A Day in Which Almost Nothing Happens But I Rattle on Endlessly Anyway

 

Happy Leap Year Day.

         Because we were a little short of hurtling yesterday I took hellhounds well out of town on one of our epic walks this morning.  It's one we haven't been on in yonks and yonks and they've relocated the freller which you aren't really allowed to do with legal public footpaths but at least it's still there at all.  The best relocated ones are when we're three-quarters through the long loop back to Wolfgang and we do not want to turn around, and Sleeping Beauty's hedge rears up in front of us.  The standard bad-attitude farmer's tactic is ploughing right up to the edge so you have nowhere to walk, but you can at least flounder on.  Worse is the electric fence set three inches from the hedgerow.  We've negotiated a few of these too, with hellhounds on strangle-short lead and clearly wondering what's sent me off my nut this time.  Chaos nonetheless managed once to sting himself and he turned around and looked at me reproachfully, the ungrateful cur.   Possibly my favourite is the dog-impassable stile.  I don't like lifting forty-odd-pound hellhounds over these things* and there's one chest-high one** that is a nightmare.  I haven't been that way in a while, to see if the frelling city council was sufficiently buried under infuriated dog walkers to have had the wretched thing altered.  Arrgh.    

            But I digress.  I never got very lost and the available paths were perfectly adequate, they were just kind of in the wrong places.  And there's one long stretch of open field where hellhounds were blistering away in all directions, checking back with me a good half a second before I panicked***, and blistering away again.  This meant by the end of our epic walk . . . I wasn't quite looking around for poles to rig a travois†, but I was beginning to wonder if it would come to that. 

            The rest of the day was pretty much head down over SHADOWS.  No, it is emphatically not going to be done tomorrow.  But it is moving along.  Just not quite fast enough.  I was supposed to go bell ringing tonight but I immolated this desire on the altar of getting paid sooner.††

            The good news is that Wolfgang has a brand-new 2012 tax disc yaaaaaay.†††  Now all I have to do is remember to put it on.  Ahem.  The other thrilling news is that someone emailed me the details of the Japanese country cookbook she was morally certain was the one I was quacking about the other night . . . and she's right.  More yaaaaay.  This was several days ago.‡  I instantly went on line ‡‡ and found a clean copy, since it's out of print and I have a deep dislike of cooking through other people's splashes and maculations, wrote the bookseller a query . . . and didn't receive an answer.  I didn't receive an answer to my follow-up either.  So tonight I capitulated and applied to ungleblarging amazon, which as we know has everything. . . and I now have a second Japanese cookbook on its way. 

librarykat 

My Japanese mother has to deal with the (she thinks) drastic changes in the Japanese language; she left Japan in the late 1950s after she married my dad. He was stationed there again from 1961-64, 

I was there then.  Shall we play the silly game of did we pass each other on the street?  We were in Yokosuka for the first year and a half— '61 to '62—and then Tokyo for the rest. 

and since then she's just gone back a few times to visit family. It's even worse for the Japanese in Hawaii- their great (and multiple great) grandparents left Japan in the late 1800s, so many Hawaii-born Japanese speak an archaic Japanese, and in dialects that have almost disappeared in Japan. 

This sounds a bit like the Appalachians?, where up till recently, since I don't think there's much untouched back country left, there were isolated areas where they still spoke the Queen's English—Elizabeth I, that is, not II. 

I remember a co-worker in the library system who hosted a Japanese college student back in 1992 – that student laughed at my co-worker's Japanese, which was fluent but so old-fashioned the student could hardly understand her. My husband was teased by his great-aunt and cousins when he visited Japan as a teenager; same thing – his Japanese was not only old-fashioned, but also too polite, his cousins informed him. 

This is one of the things that keeps stirring in the back of my mind as I plug on through my modern lessons.  I don't remember enough to be able to cite examples but that's certainly my impression.  I'm also sure—well, nearly sure—that I was told fifty years ago that there were five levels of politeness, although you probably wouldn't need the most extreme two they existed.  Modern lessons only even mention three and rarely deal with the third . . . and yet school lessons are always more polite than what you're going to hear on the street.  

