Be Grateful

After catching an overnight train to Shanghai from Beijing when my mum and Brian had boarded their flight back to the UK, Jun and I spent the night of my birthday in a drink all you can club with her brother’s girlfriend playing a dice drinking game. Then we flew to Osaka, spent time with Orlando, Kahori and their girls and then went to Nara. A series of slow trains over about eleven hours got us to Tokyo late last night and we visited my friend Koji in hospital in Saitama Prefecture today.

Way before we’d come out here, Koji had said that he planned to take time off to take us places because last time (2002 for the World Cup) he’d been really tired what with working and his newly-arrived twins. Since that promise, Koji has had a motorcycle accident and is paralysed for life. He’ll never walk again but hopes to get back some feeling or use of arms or hands. I approached our meeting with a certain amount of dread.

Speculating on why that was is a little too self-indulgent given the nature of what has happened to Koji (putting aside the MRSA virus he caught after getting to the military hospital which is closest to where he had his accident), who put me at ease immediately we got there and is remarkably upbeat, taking strength from the words of those who have wished him well. We bought and fed him grapes and chatted about the mundane (my desire for a new camera lens, Watford’s trials (we lost at Swansea in the league on Sunday and won there the following Tuesday to reach the Carling Cup quarter-finals)) and the all-important: friends and friendship.

Many of his Essex University mates have rallied and those he saw once a year are now at his bedside of a weekend. In Jun Shimizu’s case, she is doing much more than that, even taking time off work to help Megumi (Koji’s wife) deal with those nasty financial issues that are overbearing in a state where health care is not free. Blame for the accident has been assigned by a witness to Koji and so his insurance company is refusing to pay. The government won’t help until he is certified as having a disability and that won’t happen till after months - as many as eighteen, possibly - of expensive rehabilitation.

Circumstances like these are supposed to make you grateful for what you have but I am reminded more of the most haunting words of the Band Aid single: “Tonight thank God it’s them instead of you.” This is a negative sort of gratitude rather than a real appreciation. Maybe it shows a lack of imagination on my part: an inability to see myself in his position and therefore value more highly the abilities most of us take for granted. But tonight, before I sleep, I am pondering the idea of what we mean when we say “be grateful”.

Questions of Identity

The lyrics from that huge sweeping anthem are instantly recognisable: “It’s been a long time coming...but a change is gonna come”. But can you name the title of the track? Is it the first or second of those clauses? And who sang it? Was it Otis Redding?

I don’t doubt that there are aficionados who scoff at the ignorance, but last year I was not alone in being unsure. When I read a version of that line on the BBC News website as part of Barack Obama’s victory speech, it brought back the difficulty I had downloading a song I had in mind but didn’t really know. Many people using the same programme as me had misnamed and misassigned it.
Although the discussion concerning the new President has often been centred around race, the more relevant question of identity remains: who is Barack Obama? In Europe, at least, there has been massive support for an unknown quantity. Is he really an agent of significant change? On foreign policy – which is what most non-Americans care about most - John Pilger in a New Statesman article certainly doesn’t think so. Same old, same old is his verdict: kowtowing to the Israel lobby and maintaining a belief in American military might as right
Obama himself has denied a shift to the centre after winning the Democratic nomination but a change there certainly did come. Now we get to see who the man is. Is his rhetoric merely that? I was hugely inspired by his grown-up discourse on the subject of race. But those were just words. The man will be measured by his actions.

I See Dead People

Joss has kept me up date with our home games, texting me about our 3-2 home defeat to Wolves and I picked up on our 2-0 defeat at Preston after reading Aidy’s latest email. By the time we started our home game against Blackpool on Saturday 1^st November, I had trooped round the Forbidden City with Jun, Mum and Brian (nominally). That was closer to the end than the beginning of their trip: they have already been treated fantastically in Xian, with Jun’s family and friends showering my mum with gifts, taking us around in a hired van (to the Terracotta Army amongst other things) and buying us massive meals. Then we flew to Guilin and took a cruise down the River Li to Yangshuo before returning to Beijing and the “must-sees” there.

