Wednesday 8 January 2014

Geek For Hire

OK.  I actually wrote all but the final paragraph of this down by hand in the Summer of 2013 while enjoying what I could of the English weather, either sitting in my garden or lazing around Leeds Castle.  Because that’s how I roll now, I chill at castles and write in journals.  Unfortunately, the idea of typing it up was boring enough to make me put it off for four months, which is why it’s only getting out to the world now; so some parts, about dragonflies and such forth, may seem unseasonable.  The fact I start it off by pointing out I intended to write it earlier shows the vile danger of procrastination, especially when there isn’t a deadline.  Better late than never though, eh?  I also cut out about 800 words of me ranting about the education system and why I left the job.  It’s not very interesting and it’s one of the things I really dislike about teachers, they’re/we’re always whinging.




The plan was to write this in January in an attempt to keep in touch with people who I haven’t seen or heard from in a while.  Despite being able to instantly contact people on the other side of the planet via the internet or phone I just seem to…not.  I suppose it might be partly due to more pressing local concerns like earning and spending money, but that sounds like a bad excuse considering that I’ve spent the last thirty years being told that the most important thing in life is who you share it with.

I suppose another thing is, what are we supposed to talk about?  We don’t have any recent shared experiences, no plans to make.  We can talk about things we’ve done but they start to seem like isolated stories full of unknown characters that we have no connection with.

*****

I’m writing this while sitting on a wooden bench in front of the garden pond.  There is a dull drone of traffic but it is drowned out by the sound of the waterfall for the most part.  The koi are serenely floating near the surface, basking in the sun while the smaller fish dart about the perimeter, chasing one another back and forth.  Honey bees industriously work among the flowers around me and birdsong fills the trees with light chirping.  The chickens puncture this with an intermittent cluck from behind me but are generally content to sit in the shade and watch the light aircraft come in to land at Rochester airport.  

Then there are the dragonflies.  I like dragonflies generally: they’re rare but colourful, they don’t try to sit on my food, fly into my eyes or crawl into my ears and nostrils.  They’re altogether fairly pleasant company as far as flying insects go.  They have, however, decided to make my garden pond the site of some great dragonfly orgy.  Where normally I would see maybe two dozen dragonflies in an entire Summer, I’ve just seen upwards of thirty in the last forty minutes, all copulating like teenagers at a music festival.  Well, not quite in the same way.  There aren’t any tents and the dragonflies probably aren’t high, plus the biology is quite different.  That said, the attitude is exactly the same.

*****

I hate not knowing what to say on the phone.  I’m fine with comfortable silences as long as I know it’s a comfortable silence.  If I can’t see the other person I tend to presume that they feel as irritated as I feel awkward.  This makes for a definite uncomfortable silence.

Apparently telephobia  actually does exist and I’m not alone in my irrational fear of holding conversations through technology.  There are thousands of people who are similarly crippled and would rather walk five miles to ask a question about income tax rather than phone a call centre and try to explain the situation.  Still, I should call you more often and I don’t.  My bad.  What I’m trying to say is it is definitely not a case of me not being bothered, just being an absolutely rubbish person in this sphere.



So.  Updates.

It’s hard to know where to start considering I don’t know what you already know.  The odd Facebook message here or there might have told you some or all of this, so I’m figuring I’ll go back a couple of years and move forward from there.  Feel free to scan through rather than read it, I doubt it’s going to be anywhere near as amusing as me being run over by a taxi. That was comedy gold.
2012 was a good year.  I found that I had managed to get a place on the London Marathon just before New Year through someone from my school dropping out.  This did only give me three months to prepare my utterly unfit carcass to drag itself around 26 miles of my capital’s streets at something slightly faster than a walking pace though, about a third of the preparation time that was needed according to most of the training books I found.  My dad was running it too which helped with the training, but between work, the weather and my general laid-back attitude my training regime maxed out at three runs a week, with none stretching over 18 miles.  Predictably, my pace on the day was far slower than I’d like, with my final time being just over 5 hours and 10 minutes.  If we take off 10 minutes for stopping to talk to people and slowing down for a chat with my dad it’s still only just over 5 mph which isn’t much faster than a brisk walk.  Still, people seem in awe of my ‘achievement’ despite my lacklustre performance which has helped cast off the well 
founded myth that I am in fact quite a lazy fellow.  

One thing that I did learn is that crowd support really does help.  I had always thought it was just something sportspeople said to encourage fans to pay to see them, but it actually was a boost having the crowd encouraging me all the way.  I’d followed the advice of the charities I was running for (Breast and Prostate Cancer Research) and had put my name on the front of my shirt which meant complete strangers in the crowd were calling me out by name and telling me to keep going.  Possibly because I looked knackered and out of my depth.  The charities had also brought along their own groups of crowd support who were specifically looking for us.  The first group I came across I hadn’t noticed, so when they went completely berserk I was in real danger of doing a Paula Radcliffe.  I don’t mean running fast and winning, I mean the other thing she is famous for doing at a marathon.
*****

I think the orgy is over.   There’s just one dragonfly left who turned up late to the party.  He’s sitting by himself on a lily pad.  Everyone else has buggered off, presumably to do the dragonfly equivalent of having a smoke and listening  to some live music.  I sympathise.

