Trouserpress

My eldest son has two friends stopping over tonight which means that I am effectively a zoo animal in my own home.

I like Japanese people. I get on with Japanese people better than many other Westerners living here, but one thing that gets me down is the attitude to foreigners.

People tend to regard you, the gaijin, with embarrassing idolatry, familiarity, indulgence or outright hostility. With the possible exception of Tokyo, it is impossible to be just another person.

Walking to the station yesterday I passed two youths on an otherwise empty footbridge. One in a mocking and affectedly effete voice said ‘hello’ as I passed. A small thing, but illustrative of the way people can’t leave you alone. People stare at you, they won’t sit next to you on a train and store clerks and waiters panic if you speak to them, even in Japanese.

You are constantly asked about your tastes and lifestyle, and if anything matches the Japanese way of doing things you get a barrage of ‘eeeeeeh!’ noises, the local equivalent of ‘wow!’ or ‘no way!’. Your nose, height, hair colour, and eye colour are more causes for comment.

Tonight in my own living room I got a ‘Mecha ashi nagai!’ (What long legs!). You can just about put up with this outside, but not at home, which is supposed to be a sanctuary.

Imagine if I went up to a Japanese person and exclaimed, ‘wow, what black hair you have, and you’re kind of skinny.’ People would think me an utter idiot.

Next time someone tells me I have long legs, I might just point out that if they were shorter they wouldn’t reach the ground.

I wonder whether this leg-obsessed youth in my living room realizes ‘long legs’ is a term used in appreciating whisky. A well-made whisky is more viscous than water and you can see this after swirling the drink around in your glass in the trails of whisky running down the inside from the tidemark. Long, thick trails are known as ‘long legs’.

This month’s whisky, my Christmas present is very leggy indeed. It is a Bowmore 17 and is a very exciting tipple with or without the legs.

I am thinking of writing a song about it: ‘Bowmore Is Big Leggy’. Do you think it will catch on?

Burned orange. That’s what I thought of on tasting the Bowmore. Peat and burned orange. Earlier this month when trying out the Laphroaig, I threatened to stop reading the tasting notes and think for myself. So this is what happened on Christmas day when I opened the bottle — I tried thinking for myself. I repeated to myself ‘burned orange, burned orange, burned orange,’ like a mantra, utterly convinced that if I checked the tasting notes, I would find lots of references to burned orange. So I was nonplussed after reading four reviews of this whisky to find not one reference to burned orange, not even something that could be considered close to it.

Martine Nouet says:

Nose
Flowery, peaty. Mix of turf, dried herb and heather, lightly smoked. Briny notes emerge. A delicate intricacy of aromas.
Palate
Very smooth and velvety. Malty with an assertive smoky tone soothed by licorice and coconut. Wood keeps control of peat and smoke. A salty feel.

While Dave Broom tells us:

Nose
Richer with scented peat hanging above it all: heather, hint of lavender essential oil, then into cod liver oil, shoreline. Less overtly briny. Well balanced notes of brazil nut, moist tobacco, resin, liqueur chocolate, walnut, dried fruit, Jaffa cake.
Palate
Chewy and soft. Peat has a bigger say in centre, chocolate, mint. A slightly soapy note.

Approximately none of which suggests itself to my nose. Except the peat, which I could have guessed, this being an Islay. So much for thinking for myself.

Nevertheless, a thoroughly fascinating whisky, which as I type is sitting in the bottle begging for me to go over to the cupboard to let it out.

Though the bugger could save me some effort and just walk over here to me on its own legs. Mecha ashi nagai!

A couple of new posts on Psipook. I can’t decide which should be the main blog. Help!

And this month’s whisky is: Laphroaig 10yo — and as whisky of the month of December should not be confused with the 17yo Bowmore which is going to be my Christmas present. (Damn, I’ve just spoiled the surprise!)

The alert reader (Hi!) will already be aware that this year I have been trying as many different single malts as possible, and will also be aware that Laphroaig 10 is not a whisky I haven’t tried before. It is, though, the first time I have bought an entire bottle. I wasn’t intending to buy a whole bottle, or even a part of one, it just sort of happened.

This morning I drove up to the Minami Ikoma branch of Yamaya (the single best source of imported booze and kidney beans in the whole universe) to get some provisions of the non-potable variety. And some wine. Lots of wine.

Notice the way I slipped ‘drove up to’ Minami Ikoma into the foregoing sentence? I didn’t walk, cycle or take the train, I drove.

In September I turned 44 (see hysteria below), which means that 45 is next and so have decided that I might try growing up. Driving places in my big car is just one of the things I have been doing as part of my growing up campaign. Referring to the car as my car instead of my wife’s car is another part of the same campaign. When I got to Yamaya I paid for my purchases with my (gold) credit card, like other grown up people do, and absolutely against the instructions of my wife (former owner of my car) because it’s my money and my card and grownups issue instructions, not follow them.

