Darlo's World

“Ok, first off lets start with a tune. Nina Simone, live at Montreux 1976, I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free.

So it’s January and that of course means it’s time for the end of Semester One Exams. Oh, and happy new year. So far I’ve had three exams (Japanese Writing, Japanese Politics and International Relations, and Japanese Literature), with one remaining on Thursday (Japanese Listening). I won’t beat around the bush, they’ve been pretty hard, with the most difficult still to come.

The most interesting one so far has been the literature exam in which we had to translate two Japanese texts into English. The first was a delightful story called ‘Kitchen’ by Banana Yoshimoto (translated version by Megan Backus available on Amazon UK & Amazon US).

The second translation was less friendly. It was a story that has yet to actually be translated (officially) into English by Osaka-born Yasutaka Tsutsui called Yumenokizaka Bunkiten (Dreamtree Hill Junction). To say it was difficult to understand what was going on would be a huge understatement, let’s just say it was like trying understanding why people people who love the muppets choose to wear their skin in the form of Ugg Boots.

In awesome news I’ve been invited to an interview for a job in Japan. The interview’s in London just after the exam period and I’m really looking forward to it (best go and get myself a suit eh).”

… is the kind of blog I’d wanted to write, unfortunately …

Yesterday morning at the crack of dawn, I encountered the scariest moment of my life (so far).

At roughly 6 o’clock in the morning, while I was sleeping (having finally drifted off to sleep at about 2 in the morning), someone smashed through my bedroom window trying to get access to the property. The noise was horrific. In a ‘just-been-woken-up-by-broken-glass-flying-into-the-room’-like way I shouted and yelled “who’s there!?”, stumbling out of bed trying to whack the light on as quickly as I could. I was certain I saw a hand in the gaping whole, that was probably reaching for the handle, pull away.

At this point I was shaking all over, probably in part because it was a sodding cold morning and now cold air was getting into my bedroom.

Trying to keep some sort of composure, I called the police, and left all important messages about it on facebook and twitter (may have actually been the other way round, now that I think about it).

Throughout the day various police officers and community support officers came around, all of which were great and supportive, but more than anything else honest. I don’t like false hope or false reassurance about things, so I actually felt more relieved when they said that they probably wouldn’t be able to catch who it was. There were no direct suspects, CCTV had seen nothing (except for me stumbling about to check the damage from outside, discovering they’d also broken into the landlady’s shed), and due to the weather and the fact they had used bricks (which are unfingerprintable) fingerprints couldn’t be obtained.

We came to the conclusion that they didn’t think my bedroom was a bedroom, either a kitchen or lounge, and went with the intention of taking kitchen/loungy stuff. So when they burst through my window and I started up, they ran off.

I didn’t go to work, it took all day to get everything sorted out and I was still not quite all there when I went to bed that night. Up until recently my letting agent have been an absolute shambles, but started to turn their game around when I sent a letter to the landlady recommending that she change agency. I guess they way in which they handle this situation will be one of the major deciding factors to it (and whether or not I actively go out and unrecommend them or just respond to peoples questions about them).

Thankfully, I’m now feeling much better and nothing was taken (except a day’s work and the time I was going to have in bed … actually planned on having a lie in, bugger). I do want to say thanks to everyone who helped out, either by helping pick up glass, board up the window, talk with me over a cup of tea while watching Ghostbusters and eating Jammie Dodgers, or even people who just said “are you ok”. Thanks everyone.

大きな地図で見る

The hotel we stopped at was of the non-breakfast variety, but I actually got a good night sleep (and it was cheap) so I won’t knock it. Annoyingly we were blocked in by the hotel’s builder’s vans, so we had to wait a bit for them a budge over before we could head off on our way.

We’d checked online the night before about what kind of events were on at Edinburgh Festival, scratch that, what kind of FREE events were on at Edinburgh Festival, and were pleasantly surprised. Our initial trouble came in the form of getting to the festival itself. The Shat-Nav knew how to reach Edinburgh, but we had forgot to look at where the festival area was before hand. After idly driving around the city for a while, we found a car park and carried on on foot. Fortunately we had parked nearby to the main street of the festival.

Yes the streets were full of performers trying to get people to see their shows. But it wasn’t an unpleasant intrusion of your face-space like I’d talked about with the Chuggers (Charity Muggers), this had a really fun atmosphere to it.


There were various performances that we’d wanted to see, like an Irish folk dance thing-a-mi-bob, but unfortunately the maps we’d picked up didn’t show us where things were exactly, and unfortunately a lot of festival staff also didn’t know where everything was. Still, we made do and enjoyed some interesting street-shows.


Courtesy of Fingers Piano Bar we enjoyed two shows: a comical cabaret by Amy Albert entitled Delilah Dix and Her Bag of Tricks, and a wonderful performance of broadway hits sung by Cheryl Anne Easton in Dear Diary.

Feeling hungry, we ventured to the Jekyll and Hyde bar. Imagine eating in the Addams Family home (or actually it reminded me of a place I used to work at in Somerset), and that’s the kind of style of this place. Even the toilets are concealed by bookcases, unfortunately I got confused and sent a poor girl into the mens. If you’re reading, sorry love. A word to the wise, this place does seem to ask everyone for ID, old and young. While this is something I personally don’t mind or object to (I always carry my driving license), some people do seem to take the hump when they can’t get served. Know the rules people, there’s always somewhere else.

The food was quite cheap here, I think about £4 for a meal. On top of that the food was actually bloody good, and I don’t mean that in a daft stupid pun-like way. Good food, good price, good interesting decor. Coincidentally, there was a free comedy show going on downstairs, so after we ate we went down to watch.

Three comedians and an MC all tried to make us laugh with different styles comedy and performance. What was a real treat was (and I know this may sound harsh) to see a comedian absolutely bomb. It’s something I never thought was possible! I always thought that given the fact everyone was there to relax and laugh, as a group everyone would just laugh no matter how bad the jokes were. Hence why when you’re alone at home you (well, me anyway) don’t laugh as hard as often. But seriously, I did kind of feel sorry for the guy because he looked like a buddy of mine (as well as a bit of a gross between musician Angela Aki and comedian Ed Byrne). The MC and the other two comedians were more entertaining I should point out.

For our final entertainment for the night before heading off was an evening of live jazz at the Guildford Arms. Although it got a bit busy and a bit packed, it was a very good night, but unfortunately my battery had died so I couldn’t take any pictures.

This brought an end to our Scottish adventure. We headed back to the car and set the sat-nav to take us to Hull, or as near to Hull as it possibly could. If anyone out there has trouble setting theirs to go to Hull, try instead Kingston Upon Hull, it seems to be the same place. We parked up sometime around midnight, quite literally at the England-Scotland border. I would have parked smack-bang on the border so one of us slept in Scotland and the other in England, but there was a big ass wall in the way.

One thing I want to bring up before shooting off to get some food, during my time on this whole trip I didn’t drink any alcohol. Mainly because I was driving and didn’t fancy risking even the slightest bit of it in my system flaring up on any detectors. So whenever I’ve been in a bar, pub or whatever, I’ve always asked what soft-drinks were available. I know that Scotland has been associated with Irn-Bru, but seriously I didn’t expect to find it available in every place I went to! Often places seemed to favour it over stuff like juice and cola. I’d never drank so much of the stuff before I went to Scotland.