Writing Class Story 2

©Copyright 2010, Nik Frengle

Time Together

    One spring day, as he was cleaning his flat, Ben found the old shoebox, which had been on the shelf in his closet for over 15 years. He hadn't touched it since the last time he had dusted, and then only to rearrange it on the shelf. The box was full of cassette tapes. He picked up one, to have a look. On the thin sticker above the two holes for the tape spindles, written in Saki's hand, was the label, 'Florence + The Machine'.

    He had met Saki in Osaka, in early May in the Shinsaibashi district, in an abandoned 8-storey building that was due to be demolished, but that had been turned into a temporary disco by a group of avant garde musicians and artists. The floors were no more than 25 square metres each. Sue, his co-worker, herself an artist, had invited him along.
    They walked up the stairs, and on some of the floors, art installations, weird sculptures, papier mach creations hanging from the ceiling, mingled with the music and the dancers. On other floors, the walls had become the canvases for visual artists.  Saki was on the seventh floor, sketching the dancers on a wall, with broad strokes of a large felt-tip marker. Her strokes were sure, and Ben stood to watch. When she had put the pen down, and begun to take out watercolour paints, he spoke to her.
    "Is this performance art, or have you just left it a bit late?" he asked in Japanese.
    "A bit of both," she said, her eyes large in the way of a child that sees all around it with fascination. She had a haircut like the manga character Chibi Maruko, a kind of bowl cut with a window cut in front. A tickled look of joy flitted across her face, and she said "would you like to watch me perform?"
    "Yes."
    She filled in the sketches she had done with watercolours. She captured the motion of the dancers in a way that he liked, but didn't quite understand. It wasn't that they were blurred, but somehow conveyed motion despite being immobile. And Saki, too, didn't seem to move, but to flow, and watching her perform was a thing to behold. Quite a lot of time passed, time that he hadn't noticed passing, though Sue had gone off to dance.
    "Would you like a beer?" he asked Saki when she began to pack her things away into a large canvas shopping bag.
    She accepted, standing up straight to nearly his own height, 6 feet. Her movements as she walked were completely at odds with how she painted, stuttering, clumsy, as though she were thinking of three things at once.
    The bar was down on the second floor, and Ben and Saki made their way down. There was no music playing on the floor, though it was still audible from above and below. The Blue Hearts were playing above, and Guns 'N Roses below. The lights were covered with red gels, creating a sort of surreal atmosphere, accentuated by the glow-in-the dark painting on the wall of weird, wriggling human figures, a sort of Dante's Inferno.
    "Where are you from?" Saki asked in English.
    "Liverpool," Ben answered in a thick Scouser accent, causing Saki to giggle. It seemed wrong to pronounce it any other way.
    "Ah," said Saki, "that's where the Beatles are from. I think the Last Shadow Puppets might be from there as well," she said, her eyes looking upwards as if trying to remember.
    "Never heard of them," Ben said.
    "Oh, right, yes," looking flustered, and taking a long swig of her beer.
    They danced, and before he knew it, it was 2 am.
    "You want to stay at my place?" Saki had asked.
    "Sure..."
    He carried her painting supplies to her flat, not far, in the Yotsubashi area.
    It was a tiny 17-square-metre flat above a 7-11 convenience store. Her bed was at the far end, against the sliding glass door, a wardrobe on the balcony, outside the door, which she opened.
    "I have some pyjamas that I think will fit," she said, retrieving a pair from the wardrobe. He took the pyjamas to the bathroom, and changed. He stepped from the bathroom, dressed in the beige pyjamas with dog character printed on them, holding his clothes in a neat pile.
    Saki shyly made her way to the bathroom. Not sure what to do, Ben sat on the bed. He didn't know whether she had a guest bed, or whether they would both sleep in her exceedingly narrow single bed.
    "Get in to bed, if you like!" Saki shouted from the bathroom, answering the question, there being no other bed than the one on which he sat.
    He did as he was told, moving to the far side of the bed, to give her room to get in.
    She came from the bathroom and got into bed and wordlessly, putting her hand down his pajamas, began to caress him. What followed was a flurry of pyjamas being removed in haste, and sudden passion.
    That summer, they had moved in together, to his larger flat in Kobe.
    Saki had secrets: She wouldn't tell him anything about her parents, and though she told him about her art school in Kyoto, she said that she didn't want to introduce him to any of her friends from that time. She did tell him that she had lived in London after art school in Kyoto, studying art history, and listening to new music. And she played the music she liked, which he had mostly never heard before. She said that it was so new that it hadn't yet made it's way to Japan, which seemed like a silly thing to say, since he had only been there six months, but he let it go.
    They took long walks in the Rokko Mountains, behind his flat, some evenings, or walked down to the Oji Zoo, or went to Osaka or Sannomiya in Kobe to go clubbing. He was working for a large medical products company, translating their user manuals into English, and she as an illustrator. It was a summer of love, and everything that happened seemed totally perfect.
    Her child-like joy at discovering new things, or hearing music that she hadn't heard before, and her open face, so unlike any other Japanese he knew, had the effect on him of completely opening up his heart to her, seemingly before he realised it. It is one of those doors that, once open, can't be closed, and each day they had together had been happy days. For Saki, sex was a thing of joy, childlike in the greed with which it was grabbed, and yet somehow unselfish in the love with which it was done. He was completely lost in his love for her, his only desire to spend every day of the rest of his life with her. Anything else ceased to matter.
    And then it was over. He came home from work one day, and she was gone. She hadn't taken anything, but she wasn't there, and she didn't return. When he went to the police, they asked for her details, which he attempted to give. They asked him if he knew where her family registry was, and he said he didn't, she had been quite secretive. They asked if any of her friends would know, and he had told them she was secretive about her friends, as well. They asked where she worked, and he told them. However, when they had called her company, they said that though, yes, she had worked there, she had always taken her salary in cash, and they didn't have any more information.
    He never discovered where she had gone, and the police never found her. They seemed to believe that, because there was no objective record of her existence, that she hadn't existed, and therefore didn't need to be found. Just a girl in the imagination of some strange gaijin.
    She didn't return, and after a year he had returned to England, in 1988, heartbroken. All he had left of Saki was the shoebox full of tapes, and his memories.

