Tama the station cat is promoted

A while back (May 2008) I blogged about a cat called Tama who lived at a train station in Japan. Tama became so popular at this train station that many Japanese people would travel to the station just to see her. Recently, in recognition of Tama's ability to pull in the punters she has been promoted to the Railway Board as this blog entry with news video shows.

I am not sure why Tama had to wear some kind of pantomime outfit when receiving her promotion, other than its just the way things are in Japan!

I have to thank fellow tweeter @linagato for alerting me to the latest in Tama's story.

The Masters Snooker

Yesterday Jase and I were at the Masters Snooker in Wembley for the Quarter Finals. I've been watching snooker since the mid 80s but I'd never been to a live tournament. I was really excited about going to Wembley to see the snooker. The atmosphere particularly in the evening was amazing.


We were lucky to see two very different matches. In tha afternoon we saw Stephen Maguire play Ryan Day. It was a tense match which although it finished 6 : 1 to Maguire it was far from a white wash. Both players were having real difficulties and neither were happy with the way they were playing. There is a photo above of Stephen Maguire.

The match we saw in the evening (Mark Selby v Mark Allen) was totally different, it was entertaining with both players relaxed and laughing and joking with each other and the crowd at the start. The match was very close going to a deciding frame after 11 pm at night. There was a century break, high breaks, good safety play and lots of tension. The picture below is of Mark Selby who eventually won.

We had great seats particularly in the evening where we had an excellent view.

I'd definitely go to other snooker tournaments now. I'd love to go to the Crucible in Sheffield and see the world championships.

Telling my story

Telling my story is the name of the Educational Recovery Course run by the Community Mental Health Team I am attending. I prefer to call it my mad writers club. The focus is on creative writing but other art forms can be explored as well. The first meeting of the course / club was today. Not many people turned up, probably due to the bad weather over the last few days I guess, and the fact that it was bucketing it down this morning. So there were 6 of us although 3 were the facilitators!

Due to confidentiality I can't launch in to a jolly description of us all, I'd be mortified if someone wrote about their impressions of me on a blog! But I can write about what we are doing on the course. We will be keeping a journal each for the next 12 weeks, where we will write about what ever we want. The journals are private and we won't be sharing them. We will be reading stuff other people mental health conditions have written, we will be writing about our own experiences in different ways trying creative writing, biography, what ever we want to and sharing with the group what we want to. This will help us build confidence, deal with issues and be more organised I should imagine.

Anyway everyone was very friendly - it was a lot less traumatic than arriving at my first Japanese lesson in the summer, that felt like entering the big brother house! Everyone today was very nice and supportive which is good.

One very important thing that came out of today was, through considering what was worrying me at the moment and taking to one of the facilitators (she is our "peer support" eg she's mad like us) I realised I was being too ambitious with my plans to return to work, to the same job the only real modification I was planning to make was to reduce my hours by 20%. Instead this afternoon I phoned my boss and discussed working 2.5 days a week and working on a discreet piece of work, not being Head of Equality and Diversity any more. It feels so good to have decided this.
A real burden off my shoulders. Maybe then I can concentrate on getting better.

Dreek

I am in a very grumpy, bad tempered old mood today. i suppose I should just roll with it and let it wash over me. Not quite sure what I'm so hacked off about but the following does not help:

The weather is abysmal, damp, dark, cold, depressing or as the Scots would say dreek
The flat is in dire need of a good spring clean and sort out but I just don't have the motivation to start it

Actually there isn't that much to be grumpy about I just am, it's as simple as that.

The last week has been quiet. The snow lasted a few days but is mostly melted, any that remains is in mucky piles at the side of quiet roads or pavements. It looks disgusting, there is nothing more beautiful than pristine snow and nothing more horrible than dirty, slushy, icy remains of snow, in my humble and grumpy opinion anyway.

I'm due to pop into work tomorrow to discuss returning properly towards the end of this month, this may be adding to my bleak mood but on the other hand I want to get back to some normality as soon as possible.

I start my Educational Recovery arts course thing on Thursday so that should be interesting and lift this bleak, dreek mood I'm in.