Other grownup things have included listening to lots of Bach and John Coltrane, sprouting grey hairs at my temples, and regarding my younger colleagues indulgently (none have got the message yet, or even noticed). I have given up computer games (see post below) and have resolved — no mucking about this time — to make my fiction writing career a reality by the application of actual pragmatism. I have even considered buying a second car to replace the one I blew up in the summer (hey, it wasn’t my fault, OK?).

I have also been wearing a jacket to work and none of my lumberjack shirts. I have been shaving regularly and am hoping to take up sex with my wife — in a suitably dignified and grownup sort of way, of course.

It was absolutely not my intention to buy whisky at Yamaya. Once I had picked up all the bits I needed I sleepwalked over to the whiskies a decision made for me without consulting my will. I did suffer a major bout of options paralysis at the wonderful selection, but the Laph was a shade under 3,000yen, which I thought very reasonable indeed, if not an actual sign from the supreme being.

I seem to remember Iain Banks making a point in Raw Spirit of saying that we should pronounce this whisky ‘laf-rayg’.

However, the blurb on the packaging of the bottle I bought says we should pronounce it ‘laf-royg’. I assume Laphroaig is a more reliable authority than Banks on the pronunciation of itself, so I will go with ‘laf-royg’.

It could be that I just remembered Banksie’s pronunciation note wrong. I have written to my sources demanding a check.

‘Laf-royg’ is how I used to say it before I read Banks’s book, so I was right in the first place and have been mispronouncing it for nearly a year now. This presumably makes me a Laph-ing stock.

About 2am this morning I took a big slug of wine (not the first or last of the night), popped my Civilisation III (the game by Firaxis) CD from the drive and quite deliberately and calmly snapped it in half. I put the CD and the case and the box and the manual in the rubbish bin. Then I had several more big slugs of wine.

This morning I felt that I was going to miss the game, and felt some remorse for the 8,000yen it originally cost two years ago, but did not regret my little act of destruction. Then I remembered that I have been for some time planning a story inspired by Civilisation, for which I would need the disc, and gave myself a tentative kicking.

Civilisation III is a very good game indeed. That is why it had to go. I have a somewhat busy working life revolving around the wrong job, am subject to the stresses and strains that a young family will inflict on you, have the background tension of living in a foreign country for nearly 20 years and am thoroughly bothered that people are not buying my novels in droves because I haven’t published any yet. Games are a wonderful distraction from all that. When you are playing you are totally lost. That isn’t Japan outside the window, it’s Babylon or Iroquois. There are no kids making a fuss and unpleasant realities like George Bush and cancer may as well not exist. Civilisation III is, in short, a lot like heroin, but with the advantages of being legal and being administered without the necessity of using hepatitis-infected needles.

The distraction is welcome and even healthy, but Civ sucks up hours. You can’t just play a round or two and leave it at that. You have to see out that thousand year plan you have set yourself. You cannot go to bed and expect to sleep while barbarian hordes are hacking at the extremities of your empire. You bolt your dinner, drag the kids from their chairs before they have finished theirs and hurl them into bed just so you can barricade that door and invade Russia or divert resources from building-cum-infrastructure projects and towards technological development instead.

And then, of course. it is suddenly 2am and you are pissed as the proverbial computer-savvy newt and after all that work you need to unwind with another few drinks and the entirety of Air’s Liberation 99 album played at brain-disintegrating volume on the iPod, rounded off with Goldbug’s cover of Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love, possibly twice.

I thought to myself last night, as I finished off the Roman empire and set about destroying Greece, when I meet that gatekeeper in the sky and he asks me to give an account of my life, do I really want to explain that I spent years in a fantasy world playing demagogue and having little pixel avatars addressing me as ‘Lord’ or ‘Mighty One’? No, indeed. There are just some things you wouldn’t ever want to have to explain.

So there it was. I gave up smoking (ten years ago), I figured I could give up Civ.

If I had spent in the last two years since I bought this game as much time writing my novel Rumblebum as I did on playing, then I could have finished twice over by now. Not that there would be any point in finishing something twice over, but bear with me, I am in withdrawal here. So I made my resolution and acted … albeit about 18 months after making that firm resolve. But, hey, it took me eight years between deciding to give up smoking and actually doing it.

When you relapse as a giving-up smoker, you find yourself spending a few hundred yen in the local baccy shop. I do hope that I won’t be forking out another 8,000 yen in the Apple Store tomorrow.

The astute reader will have noticed that I have not been posting here of late.

I am unable to write partly because I am writing. I have been trying to get in some quality time with my current story and thereby lies a big blog entry all its own, but not tonight.

So sorry about that. But bear up. There are two advantages to me not posting.

First, you don’t have to read any of my rubbish.

Second, you can go read Nagaijin instead.