12January1996

My dear folks,

I got home tonight with a great sense of relief. For 5 days I have woken around 4 am & risen about 5 - long before the crack of dawn - when I’d rather have stayed in bed. I crept down as usual & made a couple of cups of tea, taking one back up to Jones. She likes to get up early too when I do, to get in her Portuguese & chores. Mavis crept beneath a rug in the lounge to play his invisible cat game. Like the ostrich, he’s convinced that when he’s under the mat he cannot be seen, never mind the vast & unnatural salient he produces. He gets pissed off if you don’t play the game. Jones didn’t & gave him a poke in the bum which fired him like a rocket down the stairs. It was raining when I set out, though not very hard and - like maiden aunts at the beach - I didn’t get very wet.

The programme went well enough - a frantic run-around as usual. Everybody collapses into seats afterwards & gasps for air. I wandered down the bar for a glass of Irish beer & a chat with a couple of old friends. The bar has just been completely refurbished. It’s huge - can easily take several hundred people. But I find the cigarette smoke irritating & ration my visits to special occasions only. The in-house bar is a BBC speciality which occasional visitors from other parts of the world find very surprising. There’s a pretty tolerant attitude towards booze & often the odd empty wine bottle to be seen poking out of the newsroom trash bins in the morning. As long as you do your job, nobody gives a hoot. And I can’t see I’ve seen it abused.

In the afternoon I spent three hours trying to find a Japanese speaking ethnic-Korean who can talk (in English) about the position of such people in Japan where racism is subtle but deeply embedded. It took a lot of phoning around but eventually I found the perfect person, a young ethnic Korean woman, born & brought up in Japan. She said she passed for Japanese in looks & speech but her name was a give-away & an effective bar to any kind of employment there. Thousands of Koreans were transported to Japan in the first half of the century for labour & their descendants have now settled there as a labouring underclass. “Settled” may be the wrong word.

Ahead, God willing, lie four blissful days off, time to catch up on my life. We have fairly heavy social engagements over the weekend, not typical at all. As always I’ve been sorting out a few tenant problems & catching up on my correspondence. We have had some queries about medium-length stays at the Quinta. I’m a little hesitant as the place is under water & needs a lot of attention. It’s been & being Portugal’s wettest winter in aeons. There’s a new Portuguese president being elected this weekend, a job almost certain to go to the Socialist candidate. As long as he doesn’t tax the landowners to feed the peasants, I don’t mind.

Here the Anglican church has pronounced on the nature of Hell, declaring it to be a state of non-being. There’s been a prodigious reaction from all sides, with the orthodox demanding their reassuring fires back & the sceptics finding the one as dubious as the other. I confess I’m doubtful myself. But since there’s no knowing what lies beyond the veil & noone ever comes back to tell us, I can’t see that it’s worth debating further.

I thought the Boks were going to trounce the English in the second one-day test. Was bitterly disappointed to see the visitors come back. I suppose it will give a little frisson to the next test, which can’t be a bad thing.

Love you all lots,
T