Snow

Last night and today we had snow in London, the rest of the UK has been hit very badly, particularly Scotland, but in London its quite a novelty to have snow that settles. The media are in a snow frenzy, they have even got a news special tonight on BBC1 called "Frozen Britain" as Kent Brockman in the Simpson's would say, "This news story is so big it has it's own title and theme music!"
Above is blurry picture of me in the snow this afternoon - I had to take it of myself so that's why its blurred. I had been walking home from Wimbledon for about 1o minutes when I took it so that's about 10 minutes worth of snow on my hat.

Below is a picture of the church on the corner of Latimer Road and the start of the Broadway in Wimbledon, the snow was coming down at a fair pace by then.
Below is a picture of the traffic lights on Trinity Road and Broadway in the snow. I hope these pictures of snowy Merton entertain you ;-)

It is amazing though how the most ordinary, mundane urban scenes can be transformed into something magical with a sprinkling of snow.

South Bank

Here are the photos of the south bank I took earlier that I couldn't upload. Laptop now working ok so here they are. Above is the south bank.
Here is the view east along the river from the Jubilee bridge.
This one is a picture of Charing Cross Station I like the sky in this one.

From the South Bank to 1950s Tokyo

Today I went to see Tokyo Story at the British Film Institute on the South Bank. The outing wasn't just a nice trip to the pictures for me. Those of you who read yesterday's blog entry will know that I was taking the underground by myself for the first time in ages and purposely making myself go into crowded areas of London. I'm really pleased to report that both the tube journey, and navigating Waterloo station at 5pm did not cause me much trouble. I didn't feel too nervous or get panicked which is a big improvement from before Christmas.

I took some photos of the South Bank whilst I was up there, I'll have to post them later though as my lap top won't upload them to my blog right now.

Tokyo Story is being shown as part of the BFI's Ozu season. I hadn't seen any of Ozu's films before so wasn't sure what to expect. Tokyo Story (Tokyo Monogatari) is magnificent. Set in post war Japan (it was filmed in 1953) the film deals with themes familiar to me from the small amount of Japanese literature I've read. Themes of rural vs urban, the passing of the old ways, the drifting apart of generations of parents and children. The film is delicate, dignified, and very moving. There is a quality to the film that is reminiscent of the novel Kokoro

I also think the film is totally universal. The older parents who just want some quiet time with their family, the grown up children who are busy with their own lives and children, the resentments of children towards the parents misdemeanors. The gulf between the generations, the marching inevitable progress of the urban over the rural are surely themes everyone can recognise.

There is a wonderful scene where the old father comes home to his daughters house in Tokyo drunk with his drunk buddies in tow. His daughter does not see the funny side of this at all, and although she's portrayed as selfish and unsympathetic her fathers drunkenness when she was a child is alluded to more than once in the film. A child can not forgive the parent for being imperfect.

Setsuko Hara is sublime as Noriko, the actress is rather intriguing as she gave up acting after Ozu's death in 1963 and has refused any publicity since then. She lives in Kamakura, one of my favourite places.

If you are lucky enough to live near a cinema that is showing Tokyo Story I can't recommend it enough.

Thank you Twitter and Facebook!

As most of you reading this know I have been off work for a while now, with anxiety and depression. Today was a hard day for me as most of my friends and colleagues returned to work after Christmas and I didn't, but more of that later. Over the last 6 weeks I have found a great deal of support from my family and friends, also from my online friends at Twitter who have shown great support to someone they have only got to know through short communications of 146 characters or less! In the past when I have been very anxious or depressed I felt a lot more isolated than I do now. I have the Twitter community and the ease of contacting my friends via Facebook to thank for this. So I wanted to say a big thank you to all my friends who have supported me on Twitter and Facebook, I really appreciate it!

Today as I said above has been difficult as most of the UK's working population have returned to work today after the Christmas break. From reading the twitter updates relating to this return to work most people are not happy about being back at work particularly as the weather is freezing. This is the first time in my adult life that I haven't returned to work after the Christmas break; I am still signed off work until later this month.

