My friend Governor’s Bay Jay has made a short-term house swap and is currently ensconced in Yorkshire, where she is venturing satisfyingly far and wide and chronicling her adventures. I recommend her prose.
Her most recently-recorded visit was to Whitby, whose charms merited multiple posts. I delighted in the images accompanying the narrative, since they reminded me anew of my own journey to Whitby — like GB Jay, from York — in the northern summer of 2000. Since I was travelling in high sunshine rather than rain and snow, this made something of a difference to my experiences, but many things were the same. I too headed straight for the Abbey and marvelled both at the ruins and the view, the former set in motion during the dissolution of the monasteries, and, like other northern monuments, given a general gutting-for-resources (in this case, stone) by locals in subsequent years.
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A word to the wise, said a colleague of mine a fortnight or so ago, the mother of two very lively young boys. Take as many weekend breaks as you can before the baby’s born, because after that comes a period in which you are more or less housebound. By this collegial advice was the decision that the señor and I should spend Waitangi weekend in North Otago further strengthened. As the pregnancy fog, which I understand is said by most researched accounts not to exist, continues to envelope my mind, it felt also like an opportunity to do something involving fine-motor skills — such as driving — before my previous accomplishments of coordination and logical sequences of thought desert me completely.
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My exchange students and I had our last class together today, although they will be around town on internships until the end of August. We watched Eagle vs. Shark
.
I suspect my end to the session was a bit perfunctory (pretty much “thank you and goodbye”) but I did not want any emotions to run too high. This is the fourth year in which I have contributed to this programme and regular readers know a little of what it means to me, particularly in terms of the friendships and experiences it has brought me abroad.
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My recent visit to Japan was my third. On all of these three I have made many mental and pen-to-paper notes, with the intention of writing up everything later, and on each occasion I have felt–what?–not so much stymied as muted upon my return. Increasingly I shy from the conventional “on this day I did this” touring narratives, and yet don’t seem to be able to come up with an alternative.
When it comes to Japan, I think that part of this is something like travellers’ superstition. I love that place, and hope to be able to continue to return in future, perhaps even with the señor in tow. These emotions leave me feeling in part that if I say too much about my adventures, I’ll break their spell, that I’ll be able to return to them only in print, rather than in the storehouse of memory.
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In Japan, said one of the misses Y. on the train back to Yokohama, it is necessary to read the air. This is the name for the art of perceiving the atmosphere in any situation and of understanding the appropriate manner in which to speak as a result.
The problem is, she explained, a lot of people can’t do this very well, either by temperament, inexperience or lack of intuitive abilities. So the expression for them is “can’t read the air”.
In a country where people–especially the young–love to abbreviate things, the expression “can’t read the air” shrinks down further to its component romaji initials: KY. Therefore, someone who lacks the ability to intuitively interpret the communicative demands of a situation is KY.
Even a politician has used the phrase, said Miss Y., and you know it’s widespread when it gets to parliament.
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I am from the streets of Queen[s]land, Australia
10 January, 2010
in O internet, at home, commentatrix, traveller's fragments, we are family
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