The Roof is Leaking

The roof is leaking and the wind is howling
Kids are crying, 'cos the sheets are so cold
I woke this morning, found my hands were frozen
Tried to feed the fire, but you know, the damn thing's too old.

Click to play (youtube)

Actually, it's the kitchen ceiling, in our house in the suburbs of Sheffield, 9000-odd kilometers and 9 hours' worth of time-zones away. A burst hot water cylinder, I'm told, in the urgent email updates from our tenant. Claire is not happy about this situation. Understandably so, but at least she can monitor it, and let the plumber in. I'm distracted and frustrated, and powerless: none of us needs this, on top of everything else. Curiously, in searching for the lyrics to the Phil Collins song that introduces this piece, I came across this site on the interpretation of dreams:

To dream that the roof is leaking represents distractions, annoyances, and unwanted influences in your life. New information is slowly revealing itself to you. Something is finally getting through to you. Alternatively, the dream means that someone is imposing and intruding their thoughts and opinions on you...

Quite so, though the distraction, annoyance and unwanted influence relates in good part to the presumed state of our English kitchen, and to whether or not the insurance company will pay up...

The other reason that the roof is leaking, figuratively speaking, is because of the news story I heard this morning on The World Tonight (last night, such is the nature of my Radio 4 experience these days). It is a story that affects me deeply, and is set in Tokyo, though I very much doubt the Japanese media will pick it up or will give it much attention, if they do. The feature concerns a protest by desperate, divorced—generally foreign—fathers struggling to gain access to their children, something that is nearly impossible to achieve in Japan, even where the divorced parents live in close proximity to each other; for joint custody is just not a concept. The story is truly devastating: to hear of a man who howls in anguish every night, missing the daughters his ex-wife won't even let him see, goes to the very heart of the phrase 'cruel and unusual punishment.' Click here to listen to the broadcast (from 39:45).

Here's the text link.

Japan is a wonderful place to live in so many respects: in terms of personal safety, affordable access to good health care, a generally excellent distribution of wealth and education, a laudable absence of machismo and hyper-sexualization, tremendous public honesty (if you lose your wallet, it will invariably turn up; you get on at the back of the bus and pay on exiting—and everyone pays!), a country where children are free to be children and to play on their own in the park, six year olds walk and take the bus or train home from school alone—all these are truly admirable facets of a secure and developed society. In respect of custody rights, however, of honouring and fostering paternal love, this country is hatefully, powerfully, reprehensibly unenlightened. Evidenced by non-adherence to international treaties (Hague Convention), divorced fathers are about as well-served as whales*, and as poorly understood, both legally and culturally. The law, and Japanese popular opinion, resolutely refuses to acknowledge that one can be a feckless or lousy husband, but still a deeply loving parent. I can only hope and pray that I never find myself in the position of these lost souls, watching from the street as their children grow up without them...

*The ethical treatment of animals is another huge moral deficit area for most Japanese, it is fair to say. It is still acceptable to dress up monkeys and chimps, and have them perform party tricks (Pan-kun being perhaps the best known tv victim of 19th century attitudes to animal rights).

As for Phil Collins, this song and the album from which it comes—which also features the much better known In the Air Tonight—represents the high point of his solo career, when his lyrics still meant something, or at least pointed to something meaningful; after Face Value, there follows a not so graceful decline into insipid pop twaddle (to use a technical term). But this is still good stuff.