Trouserpress

When I started this blog I promised it would be about mortality, decay, loss, exile, and single malt scotch.
Well, we’ve had frogs, lizards and varicose veins, so lets get on with the drinking.
Those of you unfortunate enough to see me regularly are already more aware than you could possible want to be that this year it has been my project to sample as many single malt scotches as possible, and I’ve been doing very well indeed.
This month’s single malt is 12-year Bowmore, which is pronounced with the stress on the second syllable and is an Islay, as eny fule kno. Of the Islay whiskies, I have previously tried Laphroaig, and three different expressions from Bruichladdich. This is my first adventure with Bowmore.
The scotch whisky business in parallel with the wine business has been getting its marketing and branding well honed in recent decades to make the product accessible to your regular punter. Presumably it is in the spirit of this marketability that Bowmore has put its own tasting notes on the label of the bottle. Saves me Googling what flavours I am supposed to be looking for.
The notes tell me that the nose is lemon, pears and honey.
OK. Let’s give it a go.
To be honest. all I got at first was the overpowering smell of peat and whisky. Then it occurred to me to take my nose out of the neck of the bottle and pour some into a proper glass where I could swirl it about and unlock the flavours. Good move, now I can smell something. Something sharp. I’ll call that lemon, though the idea didn’t spring at me without suggestion. For a moment there I had something rich and sweet but then it went away again. Meanwhile I was getting something like fruit that I could accept was pear.
However, I left a glass of the stuff on the table a while and when I came back to it, the odour was pure honey — no lemon or pear. Then I sploshed in a refill and got a snootfull of lemon, but neither of the other fragrances. Mind you, I spent my early adulthood shovelling uncut speed into my nasal passages, so it’s not surprising that they are less than reliable.
Luckily my palate is in better working order. Peat smoke and dark chocolate, the label tells me. I’ll happily go along with that. I haven’t personally smoked peat (or not knowingly) but I imagine this is what it would taste like. As for the dark chocolate, I had some 90 percent cacao once and I can see the connection in the rich dryness and the way the skin on the inside of the mouth tries to shrivel up and hide behind the tonsils.
Finish: long and complex. I’ll say. This is mixed propositions of Wittgenstein spiced with Bohm on the implicate order.
One thing they don’t mention on the label is that having had a thorough taste test, there is no way you will be able to think of a satisfying way to wind up a blog entry.

It’s official. My legs are turning purple and are about to explode.
Varicose veins, apparent onset thereof.
I am appalled at the suddenness and the rapidity of the malfunction. I imagined varicose veins set in slowly appearing from time to time. I didn’t imagine you could actually feel them growing.
The process started perhaps a month ago, perhaps less. First there were tight sensations in my lower legs and periods akin to pins and needles. Very mild but noticeable. There is also a sensation of mild bruising. At first I thought it was because my new shoes were too tight and after a couple of days stopped wearing them.
Is it possible that the veins in your legs can be ruined by tight shoes?
These vein events are more depressing than, say, the receding hairline, or the grey hairs or wrinkles. Those are things you can wear with dignity.
But these knackered veins are graphic evidence of the body’s slow debilitation. Scars from time’s claws, if you want to be melodramatic and I see no alternative.
I pointed out the bluing of my legs to my wife, who in her normal understanding way remarked ‘That’s not bad. Some people’s veins come right out.’
Well, there’s a relief.

It is my 44th birthday tomorrow. I am counting down the minutes before I say bye bye to the comparative youth of 43.

Age is already wreaking its indignities on me.

I have those much mentioned spotty retinas, incipient varicose veins, the skin comes off my hands when I do the washing up and my epiglottis is getting decidedly loose and floppy. I eruct frequently and without warning, often in public.
Turning 50 seems now like a distinct possibility. When younger you tend to assume that turning 50 is something that only happens to other people, like getting run over or contracting Ebola virus, that you will somehow get to thirty and take some kind of scenic detour that never goes near 40 or 50 or 60 or any of the rest of them. Or perhaps he boffins will invent a cure for ageing or that time and biology will merely forget about you. But no. There’s 50 leering at you over time’s horizen.

Aging with dignity is probably a noble and virtuous thing. I don’t have any dignity.

If I had a career I could be proud of or a lot of money in the bank; if Faber and Faber were handling my 20th novel instead of not handling my first one, I could I could waltz into 50 with serene dignity. I could laugh in the face of Death, and demand ‘Where is your sting?’ because I would know I have nicked Death’s sting and hidden it where it can’t find it.

But no. None of that’s for me. I am sitting here nursing time’s injuries, its torments and teasings of my flesh thinking, bugger, maybe I should have had a drink tonight after all.

Happy birthday, me.

My sister is doing a run for charity in aid of children who have been afflicted by cancer.

You can find out about the event or sponsor her by clicking here …

I am pleased to announce that I have started urinating.

For most people urinating is not a problematical thing, and they just get on with it.

I live in Japan where the summer is urine hostile.

At the end of June, when the rainy season ushers in the heat and humidity, my kidneys pack in, and stay in this JALPAK-ed state until September or October depending on the humour of whichever of Japan’s gods governs obscenity.

For that time, June, to whenever, my kidneys are dried up walnuts in the small of my back. Or in the big of my back. Or wherever.

I really don’t pee. If I let water go, it is an occasion for emailing friends and family all over the world.

During the  summer, the uric acid and ammonia collect in my eyes. My eyes look like the the tail lights on a the arse of a dirty dump truck.

On September 7th, Nagaijin announced that the hot weather had broken. On September 8th it fixed itself. 

My bodily fluids in the summer just stream out the top of my head and out of my armpits. Any water I drink is just grist for the torrent.

The water content of  the air in the summer exceeds the oxygen content. Death by drowning while breathing on dry land is frequent. I myself have died by drowning several times just breathing the air. 

But now the temperature has cooled just to the point where I can tell it to, well, just piss off. 

I have just found gecko poo inside my printer. I should have taken a photo but I absently mindedly cleaned it up.

How did it get there? Well a gecko put it there, of course. How did the gecko get in there? That is a more interesting question. And next time I print a document, will it come out with a gecko-shaped smear on it?

This year the garden, and indeed the house, are abundant with small frogs and geckoes. The wife found two small frogs hopping about inside the car yesterday and had to chase them out before she could go anywhere. Always welcome when you are in a hurry to pick up the kids from baseball practice.

On another occasion I was mugged by a gecko, though it wasn’t very successful. I was closing the shutters on the big windows to the garden when it flung itself on me from whatever point of vantage it had coigned, if you’ll parden the mess. Arriving on my left hand, all hubris and high spirits, it looked up and realised I was a might bigger than it was and boinged off again among the kids’ toys where it endearingly took up residence in my daughter’s dolls’ house.

The other night there was a frog hopping about in the kitchen as if it owned the place — which in a way it did, because its forbears were here long before we built the house. I mention the kitchen frog because it introduced a few minutes of slapstick as I tried to catch it, and as I had already consumed a few beers and a bottle of wine, this was no easy task.

If you want to bash your head on cabinets and counters and fall over a kitchen chair or two, try catching hopping amphibians while in a state of inebriation.

These house guests are welcome compared to the foul cockroaches and killer centipedes which are more common. I try to encourage the frogs and lizards in the garden by making sure there are plenty of bowls and cans of water out there and that we have some shady bushy things for them to hide under.

Of course, the water provides a breeding ground for mosquitoes but you hope the frogs will eat the mozzies before the mozzies eat you.

(Frog photo taken with mobile phone, not with snazzy new complicated camera.)

Is anybody there?

One morning I woke up to discover that I was a middle aged, chronic expatriate in Japan, with an uncooperative waistline, an excessive interest in alcohol and a dribbling career as a writer.

That’s a dribbling career as opposed to a soaring career, or runaway success of a career, or a dazzling career as a writer.

I also found that I had two jobs, one website, three kids, a wife, a cat, two cars, a mortgage, two spotty retinas and a garden — all of which, except the cat, are thoroughly neglected.

‘Right. Is that how it is?’ I thought. ‘Better start another blog.’

So I did.