*****
I followed this up with the London to Brighton Bike Ride two months later.  At 54 miles it is twice as long as the marathon, but I should have been travelling at about twice the speed.  This didn’t happen.

Within the first twenty miles, a little after we cleared Greater London, I had a puncture.  This wasn’t a problem, everyone carries at least one spare inner tube, it’s common sense.  Only a complete moron wouldn’t bring one.  It’s like hosting a house party but only providing tequila shots as refreshments:  it might work out alright but the odds are you’re going to regret your lack of preparation, as is everyone involved with your efforts.  Especially the teetotaller.  In this case it was my folks and team-mates around me who ended up regretting bringing along the lanky marathon guy.

It was another six or seven miles to the next marshal but that’s doable with a slow puncture, I just needed to put some more air in to protect my wheels.  I started pumping away at the tyre, feeling embarrassed at my schoolboy, nay, infantile mistake of forgetting my repair kit and inner tube.  Perhaps the shame made me careless;  in any case the valve decided it would be a good time to explode.  My tyre with a slow puncture became a ragged piece of rubber wrapped around my wheel.  We sent the others on ahead why my dad and I trekked back to the last marshal station a mile and a half behind us.

Unfortunately, it turned out that the mechanic’s contact point was missing a somewhat vital element: a mechanic.  Apparently he simply hadn’t deigned to turn up to the biggest bike ride in the country.  Considering the amount of business flowing through I would say it was his loss, but as I sat forlornly waiting for a marshal’s car to take me to the next mechanic along the route I couldn’t help feeling inconvenienced.  Still, the car didn’t take long and fairly soon I was nine miles down the road being ripped off by a Spanish woman for an inner tube that wasn’t quite the right size.  ‘It’ll be fine,’ she said, ‘trust me.’

Of course I trusted her.  I was desperate, she was fairly attractive.  Mirroring my romantic life, this was quite inevitably a mistake.

Three miles later, my tyre was flat.  My dad and I re-inflated it.  On average, every three miles after that, it was flat.  For about 27 miles.  Another slow puncture that we had to deal with nine times.  Needless to say, these frequent stops meant that we had no hope at all of making up on our delay and meeting the others.  Happily I found the last honest mechanic in Southern England before I had to make my way up to Ditchling Beacon.  I got a good inner tube for the handful of change I had left in my pocket as well as some adjustments to the handlebars.  Namely turning the fork 180 degrees so the wheel was on the right way around.  In my defence it looked much the same from a distance, and made no real difference apart from making me look like I’d only learned to ride a bike in the last three weeks.

I suppose I should probably knock cycling off of the activities section of my CV,  I obviously haven’t a clue of what I’m doing.  Perhaps I could move it to ‘Known Medical Conditions’ considering my history on two wheels.

I made it in the end, though it took significantly longer than the marathon.  No-one is impressed by the London to Brighton.  I should have just run another fourteen miles.

In year 10 of school, back when I was fifteen, we had a field trip to Snowdonia for our geography GCSE.  I quite enjoyed it.  It wasn’t proper camping because we were in a Youth Hostel, but we practiced vaguely useful skills which put it ahead of the majority of my education.  Navigation, survival and first aid might not be useful every day, but are a whole tonne more useful than knowing Pi to six decimal places.  Which I don’t know, but you get the idea.  These skills only get more useful when the zombie apocalypse comes.  And it will. 
 
Towards the end of the trip we all traipsed up Mount Snowdon via three different routes depending on how well we had done with our previous tasks in hiking and sea-level traversing.  Being used to family holidays walking across Dartmoor, I found myself going up the most difficult approach of the three even though the previous day I’d almost fallen into a ravine through being a clumsy oaf.  It was difficult going at times, particularly when we were climbing up a shale slope into the wind where we found ourselves slipping down a step for every two we took forward, but in the main I took it at a brisk walk, jogging the last hundred meters to the summit.  

With this in mind, along with my friends, Richie ‘from Mexico’ and Suzanne I drove toward the Grim North and our hotel overlooking the old docks of Liverpool.  I’d booked the hotel weeks in advance, going for a room with three single beds in a row.  It was cheap which overrode any desire for privacy, besides which it was only for a couple of nights.  I was still naively unprepared for what the three person room looked like in real life: a tiny double bed with a bunk bed over it angled at ninety degrees.  They all looked like Wendy House sized pieces of furniture.  There wasn’t an option of another room, so we went trekking out through town looking for another hotel.  The only place that cost less than £70 was a youth hostel across the road which Richie gallantly volunteered for while Sue and I took our original room.  Apparently he likes meeting people.  I’m not so fussed on people, especially when they blunder into a shared room at 4am and puke in the bin, but he avoided that experience this time.

Snowdon did look like it does in the pictures, so at least we weren’t mis- sold on that account.  When I say it looked like it does in pictures, I mean there was an endless convoy of increasingly miserable people hiking their way up through unrelenting drizzle to a peak hidden behind a fog bank.  Or maybe it was a cloud.  I tend to think of clouds as being high, fluffy and light though, if not white, while this wall of dark water was borderline aggressive.  We were taking one of the easier ‘tourist’ routes as we had no desire to get lost in Snowdonia and climb the wrong mountain; what with the fog this was a very real possibility.

