I stopped writing here because this was really only ever meant to be a travel journal, and when my travels ended it didn’t feel like there was much left to do. However, since I’m about to go back to Japan for the first time since I left three and a half years ago, to see in the beginning of the new decade on the small Okinawan island where I spent two of the most interesting years of the previous one, it would seem a waste not to reactivate and continue this journal, if only temporarily.

Whether in practice I’ll get much time to update it is hard to say, but the intention is there. I’ll try to put up some photos at the very least. I’ve missed writing – missed having something specific to write about – and it’s nice to have an excuse to start again.

Now I really must go and pack.

A few months ago, in an all-night café near Liverpool St. station, I ended up talking to a small group of people in interesting hats who were sitting at the next table. When they left, they gave me a flyer for their monthly cabaret, Stranger Than Paradise.

I’ve been a couple of times now and it’s among the best things I know of. Thank goodness for chance meetings in 24 hour cafés. The couple I’ve been to have featured fire-eating, harmonica beat-boxing, puppetry, burlesquery, contortionism, and a beautiful lady from the 1940s playing startling and brilliant covers of 90s rock songs, including “Creep” by Radiohead and Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box”, on the ukelele. Next Sunday it happens again, and I am already much looking forward to it.

Unfortunately, my memories of the last one were seriously marred by the fact that as we walked to get a bus in the wee small hours of Sunday morning, in the vicinity of London Bridge station, a young well-dressed, hair-gelled city type ran up to us, punched the friend I was with full-on in the face, breaking his nose, and then jogged off casually, without looking back or once uttering a single word. It was the most creepily inhuman thing I’ve ever seen a human being do, and I’m still completely at a loss when I think about it. Beware of People, is the only lesson I can draw from it.

The other week I had a roll of film from my old Russian box camera cross-processed, which essentially means ‘deliberately processed in the wrong chemicals’ (in this case, I asked the shop to process my normal negative film in slide film chemicals). Consequently, the colours are all wrong in a strangely pleasing way. A couple of my favourites are above.

At the beginning of May, two men came up to me in the street late at night and relieved me of the burden of my bag, wallet, and phone. I had little choice in the matter: I did start running at first, but then I almost immediately realised that my mobile phone was not something I cared enough about to risk getting knifed in the back for, so I turned around and handed it over.

Interestingly, getting mugged has been a lesson in how easily replaceable almost everything but data is: I was very glad that a couple of months ago I’d found a little piece of software to back up the phone numbers from my phone’s memory. Consequently, the mugging led to a couple of weeks of inconvenience until I managed to replace my stolen devices and pour all the numbers and music back into them, after which all was more-or-less as it was before. With a bit of luck the day will soon be here where even getting killed will just result in a couple of weeks of disembodied inconvenience until the insurance company coughs up for a new body into which your mind can be restored from a backup copy. Until then, though, I will continue to operate at a heightened level of alertness.

The pictures I took indoors came out quite dull and misty but they proved the general principle, so a couple of days later I took my hi-tech pinhole camera for a sunny late afternoon wander around the neighbourhood. The results are (obviously) pretty lo-fi, and I had to turn the contrast and saturation up a bit on my computer, but I quite like their grainy, dreamy feel. The speckles, incidentally, are almost certainly an indication that I need to clean the inside of my camera.

Anyway, if anyone else feels like having a go, let me know — I’d love to see the results. I think you could probably place the pinhole over another lens, but you’d have to use longer exposure times (the above were all about a couple of seconds at ISO 100 and propped on a wall and the ground respectively). Experiment is the only way really. The smaller the pinhole the sharper the image should be, but the less light you’ll get (so you’ll need a longer exposure). There’s lots of info on Wikipedia. Good luck.

It was a musical weekend, too. Having hardly played guitar in public at all in the last few years, I played twice in one weekend. On Saturday my sister’s theatre company put on a cabaret to raise money for a play they’re planning to put on in the summer. My friend and band-mate Jess lent her harmonies to an old song of mine. It was a very nice evening. I love a cabaret.

On Sunday, Jess put on an acoustic gig at her actual house to raise money for the mental health charity she works for. A bunch of people came to listen to songs, eat battenburgs, and drop money into cans. For the sake of variety, I brought along my sanshin and played the old Okinawan song “Asatoya yunta” (安里屋ユンタ) — somewhat incompetently, it has to be said, but heck, I think even an incompentently-performed Okinawan folk song is still usually better than no Okinawan folk song.