    Listening to the tapes on his old Nakamichi tape deck, fished out of the basement storeroom for the task, he noticed the band names. Some, like Florence and the Machine, Stone Temple Pilots, Oasis, and others, were ones that he had heard of. Florence Welch, the lead singer of Florence and the Machine, was 1 year-old when the tapes had been left by Saki, and Liam Gallagher was just 15, stealing bicycles, with no interest in music. Other bands, Dez's Mesmerising Melody Makers, for example, were nowhere to be found when he searched the Internet.
    He wondered if Saki was in London. Universities wouldn't give out student names to him, so he reverted to calling them, claiming he was doing a story for a Japanese art history magazine about Japanese studying in England. This allowed him to narrow his search down to 9 universities that had students in that course from Japan. He found class schedules, and took to lurking around their student unions in hopes of spotting her. He did this methodically, one university at a time, looking for a 5'11" Japanese woman.
    He had also set Internet search agents for Dez's Mesmerising Melody Makers and the other bands whose tapes he had that didn't seem to have any record. It was Dez Mez that finally came up, as part of a music festival sponsored by student unions of several London universities, including the Royal College of Art, which was on his list, but which he hadn't checked yet. The festival was being held in Hyde Park, near Speaker's Corner, in a very large enclosure.
    On the Sunday of the festival, he positioned himself on the grass outside the enclosure, watching everyone who went in. Saki, typically prompt, showed up with a couple of friends. She looked straight at him, but didn't show any recognition. The first band was just warming up, and he followed her to the side on which the bar had been set up.
    "Can I buy you a beer?" he asked her in Japanese.
    "Oh!" she said, her eyes as wide as he remembered from their first meeting, "how do you know I am Japanese?" she asked.
    "Lucky guess. Though you are quite tall for a Japanese girl..."
    "Yes, in the top 1%. You wouldn't believe how many offers to play on basketball and volleyball teams I had in Japan. Too bad I am so incredibly clumsy!"
    He grinned, and handed her a bottle of beer.
    "Don't worry, I am not trying to take advantage of you, just thought it was cool to find a Japanese girl at this kind of event."
    "Are  you a student?" she asked, to the amusement of her two girlfriends who watched from a few steps away. He was easily 40, though still quite attractive, with a majestic nose, full head of wavy dirty-blonde hair, graying a bit on the sides, and piercing green eyes.
    "Yes, I am an evening student, studying creative writing."
    They had continued to chat. It helped that he knew her, knew what she liked and disliked, what subjects she was likely to enjoy speaking about, what her feelings were on certain topics. Though the memories were 20 years old, to him they were as yesterday. For her they were as tomorrow, yet unremembered. He didn't press the advantage to an uncomfortable level, but did get her number. In the following weeks, he hung around the student union when he knew that one of her courses finished. To make sure he wasn't caught out, he actually signed up for a creative writing class, on Wednesdays, which he discovered he really liked. He 'bumped into' her several times, and though the dating didn't progress as quickly as before, soon enough he was in her hungry embrace.
    That summer, spent on the sunny balcony of her first floor Kensington flat, on the lawns of Hyde Park, and on a holiday together in Italy, were, for him, his second summer of love with Saki, though in a slightly more world-weary way than the first time, tinged with the uncertainty of whether they would be able to bridge the 20-year age gap between his 44 years and her 24, and the knowledge that she would leave at some point for 1988, and the fear of losing her again.
    He continued to watch when the bands on the tapes formed. By the end of the summer, all but two were accounted for. More to the point, she only had a term left before she finished her dissertation. That was when he thought she might leave. They spent a lot of time in her apartment, which had been funded by the wealthy father that she didn't acknowledge 20 years ago, one of her secrets.
    Not long after her graduation, in December, they decided to move in together, into her large Kensington flat, the rent she now had to cover without the help of her father.
    "What are these?" she asked him about the shoebox of tapes, as he moved his things in.
    "Your favourite bands, all on tape, so if you ever travel to the past and need to take your tunes with you, they are here." He placed the tapes on a shelf in a closet in their bedroom.
    She looked at him oddly, but didn't say anything.
    Saki began a job at the Victoria & Albert, as a curator of their Japanese collection, a dream job, and less than 500 yards from her flat. Ben, who had worked as a freelance Japanese translator for the last 20 years, now lived every day grateful to be together with her. The one thing he found odd was that she didn't paint, as she had when he had known her in Osaka.
    Saki told him that she had grown up an only child, with a mother and father who had kept her protected, and as a result had been a shy child with few friends. Her height had only made it worse, one reason she had wanted to live in Europe, where women were taller. She was not a fabulously gorgeous girl, quite skinny, with small breasts and not much of a bum. But in Ben's eyes, her joy, her love, her smile, her quirky fashion sense, all made her the most lovely person he had ever known.
    Six months later, all the bands had been formed. Saki continued to go to live shows in a variety of venues, discovering new bands that she liked.
    And then one night she came home late wearing a 20 year-old dress with dried watercolour spots, looking at him with wild eyes. If he had looked in the closet, he would have found the box of cassettes gone.
    "Where are you from?" she demanded.
    "Liverpool."
    "The Last Shadow Puppets aren't from there," she said with a grin, "they are from all over."
    "No, the Beatles are, though maybe they are a little old for you?"
    "Some things are timeless," she smiled, and took his hand.
   
    

    

 Time Together

Creative Writing Assignment 3

This is my third assignment for my creative writing course at Birbeck University. The assignment was based on an object that we brought with us to class. I brought an empty Chateau Latour 1955 bottle. We were supposed to take a memory associated with that object, and use that as the basis for a piece of writing. I used the memory of taking my wine home. I don't know exactly where I will take this piece next.

    He brought home the paper bag, excited about it's contents, wanting to share his find with someone, just bursting with anticipation.

    "Honey, you will never guess what I've found!" he shouted as he came in the door of their small flat on the first floor of a steel-framed, 2-storey block.

    "What?"

    "A bottle of Chateau Latour," he said excitedly, "1955!"

    "So, is it good?" she asked, in a rather disinterested way.

    "Good? It should be amazing, 55 years old, one of the best wines ever, if it hasn't gone bad it will be amazing!"

    "Knowing your luck, it will have gone bad," she said dismissively, and actually quite unfairly to a person who had known amazing luck in the past. "I suppose you've gone and wasted a lot of money on it? Lord knows where you stash all the money you waste…" she said in a refrain that had been heard more than once.

    "No! That is the brilliant thing—It only cost me 1,000 yen!"

    "How come, if it is so good?" she asked with open scepticism. He also heard spite in her words, and it was too much for him.

    "Fuck you, and fuck your negatory ways, woman!" he shouted.

    "Is that how you speak to your wife?" she asked. This was also a common refrain.

    "We need to do something about that," he spat, "and soon. You are an unhappy, negative bitch and a half."

    "If you think that, why don't you just leave, you spineless dickhead," she said, not really asking a question.

    "Thanks for the invitation, I think I will do just that!"

    Ken, for that was the man's name, stormed out of the apartment, the whole block shuddering when he slammed the front door shut.

    His friend, Yoichi, lived just a few hundred yards away, with his mom. Still carrying the paper bag, Ken walked over to Yoichi's house.

    "Hey man, I have an amazing wine here, and you need to help me drink it," he said after Yoichi's mom had shown him in the genkan entryway and called Yoichi out.

    Yoichi, on a camping trip about a year ago, had pulled out a bottle of wine, one that he had saved since he was 10 years old. He had heard that wine got better, and more expensive, with age, and had put one of his father's bottles under his bed, to save, on his 10^th birthday. That had been exactly 20 years before the camping trip, which had been to celebrate his 30^th birthday. Though Ken knew little about wine, he did know that only certain wines actually aged well. Yoichi, bless him, apparently hadn't know that, or hadn't known that at 10, and had chosen to ignore it in the 20 intervening years, because he was absolutely shocked when his 20 year-old wine had been vinegar, and everyone had dumped their glasses. They had instead gotten paralytic on sake and shochu, playing cards until early the next morning.