Snowdon isn’t all that difficult a climb, a fact attested to by the obese sponsored walkers and small children scaling the slope.  This unfortunately highlights my own lack of fitness when, halfway up, Richie pushed ahead like a gazelle on amphetamines while Sue and I started taking regular ‘rest stops’ as our bodies made it abundantly clear that they weren’t onboard with the ‘Snowdon is easy’ philosophy.  We got up there eventually , just after Richie passed us on his way down because it was ‘too cold’ up there.  On the plus side the sun finally came out as re reached the summit, giving us a really quite beautiful view.  After ten minutes I even had enough oxygen in my body to focus on it.  Good times.

Later in the Summer I got to visit some friends in the USA and go to the most extravagant wedding I’m ever likely to attend.  In addition I remembered my shoes and got to the ceremony on time which put me ahead of the other wedding I went to in 2012, so it was a success all round.  I failed to see a baseball game though, despite getting tickets, so I have to go back at some point.  I’m not that concerned about baseball, but an excuse is an excuse.

Washington DC was an interesting jaunt through places I’ve seen in movies along with some really impressive museums.  The one with a section focussed on the Evil British burning down the White House 1999 years earlier gave me a new interest in the 1812 war which was as incompetently led and fought as any of the modern conflicts our countries have been involved in.  I went to a Maryland Renascence Fair, opening my eyes to the US impression of Europe in the middle ages which led to a fair amount of amusement, particularly one teenager’s reaction to meeting a ‘real-life English person.’  Apparently they don’t get many of those in the forests of Maryland.  The huge theme park we went to was mostly empty and thus brilliant, especially the rides that made other people first pass out and then flicker their eyelids over their upturned eyes making them look possessed.   G-forces are fun until Satan takes one of you.

St Louis was possibly the friendliest city I’ve ever been to.  I’d like to think that it wasn’t just my accent that got me drinks for four days but it’s a definite possibility.  That said, I had people offering me help before I even spoke so I must be at least half-right.  From the girl serving at the bar who looked very much like Natalie Portman and the couple on their honeymoon to the slightly deranged veteran on the train to the guy in the truck who saw me jay walking in an evening suit and offered me a lift to the wedding I was obviously late for, everyone seemed happy to sit and chat for a while.  I’d like to point out I wasn’t late. I’m British, we just cross the road wherever we please if we can do it without being run down.  

Like I said, the wedding was a glorious affair and the band in particular showed a lot of talent, ranging from The Way you Look Tonight to Come On Eileen and everything in between, which was certainly different from the mobile disco I expect at a wedding reception.  I ended up skanking hard enough to break my own shoes, which might have been linked to the free bar.  ‘Could I have a Whisky please?’
‘Sure, what do you want with it?’
‘Just a couple of cubes of Ice thanks.’
I see you’re a man who appreciates the good whisky,’ said the barman, pulling a dusty 21 year matured Islay single malt from under the bar.
‘Yes, Yes I am.’
He was a good barman. The kind that sees four shots as the minimum that you should put in any one glass:  I said it was a friendly town. I wouldn’t want to do tequila with him though.


All in all it was a good year.  I climbed a mountain, cycled from London to the South coast, ran a marathon, went to America.  It was all good.  Halfway through October I decided it was time to leave my job.  The reasons are long and boring, but come down to the job leaving me overstressed and ethically compromised.  A good proportion of teachers leave the profession within three years, so I guess I beat the trend by doing three and a half: it’s not like a teacher dropping out at this stage is a unique event.  The job is hard enough with my career being in the hands of 16 year-olds doing exams and the government running the education sector into the ground without bullying management focussed on statistics and continual prioritisation of the statistics over the students. But that’s what has happened to the majority of the state-run sector.  That said, I got a lot of surprised looks when I was asked what school I was going to and I said I wasn’t going anywhere.  There’s a recession, jobs are hard to find, but still teachers like me are dropping out.

I had a lot of good experiences at the school.  I made good friends and met interesting people.  I went on loads of trips, including to Paris and Sicily which saved me a whole lot of money travelling.  I also taught some brilliant lessons on the basis that if I found it fun the kids would probably be onboard too.  My shadow puppet lessons worked well and The Charge of The Light Brigade reenacted on the school field with ‘Russians’ throwing paper shuriken at the ‘British’ running between them was particularly memorable and pretty useful in showing what happened at the Battle of Balaclava.  The next day an email went around telling us to stay in our classrooms for health and safety reasons.  No more sitting under the trees in the Summer reading poetry, back to the leaky classroom and failing lights.  Also, more exam practice papers, I love teaching those.

In a way I suppose I’m lucky that I started teaching outside of state-schools so I know there are alternatives.  Nova actually worked out well for me in this respect as I got a part-time job teaching ESOL almost immediately.   It doesn’t pay much, but as long as the car is running and my rent is paid I can keep petrol in my tank while looking for something better.  It’s also given me time to get some writing done.  Also a lot of procrastination, but I’m nineteen thousand words into a book which is a decent start.  Unless I re-read it later and it’s 19000 words of dross.  Still, I figure that if I don’t do it now, when will I do it?  