We woke up just after five for the Great Wall & Ming Tomb tour, and Joss’s text told me that we’d been defeated at home again. “Rasiak is back and scored” his succinct message related. I’d texted him earlier thanking him for keeping me up to date and asking who he was going with but without direct response. Anyway, the 4-3 defeat left the Hornets fourth from bottom. Surely Aidy was already a dead man walking?

The section of the wall we climbed was very different from that I had scaled thirteen years previously. Badaling is so full of tourists that Mum and Brian decided that the jostling was too much for them to continue. Fortunately almost everyone went one way so they were able to ascend a different way at their own pace.

Since then we have been to a Lama Temple and Mao’s mausoleum. I tried to sneak a video (using my phone) of the body but couldn’t look at the mobile for fear of being detected and didn’t realise it had auto-locked. Mao is as gold as the Watford strip. “Too much make-up” said Jun.

Joss’ most recent text informed me of the mutual decision by club and manager to terminate Aidy’s contract. I don’t think anyone will be wholly surprised: after last season’s disappointing end, he was going to have to improve and he has not done so. I’d like Alan Curbishley to take the job but it doesn’t feel possible. No doubt it’ll be someone I’ve never heard of; still, as long as there’s a beneficial bounce, I’ll take him.

Almost Famous

Monday we climbed the “incense burner” (557 metres above sea level) and at the top, first a solitary guy and later an excited group of students asked if they could have their photos taken with me. One of the males of the group commented that I looked like David Beckham (I don’t remember the glasses and earrings phase either).

Tuesday we headed in the same approximate direction to Yuanmingyuan to see the ruins of the Imperial Palace an Anglo-French force destroyed in 1860. Again I was invited to be in a couple of photos. Later, we met up with a friend from London, Maria, who planned this coincidental trip last year and we met her brother and a couple of her cousins, one of whom is David Lee, a Hong Kong movie and TV star. At the restaurant where we ate they got out the camera and took his picture and requested an autograph, then inexplicably asked me to sign too (later I wished I’d signed Tony Blair). At the bar of the five star hotel we went to later, people stopped talking and pointed (not for me anymore) and one awestruck girl came over just to say hello. Jun was pretty starstruck too.
A text from Joss indicated that Richard Lee is making a bit of a name for himself as a penalty saver, performing the feat again tonight as Watford squandered a 2-0 half-time lead to draw 2-2 at home to Cardiff. JJ and Hoskins scored but Priskin got himself sent off (again) and we were apparently under the cosh from then till the end.

First Impressions of a Future

Towards the end of the eight-hour BA flight (with movies on demand and tasty veggie meals), we flew over hundreds of miles of chocolate-coloured mountains, which seemed from above like a combination of millions of toblerone and a vast crumpled blanket. Breathtaking. We had a very short carousel wait for the packs we need and the cases of presents I lugged and were then out of the enormous Beijing terminal onto an equally outsized expressway to the city centre, replete with the obligatory “bad” drivers, including a police car straddling lanes as he spoke on his mobile. Before we reached the forest of fluted high rises, toasting rapid growth, I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of greenery lining both airport transit tracks and the Olympic-sign-blazoned route to the heart of the world’s economic beast, even spying a mountain-biking group in full lycra get-up between the trees.

Not long after I spotted my first foreigner (also cycling), we were at “Convenient Hotel” waiting for our room (we got there before check-out time and the place was busy, as an angry rant from a turned-away almost-guest attested). I decided to wander down a smaller road and passed two street/communal toilets (many homes didn’t/still don’t have their own) before settling on a likely place for a haircut. As I smiled at the hairdresser, she offered “massa massa” but I gestured that I wanted my head shaved. This was gigglingly achieved and then the offer of a massage re-emerged as hands stroked my groin, lips were flexed and I was shown a bed behind a curtain. “Ni bai” (200) was the price but my refusal lead to a halving. Excuses were made but not understood and I got away with nothing more than a blush and an overpriced cut (about £2.50).

