Altogether, this is a wonderful movie with outstanding performances and a palpable sense of tension and excitement throughout. The movie is also graced by the presence of two Oscar winners in Washington and Forest Whitaker. Very highly recommended!

A water purifier for my tap! 嬉しい！Now I can enjoy great tasting water direct from “our mother” Lake Biwa! And believe me, it DOES taste better! Mewby knows me best!

They do cute cappuccini too!

This first one is an old memory stirred up when I was home:

peeling an orange -
across the hallway Daddy kneels
praying at his chair

I wrote that on my first morning back home. I woke up early through jet lag, and my mom, being a restless spirit, hadn’t gotten enough sleep the night before so didn’t get up till late. This meant I had a long slow breakfast by myself in the kitchen, with my feet up on a heater, eating toast and oranges, drinking cup after cup of Yorkshire tea and reading Dharma Bums.

dark December dawn –
in my mother’s kitchen
tea and Kerouac

Chris Carver at work, had lent me Dharma Bums a couple of weeks before and I had taken it back with me to read on the journey. The bit I was reading that morning happened to be about Jack Kerouac hitchhiking all the way across America to his home town for Christmas, where he surprises his Mom in the kitchen and gives her a big hug. It’s a nice scene and it was timely reading it a couple of days before Christmas myself. Kerouac, one of the first people to popularize writing haiku in English, was by pure coincidence the topic of our first haiku class when I got back in January. Stephen, had decided to play us a recording of Mr. Kerouac reading his own poems. On the comments he made on the haiku I submitted, he asked me if I was telepathic.

The last one  I wrote a few days after my return to Kyoto. I woke up one morning at a ridiculously early time, and picking up Matteo Pistono’s In the Shadow of the Buddha, soon found myself lost in it.

sleepless reading –
under the kotatsu
dreams of Tibet

**********************

It was lovely to see them. As we have so often done before, the Mulrys, my mother and myself made a little day trip to that lovely North Yorkshire seaside town Whitby… Click through to the individual pictures on flickr if you would like a little more information.

And finally Saltburn with Mr. Potter… Here’s Mike Potter and his girlfriend Lisa who I met for the first time.And a charming lady she is too.

This is the place we had lunch at, Virgo’s in Saltburn. Saltburn is a lovely old Victorian seaside town on the wild north-east coast and Virgo’s is a very nice bistro/cafe with a great menu that includes several vegetarian dishes.

I had pasta with pesto and pine nuts. All the ps.

These two had some other stuff… We were all really satisfied anyway.

It was too cold and windy for walking so we retreated to the Ship – an old smugglers pub for pints and pirate impressions.

It’s always good to see Mr. Potter. Here’s a little Teesside moon from the journey back…

We had been there last three years ago on Xmas Eve, and enjoyed the stalls and the mulled wine, but it has increased in popularity since then, the crowds have gotten bigger and the mulled wine somehow wasn’t as good… To escape the crowds we wandered through the Umeda Sky Building and its garden instead. This is ourselves reflected in a window looking out on an illuminated waterfall.

Later we had dinner at Santa Lucia near Utsubo Park (thanks to Eric J. for that tip!). It was pretty good… Though a bit odd that we were seated in a greenhouse.

And the food was a little too salty. Back in Kyoto we went to Kisui and Miu needed four glasses of orange juice in quick succession to quench her thirst. Before heading back though we also took in the Yodogawa illuminations:

On the Sunday, (18th December) we visited Arashiyama Hanatouro (lantern light-up). It was crowded and very cold but well worth the visit.

After that we really needed a hot nabe to heat us up! I was positively dreaming of this on the train back.

This one from Soba no Mi Yoshimura was just the job!

To follow ~ Chrimbly pictures from jolly old England!

After the restaurant, our thirsts still unquenched we popped in at Kisui. Every year Setchan makes a big point of celebrating Halloween and having all her customers dress up. Setchan really loves Halloween. Anyway the place was full of lively characters, all in costume and all in high spirits who immediately burst into a rousing “Happy Birthday to you…!”  as soon as we walked through the door. Setchan and Risae’s costumes were particularly impressive:

And though we didn’t come in costume, Setchan has her own stash of wigs and accoutrements on hand and so we were encouraged to dress accordingly:

Then home for cake and candles – and as it was Halloween it seemed appropriate somehow that Mewby wear my AC/DC devil horns…

Plunging from the open grassy plain into primeval forest, we came upon a stream and Stephen Gill carefully placed some stones for the ladies to cross over.

Hesitant poets
cross the beck
on freshly-placed stones

Here in the woods we also encountered a stag who had somehow managed to avoid getting his antlers removed this year. The deer in Nara are quite unafraid of humans, and so to avoid having them injuring people their antlers are removed. This fellow is obviously faster or sneakier than most.

Here we are under a massive oak, descendant of oaks that have been here for thousands of years.

