December 20th

never see daylight

empty stencilled quotes mocking

bug eyed sleep deprived

“The greater the obstacle, the more glory in overcoming it” – Moliere

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel” – Maya Angelou

These are two empty ironic quotes stencilled on the wall in one of our work meeting rooms. I’ve been stuck in this Slough dungeon for two days. Daylight has been missing from my life. I’m a shadow. I arrive in twilight, I leave in darkness. I’m a bug eyed, sleep deprived bush baby clawing at nothing, my head full of heavy pain. The train there and back again, a grimy windowed realm, all stations to purgatory. Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for having this job, but it’s all relative.

This is the world of bids, it drains the brain, brings headaches. The quotes just infuriate me. How do (some) colleagues make me feel? Angry.

October 17th

the folded blade dragged

red tears soak into the earth

the mask indignant

I was out with a couple of Japanese colleagues, conversation covered a number of areas and we somehow ended up talking about Yukio Mishima.

Mishima was a complex, fascinating man, a poet and novelist, a nationalist, obsessed with death and seemingly fighting an internal battle about his own sexuality. He was striving to take Japan back to the age of Bushido, and after a failed coup in 1970 and with modern Japan perceivably careering away from the traditions he desperately wanted to protect, he wrote his death poems and took his own life, through the grisly method adopted by Samurai, seppuku.

He seemed out of place in a post war Japan. And this is what fascinates me about the content of his work. There are so many books to read out there, I am slightly ashamed I haven’t read more in my life, but there’s another body of work to pick from, another unique troubled author’s work to explore. The outsider is interesting, whether I agree with their world view or not, trying to understand another’s motivation, ambitions, loves and fears is compelling. And Japan to me seems unique, their insular island psyche, relatively untouched for centuries, remaining apart from the world for so long. Mishima wanted to distance himself, his country, from others and pushed himself, deeper, further into history and tradition in an ultimately futile attempt to achieve that. Perhaps the spectacular style of his demise was his plan all along. A statement. Self destructing, with controlled serenity.

February 28th

Blackbirds duel at dusk,

Songs soaked in battleship grey,

Echoes bounce off steel.

 

Most of my Haikus seem to be about birds. That’s because birds are awesome. Tonight, I left work around 6.30, it was pretty much dark. The car park was quiet apart from two blackbirds having a sing off. I could see one of them quite clearly, taking the high point in the photo above. The little spot on top of the tower.

The complexity of a blackbird song is impressive, trills and tuneful whistles, no two compositions the same. One would start, then the other would reply. It was loud. This is the the time of year when territory is all important. Spring is pretty much here. Time to find a mate and nest. The two combatants were fighting it out for the large but spartan landscape of our work car park in Stevenage. For what little foliage there is.