The Quiet Ripple Defines The Pond

So as time goes by one wonders from time to time if one has lost the touch. Has your moment  passed or as the bard has it:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest. 
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourish’d by.

Akela had this problem. On the council rock he thought of the time when he would miss his buck and the young wolves would turn against him and bite his legs off.

We will do our best

I sometimes see myself like the old grey wolf who soon will not pin his buck.

Not yet though.

Check

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v474/n7353/full/474541b.html

and

http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110629/full/474553a.html

So eat dirt young wolves.

"Nay, nay. Red Hunters all: grown dogs of their Pack, heavy and strong for all that they eat lizards in the Dekkan."

I await the dhole.

I previously played music in a bar in Marseille where there were sometimes 5 banjos. The banjo goes, danka, danka, danka, clanga, clanga, clanga, danka, danka, danka
danka, clanga,  dank, clanga, clanga.  5 together made me lose my will to live. No slow airs, no wailing as you pull bracken. That said, Kina Banjo in Okinawa is a great place. It was a meeting point on the road to the north of the island and Commodore Perry had a cup of tea here in the 1853. It was of course totally destroyed during the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. Now reconstructed it gives an impression of what Okinawa was like prior  to the war.

War, huh, yeah What is it good for Absolutely nothing Uh-huh War, huh, yeah What is it good for Absolutely nothing Say it again, y'all

Yamada sensei pot third from right

Anyway this is a long lead in to my little bit of land. Thanks to esteemed colleague Natori san, I have the right to grow stuff on a piece of land  just beside Kia Banjo. I love

Nothing so becomes a man, er or woman, as horticulture

to grow vegetables and I feel that a bit of horticulture in Okinawa will be a deeply educational experience. As you can see, the land has not been worked for some time.  By the way, we have just had another smallish typhoon and the soil is drenched. I clear and dig over a patch but do no planting as I think it will be better to let the soil dry  out a bit.

Il faut cultiver nos jardins

I intend to plant a lot of Yomitan purple potato. Loads of butterflies watch me dig.

Inna gadda la vida

Thank you

I eat this

780 yen

here – in a break between digging.

So fine

The soil is a little clayey and interestingly orange in color. I think it will be carrots, onions, beans, salad, radish, big white Okinawan super radish and tomatoes.

So I am now an official member of the band “The Islanders” Okinawa’s top Irish Traditional Music combo. We are 5 – Maho incredible fiddler and the best front end in the business – Yokay, also on fiddle and smile, Guitar Tommy, Gerard from North of Belfast on Flute whistle,guitar and vocals and me. We play in the Smugglers in Naha on the last Saturday of each month – be there.

Lament for Limerick

It is a party. We play very fast with lots of howling. The colleens from Naha dance and howl too.  We get free Guinness. Okinawa, Irish bar, drink Guinness, play “The Bank of Ireland” to ecstatic crowd, who would have guessed it?

I feel like Keith Richards

This is how Lady Gaga started

Sunday after lunch is time to go for a walk. Not the overcoat the umbrella, the wellington boots but the tank of air, the fins, the mask.

I walk out to where the dark blue line is.

Just a couple of minutes from the apartment I have located a secret beach. Actually there are thousand of little beaches like this but this one has much proximity.

Mine all mine

So if I wander out from this beach – how much wandering and how much swimming depending on the tide- I come to this.

OK Coral

In this there are many many beautiful fish.

Hmmm

Not deep

Truly amazing

So you get the idea. There huge clumps of coral, beautiful reefs and constantly changing underwater  life that my puny camera can in no way capture. It is all so easy.

I mentioned in a previous entry that one of my first recollections was a ferry trip from Campbeltown to Greenock. I can vividly remember the excitement. Sister Rosie sent me a photo of that trip.

I am still troubled

So through good luck I stumbled into the world of Shinman Yamada.

https://quietripple.wordpress.com/2011/04/06/harry-potter/

We organized an exhibition at my place of work of ‘Hamon’ – ‘Ripple’ in English, his take on life entering the primeval sludge. These are 11 very heavy pots which to me look like pods exploding. They are science fiction, amazingly coloured, different from every angle and each light. Yamada san is a great man.

Splurt

Rotarua

Installation

Plop

toenail

The noise you get when you pull your finger out of your cheek

Sputter, splat, squirt, snort, snuck, sniff, smack

There are loads more but you get the idea. I love this stuff.

Yamada san with beautiful daughter

So yesterday was the best day in my life recently. Many best laid plans did not gang agley and there were surprise events that injected unexpected happiness and joy.

A visit to my place of work by the illustrious senior staff of the University of the Ryukyus sprang a real surprise when their learned President handed me a bag. Inside was this.

Gosh

Yes, a bottle of University of the Ryukyus special Awamori but joy of joys a bottle of 1977 Ardbeg. Ardbeg is of course the greatest of the Islay whiskies, frequently referred to as  The Queen of Argyll.

