hot dogs (when you exit the store, they sell hot dogs! What a country) and headed back to my house.

And then I waved goodbye to them from the front door of my house. Which was a first. I mean, usually people are waving goodbye to me, or I’m waving goodbye from the door of my room, but here I was, homeowner (sort of), standing on the front step of my house and waving as Chris and Kate drove off.

And so I turned and headed inside.

I made some coffee and set about unpacking my my PC, dragging the desk over to the window (it was tucked up at the end of the room) and plugging my speakers in. Then books, clothes, decorations, until I was pretty much sorted.

I began assembling an array of toilet literature, starting with a wet copy of the Big Issue and Mumon’s The Gateless Gate, a collection of koans which are perfect for meditating on whilst sitting upon the bog.

A monk asked Nansen: `Is there a teaching no master ever preached before?’
Nansen said: `Yes, there is.’

`What is it?’ asked the monk.

Nansen replied: `It is not mind, it is not Buddha, it is not things.’

Feeling peckish, I went to cook up some pasta, only to find that the hob is gas and the lighter was dead. Not to worry! I went down to Sainsbury’s. Sainsbury’s was closed! I went to KFC instead and bought a burger, then found a newsagents and got a lighter for good measure. (How I miss the humble combini.)

I underestimated how scary being alone in a big four-bedroom house might be. I was terrified when I heard whistling from inside the house! only to realise it was just on BBC iPlayer from my room upstairs. I have a big stick to hit intruders, though for now I securely lock my door at night.

Today, Monday, I set about getting all the rest of the stuff I needed: an overdraft from Halifax (denied!), a haircut from the usual place on the Otley Road, next to Oxfam (stylised!), a secondhand novel from Oxfam (I just walked in thinking “I wish they had the New York Trilogy, but they won’t” but to my surprise, there it was on the shelf, as if it had been waiting for me all summer) and got a bus into town proper. (Bus’ only £1.70 now. Actually, that might be the same as last year.) At Argos, I bought some bathroom scales and their cheapest exercise bike before riding the bus back uptown with 13kg of exercise bike under my armpit. Dragging that thing back home, I set about assembling it and fixing myself some lunch when a man arrived to check the kitchen electrics. I busied myself clearing up junk from around the living room. (In hindsight, I probably should have offered him tea, but I’m new to this house lark.)

So out I ventured again to Wilkos, where I got some razors and conditioner and a cork noticeboard (false advertising on the label, as there were no pins inside and now I can’t pin anything up) and some blutac (so I can finally stick stuff to the walls) and coathangers (so all my stuff ain’t lying over the floor), before finally stocking up on edibles at Sainsbury’s (man, that place is expensive). Decorated my room. Felt less guilty about watching two episodes of the Wire back-to-back by cycling all the way through them.

And so here I am. Installed in my house. Ready for term. I am still woefully unprepared.

Peter and I, the wee hours of Sunday morning, karaokesuruing it up for Fran and Katy's birthday celebrations.

Things are pretty much just ticking over here. I’ve got bored with my weight and am aiming to lose 10 kg, which means I’m finally taking advantage of the free gym next door and working my way up to 5k runs (so glad I brought my running shoes) and a bit of muscle training. Also, I may be appropriately dressed for winter at last, but the resultant hole in finances means it will be a pretty miserable Christmas until the loan comes in in January and I get paid for my articles, at which point I am hypothetically stable for the rest of the year.

Until I get my mid-term results on Monday and everything falls apart! We did the exam last Monday, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t do so well. And so I I await the the results with great interest. If I get anything near a pass, I’ll be very happy.

I love it here, but I just can’t seem to get my head round the whole, y’know, language side of it. I keep getting urges to run off to photography college or sequester myself in a hotel for a week while I write  a novel, which is obviously not what I should be concentrating on right now. Must do language.

I think I’m going to concentrate on piling through every single goddamn kanji in Heisig’s book, because if there’s a way into Japanese that I can deal with, it’s the kanji characters. They fascinate me, in all their myriad forms and disguises, and I pick them up much easier than the actual vocabulary.

A weird thing just happened; I was listening to “Shibuya”, off the Lost in Translation soundtrack (everyone’s visiting Tokyo this month and they all want to visit the New York Bar and I cannot afford to go there on a weekly basis guysss) and there’s a bit at the end where it segues into the mundane sound of a shinkansen train and the PA chime and the announcer saying “この電車はこだま号、新大阪ゆきです” (“This is a Kodama train bound for Shin-Osaka”) and it suddenly hit me, a memory of listening to that in the UK and thinking “I can’t wait until I’m in Japan and I hear that for real” and it all came back to me, the anticipation of coming to Japan, and now suddenly I’m here and I’ve been here for so long that I forgot it this morning up until that point when it once again hit me – hey, I’m in Japan.

