Richard's blog

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So I was having a horrible nightmare this morning, something involving being a tutor for Dr Neil Thomason’s Science Life Mind subject, and being really crap at it. I’m sure Linda K is involved by some Freudian segue. But then I woke up and felt better. I pottered (a word that really should be used much more often) and then went off to Beige, the Alain Ducasse Karl Lagerfeld Chanel-themed Ginza French restaurant where I dropped a seriously ludicrous amount of money (but don’t you have to do it sometimes?) on a four-course lunch with all the trimmings, and three glasses of wine, and a bottle of water that cost about $A10, sitting on a Chanel tweed banquette mind you, looking out from the 10th floor eyrie of the world’s biggest Chanel store, which is the restaurant, by myself (as in I didn’t have a partner, not the restaurant was devoid of customers). The food was fine and I found myself speaking all three languages that I can manage, but particularly French, which one staff member started speaking with me without even checking that I could understand. In any case, that finished, I doddered (another word that really should be used much more often) in a wine-induced brain-airy state down to APC Marunouchi and bought another pair of their fine jeans to complement the two pairs I already own, the jeans were less expensive than lunch, but only just. I then came home and it occurs to me that seriously in 11 days time I will no longer be in Japan, so I packed my bags to see how much stuff actually have, and I’m deciding not to take things home left right and centre like Prada shoeboxes and books I’m probably not going to read again even though I like them, because I’m sure Buddha would say something like ‘Let go of the craving and you’ll be happy!’ or at least words to that effect. I seem to have less things then I came with, which is remarkable. I’m sure there’s a catch somewhere but I’m yet to discover it. By the way, if you didn’t know I’ve stopped working, did so on Thursday, not particularly sorry about leaving. As a last petering-off fact, it may interest you to know that Amazon’s newish Text Stats service, which automatically rates books on their difficulty, thinks that Ulysses by Joyce is ‘easy’ in most categories, scoring 6.8 Flesch-Kincaid Index, meaning that apparently students entering seventh-grade of US high school would normally find it unproblematic. Something which, as a literature graduate who nevertheless had trouble understanding the book, I would like to vehemently dispute. (BTW, What you just read has a Flesch-Kincaid index of 15 and a Fog index of 22.) Home soon.

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Here, have a tree that’s like 300 years old in Hamarikyu garden. It needs a bit of help.