My contract with the school didn’t finish until March 2013 which was a long drawn-out goodbye, but I was immediately happier knowing that I was leaving.  Which is good, because for 3 months I was doing both the evening ESOL classes and teaching at the school at the same time:  recreation was something that happened to other people.  That said, I did manage a sneaky, cheap holiday to Corfu to sit in the sun for a week, so I can’t really complain.

When I left, my department clubbed together and got be a bunch of gift vouchers which I used to buy myself a remote control helicopter.  Helicopters are cool.  At least they are when they’re not crashing into a tree or my garden pond.  I still haven’t got the hang of flying the thing anywhere with a breeze, so it spends most of it’s time diving into the ground and digging up chunks of dirt with the main rotor.  That could probably be a metaphor for my teaching career if I thought about it.

By Easter, getting out was a definite relief.  Schools are increasingly seeing themselves as businesses that need to create a product and keep a reputation and mine was no different.  The combination of education bullshit (ask me about Keegan) and corporate bullshit (ask me about enforced and unpaid overtime) had combined to form a mountain of excrement in the department that made everyone miserable.  Perhaps it was my joy at leaving The Pit which led to me crippling myself for the better part of this year.  On the dance floor of a mostly reputable brewery-pub I was bobbing along in a fairly non-committed way, despite the fairly attractive girl dancing opposite me.  I’ve learned about fairly attractive girls: don’t trust them if they ask you to trust them. Especially with inner tubes.  Turning to pick up my pint, which was more interesting than the music, led to my knee twisting a little too far and I collapsed onto the floor to the general bemusement of all.  The next 30 minutes were spent probing my swelling joint to try to work out if my kneecap was still attached, or at least in the right vicinity.  I honestly couldn’t be sure at that point.   

After struggling back to Richie’s and sleeping on a floor I found myself unable to walk for a week and on crutches or a walking stick for the next three months.  On the bright side I didn’t spend too much, which was good considering my lack of work over the Summer.  

The second half of 2013 was quiet: I visited friends, did some writing, saw my mum graduate and so on.  There was another wedding, this time James, my oldest friend from secondary school.  I got to be a best man, delivered a decent speech and shouted at family members to get to the right places for photos.  Besides losing an usher at one point and dancing like a fool despite my buggered knee, (it turns out I can still air guitar,) everything went well. I blame Summer of 69.


Which pretty much brings us up to now, January 2014. I finally get to see a physiotherapist on Thursday, a mere 8 months after the injury occurred, which is probably quite good going for the NHS these days.  I can walk fairly normally now though so hopefully I can run, ride or swim at some point this year and make an attempt at being fairly fit again.  In between procrastination.  I’m just glad I finally typed this thing up, now I can get back to the book. And plan some lessons I guess.  Things to do and so on.

Monday 2 February 2009

First steps in a new (excrement smelling) world


-->
I miss my old school. The kids were OK, they did their work, I could understand the words coming out of their mouths. Hell, they could multiply and divide single digit numbers. But I’ve moved to the comprehensive around the corner with the advice of my year 8’s ringing in my ears: ‘They’re going to tear you apart.’ It wouldn’t weigh on my mind so much, but I’m entirely convinced that they’re right. Still, its only for a few months and I can get back to finding an easy life as opposed to trying to convince some knife wielding illiterate that reading a paragraph is possible and might get him beyond his U grade into something resembling a good old fashioned F.
Today was to be my first day of visiting the school and sorting out the paperwork before I get stuck into classroom management.[1] The stick in the spokes of this idea is that for the past week a bunch of boring but quite bright people living in a student style mess under large satellite dishes have been watching a blizzard the size of Belgium heading towards Kent.  A little late, these people let the general populace know about the blizzard but was pretty much common knowledge that it was going to get pretty arctic-like around tea time Sunday.
Nonetheless the moderate amount of snow (under 5 inches) still brought the country to a standstill. Of course, everyone in the country expected this because it’s generally accepted that the UK is shite at dealing with any form of inclement weather no matter how mild it may be. Leaves on train tracks, power cuts at stations, un-gritted roads with overturned HGVs on them. We just accept it as a given. All the school senior managers were raring to go with calling it a snow day and staying under the duvet for another 24 hours. Teachers are freaky-weird people, but even the most hard nosed hell bitch knows when to call it a day with this kind of weather front. All of them except mine which decided that half the school could stay at home, but the older half along with all the teachers should come in. Sure, she’s new. Sure, she’s only there because the head just disappeared leaving her in charge. But that doesn’t excuse her for going altogether full-imbecile and making me and everyone else hike into school. Someone suggested she has something to prove: that she’s capable and not going to be cowed by bad weather. If she was out to prove that she’s a fence sitter with worse decision making skills than whoever decided to navigate the SS Titanic through an ice field, she’s done a grand job of it.
Compounding the general aura of incompetence was when she decided at 10:15 to send everyone home. Some people spent longer trying to get there in the car than being at school, but she was very upbeat with how well the students were working, and the commitment the staff had shown. Apparently she was sending us home because it might be dangerous to drive later. It was damned dangerous to drive in you ignorant wretch. Half the trains were cancelled and bus drivers have more than enough sense to give their bosses the finger at the prospect of going out there. IT’S STILL BLOODY SNOWING.
All in all, I had a quick walk around and had a cup of coffee. That was my work day.
Start as you mean to go on.
Oh, I got shown one of my classrooms. It’s a toilet. Literally. It used to be a boys’ changing room, but they converted it into a classroom: a classroom the size of the basement in Station Street with the acoustics of a toilet. I don’t even know how they have preserved that echo familiar to anyone who has ever been in the gents. It’s an engineering marvel of some type. I’ve been warned that it ‘sometimes smells of toilet,’[2] but the teacher keeps air fresheners which upgrades it to ‘smells of toilet with a hint of industrial cleaner.’ There must be someone with a camera waiting for me to react, I thought. This is ridiculous. There’s cubicles outside the door. There’s a hand dryer over the teacher’s desk. There are schools in Africa built out of burnt out cars and AK47 shell casings that are more fit for purpose than this. What if I go to teach and need a leak? How am I supposed to keep my composure when every sight and sound around me tells me that this is the place to flip out my manhood and see how far I can piss across the room? It’s not a classroom. It’s a bloody lawsuit waiting to happen is what it is.