    Though it couldn't be said that Ken had thought of that when he headed to Yoichi's house, the immediate reason being that his house was closest, when he remembered it, he thought it really appropriate to share his own amazing find with his friend.

    In Yoichi's room, they Googled the wine, and had found a similar one, from 1959, for over $3,000.

    "What is your mom's best dish?" Ken asked.

    "Mmm…I don't know…maybe tekka don…?" he said, referring to a bowl of rice with tuna sashimi on top.

    "Ok, cool, can you ask her to make one for each of us?"

    "Yeah, sure, it is almost time for dinner. Won't Aki be angry if you eat here, though?"

    "Screw Aki and how she feels," he said, looking down at his own stockinged feet.

    "Whatever…just a second, I will ask my mom to fix us tekka-don. I think she might have been planning it anyway."

    Ken continued to use Yoichi's computer to search for information about wine's online, and when Yoichi came back to say that his mom would be making her specialty, Ken asked "do you know how to decant a wine?"

    Yoichi didn't, so they googled that, too.

    They sat at Yoichi's living room table, a large decanter that his father had used, and that his mother had saved after his father's death, was in the centre, with the wine poured from it's resting place of 55 years, and into the large crystal vessel.

    The wine had a very mellow taste, and was in every way beautiful, no mustiness or bad flavour about it. And, strangely, the raw tuna, covered with soy sauce and wasabi, was the perfect food to eat with it, the bite of the wasabi, the soft flesh of the tuna, and the rice at the end all enhancing the flavour of the wine.

    At the end of the meal, there was still about a third of a bottle left, and Yoichi and Ken retired to the living room, wine glasses in hand, and had one last glass of the wine each.

    "This wine is magical," said Ken.

    "Yes, indeed. Thanks again, mate, for sharing it with me," said Yoichi, who was genuinely touched that his friend had shared such an expensive and special wine.

    "No, I mean this wine is really magical. Once I drink this glass," he said, holding the glass aloft, and looking through the glass at the setting sun outside the window, "I will be transformed somehow. I don't know how, but I just know this," said Ken with a certainty that had only come to him at that moment. He drank the wine, and that moment is the one where things did change.

Creative Writing Assignment 2, Variation: Third Person

This is a variation on the last piece I wrote for my creative writing course at Birbeck University. I re-wrote that piece in third person, in an attempt to shorten it, and to see whether it worked better without the first person of the original. Have a look at both, and let me know what you think: Does this one or the other work better for you?
 
    "I do like tennis, but I swim," said the man with a German accent.

    His companion's eyes widened, but in typical English fashion, merely raised his left eyebrow, and inquired "but you like to swim?"

Diether, the German man, replied "that isn't the point—I do it for myself. My body likes it."

"But don't you get bored?"

"You don't understand," said Diether. He was right, the Englishman didn't understand, but it is unlikely that anyone, including Diether himself, did in fact fully understand.

The Englishman, James, was fascinated by Diether, and looked forward to their meetings. They were, in many ways, opposites, and Diether—tall, blond, formal, stiff—was seemingly the polar opposite of James—slight, dark, casual, and floppy. Diether's powerful, fluid strokes through the pool contrasted with James' frantic, almost manic, crawl stroke, 200 metres of which would have completely exhausted any normal human, but which he kept up for 1000 metres.

The regard they had for one another was, however, genuine enough, and their friendship deepened. James' voluble nature caused him to talk rather a lot, and Diether was by nature a listener, so this suited. But this disguised the fact that Diether had opened up far more to James than anyone since he had been married.

He told James about his failed marriage, his daughter, Hannah, and his childhood in Cologne. It must be said that it took him more than a year to divulge the most basic information, such as why he had come to the UK, what his ex-wife's name was (Jane), and what he thought of tennis, which is where we started.

They often found themselves in the club bar at the Porchester Pool & Racket Club, though generally for a coffee or cup of tea rather than a pint. The bar was a sort of cheap and cheery one, with comfortable cloth-covered sofas, likely from Ikea, brightly coloured lacquered tables, also likely from Ikea, and inexpensive red and yellow carpet tiles. The staff may have thought them a gay couple, which was mostly down to James' use of his hands, expressive in the way of an Italian, but floppy in the wrists, like some sort of marionette.

Neither Diether nor James had felt such a strong bond of friendship that they could remember since childhood, though of course neither would say so in such words. For Diether this was a surprise. With James, though he took the piss when he thought Diether wasn't paying attention, and had his annoying English manners and irony, there was a level of trust and regard, and something about the ever-chatty James that was very attractive, and drove him to make the effort to deepen their friendship.

For James, the fascination was with someone so set in his ways, so unyielding, so unlikely to change. Perhaps he had been betrayed by someone, and wanted a rock, or was simply fascinated by someone so extremely different than himself.

    Friendship, in their case, meant swimming together maybe once a week, it meant dinners every week or two, and drinks on Friday evenings. Because of Diethers requirement for routine and order, the times and activities were quite well defined. Diether worked as a print master in a printing plant of a daily paper, and worked from 9 pm to 5 am, Sunday to Friday. He had never, in his 34 year career, missed a day of work.

    One evening, James was at Diether's flat in Bayswater, on Inverness Terrace. Diether had a nice, large apartment there on the first floor of a Georgian townhouse. He liked, he said, to have somewhere for his daughter to stay, though by that time she was off at Oxford. His apartment was large by London standards, with a large kitchen/lounge/dining area with lovely high frescoed ceilings, wooden floors, two bedrooms, and French windows looking out on to Inverness Terrace.

    Diether was preparing a Spanish meal with fish, a very good gazpacho, prepared, actually that morning to let it gain spiciness over the day, and some tapas. He spent two weeks every summer (and for Diether that meant no lapses) in Mallorca, and that had been one of the things that had caused him to want to cook in the first place, to recreate some of the foods that he had there properly. He had never, in James' experience, cooked anything other than Spanish. When James had invited Diether to his own house, and had cooked Chinese, Diether had been unhappy with the food, which he found to be too exotic, and which was why the evening meals now always ended up at his house.

    "Your doorman has let some riffraff in the building, old boy," said James with a posh voice and a grin from the living room, after two loud voices in a language he didn't recognise continued outside Diether's door for nearly ten minutes.

    "Unfortunately, James, I do not have a doorman. Would you be so kind as to ask them to leave their position outside my door?" he requested from the kitchen, with no irony. Diether had an irony deficiency, one more thing James found very funny.

    Peeping out from the door, James saw an oriental woman in a red wool coat speaking loudly to someone, who didn't seem to be saying , and whose back was to the door. He coughed loudly, to try to indicate his annoyance, but foreigners never seemed to get such subtleties, forcing him to open the door and address the sources of his annoyance.

    "Can I help you?" he began to ask, but the woman with her back to the door turned and tried to force her way in. James, slight though he was, blocked her way.

    "What's going on out there?" Diether called from the kitchen.

    "Stop!" he yelled, but it was no use, she kept trying to get through him.

