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The
Morris Telford archive. Read about Morris's previous
exploits, and find out how the adventure has unfolded.
Follow
Morris's journey
Day One
Day Two
Day Three
Day Four
Day Five
Day Six
Day Seven |
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| FACTS |
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Name: Morris Telford
Age: 33
DOB: 18/04/70
Occupation:Unemployed
Hobbies: Enlightenment, Philosophy, Bingo
Favourite
book – Ordnance Survey Map of Shropshire 1999 edition
Favourite
foods – Pickled Eggs
Favourite
film – Late For Dinner
Favourite colour – The delicate cyan of the dinnertime sky in
Moreton Say.
Favourite British County – Shropshire
Favourite Place – Moreton Say
Favourite Postal Code Area – TF9
Favourite radio
frequency - 96FM
Favourite sound – The gentle breeze rustling through the leafy
glades of Moreton Say
Favourite Clive – Clive of India
Favourite Iron Bridge - Ironbridge
Favourite adhesive note size – 75 x 75mm
Favourite Vegetable – Anything grown in the fertile soils of
Shropshire
Favourite band – *(shameless plug)
Biggest inspiration – |
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Communicate
with Morris via the - or look back through the archive
to find out what happened in previous weeks.
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Busy
day today.
Flew with Air China overnight to terminal two of Narita Airport.
I sat next to a young Japanese boy who did nothing but play on a
Gameboy Advance for the entire trip. This was doubly irritating
in that he didn’t respond to anything I said to him and he didn’t
let me have a go on Mega Man Battle Network 3.
I had the usual hearty welcome at customs. Why is it every time
I pass through customs and they ask me my reason for visiting the
country they will never accept the truth.
I’m not coming for business reasons or pleasure reasons. I’m visiting
the country to try and tell the people all about Shropshire and
perhaps convince a few to relocate or at least embrace the Shropshire
way of life. It’s not complicated; I just want to make people happy,
so why do I always come up against this scepticism with airport
security the world over?
I tried to give one of the guards a little A5 brochure I had about
Shropshire, nothing divisive just a picture of Moreton Say, a few
paragraphs about how nice Shropshire is, my Mother’s home address
and a voucher entitling you to 20p off a toasted teacake at a café
in Market Drayton and he accused me of offering him a bribe. It’s
so hard to convince people that I don’t have any ulterior motive;
I do hope the rest of Japan is less cautious in accepting my help.
After some confusion at the check in over why exactly I was in Japan,
they did let me go and I managed to get a bus to Tokyo. The bus
was very clean and pleasant, without the odour of urine I am accustomed
to on British transport.
First impressions of Japan, it’s very nice. I’m staying in a tall,
gleaming steel and glass hotel - it looks a bit like my Mother’s
old greenhouse, only bigger and with rooms and guests instead of
tomatoes and the engine from a 1976 Mini.
There seems to be a lot of American businessmen here, so there’s
a lot of speaking slowly and shouting going on in reception.
The Japanese staff are very polite and their English is excellent,
I asked one of the women at reception about local Bingo halls and
she was most enthusiastic and helpful, giving me a long list of
local establishments. I think I’m going to like Japan.
Walking
round Tokyo today was a revelation. Everyone is so polite - not polite
in a "come in and tell us all about Shropshire" kind of way, more
in an "avoid eye contact with the odd looking Englishman" type manner.
But at least no one has kidnapped me, drugged me, venerated me or
strapped me to the top of a Winnebago.
I talked to a group of young men outside an arcade, they seemed disinterested
at first while I told them about Shropshire, but when I mentioned
I’d spent the last week with Shaolin monks it got their attention.
Apparently they are a street gang called the Yumo-Ka-Tekk-Boyz, which
as far as I could tell is like a Japanese equivalent of the Boy Scouts.
But instead of knowing hundreds of ways to tie a knot, they pride
themselves on their martial arts prowess.
Fresh from my training in China, I may have overstated my own ability
and ended up agreeing to take part in a contest of champions in two
days. They seemed friendly enough about it though so I’m sure it’s
all in good fun, they gave me a blue scarf to wear tied to my arm
to signify I was one of their organisation.
I agreed to see them in a couple of days at somewhere called the Tako-Do
arena and left them to help old people across the road.
Watched TV in my hotel room. No sign of Countdown or its Japanese
equivalent, but I did find a game show where the contestants have
to put themselves through all sorts of obscure mental tortures to
score points... so I settled for that instead.
I saw
some Japanese fighting fish in Tokyo today. I used to have a goldfish
called Dave Ottley. He was named after Dave Ottley from Telford who
won a silver medal for the javelin in the 1985 Olympics. Dave (the
man not the fish) is now Sports Development Officer for Wrekin District
Council but can still skewer a tangerine from 500 paces.
The Japanese fighting fish made my goldfish Dave look like just a
harmless pet, which, of course, he was. The fighting fish were kept
one per tank and just hovered in the centre. They didn’t swim around
or practice their fighting moves, or leap majestically from the tank
or anything; they just floated at a stationary point in the centre
of each tank and waited.
There was also a really unpleasant smell around the fish, a stinky,
rotten, decaying, fetid smell. It may have been the fish, it may have
been the man selling the fish, I’m not sure which.
I asked the man with the fish, who I noticed has plasters on each
of his fingers, why they don’t move. He told me, in an authentic accent,
"they are preparing for battle". I’m ashamed to say that I laughed
at the man when he said this.
