Devenish

For the intro music, click here It’s Christmas Day 2008. I’m sitting alone in Starbucks in Mikage, a suburb of Kobe, Japan, having just dropped off my son Seán for his last day at school here. This is about as dyslocated as an ex-patriot could wish for, supposing that I had indeed wished for it. Over the last few years, I’ve had occasion to think a lot about national identity, and self-identification. Not just because of the almost embarrassing number of citizenships available to me—and even more to the children—but also because of the time spent away from the country for which I feel the greatest affection. Love, perhaps. Christmas stirs up this pot, as no other time in the year. As a British/Irish/Canadian [1] citizen, I am one of the few trial citizens I know: to my knowledge my children, Seán and Julian are the only people to have the right to four passports each—though they will have to choose between Japan and everything else unless Japanese law changes between now and

The soundtrack for this piece can be found here Here's something I only noticed recently. As with so many things, it's probably blindingly obvious to other people, but I guess I'm a late learner... What occurred to me the other day, then, after 46 years of self-reflection, is that either I don't see the real me, or, depending on your perspective, no-one else does. What I see almost all the time is a mirror-image, which is ever so slightly, but distinctly, different. (I realized this when I accidentally inverted an image for my home-page, and noticed that it seemed much better, by which I mean, more familiar. Most photographs seem wrong somehow, not the face I know, but no-one else's either.) Unless one is blessed with perfect bilateral symmetry, we all look that bit different. And so the face I believe I present to the world is just not what people see. Here are two examples to illustrate: in each case, the first (a) photo shows the outsiders' view, the second

I had noticed that I've got off the family track a bit on this blog, and had intended to put up some new family pictures (rather than simply ranting on about French music!). But this afternoon I spotted a folder with some video clips of Sean over the last few years, and thought it would be nice to put these up first. In the older ones, he's wearing the same clothes that Julian has now inherited and is mostly wearing through (one of the advantages of having two boys, I guess...) August 03, Age 2.5: Sean the boy who says "Ni" July 04: Sean the Rapper (Age 3.5) July 05: At the beach (Suma, Japan: Age 4.5) June 06: Singing in Sheffield; Age 5.5 April 07: Reading for Julian: Age 6

Here's "une jolie chanson" from Yves Duteil that manages to celebrate French in Quebec in an entirely positive way, and which reminds me of the warmth and richness that French contributes to the Canadian identity. (This may not of course be the writer's intention, it's just a personal effect, perhaps.)

Despite my earlier post, Los Angeles does have a few good points. First, there's this great passage from Spook Country , a recent novel by William Gibson, who up to now has mostly written a particularly interesting form of science fiction... ...[S]he walked back to the Mondrian through that weird evanescent moment that belongs to every morning in West Hollywood, when some strange perpetual promise of chlorophyll and hidden, warming fruit graces the air, just before the hydrocarbon blanket settles in. That sense of some peripheral and prelapserian beauty, of something a little more than a hundred years past, but in that moment achingly present, as though the city was something you could wipe from your glasses and forget. Sunglasses. She'd forgotten to bring any. She looked down at the sidewalk's freckling of blackened gum. At the brown, beige, and fibrous debris of the storm. And felt the luminous instant pass, as it always must. LA before... ..and after..

I've just taken this picture from our balcony of a spectacular autumn day in Rokko (the part of Kobe where we live: the mountain behind is Rokko-san). Unfortunately, we're stuck at home today, because Sean is off school with some bug: high temperature and general miserableness, but at least it's not raining...

Given the rather bleak nature of my last Inishmacsaint blog, I thought to add here a couple of inspirational notes. An interest in life... This I found yesterday at the beginning of Graham Greene's novel Our Man in Havana , which happened to be sitting on Ayumi's bookshelf at her parent's home, and which I picked up faute de mieux. —I could give you a medical certificate, said Dr. Hasselbacher. —Do you never worry about anything? —I have a secret defence, Mr Wormold, I am interested in life. —So am I, but... —You are interested in a person, not in life, and people die or leave us — I'm sorry; I wasn't referring to your wife. But if you are interested in life, it never lets you down. I am interested in the blueness of the cheese. You don't do crosswords, do you, Mr Wormold? I do, and they are like people, one reaches an end. I can finish any crossword within an hour, but I have a discovery concerned with the blueness of cheese that will never come to a conc