    "Stop right now, or I call the police," he tried again, still to no avail.

    "Stop or I slam the door and break all your fingers," he tried again. Her friend then shouted something at her in a foreign language.

    Right at about that point, Diether came out of the kitchen to see what the commotion was.

    The woman trying to get into the flat stopped dead, and spoke for the first time.

    "Diether!"

    "Nat!" said Diether, "Mein Gott! Was machen sie hier?" he asked in astonishment.

    James and the other woman just stood staring, as they embraced, she with her face buried in his chest, and silently racked with tears. After a bit of that, Diether led her into the living room, to the sofa, and the other woman followed the others in to the apartment.

    It turned out that Diether had been an exchange student in Thailand when he was young, and Nat had been his host sister. The woman in the red coat was her older sister, Pat. Diether and Nat had been in love, but her father had found out, and had Diether sent home.

On this evening, Pat, who lived in England, and who Nat was visiting, had been trying to convince her younger sister to drop things, as it was mad trying to get back with someone thirty years later. Her arguments were the ones James had heard outside the door prior to opening it, but had been to no avail.

    Probably because they were young, both ended up getting over things, getting on with their lives, getting married, and having families. But for both of them it was first love, and even 30 years later, they both held memories of one another dearly.

    Nat spoke English, and that had been one of the reasons that Diether had initially become so close to her: She was the only one in her family who spoke English. Diether hadn't spoken any Thai, and hadn't tried to learn at all. He had decided that he would improve his English, which was a lot more useful than Thai. This refusal to learn the language had meant that he came to depend on Nat's English ability. His world was somewhat limited by his rather stubborn and arrogant view of the place he lived in. For Nat that had been OK: He had been all hers.

    James was taken aback by the entire situation, from a mad woman forcing her way in to Diether's apartment, to a long lost love come from Thailand, information he gleaned from Pat, who stood with him in the entry to the living room as Nat and Diether sat on the sofa, murmuring to one another, Diether stroking her shoulder and her cheek.

    After some minutes, Diether, ever the gracious host, got up and asked James to set the table for an additional two.

It fell to James, the Englishman, to make polite conversation during the meal.

Chatter about the weather, football and jokes about politics followed, but the air was constrained, everyone thinking the same thing: 'What next?'

    That question was answered by Diether: He had to go to work. It was nearly eight o'clock, and that meant an end to the evening. The two women slept in the guest room, and James took his leave.

    Though James called Diether the next day to check up that everything was ok, Diether wouldn't say anything besides "I am dealing with things. I will let you know if I need any help."

Diether called James the next week, and requested that they meet up at the club. They usually met in the lobby before their swim, so that is where James was waiting when Diether came in. He had bought a new gym bag, and it was only when they got to the locker room that James saw that it contained tennis whites, shoes, and a tennis racket.

"Teach me to play tennis, James," said Diether, smiling.

"But Diether! Of course! But why?" said James in genuine surprise.

"I am tired of regretting what I have not done when I had the chance, and I have always regretted not playing tennis when I had a lovely girl who so wanted to play with me. But I also don't want to look foolish, so I thought a bit of practise first might be good," said Diether, his innate sense of organisation requiring certain steps prior to his first game with Nat.

    Nat loved tennis. She and Diether had gone to the country club in the posh Bangkok suburb where they lived nearly every day in the five months before he got sent back, but Diether had never played tennis with her and, despite her attempts to get him on the court, he had only swum.

"Crikey! Next thing you'll want to cook something besides Spanish. Thai or Chinese, maybe?"

"Don't be silly, James, I have friends who can cook those sorts of things for me" he said with an uncharacteristically happy smile, and just the faintest hint of irony.

Creative Writing Assignment 2

This was the second assignment for my creative writing course at Birbeck University. The assignement was for one person to interview another, and for one more person to listen, and take notes of the quotes of what they said. I had to choose one of my quotes, which is the first sentence of this piece, and then use it as the basis for a piece of writing. I read this in class, and got the impression that it was too long. Let me know what you think. After the class, I went home and re-wrote it in third person, which shortened it quite a lot, even though I added a bit more in terms of narrative. That is the one that I posted as Assignment 2, variation. I would really be interested in which you think works better.
 
    "I do like tennis, but I swim."

Diether, a man with whom I had recently become friends, said this. We were speaking over a coffee in the Porchester Sports Club, where we are both members.

    I had watched him swim, his monotonous breathing done up and down the pool as his strokes glanced in and out of the water, barely causing a ripple, a fluid movement, beautiful to watch. He did this every day for 2000 metres, or about 40 minutes.

    The first time we met, I had just finished swimming 1000 metres, which was a lot for me at the time, and swum with considerably less grace than Diether. I was in the dressing room, he came in from the pool, still in his Speedo and swim cap, we began changing together near the same lockers, and began talking, as you do, about the recent freezing weather and not wanting to go out in it.

    "Why don't we have a cup of coffee at the bar?" I suggested after we had both changed, and that is exactly what we did.

    "You're such a beautiful swimmer," I said. It is a bit odd for men, in conversation with one another, to refer to traits of other men as 'beautiful,' but I am one of those people who like rather expressive language. I also like women, if that was your next question.

    "Thank you. Swimming is an important thing to me. It keeps me fit and sane," he answered.

    It was maybe a few months later, when, again over coffee in the bar, we somehow began talking of tennis. Perhaps it was coming on spring time, and I was beginning to yearn for the courts. That is when he made the comment about liking tennis, but swimming.

    The comment tickled something in me, and began my fascination with him. It could be that it was because he was German, or that he was rather set in his ways, but I found it at once hilarious and worthy of derision. I have learned my lesson at my age, though, and kept my mirth to myself.

    "But do you like to swim?" I asked.

    "That is not the point—I do it for myself. My body likes it."

    "What about your soul, though? Don't you become bored?"

    "You don't understand," he said, and was absolutely right.

    I was to see him many more times, and despite the fact that I teased him about how stiff he was, albeit obliquely, and unlikely to pierce his Teutonic armour, we became friends.

    Friendship, in this case, meant swimming together maybe once a week, though I was really no match for his form, I could at least almost keep up. It meant dinners every week or two, and drinks on Friday evenings. And it meant a sincere regard for one another, though it must be said that the regard I had for him was tinged with a certain fascination at what I saw as his eccentricity. In hindsight, it was less that he was eccentric than the fact that we were quite different in outlook. Normally one has a hard time warming to someone as different, but in this case, for whatever reasons, I found myself enthusiastically looking forward to our meetings.

    Diether was not a man one got to know very well, very quickly, and it took me a long time to piece together who was, what he did, and from where he had come. He was German. I already mentioned that. He had been married to an English woman, but they had divorced a number of years before. They had a daughter, Hannah, who had lived with her mother, but who Diether saw often. She was a nice girl, and Diether was justly pleased with how she had turned out, despite some misgivings about her mother's child-rearing skills and the fact that she had grown up in a country that Diether did not particularly like.

