30 - Intervention

You’ve all been very patient, but it has been a good long while, and I think it’s time to talk about my wedding. I’ve already spoken to a lot of people about it here in Japan, answered a lot of the same questions, and many of you were there in person. But I feel like talking a little about what went on below the surface, because the run-up also had a massive impact on arguably the most important day of my life. But firstly, and unquestionably, a brief overture:

The day of my wedding was absolutely perfect. I know it, and I’m sure Steph feels the same. I cannot express just how perfectly everything slipped together on the day. I don’t have thanks enough to give to you all for your support, but what I have is yours. Thank you.

And now that you have that solidly in your minds, I can say the following without fear of you all misunderstanding. The year, and then especially the week, running up to March 22^nd, included some of the lowest points of my life. The Thursday before, I could not name for you a single moment where I was not ready to burst into childish, angsty tears. Truly, it was a hard lesson in self-control. And I don’t even think it was because things were going wrong, because they weren’t. Everything went very smoothly, I reckon. And by the end, everything was finished without needing a single compromise.

But the stress! The unbelievable crushing, suffocating stress that that week became. Now, I work in a junior high school. I know stress. I’ve seen it in the teachers who work here, and the kids studying for the exams that will shape the rest of their lives, and also in the other ALTs of the community who put up with torture sometimes. I count myself one of the luckier ones, to not take on as much of that stress as others. But that week before my wedding… By the afternoon of Friday, the stress was thick and tarry enough to be felt sticking to the air, forcing its way down your throat like second hand smoke. You could feel it sinking into your skin, into the hollow around your brain, into your veins. There were times, when I was between jobs, when the urgency gave way a little and I felt like I would melt like a human statue made of grease and seep away between the floorboards.

The stress changed the way I saw everything. If I had taken a step back, viewed the day’s events from more of a higher management point of view, I’d have seen that this person went here to do this job, which they did, and in the meantime this other job was done by this team of people over there. Clean and efficient, like orchestrating war in a strategic computer game. But with so much – I am hesitant to use this term but can’t think of any more appropriate – negative energy clogging up the church and the house and anywhere else two or more people gathered together in the name of matrimony, all I could see were a bunch of people, drawn together out of reluctant loyalty, doing a job well but to them far too slowly, with too inferior a set of tools, and to an insufficient, disappointing end. Maybe nobody else felt it. But I certainly felt that wherever I was and whatever I was doing, I was in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing incorrectly, and was only succeeding in getting in everybody else’s way. And why was this all going so poorly? Because of me. Because I had the dumb idea to try and get married. I have been to darker places in my life, but not for many years have I so much wanted to squeeze between the brickwork and hide from the world like some kind of vermin. And that thought in itself brought additional waves of misery. I was doing this for Stephanie, and I was doing this for God. If I was unhappy, then I was letting them down. If I was unhappy, what was the point…

So then why was it that when Friday night came around, everything was in its proper place and the whole thing was set to go? Why was it that when Saturday came around everyone was able to move themselves to the right places at the right times without ever needing to be told? Why, and this one really gets to me, why on earth did three or four days of darkness come together to create a day so brilliant and so holy? How does something like that happen? Was I suffering for nothing, or was it necessary to bring out the light from inside? The light that, I guess, must have been hiding just out of sight?

I think a big part of it was all the attention. I don’t mean people fussing over me, because I didn’t get swamped by that. But to look around was to see things that were changing because of me. The decorations in the church, for example, or the endless papercraft things strewn about the lounge, or the scowling anxiety of my parents. In some small way, it was all directed at me. And though I do quite like pushing myself out into the limelight from time to time, and I do have something of an addiction the sugary, pre-game nerves that I first felt as a theatre student at high school. But I couldn’t hide from it that week. I couldn’t get away. And unlike when I stand in front of the kids in class, or in front of the Board of Education at a meeting, I was not, could not put on a front to protect myself. I couldn’t be Teacher Pete, or Actor Pete, because neither of those suave suckers was getting married that weekend. I had to be me, under the scrutiny of hundreds, for a long, long time. And that was terrifying. So I guess, then, that most of the stress I felt was of my own creation. That flip-side of the drama coin, the feeling of always being slightly behind where you should be, that was my own feeling, not anybody else’s. That explains why everyone was smiling. Well, nearly everyone.