Gentlemen it is my duty
To inform you of one beauty
Though I’d ask of you a favour
Not to seek her for a while
Though I own she is a creature
Of character and feature
No words can paint the picture
Of the queen of all Argyll

On the evening that I mentioned
I passed with light intention
Through a part of our dear country
Known for beauty and for style
In the place of noble thinkers
Of scholars and great drinkers
But above them all for splendour
Shone the Queen of all Argyll

To be given a bottle of Ardbeg that was distilled some 35 years ago on a cold, grumach Islay day  in the middle of a hot afternoon in the East China Sea was too much. My shoulders shook, my eyebrows swat, my liver cried out, my low serotonin made me cry out for instant gratification. How did such a bottle end up in my sweaty hands in Okinawa?

The Queen of Argyll with the Empress of Okinawa.

Now here is the rub.  Where is the driving rain, the scream of the Herring Gull, the rotting creels, the holed clinker boats, the cry of the lamb who has lost its mother, the sob of the old women beshawled in the ditch, the stench of rotting seaweed, the clatter of empty Irn Bru bottles rolling around in the skip, the  grey, the purple, the dark brown ?

This is an ex Ruddy Kingfisher

Here it is the turquoise, the wild amaryllis, the smack of the Ruddy Kingfisher against the window, the squeal of children splashing in the sea for fruit, the perfume of the prickly pear, the screech of the monster fruit bat and the deal clincher sunshine.

I cannot drink ancient Ardbeg here.

I will have to wait until Winter creeps over the windowsill

Starts on Saturday evening when I rent two tanks.

Up very early on Sunday morning and off we go to Cape Maeda – 5 mins from the apartment. It is a perfect morning, blue, sky, calm, warm, blue, sea, sun. By 7:30 I am under water and this is what you get.

No comment

No comment

Yellow fish

Fish

Not a fish

Fish

Fish with stripes

Stop off at French bakery on way home and at 9:00 I am having coffee and croissants on my terrace.

Thank you Okinawa.

I have always loved going places by boat. My earliest memory is a trip from Campbeltown to Greenock on a steamer. I cannot quantify the excitement. Today I go from Okinawa to Tsuken, the island of carrots.

Notice Carrot metaphor

So Tsuken Island is a little patch of land off the east coat of Okinawa. 30 minutes on the ferry and you are there. The great joy of this trip is the birdwatching .

OK this is fairly specialized but stay with me. Okinawa stands out amongst other sea adjacent places I have lived in by having virtually no seabirds.

I live on an island in the middle of the East China Sea yet there are no Seagulls going “gaaa gaaa gaa gaa.” No Guillemots going, ” Gur gur gur gur.”  The only seabirds are Terns and they are very difficult to spot. So great joy as my boat trip reveals two rare species of Terns.

Dudes ! This is the Black- Naped Tern. Bad photo I know but taken from far away from moving boat.

On the same  seawall!

Roseate Tern! Black hood, red legs.

I arrive on Tsuken Island on fancy bike. Big Red don’t worry this is temporary

So many beaches! No one here.

Pluke

Hermit crabs party

Lady does carrot stuff

Old Boats

Groan, Pacific Swallow

The boat back was much smaller.

My bike and obscure root vegetables leave the island

Phew, it is getting hot.

So I set off on an adventure. I am early for the boat so I set off on the bike to find a restaurant. I am on the East side of Okinawa, just across the road from a fishing port.There is a restaurant.  Hmmm, good place to eat I grunt.

There is an anchor outside

I am very hot and sweaty from cycling and I order a beer.

Nymph in thy Orions be all my sins remembered

The menu is all in Japanese. I order something. I have absolutely no idea what I will get. This is wild because in er, like, normal life we are defined by what we choose. Which car, which jeans, which music, which political party, he can’t be a man cos he doesn’t smoke the same cigarettes as me.

In Okinawa, I am childlike and love it. I stab at the menu : the waitress says “Hai!!” I am not what I choose.

This is what I get.

Quelle surprise!

Chicken fried steak, fries, Milton Keynes Chinese Restaurant soup. I have not eaten anything like this for 5 months.

No, you can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
And if you try sometime you find
You get what you need

I am not what I choose. What liberation!

I will go on a little bit about the field that is quite close to my apartment. When I got here in February it was fallow. I then spied a man working it with a large motoculteur, which I believe is rotivator in English but for me these machines will always be motoculteurs. He broke it up nicely and then painstakingly built up drills. One morning on my way to work I spied him. He was shuffling along the drills planting by hand.  I returned in the evening and he had almost  finished planting the whole field. Which reminds me of a joke.

In the jailhouse.

Paddy Ugly,  “What are you in for?”

Paddy Sweet, ” I dug up a couple of praties and the landlord caught me eating them. I got two weeks.” “What about you?”

Paddy Ugly, “I got life for rape.”

Paddy Sweet, “Crivens! You must have eaten the whole field!”

A thing of beauty is a joy forever

So the photo above was taken a couple of days post planting. Immediately post planting the little plantings were all weak and floppy – would they make it? Obviously yes, but little did they know that far to the South;  gathering its brows like gathering storm, nursing its wrath to keep it warm, was typhoon Sogda.

The wind burnt the fledglings beyond hope.

God is er unpredictable

Why does God want us to suffer?

The man  put in  I do not know how many hundred plants by hand.  A week later they are destroyed. I mean,  it’s not fair. Isn’t there some kind of tribunal he could complain to? What is the Government going to do?

He loves us!

This morning the same blasted plants are  kicking out the old pessimism and are bursting into life.  Forgiveness and redemption.