Catching Up

Sorry for being a bit quiet lately.  I've had some medical issues, a bit of a shock as I am not usually ill.   But now I hope I am on the mend and I'm looking forward to our forthcoming trip which will take in Japan,  New Zealand and California.

I've never visited Japan and nor has T (the picture above was taken by F on his visit a couple of years ago).  The trip is built around my work about Lewis Carroll  and I will be seeing Tokyo and the Toyama region with some Japanese "Alice in Wonderland" friends - Alice is popular in Japan.  I will also be writing some travel articles and of course posting here! 

Thanks to the travel articles, JNTO has teamed me up with the company Japan Experience which has just sent my Japan Rail Pass - yay - my first hold-in-the-hand tangible evidence that the trip is for real.   The company has also fixed some interesting outings for me around Kanazawa and Kyoto.

And I'm really delighted at the prospect of meeting Yoko, Tomoko and Keiko in Nara.  They blog about this very beautiful area of Japan (click on their names to see their blogs) and it is completely because of them that I put Nara on my itinerary.

So, as well as planning the trip, re-reading Lewis Carroll notes, doing other work and hanging around in hospitals, these are some of the more fun things I've been doing while I haven't been blogging....

Went down to Henley to see how K's boat is getting along.  It has a permanent mooring in a beautiful stretch of  the Thames.  She treats it a bit like a holiday cottage, although the engine works fine. She's just had it craned out to be blacked at the bottom and repainted in traditional colours.

The next thing will be to paint  the traditional decorations of diamonds, roses and castles back on to the doors and sides. K's considering doing it herself, it doesn't look that hard.  (So speaks the person who can't even paint a number on a bit of wood to go on our front gate.....)

Went to a concert of Indian Music at Kings Place, which is a fairly new and completely inspiring music and cultural venue in Kings Cross.  The concert was over four hours long and to be honest I'd been wondering if I could sit and listen to Indian music for 4 hours because I don't know anything about it.  But the flautist Shashank Subramanyam was just astonishing and his accompanists so good that I didn't want it to end.    I took the picture when they'd finished as you weren't allowed to film during the performance.

Spent lots of time with the twins who are always such fun.  And we took Little A and S to Regents Park boating lake which is so entertaining, though expensive.

We also paid a visit to in-laws in Dorset.   Here's a photo of us trying to find a spot to picnic on the beach in the RSPB reserve at Arne Peninsula.  We'd forgotten to check the tide tables, and so actually it was high tide and the beach was covered in water! But we found a handy canoe tied up to a tree and had our picnic in that as the waves broke around the canoe.

Also spotted this threatening sign on a pretty little bridge nearby

I've been looking through other peoples' travel blogs, and found this one which interested me. It's about dealing with anxiety, particularly travel anxiety.  Actually, I have suffered quite badly from this too (although not as badly as Lauren, the blog's writer). It's OK now that I have wound down travel writing and really just do it as a hobby.  But when I was being well paid as a freelance for turning in the perfect product to someone else's specification, there was a lot of anxiety attached in taking off into the unknown.  Obviously it is nothing compared to the stress of being a brain surgeon or a judge (or indeed anything that actually matters).  And it was well worth it for the wonderful experiences.

Lauren thinks that too. Take a look at her blog, it's good.