Here’s what I’ve been up to lately:

Saturday October 4th: Went to see Randy Weston and Alex Blake at Kamigamo. That was an amazing night. Those two guys are no spring chickens but they play with all the mercurial energy of youth. Alex Blake plays his bass like a crazy man, and both of them are just pulling, no yanking music up from the depths of their souls. At the end of the night Randy Weston thanked us all for a deeply spiritual evening – and truly I felt blessed. So much so, I bought the CD.

Sunday 5th: Braved the rains and went to the Vegetarian festival at Okazaki park and ate a lot of food. Despite the incessant inclemency there was quite a big turn out and the lady who runs Sunny Place told me later she sold all her foodage. Here are a couple of pictures of things that look (and taste) like hotdogs and burgers but aren’t, and me enjoying an organic beer.

Wednesday 8th: Went to “Gnome” Irish pub on Kawaramachi. It’s a good place, good music, lovely food but no customers. I think it may need the Deep Kyoto treatment. Later on I went to “Alphabet A” on Pontocho with Massun, and Yoshida-kun turned up later too. That’s a good bar too. I really really ought to give it a review sometime…

Other than that a fairly normal week, worked a bit, wrote a couple of tests, and was told by some first years that I have a very small bum. Please don’t look at my bum, I said and moved swiftly away before any other ideas entered their heads. Went to “Field” Irish pub on Saturday to hear some Irish music, as they have a session there most weekends, but they weren’t much cop unfortunately. In fact the guy playing the tin whistle who seemed to be the leader, was practically tone deaf. So ended up in Joao instead. No problems with that though it’s a great place and we had a great chat with Taisho. Sunday I checked out the Parisian art exhibition at the Kyoto City Art Museum in Higashiyama. It was interesting but too packed with people to be enjoyable to be honest… Then last night I went to Uji. They have lit up the streets and the bridge there with lanterns decorated with scenes form the The Tale of Genji. All very pretty. It finishes on the 19th so go now if you can or check out the pics below (because who needs words when you can look at pictures?).

Today, I went to Otsu to record some narration for a KCTP promotional video (I’m as smooth as an NHK newscaster apparently) for which I received a handsome fee. I wonder how one gets into narration work… And that pretty much brings us up to speed. Here’s a couple of pictures of a friendly cat I met in Uji last night: