End of week thinkings

(Today’s photo was taken on our trip to Yamaki Organic Soy farm last month) Morning. You find me on the train to work. It’s a Saturday. About 8am. Not too crowded. I got a seat. It’s 30 minutes to my stop from here, no changes. It’s been a challenging week. It started with my working […]

Video blog: Edogawa Ekiden (relay race) and more

It’s been a looong day. In the morning I joined Tom, Nami and Phil to run the Edogawa Ekiden (relay race). Things didn’t quite work out as planned for us personally, so I thought instead of focusing on our story I’d share with you some footage of the various characters we met throughout the event. […]

Tokyo CGM Night Volume 4

Last night saw the fourth installment of Tokyo CGM Night, a night hosted by Danny Choo and Andrew Shuttleworth to celebrate Japan’s Consumer Generated Media producers. It’s a chance for Japan’s top bloggers, YouTubers and podcasters to gather and talk about past achievements, and make plans for future collaborations. This was my second CGM, and […]

Tiltshift Sunday

It’s been a great day, during which I’ve been fortunate to spend time with my two best mates in Tokyo. Whilst I’ve managed to get up at 6am every day this week, last night’s ridiculous experiment to see if I could run four operating systems at the same time on my old MacBook made sure […]

Cats and choppers

Today, following a 9.3km run with Tom at 7am, I headed out to see Bibi and his wife (and cat), who live up in the mountains of Western Saitama. One of the reasons for the visit was that I wanted to play with Bibi’s big chopper, which some mumblers may recall me talking about a […]

Brandon Steep hit the shelves at HMV Japan

It’s so good to see your friends doing well. The Kirk family have been good friends of mine for about 20 years. My trip to Islay (Scotland) to visit them 17 years ago was probably my first ever ‘big’ trip somewhere by myself. Later, they were kind enough to let me live with them for […]

It’s a small, small world

Photographic entertainment is provided by yesterday’s Office Halloween party (sorry for the repetition to those of you who have already seen them in my site feed). For the past two weeks I’ve been looking for someone to do tandem learning with. That is, someone who will teach me Japanese in exchange for me teaching them […]

Joseph is online

(A blog I wrote a couple of days ago, and am posting now to celebrate our reconnection to the www this morning. Our new fibre modem has resulted in our actual (vs. advertised) download speed quadrupling to 24mbps, the fastest domestic connection I’ve had yet 🙂 It’s several years now since I decided to actively […]

The wedding service

The morning of the wedding was pretty hectic. I’d had this idea that if I tried to prepare everything as far in advance as possible, there would be little to do on the day itself …but it didn’t quite turn out like that! At 7.20am I was on my way to Hereford to do some […]

The night before my wedding

It’s now ten minutes to midnight on the night before my wedding day. I dropped *Twinkle* back to the cottage we’ve rented for her parents, where she will spend her last night before she becomes my wife. It’s been an amazing day. Thinking back over the last 16 hours I feel tearful – we have […]

Back in the Alps

As part of my prep for leaving for Japan, I’m going though my box of diaries, which also contains a few DVDs of TV programs featuring me or my friends, and converting them to MP4 format which I can keep on my laptop. One of them I’ve not seen for years is the documentary made […]