After a rest when the room became available, we ate tofu, noodles, mushrooms, spinach and slices of an unidentified root vegetable from an enormous hotpot bowl and I washed it down with Yanjing beer from the bottle, forgoing the use of the shrink-wrapped crockery. Then we taxied it to a bar area near a lake that translates as “back sea”, joined in ti zhenzu (keepy-uppie with a coloured and weighted shuttlecock) and people-watched in a few locations. One of the main points of discussion was the changes that have led to the sort of prices some of the places could charge and Jun put it down to the number of foreigners and the endemic corruption. With absolutely no evidence, I was inclined to believe that at least some of the young locals we saw enjoying their Saturday night had legitimately earned large amounts in the boom this country has enjoyed.

We got back and our forty-hour day was iced with the news that Watford had won their first away match of the season, 3-0 at Southampton. Tamas Priskin scored two and Richard Lee made a penalty-save double. Result!

Throwing away love

Thursday 16th October 2008

Even my final(ish) game (home against Preston two Saturdays ago) couldn’t inspire me. Watford had already lost two away matches in a row (2-1 at Sheffield United and 3-2 at Burnley) and I was hoping that I’d shout my part in a thriller. Although Joss and I had missed the first two goals this time - three already in the short bit-season we have together - I was unable, despite the assurances of the guy behind me that there were more goals to come in a game where the defences were apparently asleep, to do my job as a supporter.
Ennui/dread? Past/present? Either way I was tense. The past has been perfect, the future not simple (thank you Carrie from one of the few episodes I’ve watched). Six minutes after we’d sat, Tommy Smith added to John Harley’s equaliser and promise seemed to be fulfilled but the rest was imperfect and goalless. At the end, the faint resolve I’d had to say “goodbye” to those around me I’d never said “hello” to dissolved in Englishness.
Since then and the international break, it’s been donate, box, clean, and look for tenants. Hardly had time to see people (though haven’t been that in demand anyway) except for the well-attended “Bon Voyage” party I organised last Saturday at Salvador and Amanda and now we’re off. We’ve filled to an eight foot ceiling a 25 square foot storage unit in Wood Green with stuff which is mostly mine. That space does not include the twenty years of letters and cards I was nagged to recycle by a wife who sometimes seems to have no past except when it comes to a memory of my failings.
So, do you get my mood?
Football: Elton John spoke out about the board and the finances. You’re going to have to look into the whole shebang in a lot more detail than I have to decide if he’s right but a season in the premiership (remember the argument about the £40 million income I had at my nephew’s funeral?) and £20million plus for five of our best players in the meantime (Ashley Young, Hameur Bouazza, Marlon King, Danny Shittu, Darius Henderson) and yet there’s no money left and even what was “ring-fenced” for stadium improvement has disappeared. The PM’s belated denial of cash bonuses to those bankers who’ve profited from failure has no equivalent at Vicarage Road. If the economy at large is experiencing a “credit crunch”, the Horns have had a “dividend drain”. Where’s it all gone?
Leaving: I could have improved on the relatively last-minute nature of my boxing up. Having known for months that we would leave, I think I should have planned and selected what to do with what. Instead, I found myself cutting stamps off envelopes containing letters I received before I even got to Manchester from people I still hold dear. Much of that history exists now only in a faulty memory, most of the rest is lost to a mixed-recycling bank that probably means construction filling. I may yet walk on, around on even below part of the mulch of ink and paper that all those words have become.
I felt the love then but not now. As I worked through that trunk of well wishes, clichés, poetry and pretension, I measured my present relationships with those whose past words I cast into the “bags for life” I’d use to carry them downstairs. Some, I’d forgotten: mostly the students who’d signed group “thank you” cards but there were letters from people I couldn’t place. Others were part of the continental drift that ensues from regular movement and change. Most were still there and are still here. I threw away letters telling me of split-ups, requesting advice in the face of temptation, making eternal declarations, describing the most profound feelings and… The hundreds of words of a blog entry are too limited to do justice to the tens of thousands lost to my biographers.

And I am sorry.

Pause