[1] Classroom management is teacher speak for finding a way to stop the bastards being bastards long enough to ram some learning into their heads.
[2] Shit

Recap on the last episode

So……the blog thing stumbled huh? Well, in my defence there were good reasons. For starters, I am, by my nature, a lazy lazy man. Which in part makes me an exceptional worker because if anyone can find a way to get a job done quickly to the bare minimum of standard, it is I, because I want to stop working on whatever monotonous thing it is as soon as humanly possible. Employers often fall down at this point. If I work my genius and get the job done with 30 minutes to spare, I expect to spend those 30 minutes with my feet up reading some kind of comic or talking bollocks with anyone who happens to pull up a pew. What I don’t appreciate is being given some sort of ’make-work’ task. You know, those stupid jobs that definitely don’t need to be done because they are pointless and only exist to make the employer feel like they’re getting their money’s worth out of you. ’We’re paying you until 11, so you’re going to work until 11.’ Washing shelves. Sweeping the floor again. Sorting tea into date order. Writing lists of stock that’s needed despite the fact the computer system knows exactly what it needs unless middle-management/chavs have been pinching it again. Bollocks says I. If you’re going to be that way I’ll work the same speed the rest of the chav-spawn do, the work won’t get done and you’ll have some kind of stress related bowel movement all over your half price Burtons suit because the upper-middle-management are going to lay the smack down on you with something like ’we expected better.’

Secondly, there was every chance my sister would read the next part and talk away about it to my parents who would then read it and there’d be mucho explaining, worrying and general hardship that to be honest, I couldn’t be bothered with.

So. It started with a costume party. For some reason, almost every party was a costume party in Toyama, for reasons I never quite gathered. It could be that there were only about 20 English speaking people you ever saw on a regular basis and making them dress in outlandish ways gave some kind of illusion that there were more of us. Of course, as the ultimate lazy man, I simply went through a bunch of characters which mostly just relied on me wearing some kind of suit. Japanese costume party? Well, I’d be Yakuza then, with some kind of pop-gun for shooting people who question whether or not I bothered. Letter M party? Do I dress as a monkey the same as 30% of the crowd or do I simply don the suit, strap a bit of black leather to my face and become a Masquerade guest? Well, when it came to the celebrity party I figured I’d change to something without a suit to pour chu-hi over. Realising that looking like a celebrity would take effort, I went the other way and became ’generic roadie’ with my catchphrase of ’we’re part of the band too!’ Happily all I had to do was wear jeans, big bastard CAT boots and a black T-shirt. To finish off the look I found myself a really shit baseball cap that only a moron would wear. I don’t recall too much of the party. A lot of people put a lot of effort in and then got trashed. I stayed somewhere near sober because we ran out of mixer for the whiskey and its not possible to stomach Black Nikka whiskey without so much as an ice-cube. Japanese whiskey is on about the same level as Tesco’s white label. For all I know both are made from the same secret recipe of dog hair and cow faeces, but Black Nikka in particular retails for about £4 a bottle so you can see how too much too fast can cause blindness. Anyway, It came to about one and I was struck by the revelation that I still had a bottle and a half of Coke at my place, and Beth would probably still be up in some kind of state. Good times could recommence, and I could get out of the party without having to help clean or suffering the embarrassment of projectile vomiting Black Nikka off the 6th floor balcony. It was a plan. I text Beth about my impending arrival, ate a handful of peanuts, picked up the unopened second bottle of Black Nikka and made my way to the glorious contraption that was my bicycle.

At this point, a huge flaw in my plan revealed itself. A monstrous typhoon was passing the town and the weather was decidedly not pretty. It was that kind of sheet rain you only see in the movies because the gods aren’t that bastardish in real life. However, not one to be beaten by the foreign devil gods I fired up my I-Pod with The Trooper, flicked on the sorry excuse for a dynamo powered light and peddled like a madman onto the streets of downtown Toyama. Downtown Toyama sounds a bit dramatic. I mean, it was downtown, it was in Toyama, and it was 5 minutes walking distance from the red light district. But it wasn’t all that exciting. When I got to the shopping arcade I was wet though and freezing cold, but was within 10 minutes of dry clothes and alcohol entering my system, so pretty much I was riding high on The Tailgunner. I came to the intersection going at a fair pace, but it was 1:14am there were people walking in the middle of the road, so the path must be clear right? On I went.