So I have wandering feet again. I want to head out to Yokohama or ride the Tama monorail or, pfft, I don’t know, just go somewhere. I haven’t been anywhere in ages.

I’ve just realised where this has come from. The last time I was in Japan was 72 days. Today is day 71 of this expedition. On Saturday I will have been abroad for longer than ever before. Interesting.

New favourite band: J-technopopsters Perfume, who are irresistibly moe and backed up by some bangin’ choons. Am planning to enter Writers’ And Artists’ 2010 short story competition. In negotiations for possible house to live in next year.

(Allegedly she’s singing “smoking cigars”, but you can never be too sure with Bjork)

Last night was my planned birthday celebrations, and I was genuinely heartened by just how many people turned up: old friends, new friends, friends who were sort of in between. A group of us set out from Shinjuku station to the Shinjuku Park Tower and the Hotel Park Hyatt. Oh, the sumptuous wood panelling, the carpets, the soft lighting and the overwhelming sense of sheer class! It’s another world in there, of luxury and considerable wealth, and it’s exciting just to spend an hour there.

So, up to the 54th floor, home to the New York Bar: I had cocked up slightly, telling people we’d dodge the cover charge if we got there before 8pm, but (probably to combat people like me) it turns out that it’s only if you leave before 8pm. But there was a general consensus of “hey, when will we next be here”, and so we settled in at our table and I ordered a bourbon and soda and after coordinating plans with the people who would be coming later/were already there/were lost basked in the general atmosphere. A jazz band came on. The lights of Shinjuku twinkled. Bar staff hurried to and fro. People drank. The bar was being all marbley and mahogany-y and muted and sombre and classy and I wished I could have just bottled up the ambience because it was so ridiculously cool.

Entry, service charge and one drink? 5,000 yen – £33. Yeah. Obscene luxury comes at a price.

So we ditched the Hyatt and met up with the others at Shinjuku, and then got to Shibuya to meet yet more people, so that in total we had me, Ella, Fran, Dan, Hattie, Satomi, Rob, Miles, Katy, Chris, Jan, Yuta, Tom, Kat, and Ruben, and it was so awesome to have all my friends there and to have everyone turn up, and that was what made it such a good night.

We split up: half of us went to get some drinks in, the other half went to get some food, and I hadn’t eaten so I went with them. Round about 11:30pm it was last trains, so most people headed home, leaving the Mancunians (Tom/Ruben/Kat), Jan, Rob, Dan, Satomi and Verity to PARTY HARD UNTIL DAWN. In theory. We couldn’t quite work out where we wanted to go, and Shinichi Osawa was playing in Roppongi but that was kinda expensive and then we missed the last train, and we could have gone to WOMB, but then I thought hey, Club Air is only 3,500 yen and I’d like to see what that’s like, so we marched through the backstreets of Shibuya and eventually stumbled across Air, a house/techno club hidden underneath a bohemian restaurant in a residential area. They were IDing, which meant Satomi and Verity couldn’t get in, unfortunately, so they went their separate ways with Rob while the six of us left headed down the flights of stairs into Air. And it was pretty good. Drinks weren’t too pricey (although anything isn’t too pricey after the Hyatt), and after a year at Leeds of Halo and Oceana I’d forgotten how much I enjoy house music. Some bald British chaps called Shapeshifters were DJing, which Tom was excited about. And so we partied into the wee hours, some Japanese girls we’d just met spontaneously erupted into singing “Happy Birthday” for me, Dan had his smuggled-in bottle of scotch plucked from his hand by one of the staff, some Spirytus was downed (96% – I was not touching that stuff), we exited merrily at 4:30am or so and got back to the station largely without incident (he says, glossing).

Funny thing on the way back: a trio of homebound musicians (judging by their instruments) on the train were talking in Japanese about De La Soul and Marvin Gaye, and I caught Tom’s eye, and he was like “Are you hearing this?” and suddenly the musicians went silent and the girl said “聞いた?” (“They heard?”) and an awkward moment was avoided when quick as a flash Tom launches into a conversation with them about Marvin Gaye, which lasts a merry serendipitous ten seconds before it’s our stop and we have to get off. Ah, those little connections you make with complete strangers, sometimes. It’s really rather wonderful.