When I lived in Japan as a young girl, the kids in the military dependents' school sang a little ditty to the tune of "London Bridge is falling down" – moshi moshi ano ne, ano ne, ano ne; moshi moshi ano ne, a, so desu ka. 50 years later, I can't get this out of my head! Apparently it's called "Denwa Uta" – Telephone Song. Translates roughly as "hello, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh; hello, uh-huh, ah, is that so" 

Oh gods I haven't thought of this in . . . fifty years.  Yes.  Oh dear.  Yes.  I was in one of those military dependents' schools, and . . . well, the other kids sang it.  Even then I was uneasy about the whole dissing another person's culture thing, and I wasn't sure if that's what was happening or not.

Funny thing, though, when my mother talked on the phone with her friends, her side of the conversation often sounded just like that! 

YES.  I loved this when I heard it.  But I was always too timid to ask a real Japanese person for details. . . . 

* * *

* And to think I complain when hellhounds wish to skip meals. 

** What do you do if you're short?  And have three Newfoundlands? 

*** This involves standing in the middle of the field whimpering and chewing on your knuckles and remembering the old lurcher rule that your dog will come back, but it will come back to the place it left you, and staring around for two little dots appearing on the horizon and hurtling toward you till you can recognise them as hellhounds.  Mine streak up to me, goose me energetically, and stare around hopefully, willing me not to put them back on lead yet. 

† It's pretty warm.  I could have lashed my coat between the poles.  With a combination of the bits of green garden string I always have in my pocket^ and the wire from my frelling mono earpiece which would then give me the excuse/impetus to buy another one preferably that does not make me crazy.  I've been complaining about listening to one stereo earphone for months—listening to chaos theory or Japanese language lessons this way isn't bad, but listening to music is dire—because I like to have some warning when we're about to be mugged by off-lead Fluffy, which requires one ear free to detect the panting breath and thundering feet of approach.  I haven't been able to find anything plausible online in the UK^^ and then Peter strolled into the local ironmongers a few weeks ago . . . and came home with a mono earpiece.  Calloo callay.  Except it's one of these gods*&^%$£"!!!!frelling D-ring things that fits entirely over your ear AND I HAAAATE IT.  Between glasses, earrings and hair there isn't room for it anyway.  ARRRRRGH.   But I do hear Fluffy coming, and I'm not always standing on the wire to the other earpiece after I've bent over to pick up freshly delivered crap and the wretched thing has fallen out of my pocket again. 

^ Except occasionally when I want one and there aren't any 

^^ America is apparently rotten with mono earpieces, well how nice for you 

†† Also it's a last Wednesday of the month which means that Wild Robert has a practise for us scum at some arbitrary tower while Forza is taken over by demiurges and celestial beings.  This month's arbitrary tower is in New Zealand or something.  I didn't think I could drive that far.  

††† I know you can do it online.  I already said I knew you could do it online.  I don't want to.^  Especially when I have a perfectly good husband who walks past the post office every day because it amuses him to buy his newspaper in person rather than have it delivered.  Although I hadn't known, till you and Nadia told me, that the database would already know that Wolfgang is insured, even if I've lost the damn form. 

^ And 'old' is a relative term.  In my case it means I'm old enough to say 'I don't want to'.  This middle-class first-world society I, and I assume most of you, live in is wildly overloaded with stuff to do, learn, experience, understand, seek, puzzle out, encounter, participate in, organise and reorganise your life by and blah blah blah blah blah.  I don't want to know how my computer works.  I just want it to start when I turn the key in the little hole.  Etc.  If Peter stops walking past the post office to buy his newspaper every day, I promise to learn to get my task disc online. 

‡ I'm still waiting for A SIMPLE ART to arrive.  Don't worry.  You will be the first to know. 

‡‡ See?  I'm perfectly capable of going online when I'm sufficiently motivated.^

^ This didn't do me a lot of good with the mono earbud however.