In bad weather, motorists are expected to lower their speed to allow for the conditions. This is perfectly sensible. After all, why test fate? Why make that choice that could lead to such intense agony and miscellaneous trouble that none of us really want to deal with? A sensible man would slow down. There are at least two exceptions to this rule. I was one of those exceptions. You see, while a cautious motorist will slow down, a cyclist will in fact speed up on account of the lack of anything protecting him from the elements. Its all well and good to slow down in a car. You’re dry, warm, listening to Motown greatest hits or something. No rush. If you’re wet through and the only thing stopping the wind flipping you sideways is your forward momentum you’re not going to stop for anyone. You’ll swerve, you’ll curse, you’ll fluke a bunny hop onto a step, but you will not stop. The other exception is a taxi driver trying to get somewhere before their company has to give people money off their fare. They generally know what they’re doing, and bar something completely random happening, they can deal with the speed. They’re experienced, they’ve seen it all, they’re ready for anything. Anything except a soaked half-cut foreigner bombing it out of a side road peddling to some insane beat that only he can hear. I saw him. He saw me. We both did the highway code sensible thing and braked. As it happens, if I’d stuck to my ideology of not stopping for anything, I might have made it. Needless to say, I didn’t. It turns out sheet rain and emergency stops don’t mix all that well. I started skidding. I released the brakes and braked again. Hell yes, I should get through just for being smart enough to know to do that. But foreign gods hate me.

I’m sure there’s supposed to be some kind of life flashing before your eyes thing. My life has been in real danger only twice. Once, when I was hanging off a cliff with one hand in Snowdonia. I was thought something about holding on, and that was about it. This time was different in that I knew there was nothing left to do but grasp onto that brake and ride this bastard out. I couldn’t bail, my head would end up under some juggernaut’s wheel and explode like a watermelon. Swerving would lead to a similar fate of my face impacting with a combination of tarmac and tyre rubber. Given these circumstances its easy to see how a brain supercharged with adrenalin and nothing in particular to do except wait for oblivion could end up flicking through random memories. However, in retrospect, either this is bollocks or the Black Nikka had rendered my brain into some sludgy oatmeal that had no interest in past events and was more concerned with imminent pain and possible dismemberment which to me seems a more sensible thing to think on anyway. Kinda pressing in fact. To this end my thoughts went something along the lines of ’oh shi…’

’…..it.’* I crashed straight into the bonnet just in front of the windscreen ribs first and bounced backwards onto the shiny wet tarmac while the taxi slewed to a halt a few meters further down the street. I’m not entirely sure on the physics, but somehow my bike flipped up from under me into the air and was heading straight for my face. Though by no means beautiful, I like my face well enough to keep it where it is, so it ended up piling into my raised forearms rather than my nose. To be honest I could have really done with some kind of video footage to show exactly what happened. How was I lying broken on the ground with my bike flipping over me? Was I really riding that fast? Surely its not possible without my legs flying off? Or at the very least some intense crotch burns.

My chest hurt. My back hurt. My head hurt. Not badly, but that kind of insistent throb that promises the morning isn’t going to be much fun at all. For some reason I dared hope nobody saw what happened and any shred of street cred I had would be retained. Alas, there was a fair number of spectators standing under their umbrellas watching with the languid interest of people who regularly see people pummelled by motor vehicles. In many countries I’d have immediately been accosted by do-gooders wanting to know if I was ok, and if I wasn’t, if they could they possibly steal my wallet. In Japan its considered to be bad form to offer aid on account of it adding further humiliation to the unfortunate person’s suffering. Before I’d always considered this a slightly cold, almost cruel attitude to those in need, but standing in the middle of the road being lashed by a storm I completely understood how unwelcome their attention would have been. I just wanted to get back on my way to some warm apartment where I could put the whisky to use on numbing the ache permeating my entire body. Looking at my bike, I came to the realisation that it in no way was going to be that easy. I’ve ridden a bike with two buckled wheels before. Its intensely hard going, but do-able if you’re particularly desperate or alternatively too far gone to realise that you seem to be putting uphill effort into going downhill. Unfortunately, as well as being buckled, by front wheel was bent at a 45 degree angle and quite obviously wasn’t going to turn ever again. Compacting the problem was that the taxi driver was out of his car walking purposely towards me talking on a mobile phone. I’d only travelled in a taxi twice since coming to Japan, and so I was ready for a Westerner strain of the species in that I expected insults, threats and quite possibly a number of blows. I winced at the shock of pain that lanced through my chest as I drew myself up to my full height to try to discourage at the very least the latter expectation.

He was a jovial looking chubby guy in his late thirties who hung up the phone and started speaking Japanese at me. At me rather than to me because my Japanese is profoundly sub-par. In fact, probably the majority I learnt from Street Fighter, but you’d be surprised how little the word hadouken (powerful energy blast or wave motion fist depending who you ask) is used in every day conversation. He seemed to be apologising and asking if I needed an ambulance, looking quite concerned. My face split into what I hoped was a friendly smile and unleashed the one word I knew which would sort this situation out.