At Shinyakushiji we viewed 12 ancient statues of heavenly guardians, a big fat Buddha, and in the garden flowers like these:

Shinyakushiji -
a boy admires a girl
admiring Budhha

The persimmon trees in Nara were hung with luminous fruit… But I couldn’t help noticing the metal fencing and forsaken machinery – that was painted the same colour!

rusty ripe persimmon -
In the long grass
abandoned metal fences

Finally we returned to a cafe, where we had tea and delicious apple cake – and shared our haiku.

Finally something decent on the TV.

I was delighted that my own two offerings met with the others’ approval. And even more so that one of them made it onto the Hailstone website report. You can read some haiku by the other members and Stephen’s report there.

On the first day ten of us were driven in three cars (all praise to David McCullough, Hisashi Miyazaki and Stephen Gill for driving us) up to Toyama. After a lengthy journey we transferred to a cable car, and then a bus that drove us through a lovely national park, forested to begin with and then up into and beyond the clouds. Along the way, the bus slowed down so that we could see the Shomyo falls – the highest falls in Japan! I took a quick fuzzy pic out of the window with my i-phone:

Beyond the treeline we were treated to spectacular views of misty mountain slopes swooping down into a beautiful sea of clouds. Everybody on the bus was oohing and aahing at it but you’ll have to take my word for that as I failed to get a decent snap-shot.

And then we were off the bus and hiking up to our hostel. In the picture above you can see the road ahead of us, and if you notice Mewby (on the right) feeling inspired is scribbling a haiku in my notebook. The notebook incidentally was a gift from Stephen Gill which he bestowed, along with oranges, before our ascent. Here are some more pictures I took along the way. The path is beautifully cobbled and as Stephen said, looks very much like an old Roman road.

All of those pictures were taken with my i-phone as we were on the move. Once we reached the hostel though I whipped out my proper camera. The views were lovely and got lovelier as the sun went down.

After we’d had a good feed and some of the men had opened up the bottles of spirits they had brought along to loosen up our tongues, the haiku sharing session commenced. I’m pretty sure that Stephen will be posting the best of them on the Hailstone site in the near future. There were a couple of really nice ones from David as I remember and Miki and Atsushi had some good ones too. As for me well, I’d scribbled something along the way, but I wasn’t satisfied with it so I kept working on it, and working on it until…

…I still wasn’t satisfied with it. Anyway, my poems won’t get better if I don’t open them up to scrutiny I thought, so I opened my mouth to deliver my gentle poem on soft clouds and mountain tops – and at that moment two rather silly women came in from outside, sat down behind me, and started shrieking noisily about the cold. And they continued shrieking quite happily for some time about whatever other topic entered their heads. And wouldn’t stop. SHRIEKING. At the top of their piercing voices. So I found myself shouting rather than reciting the following words in an oddly inaproppriate tone of intense irritation:

gently on green slopes
cloud scraps drifting
into a hollow milk mist sea

Stephen wasn’t happy with the word “hollow”, but though I’m not so happy with the poem as a whole, I can’t think of a better word to describe the insubstantial quality of a sea of clouds so I’m (stubbornly) reluctant to let that “hollow” go. Anyway, some of the Japanese poets present put their heads together to translate it and it actually sounds much better in Japanese:

ゆるやかな緑の坂を
千切れ雲が漂う
空の乳海

Mewby also wrote a haiku, which she has given me permission to post here:

車窓から
色濃く流れる
季節かな

And here is Stephen’s translation:

From the carriage window
ah, the season of deepening colours
flowing by

That was Mewby’s very first haiku! Further challenges however, still lay ahead!

This is the mountain we had to climb the next morning.

It didn’t look like the top was that far away. But actually it was, and it took a good hour and a bit and a hard slog to get up there. Tateyama is actually considered one of the “three holy mountains” of Japan. So we made a point of getting a blessing at the summit shrine. Directly under heaven, we sat on loose cobbles as the shrine priest prayed over us. We learned later that those cobbles (some of them immense) had been brought there by pilgrims. It was a lovely ceremony. You’ll notice from the second picture in this next set that from the top you can actually see Mount Fuji (another holy mountain).

That wasn’t the end of our journey though. The tricky part was getting back down. Poor Mewby had a very hard time of it. But she kept going and eventually she got there and I think she felt a great sense of achievement having done so.
Here we all are at the bottom.

Finally though in tribute to brave Mewby, as my own haiku skills aren’t sufficient, I shall cheat and borrow the words of Mitsuo Aida instead.

only human
after all

it’s ok to stumble, isn’t it?
we are humans after all

I made these with the help of this neat little app that I’ve got on my i-phone. Good, aren’t they?

Bravo Mewby! And many thanks to Stephen, Atsushi, and Hisashi for organizing such an enjoyable and stimulating trip!

in Japanese,
to be filled with emotion is
written as “to feel and to move”

Update! The official report of the trip with more pictures and some very nice haiku is up on the Hailstone Haiku Circle site now! Click here: Autumn Haiku Hike to the Summit of Mt. Tateyama.