    Diether had moved to England initially to join his wife on a two year assignment. She had been working for a large German bank in Germany when they had met, before the City had become so dominant in finance, and that is where they had met. Cologne, it had been, when that city was rather influential, being just up the road from Bonn, prior to the fall of the wall. Having lived in Cologne myself for a short time, I was sympathetic to why Diether's ex-wife had taken the assignment in London. Though a very nice city, Cologne is very closed in terms of allowing outsiders in. I mentioned this opinion once to Diether, himself Koelsh (being from Cologne), and his response was that "it was better than London, where everyone is welcome, even the English." He had that 'bah-humbug' air of him. In some of my classmates in university I had heard such statements, uttered in an attempt to goad someone into protesting or calling the utterer a racist bastard, or said with sly irony to suggest the opposite.

    In Diether, though, there was no irony. None. That was likely another aspect of England that he disliked: To someone unable to use or understand irony, living in England, it must be almost as though you don't understand the language. I don't know, but can guess, that after he and his wife began to live in England, and speak English, that could have been one of the things that made their relationship difficult. I imagine his wife must have found his irony deficiency tiring.

    Diether was a master printer. The Germans, he told me, make the best presses in the world, and I will have to trust him on that point, knowing nothing of the subject myself. Being a master printer involved an apprenticeship which began when he was 14 years old, and continued until after he was 20. There were tests along the way. But after he had finished his apprenticeship he was merely a journeyman printer, meaning that the formal training of the apprenticeship gave way to more responsibility, and more focus on the job itself. After nearly 10 years of that, he had become a master printer, meaning that he could run a wide variety of printing presses, and could manage others to do it, too. He had had his own apprentices, though not for long, since about two years after becoming a master printer in Cologne, he had followed his wife to the UK.

    In London, aided by his former company, and contacts they had in the UK, he landed a job as the foreman of the print shop of one of London's major daily newspapers. This meant odd work hours, which could have been one more reason his wife had wanted out. He worked from 9 pm to 6 am, so I am not sure how much of a sex life they must have had. In fact, he still works those hours. They suit him, he said, and there is no reason to change that which suits. That was Diether all over. He still complained about the fact that his company moved their printing facility outside of London, down near Gatwick, and he refused to move out of his central London flat to be closer to work. I guess with the hours he worked, traffic wasn't really a problem.

    One day I was at Diether's flat in Bayswater, on Inverness Terrace. He had a nice, large apartment there on the first floor of a Georgian townhouse, in fact taking the whole floor. He liked, he said, to have somewhere for his daughter to stay, though by that time she was off at Oxford and I don't believe that she often stayed. In any case, his apartment was large by London standards. He had a large kitchen/lounge/dining area with lovely high frescoed ceilings, wooden floors, two bedrooms, and French windows looking out on to Inverness Terrace.

    Diether loved to cook. Like everything that he set his mind to, he was very methodical and precise, following the recipes very carefully, and reading books to develop his cooking skills. On this evening, he was preparing a Spanish meal of some sort, with fish, a very good gazpacho, and something else I can't remember, for reasons which I will explain in a minute. Diether spent two weeks every summer (and if he said every, you could count on there being no lapses) in Majorca, and that had been one of the things that had caused him to want to cook in the first place, to recreate some of the foods that he had there. So a Spanish meal with Diether was in no way unusual.

    What was unusual happened as he was preparing dinner. We heard some voices outside the door to his flat, coming from the landing. That wasn't so strange, I guess, as there was another family living on the second floor, and they of course had to get there somehow. These voices, though, were speaking a language that I didn't understand, rather loudly, and it wasn't the French of Diether's upstairs neighbours. And they continued to speak loudly for maybe ten minutes.

    "Your doorman has let some riffraff in the building, old boy," I said with a posh voice and a grin.

    "Unfortunately, James, I do not have a doorman. Would you be so kind as to ask them to leave their position outside my door?" he asked me from the kitchen.

    I peeped out through the peep hole, and could see a woman in a red wool coat. She was speaking to someone who seemed to be rather short and leaning against the door, as when I looked through the keyhole, something blocked it. I couldn't understand the language they spoke, but the woman in the red coat seemed Oriental. All I could see of who she spoke to was a foot sticking out, as if the person leaning against the door was sat on the floor with her feet out.

    I coughed as loudly as I could, really a clearing of my throat rather than a cough, but the red-coated woman and her friend didn't seem to take the hint. So, I eased the door open, in case the person leaning against it had her weight on it. The door opened inward. As soon as I had opened the door, the woman leaning against it stood up, and grabbed the door frame.

    "Can I help you?" I had begun to ask, but this woman, maybe 40 years old, I thought, and like her friend, with Oriental features, began to try to force herself into the flat, holding on to the door frame and trying to pull herself in. What was preventing her was me blocking the door and her friend pulling on her other arm.

    "Close the door!" her friend shouted. I would have happily complied, except that her mad friend, who hadn't uttered one word, just a very intense and frightening look, still had hold of the door frame, and I would have broken all the fingers on her right hand if I had shut it.

    "What's going on out there?" Diether called from the kitchen.

    This seemed to spur this woman to get in even more, and I couldn't answer him, having to concentrate on keeping myself upright as she tried to bowl through me and into the apartment.

    "Stop!" I yelled, but it was no use, she kept trying to get through me.

    "Stop right now, or I call the police," I tried again, still to no avail.

    "Stop or I slam the door and break all your fingers," I tried again. Her friend then shouted something at her in a language that I didn't understand.

    Right at about that point, Diether came out of the kitchen to see what the commotion was.

    The woman trying to get into the flat stopped dead, and spoke for the first since I opened the door.

    "Diether!"

    "Nat!" said Diether, "Mein Gott! Was machen sie hier?" That I did understand, though I am not sure she did, as she just repeated his name again.

    Diether shoved past me, and embraced the woman, who began to sob. I and the other woman just stood staring, as they embraced, she with her face buried in his chest, and silently racked with tears. After a bit of that, Diether moved her into the living room, to the sofa, and the other woman followed us in to the apartment.

    It transpired that Diether had lived, as part of some kind of German international development program, in Thailand for what was supposed to be one year. He had lived with a host family, and Nat had been his host sister. Pat, the other woman, was her older sister, and had already left home and married an Englishman by that time. On this evening, she had been trying to convince her younger sister to drop things, as it was mad trying to get back with someone thirty years later. Her arguments were the ones I had heard outside the door prior to opening it, but had been to no avail.

    I didn't find out the details until later, but Diether and Nat had fallen in love. Her father, who was someone rather important in the Thai government, found out about this, and promptly had Diether sent home to Germany, with a strict order to keep away from his daughter. Neither of them said it, but it seems that they were completely in love, and both suffered broken hearts.

    Probably because they were young, both ended up getting over things, getting on with their lives, getting married, and having families. Except that she, apparently, hadn't gotten over Diether, and when her husband, who was somewhat older than her, suddenly died, she had gone to England to see her sister. Considering her state that day at the door, I am guessing that her mental state had been fragile.