The prospect of these little fish doing anything resembling "battle"
struck me as absurd. My laughter did not go down well with the little
Japanese fish selling man and he started shouting about the ancient
art of Japanese fish fighting, the sacred history of fighting fish
breeding going back centuries and something about western ignorance.
He then dared me to put my hand in the tank.
In retrospect, sitting here at the Tokyo Medical and Surgical Clinic
in Kamiya-cho with my hand in tatters, putting it in the tank was
a bad idea.
It’s the
martial arts tournament today and I’m going to the Tako-Do arena to
explain I will be unable to represent my Boy Scout friends as a vicious
fish attacked me yesterday.
The collection of youths waiting for me at the arena did not seem
to be taking my fish wound seriously and I noticed that the majority
of them seemed to be wearing red bandanas, headbands, scarves or other
garments that clashed quite obviously with my blue scarf.
Also in the background I could see some quite violent confrontations
going on, not at all the sort of thing Lord Baden-Powell would have
approved of.
When I was a young man in Moreton Say we never had anything like this.
We never used to attack each other or feel a need to separate ourselves
into gangs.
I say "we", but to be fair the only friends I ever really associated
with in Moreton Say that were under 25 were both made of straw. I
still have very fond memories of those lazy summer days in the sun-drenched
fields with my friends, Tony the scarecrow and wicker Amy, and they
both taught me a very important lesson about never playing with matches.
What with all the shouting and fighting and fish bite belittling,
I didn’t much like the look of Tako-Do arena so I practiced what I
consider to be the foundation teaching of Salopian martial arts, I
ran away. It’s often the bravest thing to do.
I met
a man called Yoshi today in the business district of Tokyo. He was
sitting on a metal bench in a smart suit and tie eating a bowl of
what looked like, and indeed turned out to be, raw fish.
Yoshi was very receptive to my tales of Shropshire life. I sat next
to him on the bench and talked to him for nearly two hours, covering
most of the basics about how nice it is in Shropshire and including
a few personal anecdotes about amusing country happenings involving
tractors, small animals and crop drainage.
It was after talking to him for a couple of hours, I asked him if
I was making him late for work. This turned out to be a crucial question.
Yoshi broke down - not in great big sobbing floods of tears or anything,
like you do when you first find out as a young boy that London is
the capital city of Great Britain and not in fact Oswestry like your
Mother told you, but a restrained anguish of self-hugging and rocking
back and forth.
It turned out that Yoshi lost his job last year. He had been working
in some sort of large Japanese corporation sitting in a small cubicle
doing small tasks on a small computer. The company expanded but somehow
did not have room for Yoshi’s particular brand of smallness and he
lost his job.
Yoshi has a wife and a small son and couldn’t face telling them he
had lost his job so he went home that day as if nothing had happened,
thinking, "I’ll tell them tomorrow". Then he got up the next day,
put on his suit and took the train to Tokyo.
He’s been doing this for over a year now, every day he kisses his
wife and child goodbye, leaves for work and comes and sits on a bench
eating his sushi and watching the world go by. I’m the first person,
the very first person in over 400 days, to sit down next to him and
offer the olive branch of polite conversation.
I like Yoshi, he’s small, polite, well dressed and he looks like I
might in a few years time if I were smaller, more polite, dressed
smartly and had a sudden genetic leaning towards the previously unknown
Japanese side of my family.
So I agreed to meet him here on his bench at the same time tomorrow.
Before
I meet Yoshi today I’m arranging a few things for him.
I’ve contacted his former employer in the Shiraishi business complex
and found out where his old office was. I’ve arranged to lease a slightly
larger office next to his old workplace, one where all his previous
employers have to walk past to get to their office. I’ve bought him
a big desk, a big computer and a big brass sign for his door. I hope
he likes it.
I just left Yoshi in his new job, I’ve paid off his debts, I’ve arranged
for a regular salary and I’ve given him, I hope, a new lease of life.
I obviously made him promise he and his family will move to Shropshire
when he retires, but that’s decades away yet.
The only things he did have reservations about were the brass plaque
saying "Japan’s Ambassador to Shropshire" on his door and the life-size
portrait of Carol Voderman I had hung behind his desk, but hey, I’m
the boss. He really liked his big desk.
Walking
around Tokyo today, people seem worried about earthquakes, there’s
supposed to be a big one coming and they had this massive exercise
recently where they practiced what they would do in case of a major
tremor, it was sort of like a fire drill, but taken seriously.
I spent some time with a man called Kuroda feeding the birds with
a plastic bag of breadcrumbs, who proudly told me that he could predict
earthquakes.
He said that whenever a really serious quake is about to happen he
feels it in his left leg. Then he rolled up his trousers and his leg
looked like Noddy Holders top hat, all down his left leg he had drawing
pins stuck into him, not the steel ones that maintain sterility in
the packaging either but the cheaper brass ones used for notice boards
and posters.
Kuroda told me the pins sing to him as a warning, then just as he
was telling me he started humming in a sort of high pitched whine
and shouted "It’s coming! It’s coming!" and made me hide under bus
shelter. After about half an hour he admitted that the drawing pins
were not one hundred percent reliable and it was possibly a false
alarm.
He was a very pleasant man though and we had a nice chat about Market
Drayton and how there are hardly any earthquakes there. He said he
really wanted to go live in Shropshire, but if there were no earthquakes
there he would be wasting his gift and all those years sticking drawing
pins in his leg would have been wasted.
It was hard to argue with him on that point so I left him, his leg
shining in the Tokyo sunlight like a little disco for the birds.
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