bicycle thieves

For the third time in 5 months my girlfriend has had her bike stolen. No, we don't live in thief infested London, we live in suburban Tokyo, supposedly one of the world's safest and crime free cities. And yet it's happened again, this time in the night, to a bike that was sickly blue and multiply locked. The last time it happened we trudged over to the cop cabin near the station and spent an hilarious hour documenting what went on, namely that the bike was parked and now was no longer there. It shouldn't have taken ages to explain that but it did. The officer even walked with us to the place outside the supermarket where the bike once was. With deadly seriousness he paced out the roadway, and we half expected him to draw one of those body outlines of where it'd been. That's all we heard predictably, and now it looks like we'll have to go through the same pointlessly stupid procedure. And yet we feel the need to report it, just so they know, just to give them a bit of work, and perhaps so they can blame foreigners as many of my students do, of the 'crimewave' hitting Japan.

Cycling is weird in Tokyo because there don't appear to be any rules governing where you can go and what you should or shouldn't do. For example, cars in Japan drive on the left whereas bikes seem to take a laxer attitude to laws of the road and cycle wherever the hell they like. Pretty much like cretinous car drivers who puzzlingly hog the middle lanes of motorways in Britain and thus clogging up traffic all around them and ironically making things more dangerous, cyclists here often go down the middle of the road as if they're more concerned about people coming out of side roads rather than cars coming straight at them. Women seem to be the worst culprits, and women with children strapped to them even worse, as if by rights with a child in tow they somehow have the right to carve a path of their choosing. They simply ride straight at you and it's up to you whether you want to avoid getting bloodied. One day soon I will simply keep going, just to see what the result may be. Deportation perhaps. But don't worry, I already feel like leaving.

I read last year that during the long weekend holiday period in April that 141 people had been killed on the roads, so quite clearly the Japanese are as good at driving as they are at cycling.

The Japanese are funny in lots of ways, but hey, aren't we all? But watching their TV programmes one gets to see that an advanced state of juvenilia is at work here. All the adverts with daft cartoon figures, the incessant squeaky voices, the staggering number of game shows, the pap. I've been hunting for months and have rarely been able to find something educational or taxing.

The bizarre behaviour of our neighbours here is an interesting case. We hear not a squeak out of them during the working week, but come the weekend when clearly they are forced into each other's company for longer than either can bear, there are the most staggering blazing rows, the sound of things thrown and faces slapped, the screams (from both of them) of 'it hurts!' going on sometimes for 3 or 4 hours, before finally a door is slammed and one of them walzes off. I just wonder what it is exactly is going through the minds of the hundreds of people alongside us who have to put up with this moronic racket, am frankly staggered that nothing is done, no police are called, or that these people aren't castigated by other neighbours. We don't speak much Japanese ourselves so we're probably not the ones to complain. And on it goes, as it did this morning. Is it Japanese society that allows this to happen, where people turn a blind eye to this stupidity, or is it actually discussed? I don't have a clue, but I know that if I get involved then I can envisage my doorbell being rung at odd hours, people complaining about me. Me and the g-friend have discussed whether we ought to stage a similar row just to see what happens, just to see those complaints flooding in. Shame really as we love the flat even though it's expensive and we know for a fact that my company is fleecing us for it. Ah well, back to the sushi ranch.

my girlfriend says that I'm a total nightmare

She's staring bog-eyed at her computer whilst I do the same with mine. Only I've recently made myself a curry and have a cold, so just when she's attempting to reach a balletic pirouetting high kicking triple salco on her MA essay I am crashing around, blowing up the microwave, slamming cupboard doors, sneezing and farting, all at the same time. The eye rolling is taking on Bette Davis proportions. Damn this girl can act.

I tell her that her eye rolling is just like her mother. Things may be thrown and smashed any time soon. She twizzles her hair and looks oh so seriously school-ma'am-ish, as if her MA, seeing as its been paid for, far outranks my 'novel in progress'. I'm editing too damnit!

The last cold I had, not more than 6 weeks ago, precipitated such an alarming degree of furious nose blowing that I perforated my eardrums. Blood has never come out of my ears before. I didn't sleep for four days such was the discomfort, but I got through quite a few novels. This week I got another cold and broke a tooth. And yesterday I knocked over another glass of wine, smashing that and soaking the sofa, or rather her sofa, the one she sits on to work on 'her' computer.

I must've smashed 6 glasses in the last 4 months (she says 8) - it's not the money or the inconvenience of buying more, but the alarming thought that I may have finally turned into my oldest brother, who's actually been doing the glass smashing, ketchup down the shirt, foot through the newly decorated floorboards type stuff for years. I have become him. I even sniff like him. Whilst he is now losing weight I am putting it on. I have become clumsy whilst he has joined a ballet class. Okay, the last one's a joke but this role reversal type thing could be the X Files. Only we don't have to watch that total cretin who smokes all the time and looks mysterious. Why do they have to make him smoke every single stinking time he's on screen? Do they think we'll forget which character he is? Doesn't he ever take a break? Watching people smoke is as pleasant as watching people pick their nose and eat the contents, the pathetic way they drag the smoke back in their mouths. I am an ex-smoker, obviously, but I saw the light. And I sensed the stench. Me and the G-friend both want the Cancer Man assassinated almost at any price, and the G-F is a pacifist as far as I'm aware. She's the kinda girl who'd prefer to let a thief take all our stuff rather than let me beat the living crap out of them.

I've now been called 'a snorting bull' - can you believe this? Okay, I am a bit of a nightmare but sweetie pie, it's just a blip, really it is.

another day at the sushi ranch

This isn't necessarily Tokyo / Japan info or even slant, only me and my wee lassie are currently here so what the hell. Tempura may get a mention, the odd shrine, my inability to either capture the fullness of Mount Fuji in a camera lens or climb it. Mostly it'll be politics, life, film, the perils of writing a novel, and if I get badly drunk I might even throw in a poem.

I'm going through a dip in fitness right now, though the g-friend would say it looks more like a trough. Am starting to look like Frank Cannon, or Les Dawson, who is / was nearer to my Yorkshire roots and like me, can / could gurn with the best of them. Have joined a gym but not got across the threshold yet. It's all looking a bit daunting, all those machines, all that blue water. I haven't been in a swimming pool this century.

The g-friend had an interview with an American the other day for a specialist part time teaching job. He used phrases like 'fasten your seatbelt, this is going to be a bumpy ride' as if he was in his own Hollywood action film. He talked about his team of people as if they were some sort of elite SAS commando squad, sent out on perilous grammar operations. It's always amusing and excrutiating in equal doses when you meet people who are so full of themselves, so stuck in a world of cliche. You can look at these people in the eye really close and ... there's nothing happening in there.

G-friend's birthday today. She got chocolate buttons so she's happy for now. She got a birthday card from her Ma with a 'hand-crafted look', which must be the new thing now in England, or in America where it originated. I have grave doubts about anything American to be honest, especially since they voted for the world's creepiest cretin, twice. Or rather the first time it was the supreme court, and the second time it was a mixture of the rabid god squad who turned out in huge salivating numbers, and simple Americans who thought they felt safer with the candidate whose eyes are way too close together, and who got them in the mess to begin with.

This' keeping America safe' thing is a laugh, like they've all forgotten whose watch it was in Sept 2001. And all the information was on his desk, for the entire month of August in fact, but George, bless him, took that particular month off. Good one America, we can always count on them to stick their heads up their asses when it comes to logic, reason and common sense.

Off to bed.