    Nat did speak English, and later we had many long conversations. She told me that her English had been one of the reasons that Diether had initially become so close to her: She was the only one in her family who spoke English. Diether hadn't spoken any Thai, and hadn't tried to learn at all. He had decided that he would improve his English, which was a lot more useful than Thai. This refusal to learn the language had meant that he came to depend on Nat's English ability. His world was somewhat limited by his rather stubborn and arrogant view of the place he lived in, Nat told me, but that had been ok with her: He had been all hers.

    Her passion was tennis. She and Diether had gone to the country club nearly every day, and I asked her whether Diether had played tennis.

    "No," she laughed, "along with not speaking Thai, Diether did NOT play tennis. Believe me, I asked. He preferred swimming, he said. I couldn't get him to even try tennis."

    Nat was an attractive woman, even at 47 years old. She had kept fit, and had kept a youthful air about her, almost childlike in manners. She was, after the initial impression of mental instability had worn off, a very nice, lively woman.

    But I am getting ahead a bit. We were still in Diether's apartment, the four of us, Nat still recovering, Pat and I stood looking on like uncomfortable spectators. Diether, ever the gracious host, got up and asked me to set the table for an additional two. We had dinner, and as usual Diether's Spanish dishes were lovely, but to be honest, on this occasion I am not sure any of us derived the full enjoyment out of the food.

    It fell to me, the Englishman, to make polite conversation during the meal. I was still very much unsure about what had occurred, and therefore stuck to those subjects that every Englishman learns to speak of ad nauseum.

    "So, it was quite a nice day today, wasn't it? Hoping for a bit of sun tomorrow as well, knock on wood."

    "Yes, that would be lovely," said Pat.

    Silence.

    "So, assuming the weather holds, what will you be up to tomorrow, then?" I ask.

    Not a good question, as it depended on a resolution to the question of what her younger sister would be doing next. Chatter about football and jokes about politics followed, but the air was constrained, I think everyone thinking the same thing: 'What next?'

    In a funny way, that question was answered by Diether: He had to go to work. That is one of the aspects of dinner with him, that he has to finish by 9 and then go off to work, except on Friday, which he had off. It was a Sunday. He had never, he told me, missed work, in the 33 years he had been working. On this occasion, it meant that Diether was able to offer Nat and Pat accommodation for the night, and leave the awkward situation until the next day to sort out.

    I took my leave, but called him the next day to check up that everything was ok. He wouldn't say anything besides "I am dealing with things. I will let you know if I need any help."

I called back about a week later, when I hadn't heard from him, and he was equally cryptic, but suggested we meet up at the club. I went early, and expected to see Diether in the pool, as that was what we usually did: Plan to meet at three for a coffee, but actually see each other in the pool beforehand. This time, though he wasn't in the pool, and I did not see him, in fact, until I came out of the shower after my swim. He came in to the locker room from the club side, dressed not, as was usual, in Speedo and swim cap, but in tennis whites.

Creative Writing Assignment 1

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This was my first assignment for my creative writing course at Birbeck University. The assignment was to take the dream image of one of our classmates, and write what happened before a certain moment in that image, and what happened after. I chose the moment on the cliff, with the leopard.

The spotlights came up, highlighting the mountains behind the plateau on which the assembled string musicians sat, bows, fingers, and hands poised to play the opening notes of a most unusual concert, set in a most unusual setting. The plateau sat atop a ledge above the mediaeval town of Aran, cut into the spectacular mountain which rose behind it. The moon was full, and visible above the peak of the snow-peaked mountain Prima, the tallest mountain, which jutted into the sky, seeking, it seemed, to impale the moon on it's narrow spear of a peak.

Closest to the mountain and protected by an overhang, were the string players. There were an enormous number of them, more than 500 players of all sorts of stringed instruments, from violins to shamisens, from guitars to sitars, from lutes to banjos, and many more whose names are known only in the tongues of the farflung places from which they come. Even with so many, though, they occupied only a small part of the massive plateau. In the centre of the plateau, were assembled over 400 tables, each seating nine people. To the side, were four massive tents, in which the food was being cooked to feed the assembled guests. The deer and cattle served that night, over 50 head, had been marched up the mountain and then slaughtered, special precautions taken to muffle any noise, the plateau possessing almost magical acoustical properties which meant that any sounds generated there carried to Aran as though they were being produced mere feet away.

At the front of the plateau sat the prince of Aran and 500 of his closest friends. At the side of the prince, sat a leopard, a sleek female with an improbably small head atop a lithe, sleekly muscled, and beautiful body. The prince stroked the beautiful animal, but not in the way one would stroke a cat, or a dog, but in the way one would stroke the hair of a lover.

The conductor of the assembly of strings, the very well-known Mr. Sowaza, awaited the signal to start, which was to be relayed to him from the prince.

The assembled guests sat at their tables, chatting, and drinking the sweet sparkling wines that had been served, and sensed what was coming. The noise abated as they either discontinued their conversations or began to speak in hushed tones. String playing and listening is such a fact of everyday life in Aran, part of the fabric of the town, that it was respected but not revered. Everyone, to a person, expected a fantastic concert, and had respect for the musicians who they expected to provide it.

The sweet evening mountain air, the floodlit mountain behind them, the twinkles from the hundreds of candles on the tables, the moon in the sky, and their beloved Aran below, all created a magical atmosphere that no one would forget. If anyone had any doubt that this was the best party ever, they disappeared as the prince gave the signal.

Mr. Sowaza brought his baton down, and the entire assembly of musicians played the same note, an E flat. The song had been specially composed to resonate at those frequencies that carried best to Aran. After the initial note, the violas, the shamisens, and the Lao lutes took the melody, and the other instruments took the harmony. Two old Lao men, Mr. Kangprathet and Mr. Ngam played their small instruments, constructed of coconut shells covered in calf skin, long teak frets, and strings made from the guts of water buffaloes, and played with bows that had been given to them by one of the famous violin makers of Aran, being so far superior to their own bows that when they returned to their country, the technique of making them would be designated a national treasure.

The melody was high, with the slightly spicy smell of the Orient, yet came back again and again to one which owed it's debt to the lovely melodies first conjured many hundreds of years ago in the valleys around Aran. One by one, instruments came in and left, the banjos, the guitars, the 30-strong bass section's deep sounds shaking the glasses that the guests had now set down on their tables, enraptured o f the music, and completely forgetting all else, the wine, the conversation, and even the beautiful setting they sat in.

Those not fortunate enough to have seats on the plateau sat in the market square of Aran, or in their homes, windows open to hear more clearly, and because of the way that sound travelled could hardly be called deprived of the marvellous performance going on above them. They, too, stopped all that they were doing, and listened to the performance, the magical performance, some closing their eyes to better experience the sensation of the sound, concentrating all their focus on that single sense.

The Symphony of Aran, as the piece later became known, was never heard in such perfection as on that night, the night of it's first performance. The composer, Mr. Jalakey, was seen with tears running down his face for nearly the entire performance. The pride of hearing his masterpiece, and it will definitely be remembered as such for many centuries to come, for the first time, in such an atmosphere, in Aran, on such a night, was so great that the memory was his most treasured.