In one way I'm quite envious of the masses of disheveled, down hearted commuters making their way through London's sub zero streets this morning. I wanted to experience that huge January hangover, back to work, dismalness for myself. I need some normality and routine in my life right now. Over the next few weeks I hope to work out with my boss a plan for returning back to work and the thought of this fills me with both anticipation and doubt.

I still have a lot to work through myself and with those supporting me. (I'm hoping to join a support group run by the local community mental health team in the next couple of weeks.) I will keep you all posted through my blog how that goes and everything else. Over the next couple of weeks I plan to venture out a bit more by myself on public transport (one of the things that was making me most anxious) and visit public places (crowds even small ones, not one of my favourite things when I'm feeling bad.) It sounds really basic but if I can't cope with getting to and from work how am I going get back to work properly. I'm starting tomorrow with a trip to the South Bank, one of my favourite places in London but I have to get there on public transport and it is often crowded. I'll let you know how it goes.

He's behind you!

BushyNY2010 19
Originally uploaded by JasonGDoig

Here is the photo I mentioned in my previous blog entry. A real "He's behind you!" moment. I'm busy photographing a stag much further away whilst this one just saunters past me. Jase couldn't let me know in case he spooked it but he took the photo instead :-)

New Year 2010 - Hampton Court

Jase and I saw the New Year in at the Hampton Court Hotel (above is a picture of Hampton Court Palace as viewed from our bedroom window.) At night the palace was lit up in different, changing coloured lights, very pretty. Below is the view over the Thames and the Bridge at Hampton Court. We watched the fireworks at midnight being reflected in the Thames.
As we were staying in the Catherine Parr suite we got a 4 poster bed, pictured below.
Jase and I had a quiet New Years Eve seeing the new year in together watching the fireworks as mentioned above, from the huge bay window in our hotel room. It was bitterly cold outside so it was lovely to be cosey and warm indoors. We toasted the new year with some beer.

When we woke on New Years Day there was a fine sprinkling of snow over everything but as the day was bright and sunny much of the snow had melted by the time we set off for a walk at 11. As you can see in the picture of the stag in the bottom right hand corner of the picture there was still a small amount of snow on the ground in Bushy Park.
Bushy Park is full of wildlife including deer, water fowl, song birds and bright green parakeets. Jase and I went armed with our cameras to get some photos of the wild life. You can see Jason's pictures on his flickr page by clicking here

All the pictures on my blog were taken by me. I really like the photo of the bird below drinking or is he looking at his reflection?
There was a very grumpy swan on the pond, he just swam up and down menacing the other birds and either running them off the lake all together or as in the picture below forcing the other birds to flap away.
The bad tempered swan seemed particularly upset by the presence of geese. I'm guessing because they are fairly large and maybe not permanent residence on the water if they just winter here. Below is a picture of the swan threatening a goose that he had managed to threaten out of the water and on to the bank. One of my favourite cafes is one on the banks of Grassmere in the lake district. The out door cafe is often pestered by a large swan they call Henry viii who harasses patrons of the cafe hissing at them until they move or leave him food. This swan was just as fearsome as Henry viii up in the Lake District and as this swan lives right next to Hampton Court Palace I think he too deserves to be named after the hot headed, larger than life and aggressive King.
Below is a photo of the poor birds that had been intimidated by the swan into a corner of the lake.

Bushy Park is famous for its semi wild deer. As they are used to people visiting the park they are not completely wild but they are still very wary of humans and you really wouldn't want to get too close to one of the stags or one of his does. I was very patiently waiting for a good picture of this stag, standing very still, being very calm, letting the stag get used to me and carry on with his bark chewing. Whilst I was engrossed in this another stag walked right behind me, close enough for me to have touched him. Jason saw all this but couldn't call out to me in case he spooked the stag or me! Jase took a picture of the scene, me blissfully unaware of the giant stag at my side. I'll blog the picture that Jase took after this entry.
Bushy park is also home to some rather exotic birds, bright green parakeets. There are many urban myths about how the birds came to live in south London but none of them can be proved. I like the myth that Errol Flynn introduced them whilst filming in London.
We had a lovely morning in the park, it was a fantastic way to start the new year.