…I just found an Eisa group playing a nice version of Asatoya yunta on YouTube. (The music doesn’t actually start until about 40 seconds in but it is well worth the wait).

That was the plan, anyway. What happened in practice was quite different: she was refused entry by UK immigration on the basis that they didn’t believe she was a genuine tourist. Why? Because she didn’t have a detailed itinerary for her three month stay. This, we were told, is ‘not a prerequisite’, but still enough grounds to refuse her entry. So, to summarise: she was refused entry to the UK for not having something that isn’t required. I’m sure Kafka would have clapped with delight. Welcome to the UK!

I did say to the immigration officer who called me with the news that surely detailed itineraries are the kind of thing you make when you’re visiting somewhere for ten days, but not when you are going to have plenty of time and be staying with locals. When in fact one of the purposes of your trip was to avoid having to sort things like childcare out from the other side of the world. By that time, though, the decision had been made and it was obvious that arguing would amount to nothing other than conducting an investigation into the sound my head makes as it smacks repeatedly against the glassy, impenetrable surface of a vast bureaucracy.

So instead of three months, she was kindly allowed to stay at my house rather than a detention centre for two days until the next flight back via Seoul, the way she came. For what it’s worth, we did have a very nice two days – we tried to fit in as much as possible, in the hope that she might feel that she’d at least got something out of her trip.

I could rage about the idiocy of it; I could speculate about the extent to which this sort of thing is likely to be a fairly direct consequence of increased pressure on Immigration from our thuggish Home Secretary. But I won’t, if only because what galls me even more than all that is just this: that after three years in Japan during which I was treated so well, my first Japanese friend to visit the UK should be treated like this. Put simply, it made me feel ashamed of the UK and of what it increasingly seems to be becoming.

Set up as an experimental unit back in the days when the BBC had enough spare money to set up experimental units, the Radiophonic Workshop were providing BBC programmes with avant-garde electronic soundtracks years before the invention of the synthesiser.

I’d always imagined the Workshop to be staffed with comic-book stereotypical electronics boffins in white lab coats, but in actual fact most of the staff were experimental composers, with backgrounds in musique concrète and jazz, and the patience to piece together elaborate compositions produced entirely by manipulating and cutting up tape-recordings.

For someone with an interest in electronic music, it was inexpressibly exciting. These people, with only tape machines and basic oscillators, were making music that still — 40 or 50 years on — sounds futuristic, and far less dated than a lot of music from 10 years ago sounds nowadays.

It was also an interesting study in the ways that constraint often enhances creativity: at one point two former radiophonists complain that the day the workshop got its first synthesiser was the day the quality of their output began to decline — that up until that point they’d had only tape to play with, so they’d had to think about exactly what they were doing, whereas from that point on making electronic music began to be about faffing with a machine trying to find a sound you like.

Anyway, if you have any interest in electronic music, it is well worth a watch, and — luckily enough — it seems the programme can be downloaded here. (Thanks to Andrew for finding the link).

In my experience, out of every ten people, about nine have never heard of John Martyn and one thinks he’s just about the best thing ever. I don’t think I’ve never met anyone who knows his music who doesn’t think he’s pretty great. If you haven’t already, please acquaint yourself with his music at the first opportunity. As long as you have working ears and a human soul, you will probably like it.

In fact, never mind that. Listen to him right now, playing on TV in about 1973:

…See?

The years haven’t treated him so well — he’s lost a leg, his voice is now probably huskier and certainly more slurred than Tom Waits — but his singing voice is still achingly beautiful, and even despite some rather ill-advised and unfortunate saxophone-playing, the concert was almost unthinkably good.

Although I would have been happy just seeing John Martyn, the support act — John Smith — was a total bonus. I’d actually been quite wanting to see him since I came across his website last year, but was unprepared for the extent of his greatness. He played the whole set unaccompanied — just him and an acoustic guitar on a stage that seemed several sizes too large — but he was great, and his final song, Winter, was just surpassingly brilliant, and essentially unlike anything I’ve ever heard before. Today I found a video (below) of him on YouTube, and I watched it over and over until I had to leave the house. I can’t help but feel that he is a potential John Martyn of the future. Anyway, I’m planning to see him play at a smaller venue this coming Sunday, and hopefully get a copy of his CD too, so we shall see…

A long exposure in which I appear as a ghost with St. Paul’s Cathedral in the background.

This man was sitting on a bench, speaking into a dictaphone and looking at his watch. Perhaps he is a spy.

A view across the river to St. Paul’s.