Daijobu. Its an awesome word which essentially means ’hey, no worries.’
You lost a students files. Daijobu.
You just got mugged. Daijobu.
Your house is burning and your sister is inside. Daijobu.
In my case, almost suffered death by taxi. Daijobu.
Its Ok, I can make my way home, we can forget this ever happened. I just need to get home, out of the rain, and not be caught up in any kind of insurance detail malarkey. Over the man’s shoulder I noticed that we were in fact standing just outside the offices for his taxi company. More to the point, we were standing outside his taxi company and there was a trio of men in suits walking across the road in some very serious looking suits led by a frightening looking old guy, the kind of guy who is almost certainly in with the organised crime syndicate of Toyama . You know a man is important when he has a lackey hold an umbrella for him, but only over him. The lackey completely ignored the downpour that was falling on his own head. My Daijobu’s got a lot more urgent as I tried to pick my bike up and make some kind of limping getaway because if those men got to me I was finished. Mucho explaining would have to be done, and I was in no condition to be on my top blagging form.
Unfortunately, while the man was as I say a jovial chubby type, he also a steely grip that suggested just under the chubbiness was a helluva a lot of muscle fed by a driven will to do the right thing, in this case getting me medical attention whether I wanted it or not. Then I recognised a two words. Phone. Police.

At this point wild untamed terror took over. Japanese are, generally, nice courteous people. Japanese police work on the basis that a confession is the ultimate evidence and they know they can do most anything within the Geneva Convention to get one. They stop being courteous and turn into the Spanish Inquisition but with more conviction and perhaps less mercy. ’DAIJOBU. I feel great, honest. On top of the world. No harm, no foul, eh? DAIJOBU.’ The trio of men in black arrived. I turned to them imploringly. ’Daijobu, right? Hai? Daijobu?’
’You hurt?’
’Nei, Daijobu.’
’Your bike, its broken. We will pay?’
’Nei. Daijobu…eh…Daijobu…cheap…five thousand yen…daijobu…no worries.’
’You need to see…doctor? Hospital?’
’No, no, no, no. Daijobu’
’Police are on their way. They will help.’
’No need. Daijobu.’
’Its ok. I know…some….English. It will be OK.’
’Daijobu. Its OK. Its OK now. I’ll just go home. Very tired. Oh crap.’
The police arrived. Not on foot, or those quaint bicycles they meander around on. It wasn’t even your average police car with a couple of coppers. Toyama is the capital of the prefecture, so it has a substantial police presence, but is also on the quiet West coast which means they don’t actually have all that much in the way of crime. So I found myself facing a police van with an entire squad. I’d say they were making a mountain out of a molehill but it would probably turn out that they were just very very bored police officers. Plus, they got to lay the smack down on a foreigner, and to a certain type of Japanese person this is a special opportunity to be treasured.

There was lots of talking between various black suited types and police officers, the senior of whom occasionally asked me something to which I shrugged. Another Black suited driver joined us and, on account of his wife learning English, knew enough to translate some of what was going on. I gave my details as best I knew them, but got a particularly bad feeling when they asked me about where I worked. If they followed up on their investigation in any way and got hold of my workplace I could kiss my job and my holiday-life in Japan goodbye. The company doesn’t particularly care what you do as long as you don’t give them a bad reputation, and having one of your teachers involved in a drunk riding accident at 2 in the morning would be considered all together quite embarrassing. I had no idea of Japanese law, but I was sure I must have broken at least one law. At least the car didn’t appear damaged. No, wait, the wing was distinctly concave. Balls. Which is what they had me by when the senior policeman found the Black Nikka on the ground next to my bike. If it had broken, as bottles are liable to do when they hit concrete at speed, I’d have been in a blaggable position. ’Never seen it officer. Someone must have dropped it officer. Nothing to do with me.’ Alas, bar some scratches to the label, it was unharmed, which blew my defence of disowning it completely out of the water. A malicious grin split the man’s craggy face. It was almost as good as a confession. I sent a hurried text to Beth.

Been run over. OK. Will be late.

Play it down I thought. Yeah, I’ve been drinking. He can smell it. But he doesn’t know how much. That bottle is still sealed, its not like I’ve drunk two thirds of it. I was at a party, had two or three drinks over a period of time, and made my way home. Hell, that was pretty much the truth. Sure my drinks were pints of rum and coke rather than shots, but they don’t know that. I made my defence through my amateur translator while the officer nodded sagely. A man was using a wheel to measure distances of where the car hit me and where I hit the ground, and marking key points with chalk. The officer beckoned me over to the van and started fiddling with something inside while mumbling. ’He wants you to breathe into this. OK?’ The translator said. The officer turned holding what could only be a breathalyser test. ’Really blow,’ the translator added with a good natured smile. Even if there was a choice, refusing would be right up there with confessing, so I did it. And the reading went up. I can’t recall exactly what it said, it wasn’t a fancy digital one, but rather a strip with some coloured line that reminded me of doing PH tests as a kid. Anyway, I was three times over the legal limit from driving in Japan, which means I quite possibly would have been OK back home. So if its that for driving, I asked, what is it for riding a bicycle? It turns out bicycles come under traffic law, so its all the same thing to them. As far as the law was concerned, I was a drunk driver, one of those careless fiends who casually drive .. running down some sweet old lady and her grandchildren.