The symphony conjured the images of the mountains, of the flowers growing in the high meadows, of the sound of the water of the creeks in the valleys, it was the sound of birds which migrated in from the east which brought the slight hint of the Orient, and there were the sound of winds of the southern Mediterranean desert, but all came back to Aran. And Aran, in this piece, ebbed, and it flowed, from the sounds of great thunderous crashes of avalanches, to the sound of a single songbird.

The finale was dominated by the violins of Aran, nearly 200 of them, and incredibly each one weaving a different part of the melody, though all playing in the same key, a nearly improvisational performance, but one that had been practised and refined, and followed a grand design rather than individual expression.

And then, some 90 minutes later, Mr. Sowaza raised his baton, and it was over.

The silence was profound. It was as if day had suddenly turned to night, the light, powerful rays of sound suddenly stopped shining on the guests. After a three second silence, a man near the front stood and began to tap his wine flute like a madman with his fork.

"Bravo! Bravo! Bravissimo!" he shouted, and was joined by others who also stood and struck their glasses. The glasses, in various states of fill, echoed a variety of notes across the plateau, and down to Aran. And suddenly, the sound 4,000 wine glasses being struck created it's own wall of sound, a sound of pure joy, of wild joy, uncontrolled and therefore not recognisable as music, yet containing in it's random notes, randomly struck at irregular intervals, a music of the soul, a pure form of expression. It was, somehow, the magical sound of laughter. And when the assembled guests began to hear it as such, they put down their glasses, and began to laugh. It was a laughter of joy, of having experienced something that was so perfect that tears were shed even as laughter bellowed forth.

Mr. Sowaza acknowledged their praise, recognising it for what it was, and bowed. On his signal, all of the musicians not already standing, stood, and on a further signal, all 500 plus musicians bowed. The applause was loud and enthusiastic, and held for over two minutes, laughter and tears mixing with the applause.

Even the elegantly attired ladies and gentlemen of the prince's party stood and clapped, their concern at outward appearances falling away in the face of such a magnificent display of musical virtuosity.

The female leopard had curled up around the feet of the prince, wrapping her long tail around his left leg, and purring contentedly.

The night continued to echo the wonderful sounds of the musicians, who took turns in four groups playing dancing music late into the night.

The guests sat down to dinner, a wonderful meal prepared to perfection, and served with impeccable care, of such basic ingredients as beef, venison, potatoes, cabbage, and things that made regular appearances on the tables of Aran, and yet seemed to have been transformed by some magic into a meal of extraordinary depth and richness.

When they were done with their exquisite meal, they took to the dance floor, which sat between the diners and the musician, a fabulous tile floor across which they glided to the sounds of fiddles and banjos, kotos and cellos.

No one wanted the party to end, and the guests, the musicians, and the nobility danced and talked and ate until the wee hours of the morning.

As the sun rose behind Prima, the rays of light flashing from the top of the mountain as though emanating from it, they stopped their dancing, their drinking, and their talking, and sat facing the rising sun, as though it was a god to whom they were praying.

And, if truth be told, they were praying, praying to never forget what was, hands down, the very best party. Ever.

One man who attended the party composed a song that described his feeling, and the following verse from that song probably echoes the feelings of many of the guests:

Song of Aran

Won'drous Aran, your valleys and yer heights

Won'drous Aran, your music and yer sky

Won'drous Aran, I had not lived til I'd seen your sights

Won'drous Aran, may I have mem'ries of this night until I die

Back on the road

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I love to run. Not totally sure what about it really appeals to me, but I really love it. But it doesn't always love me: I have had my bouts of shin splints, tendonitis, chafing, bloody nipples, exceedingly sore knees and legs, to the point where the physio told me that "some people just aren't meant to run, and maybe you are one of them." Frackin' moron--doesn't she know that running is a basic human thing? Fight or flight actually requires the ability to fly, or rather flee.
Part of the problem that I had was that I was slow, at least the last time I was running seriously. That meant that my form was poor. I don't know why that is, but for me running slower than 6 minute kilometres seems to mean that my form is poor. I have heard others say similar things. After I speed up, somehow it improves. I only know this because of pain: Many years ago in Japan I started up running again. I had a lot of stress, and a newborn son at home, and needed a release. I started running at night in an old pair of New Balances only sold in Asia. It was perfect for stress release, but I got shin splints. I investigated extensively on the Internet and bought a pair of New Balance 580s from Road Runner Sports in the U.S. They seemed to do the job pretty well, and I was able to continue running, but there was still a niggling pain in my lower leg.
However, after I started running faster, there was no more of that. I started to train for a half-marathon, with my goal to finish in 90 minutes, which was when they re-opened the road that the race was being run on. I was quite good about training, and had run half-marathon distances in training at about 96 minutes. The marathon was in early January, and I went home to Oregon that Christmas, via Honolulu and a week in Hawaii. I slacked off the training in Hawaii, but got back to it in Oregon.
Oregon would seem to be the perfect place to train, and especially Eugene, where I am from, and where I spent that Christmas. The problem was that it was shitty rainy weather, and I was running around Amazon Park, which was only a hundred yards from my mom's house. It was a 2k barkamulch trail, which was completely mushy with the rain. I was training, at that point, on about 8 or 10 km per day, and somehow the softness was not a good thing. Not a good thing at all, and led to some serious pain in my right knee. I rested after that, hoping it would be better for the half-marathon, which I was due to run 2 days after getting back to Japan. I made it to about 10k before the pain was too excruciating to continue. The next day when I went to the hospital, the doctor gave me a shot of cortisone, and, similar to the physio, told me not to do anymore running. I told him to get stuffed, but the combination of not finishing the race, and being in quite a lot of pain put me off it for quite a few years.
Fast forward to two years ago when I applied, and my application was accepted to, the London Marathon. I had never heard of a race that didn't accept all-comers who applied in time. Eugene doesn't have those sort, and neither does Japan. London does, though. But I hadn't really been training. I had applied to motivate myself to train, but waited until the results of the lottery in December before I really got serious. I set myself a very ambitous training regimen, which involved training a lot, and doing a long run on Sundays. I was up to 15 miles on my Sunday run, at a so-so pace, but after my long runs, and after some of the longer training runs, I had very bad shin splints. I found a store in London, Profeet, which did gait analysis and then used that to choose the perfect shoe and create custom-molded insoles for them. They set me up with some Mizuno's which seemed to be pretty good. I still had shin splints, though. And the longer my long runs got, the longer it took me to recover. I could barely move my legs on Mondays.
That's when I went to the physio to get her to reduce the pain. But nooooo! She had to tell me to stop! Again, I railed against her advice, but was also in enough pain that continuing despite her advice was difficult anyway. This time, though, I did quite a lot of research about why I might be having these problems. It looked like, in reading Gordon Pirie's book on running, as well as alot of other stuff, including a rip-off eBook that looked terrible, but wasn't actually as much of a ripoff as I thought, that the problems in my lower leg were probably the result of heel-striking, or some other problem with my form. There were some jump-roping exercises and others that would apparently help. I also heard about something called the Pose Method, which was a method of getting people to run with proper form, on the balls of feet (BOF). I bought a book from a guy in Reading, which also had a DVD with samples of lots of exercises. Most of the exercises required some amount of space, and I began to use the gym at work's aerobics studio.
I had also, during this time, joined our company's volleyball club. It is a great game, which I love playing. However, within a very short time of joining, I injured my thigh muscle, a first, and also a short time later my calf muscle. The thigh injury took quite a while to recover from.
It looked more and more like I would never get back to running.
I had, in my mind, however, accepted what Dr. Nicholas Romanov said about form in his Pose Method book. It struck me as being essentially true. Some of the things he says:

• Humans naturally run on the balls of their feet, which can be seen watching someone run barefoot. It is only the running shoe companies that pad up the heels to such an extent that they can be run on that have thwarted natural human biomechanics.
• Running is essentially about falling forward. Gravity moves the body forward.
  
