I’ve been back in the UK a year now- my longest continuous period in the country of my birth since 2003 when I left for Japan- and many times up til now, with a double whammy today, I’ve been hit with the feeling that- ‘this is not the country I remember.’

Lots of things could potentially explain this.

First I’ll explain what the double whammy was.

We went to nearby Romford to go to the cinema, a little town on the edge of East London (If I say I live in London someone invariably says- “Mate, that is Essex, ha ha,” and if I say I live in Essex, someone says- “Ha ha, mate that’s London!” It’s no bother either way, neither holds any shame for me, just a thing that happens).

I didn’t expect much. A shoddy rundown cinema maybe full of screaming welfare brats, a town-center full of gangs wearing Burberry and baseball caps eyeing up passersby looking to kick off, trash everywhere, blokes aggressively cat-calling ladies, and just a general sense of crappy mean-ness (to mean, paucity, sparseness, ungenerosity of space and spirit).

And that’s not what we found. Nobody eyeballed us or tried to stab us. The cinema, which has reviews on Google which state- ‘disgusting, filthy toilets, awful staff’- was massive like an airport, modern, light-filled, clean, cheap, and surrounded with loads of really appealing chain restaurants.

We ate at a Toby Carvery, for the cheapest price I think we’ve had a proper meal in a chain restaurant yet- and the size and quality of the meat and unlimited veg blew me away.

The town center was lovely, quaint in places, bustling in others, with some historical churches, museums, a lively market, and more shops, pubs and coffee shops than I could shake a stick at. Here are some pictures:

This is the ‘flag’ the Brewery puts up to announce itself. I was impressed. The Brewery is the mall where the cinema is.

Here’s looking back over the mall from the departure lounge, sorry, outside the cinema. Doesn’t it look like an airport?

Inside it is crazy spacious. It just feels generous. Like- ‘Sure, tile this whole bit, why not, we’ve got the space.’

From outside. It’s big and modern-looking.

We ate at the Toby Carvery. This meal cost about 8 pounds, including the soup you can just see at bottom left. I barely finished it, and am only eating again now at 10pm! Serious food. (In case you’re American and don’t know what the things on the lower right are- they’re Yorkshire puddings – now you can Google them).

So what am I talking about, saying it’s different from how I remember? I guess, it’s money. But not only money- more a sense of generosity of space, of quality, and abundance. But not only that either- more a sense from the people who are moving about amongst all this- that this is normal. They want this, they’re aspirational for it, they demand it and so they get it, and they don’t need to fight with anyone to keep it.

I don’t know why this knocks me for six so much, and so regularly. Of course it’s not just this either. It’s also things like:

• Having a garden and house of my own.
• Lovely sunny weather.
• Having money myself to spend on stuff.
• Meeting people who are driven and ambitious.

I suppose it’s true that through my younger days I’d always associated money, generosity of space, abundance, gardens, good weather, aspirational people who take abundance for granted, with the USA. Perhaps I associated the UK with all the negatives I mentioned above: dreary, monotonous, poor, bleak, hopeless, full of people living lives of quiet desperation.

I dunno. Maybe I just saw one side of the UK. Maybe things have changed in 13 years. Maybe I was in the North and this is the South and those areas are just really disparate. Maybe 11 years away have dimmed the positives and accentuated the negatives, or maybe I was predisposed to seeing things in this depressing way as a kid. Maybe also I never had money before, never had a garden, and now I do. I didn’t have a job, career, clear career prospects, or wife before, and now I do. Maybe new tech plays a part- back then the ipod was barely a thing, the internet was still starting out, and my cellphone was a hefty blue brick that also, wowzers, told the time.

It’s weird. If I’d thought the way I’m starting to now about the UK, way back in the past, maybe I wouldn’t have been quite so keen to get out. Back when I was 19 and I went to the USA for 6 months, and when I was 23 and went to Japan for 11 years, it felt like I was seeing nothing in the UK too worth shooting for. Staying seemed sad.

Perhaps that was also wanderlust, a desire for adventure, generally being young, but it was also this sense that the UK was small, and maybe small-minded too. It had the kind of people we saw on ‘Little Britain’, fighting over tuppence and getting their little egos all bent out of shape about tiny perceived slights, because there was nothing bigger to care about. I couldn’t bear to stay and use myself up battling for a few more divots in the earth and a slightly bigger piece of rock candy.