The officers and black suits went into some kind of huddle to decide what to do next while an exceptionally attractive young police lady led my translator and I into some cover from the rain to do some kind of roadside tests. They all followed the format of the officer saying something, the driver translating, me doing it, and the driver giving me advice.
’Blahdy blahdy-blahdy blahdy blah.’
’She wants you to walk over there.’
’OK.’ I walked along the crack between the paving slabs. I’ve known times when this could have been a problem, but at this point, I was stone cold sober and had seen enough ’Police Camera Action’ to know to turn at the end and walk back where I came from.
’Yes, Yes! Well done!’ The driver clapped. It was like having my very own supporters in some kind of twisted sport. I’m not sure exactly what he expected when he asked me to walk in a straight line. Maybe his fear of messing up the translation meant he half expected me to start cartwheeling down the road while singing ’She’ll Be Coming Round The Mountain. Which would have ended in tears because I can’t carry through a cartwheel and I only know the chorus to the song. Anyway, it was good to know at least one of these guys was on my side.

The senior guy, satisfied that my superior gaijin drinking abilities had dealt with the alcohol let me off with the warning of ’look before you cross the road. And don’t drink.’ I agreed that this might well be the way forward for me. Yes officer, I’m a reformed man who’s learnt from his mistakes, and will never touch a drop again. At the very least, not a drop of that absurd Black Nikka. It really is terrible. This was pretty much on the condition that none of us tried to sue each other as it turns out that in an accident, a motor vehicle driver is always the responsible party. I have the feeling that the black suited guys were as happy as me to see the end of this, as it could quite possibly end up costing the man his license and the company a whole lot of money and bother. Everyone wanted it to be daijobu. Happily, as cycles come under traffic law, the primary punishment is penalty points on ones driving license. As I didn’t have a license, I was mostly safe. Unless they talked to my boss at Nova, but even these bored police can’t be that motivated. There was one last thing to do, have official photos taken of the damage incurred to the vehicles. This consisted of the driver and I crouching next to our respective machines and pointing at the broken bits. My bike required a lot of pointing. And then I had to carry the bastard thing back to my apartment to get my drink with Beth. Past a police station full of curious faces. Damn.

In the morning I was woken up by the door bell, and found the head of the Taxi company flanked by the driver and my favourite fan outside holding an envelope. It was compensation for the unfortunate incident and there was a whole lot of official bowing that went on which was particularly unpleasant for me because my ribs were actually in agony by this point, and moving at all was a chore. After they left, I opened up the envelope to find five thousand yen, the same amount I said my Bike cost. Whilst this was the truth, in retrospect I should have quadrupled the price considering the amount of pain I was in. And then I had to walk to work because my bike was bust. I still don’t understand how I ticked off those foreign gods so much. It seems unfeasible that I should have this much trouble considering my usually good karma. By the third lesson of the day I couldn’t breathe without feeling like I should be screaming, so I figured getting those ribs checked might be a good idea. Of course all the hospitals were a good distance away because otherwise they would be convenient, leaving me to call on the elemental power know and Koji, who promptly picked me up and drove me to the Accident and Emergency department. Whilst not particularly an emergency, Japanese hospitals have some kind of screwed up useless system mirroring the bank’s operating hours, where they open at nine and close at three or four. Thus I was an emergency, and waited for a total of 20 minutes before being whisked between a doctor, having X-rays taken, and going back to some kind of consultant who studied the X-rays and had Koji translate what was going on. The doctor started laughing. Koji started laughing. They started laughing together at my X-rays. At this point my temper was seriously frayed and I demanded an explanation for the apparent hilarity my x-rays represented. Koji pointed at a big white patch on the screen.
’You see here?’
’Yeah, what is it?’ Some warped part of my brain jumped to conclusion they were laughing at some kind of massive tumour or haemorrhage in my abdomen.
’This bit?’
’Yes! What is it!?’
’ITS YOUR GAS. HA! YOU HAVE TOO MUCH GAS.’
’Gas.’
’Yes. Too much.’
Embarrassing. But not life threatening. I figured on releasing the gas right then to see how they liked the solution to this particular problem, but in all honesty I hurt too much to break wind. Nothing was broken, and there was nothing to indicate anything more than perhaps a hairline fracture. All the pain was most probably muscular, and would fade after maybe four weeks which doesn’t sound so bad until you realise how much the muscle between and over your ribs has to move. Say, every time you sit, try to roll over in bed, or indeed, breathe. Until then I had a cocktail of painkillers and anti-inflammatories and was packed off on my way with over a hundred quids worth of medical bills and a swipe card that contained my records. As far as efficiency goes, its pretty useful to have a patient carry duplicates of their records. There’s no need to hunt for them, no risk of losing them in paperwork or the system, everyone carries their maladies on a metallic strip in their wallets. Convenient.

What was inconvenient is that I ran out of pills after four weeks but was in pain for three months. Especially inconvenient because ten days later I climbed Mt. Fuji…







* Rhymes with hit obviously. If I hadn’t pointed that out some student literary critic would possibly find it one day and point out how I must be some kind of genius subtle writer for using it to start a paragraph in which the person in question physically hits something. Really, its not a sentence, its not even a word particularly, its just the noise that rhymes with hit. Amazing. Well, I’ve blown it for both of us now kid. I’ve destroyed the subtlety and you’re going to have to find something else to dissect.