• Pounding the ground and/or pushing off are very hard on the legs, and it is far preferable to pull the legs upwards and let gravity, rather than muscle, propel one forward.

Anyway, because of various reasons, starting with laziness, but also involving massive flooding of the gym, as well as volleyball-induced injury, I didn't get back to running. I did training sessions with Oleg, a Pose coach in Reading, a few times, but he moved to Germany, and scheduling the sessions was a pain.
Last summer my mom came over and my family, together with her, travelled to Italy. We stayed most of the trip in Amalfi, the headline town on the Amalfi coast. It is a lovely area, but one the features is lots and lots of stairs. I sweated like a pig. I was so out of shape, and a fat 95 kg, that I was huffing and puffing like my 65 year-old mother. Not good.
So, I joined the gym and started doing exercise biking nearly every day. At some point, I think I mentioned it on a previous blog post, I also started to look pretty seriously at my diet, and to reduce my calorie intake.
However, I didn't run except very occasionally. When I did run, I tried to run Pose, but I kept getting cramps and minor muscle tears in my calves, a clear indicator that I wasn't running correctly.
I got extremely busy in December, and was spending a lot of time in Paddington, where I didn't have access to the company gym, which was the excuse I used for why I didn't continue with my every day training. It was/is, as far as excuses go, an ok one, but it is still an excuse. Recently I have been trying to get back in to it. But stationary biking, as opposed to going home and seeing more of my family, is lame.
Last weekend, I again tried running. This time there was no pain. I told myself that I need to make sure that I don't run with any tightness in my muscles, as that can lead to an improper running style. I did have some tightness on Monday, so I held of. Tuesday is volleyball night, so I got a different kind of exercise. Yesterday, I ran again, also without any real pain this morning. So, I ran again today. Again, I don't feel any pain. Yeah!
I didn't run fast, but I did run on the balls of my feet, and the lack of pain hopefully means that now I've 'got' the Pose method. I use some quite flat and light shoes, which hopefully will last awhile, as I bought them in Japan, and they aren't available here.
It is really good to be back on the road again. Hopefully I can stay running, injury-free.

More Cuts

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I may have mentioned a few weeks ago about my bet that redundancies would be announced on January 16th. I was about 5 weeks too early in my reckoning, apparently.
Today 500 reduncancie at Vodafone UK were announced.
The odd thing is that the redundancies have already started, two weeks ago in Vodafone Group. The facilities project manager for the Paddington project, as well as another person in facilities, I heard directly from them, had been made redundant. Very strange, as he was quite good at his job, and genuinely cared. Then I hear that Simon Lewis, the Group Communications Director, has left, as has the head of internal communications, several other people within internal comms, as well as several people in the Corporate Social Responsibility team. Next I hear about some internal audit people gone. But there has been no announcment.
We learned more from Bloomberg than from any communication from the company. Perhaps that is because internal comms is not functioning? Quite possibly. However, it was the CEO's business manager that took over as head of corporate affairs, which absorbs communications, internal and external, and one would think that if she was involved that, naturally, something would be communicated. I have known her since my Japan days, and would give her very high marks when she was the manager for Bill Morrow, our CEO there, as well as Vittorio Colao here.
This reminds me a bit of when Arun Sarin sent David Jones, formerly CEO of Vodafone Netherlands, to Japan to straighten things out as the COO there. Everyone knew, from day one, that he was there to make a show of exerting central group control over Vodafone Japan. He made no attempt to speak to employees, never addressed all employees, even when given the chance at an annual event we held, opting instead to speak on video. He, also, was very quiet right up until the day that he offered all employees the chance to take voluntary redundancy. Twenty five percent of all full-time employees quit the company, receiving quite a good package. Many were the most able people, since the package was so generous that if you were good at your job the temptation was clearly there to take the package and then start at a new job. And since the majority of workers were non-regular employees, so called contractors, the employees really did have the role of driving things, and that was really lost after the 'restructuring'.
He stayed on afterwards, but it was a miserable failure. His people skills, never good in the first place, led to new lows in morale as draconian measures such as 'every trip outside of Japan must first be approved by David Jones' were implemented, but it was never possible to get an appointment to actually get anything approved. I used to send one woman on my team up to his office at 6 pm on Fridays, because we figured out that was the best time, everyone else gone drinking. Also, she was quite cute, which I found really helped, as he wouldn't give me the time of day.
Ironically, it is another former Vodafone Netherlands CEO that is again in the drivers seat. Not knowing Guy Lawrence well, I wouldn't venture to say that he was responsible for this round, since it has apparently been planned for awhile. I would say, however, that Vodafone UK seem to have only two pages in their playbook: Redundancies and Outsourcing.
As a Vodafone Group employee, the complete lack of communication on what, if anything, will happen to us, hasn't been comfortable, and because the rumours didn't specify whether it was Vodafone UK or Vodafone Group or both sorts of employees which would be made redundant, it was very hard to tell where we stand. It still is.
Perhaps the fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) of the past few days are fully justified, as there are always those willing to fall back on tired managment techniques in an effort to show how tough they are, how much 'fat'--as if people were an expendable resource--they can cut. Irony of ironies, these 'change programs' or whatever other current euphemism for large scale firings are called, cost quite a lot in the first year in severance costs. By the end of year two, there is a significant chance that the company has hired other people for the roles that were cut, or is using contractors for it, an option that is actually more expensive in the short, medium, and long-term economically unless your entire business model is based on the outmoded industrial legacy of layoffs, which make much less sense in a business where the number of people tied to the scale of the product being delivered is quite small: Our network still needs to function, our billing still needs to work, our portal still needs to deliver content, our call centre staff have no fewer people today than they did yesterday calling to ask for help. In this sense, we are truly post-industrial, in the sense that we are selling a service where each employee is not necessarily directly tied to the scale of it's use. Unlike auto workers, whose productivity and their use to the company is tied to how many cars they can build, and how many of those cars the company can sell, we don't build anything. Nearly everything has been outsourced, nearly all differentiating factors have been extinguished, and FUD is not a great working environment.
Back at group, the randomness of some of the trickle of redundancies I have heard about does create a fear.
I shall be interested in whether our hermit leader explains the grand strategy he has been working on. People who actually know anything are being incredibly tightlipped.
Fuk this FUD. Not only did 500 people get fired, but our volleyball club members, most of them Vodafone UK people, were in no mood for games tonight, so it got cancelled.