It’s weird. I came back to the UK really not knowing what to expect. I don’t regret leaving in the first place or coming back now, not at all, but now I’m thinking, cautiously, knock on wood, this place is pretty good. It makes me happy, cautiously, while I wait for the other shoe to drop. It’s a wonderful surprise that still baffles me, and I can’t help wondering- was it always this way, and I just didn’t see it?

Since my Dad’s moved in with his mom (my grandmother) he’s been reorganizing her Kent farmhouse, which involved bringing a few older bits of art to the fore. Here is an image of one of my late Grandfather’s factories – a man after whom I appear to have been named (John Grist). I’m not entirely sure what it made. It does look impressive though.

I’d like to see a photograph of the actual factory it represents, but perhaps they don’t exist anywhere. Dad?

My grandfather was in industry (maybe oil?) and also worked on the bomb squad in World War 2. He loved race horses and owned several. For a while he had a yacht, and we went out on it once as little kids.

My first year in Tokyo was 12 years ago now. I was 23, I think, 6 months after finishing university. It was mad, heady, crazy days- a drunken extension of my Uni days but one where I had a job and a ready-made community of folks to hang with in my language school’s students.

I mention this not for any special reason of nostalgia, though both SY and I these days sometimes think about how we miss the ‘simple life’ of our two-room apartment in our latter days in Tokyo, with walkable commutes and loads of great restaurants nearby. I mention it because I stumbled on these photos that my sister Alice sent a while back, which she took in Tokyo on her trip over to visit me in the middle of that first year.

She scanned them (12 years ago really was pre-facebook, pre-cell phone cameras I think, pre-everything really…) and sent them to me a while ago, and now I shall post them here.

Alice at left and me in the middle, in the hallway of my language school before we went out with students for drinking and karaoke.

Me in I think Meiji Jingu shrine.

In my school-provided apartment. I wall-papered the walls with wrapping paper.

In front of some kind of bar with my good buddy Scott.

Karaoke-ing with some students.

Me and Al.

Writing news

Working on chapter 5 of Zombie Ocean 3. Cerulean is not suffering in this chapter…

2,000 page reads again. Up and down. No reviews for a while. Sent the cover brief for King Ruin to the artist- it will have a hot killer Egyptian lady on the front. That should get more eyeballs than the current cover…

I did some work on chapter three of Zombie Ocean 3 today, and made myself tear up about the ordeals poor old Cerulean is going to face. It is a hard life for him, without a doubt.

SY says- “Why does it have to be so miserable?”

Me- No great answer. A story needs ups and downs? But why can’t we all just get along?

We had a good chat about writing yesterday while having a long lunch in the only nice restaurant in this little town, an Italian place where the lunch set takes 2 hours to eat. At one point I explained the plot structure of Zombie Ocean 3, and why I was uncertain if it worked (which I always am about all my books), and she was enthusiastic.

That doesn’t always happen, and it got me enthused too.

SY is writing too. I can’t comment on it here- top secret stuff- but I can say she has a powerful and original mind for bizarre, Kafka-esque surrealism. She’s writing in Korean, so perhaps I can only read these after I learn Korean.

I’m learning Korean now, every day on the daily 30 minute commute into work. The goal is twenty new phrases, but with this learning app’s algorithms that keep recycling old half-learned phrases, I only get 3 or 4 new ones daily. And a hundred or so reviews.

Still no photos, the internet is mostly down still.

Today we painted the tile kitchen floor. Of course first we sanded it, with 40 grit sandpaper under our booted feet, skating around without a care in the world.

Yesterday I bought a belt sander, a fairly serious bit of equipment, and had a go at sanding off the glaze on the tiles with that- necessary because with the glaze, paint won’t stick to the tiles. It bit a bit of glaze off each time, then almost immediately the grit was stripped off and the belt was just heating up the tiles, burning the glaze a splotchy black. They weren’t roughened up at all, just burnt.

Two belts burnt through in 20 minutes. Either I was using it very wrong, though it’s a simple machine so I can’t imagine how, or it isn’t cut out for sanding our hardnut tile floor :D.

So, back to basics, and sanding via the ‘skate’ method. Now two coats of tile primer are on, we may put a third tomorrow, then the blue floor paint on top later in the week. God I hope it sticks!! DIY is hard work!

Photos as soon as my internet is back up (should be tomorrow).

A full, knackering day today of decorating, shopping, exercise, sanding down tiles (photos soon), using polyfilla for holes, and tidying up, that was kicked off with this long and tortuous exchange- re: our broadband is down.

Broadband fiasco (9-10am)

• I called to our broadband provider and try to arrange an engineer visit to fix the fault on the line. End up trapped in an automatic voice recognition computer loop for 30 minutes, asking me if I want to book Monday or Tuesday (only- which I couldn’t do) despite calling and recalling multiple times trying to lie my way to a real human. Nope- I was sent to that loop every time I identified myself. Ultimately call a different number, go through the new sales line, get them to transfer me to technical, and then try to arrange the visit.
• The guy says weekdays only. OK, I work on weekdays. He says, maybe we can do from 6:30pm. OK let’s do that. I add, is there any compensation for my inconvenience? He says, that’ll be sorted out. I say, is that it? I’ve been trapped in your automatic system for 30 minutes. He says- do we really want to make this call any longer?
• Taken aback. I say- yes. I’m being civil. I can see you’re frustrated, you’ve got to understand I’m more frustrated than you, as I’ve been trapped. I want to know how the company’s going to compensate me for the inconvenience of my internet being down.
• He says, I’m being civil (with rising tone of impatience).
• Me- OK, tell me your name.
• My name’s Michael.
• Really? (That’s my name!) What’s your last name?
• I can’t tell you that. It’s a privacy issue.
• Seriously?
• Yes.
• So what about some ID number?
• It’s company policy I don’t release that information.
• I doubt that. But ok- so you won’t help me with compensation, and you won’t tell me your name. Please connect me to your supervisor. Can you do that?
• I can. Plinking and aggressive typing sounds.
• Michael what are you doing? …. Michael?
• Line transfers. Automatic message. It is the flower-ordering system for a completely different company. And to add insult to injury- they’re not even open on Saturday.
• Whaaat?
• Me- cheeky bastard. Not giving up though, keen to see if I can get some decent behaviour out of this company. I don’t expect it, but am curious. Much service from them, and others in similar service positions, has been poor, and the last time I lost my temper. This time I’m going to stay calm and just keep going bull-headedly.
• Call the complaint line. The guy answers. I explain how I was sent to get flowers. He apologizes and says- that shouldn’t have happened. How crazy that this immediately makes me feel better. Somebody agrees that you’ve been treated poorly and you feel justified. He looks into the situation. At this point I am thinking the previous guy didn’t even book me an engineer visit, so I ask about that.
• No. No visit booked. No record of my call. No notes in the file.
• Whaaat? Who was I talking to?
• I’m sorry sir I don’t know.
• Well I definitely spoke to someone. I should start recording these calls (after hearing their automated message tell me many times that they were recording me).
• I can book you in now.
• We got it booked. The complaint is in the system.

Phew. I’m sure everyone has been through something like this. At least I got some satisfaction in the end, and successfully booked- but really, who did I talk to? And why a flower-ordering service? It seems more effort for him than just hanging up.

BUT- I keep my cool :). So we’re all good. And the kitchen floor tiles have been sanded by us skating around on sheets of sandpaper like Mao Asada (Japanese figure-skater) ready to be primed and painted tomorrow. Progress was made. I am at peace.

Today during a training day at work, I came across this piece of wisdom scrawled on a toilet cubicle wall:

It gave me real pause. Fascinating, and so pithy. This completely sums up my philosophy on writing and self-publishing, on blogging, on just about anything. Lots of thoughts went through my mind- with regard to blogging- that until I started this blog up, I was certain I had nothing interesting to say on a daily basis.

So I censored myself in advance. I wanted to put something out there in blog format- but I was stricken with doubt. Making it worse was the fact that my site- this site- at times has pulled in very large numbers of hits for the ruins and haikyo posts.

Would I want to put all those people off with non-ruin posts about my writing, life and observations? But then, if those people were only interested in my ruins stuff, and I’m not doing ruins stuff any longer, then how am I gaining by editing myself to avoid driving them away?

I’m not. I’d love for them to cross-over to my fiction, but most seem not to have. That’s fine.

Doubt. Yeah, deep brother.

Then I saw this second contribution on the facing wall, offered up like a comment on a Facebook wall:

Perhaps, an equally wise and universal sentiment. It pays to go hell for leather. Hold nothing back. Commit. Who does Number 2 work for?

I noticed later in the same day that the original message had been wiped away. Now all we are left with is its forlorn echo. That is wabi sabi, my friend, the impermanence of all things.