Alright, alright. Backslash gloom. The ends justify the means, and nobody died at my awesome wedding, which is of course the most important thing. I’ve said my peace (Piece? I don’t even know. I feel my peace because of it, at least.) and am more sane for it. I’m sure you want to know about the honeymoon and all that.

First stop on the tour was Eye Kettleby Lakes, which rents out fantastic little log cabins. We were there for two nights, which was enough time to do a solid, grueling chunk of nothing except eat the food we’d ordered and drink organic cider and watch Rio. Funny film when you’re tipsy. I read a lot (Brandon Sanderson’s new Stormlight Archives book), Steph slept a lot. There was a jacuzzi. That sort of thing. Awesomely relaxing, endlessly fun. But not really interesting to read about, I’ll bet.

So next on the list was Edinburgh, which (sorry Kobe) is my favourite city on the planet. Leicester doesn’t even come close, for all the excellent breed of people it is home to. Edinburgh is small enough to walk around in, friendly enough to be a comfortable stranger in, and familiar enough to fill me with a soft, sweet, orange nostalgia glow. I was impressed to see that very little had changed, which is really something ‘cos haven’t they been working on those trams now for like a decade? Potterow’s shop being outside now was probably the most drastic change I noticed, though as a non-resident I guess there’s a lot I missed. I mean, these days I’m afraid I’ll visit Edinburgh and for the first time ever find myself walking the streets of foreign territory, so most changes were small things by comparison. Boy, do you Scots like bringing up the referendum. ‘On the left you’ll see Loch Ness, and Nessy, of course, votes ‘yes’.’

We did a fair amount of sight-seeing during our brief trip to Edinburgh. Up Arthur’s Seat, down past the Parliament buildings, around the university campus. Continued my age-old tradition of walking up towards the castle and then thinking ‘ah, I don’t really feel like it’ and then walking away. The Mosque Kitchen, oh how I missed you. And, of course, a fantastic meal with a true friend on the night before we left. Edinburgh was safe and thus really not exotic. But I love it. I really do.

Next was the train up to Inverness, and a push against the Pete’s Furthest North Travelled line. Train was fairly uneventful, though I was surprisingly staggered by how inconvenient it is. Or rather, how inconvenient it is compared to Japan’s swipe-your-wallet-and-get-off-when-you-want system. In actuality it’s probably quite good. We stayed in a Premier Inn on the riverside, which turned out to be a great location. Inverness, like Edinburgh, is fairly small, and we could walk to anything we needed. We started off our visit with a quick walk around, down south along the river, before finishing up with a meal at a pretty excellent Indian restaurant in the city centre.

But that day was a taste of something to come, which I’m still struggling to get my head around. I reckon it’s Japan, but since leaving the UK I’ve grown very nervous of strangers. No, strangeness. I’ve grown very uncomfortable with the unfamiliar. So, when it turned out that the Frankie and Bennie’s in Inverness hadn’t been around for a very long time, suddenly I was struck by this fear that we weren’t going to find anywhere. Wherever we went would be new, unknown… No adventures for me, and good morning to you. But I do think Japan is to blame. Japan’s urban culture is designed to de-personalise the act of interacting with services. The trains are a good example; just swipe your Icoca or whatever and off you go, no need to even make eye-contact with station staff. But even when you do, it’s so scripted and polite you may as well be talking to machines. Follow the script, and you get exactly what you need. I’m used to that. God help me, I actually quite like it. And that has made me weak. Oh, and also the Scottish can be very loud.

So the next day I should have been more prepared. We tried going north, to a place called Fortose that has good views of the sea and a sweet cathedral. We say ‘tried’, because we got about half way there and then got off too soon, with a solid stretch of unwalkable A-road between us and our destination. Oh, the shame I felt that day. Can’t even get the buses right anymore. Now, Japanese buses are much better. And it wouldn’t be my last bus failure of the trip.

So, morning essentially wasted, we then took a pre-booked tour down to the Loch and the surrounding sights. And, praise the Lord, it made up for the early failures. Our guide was very sweet, and Loch Ness, though so commercial when viewed on the internet, is simply stunning. Did you know you could fit most of the world’s population into it if it was dry? Staggering. After that was a brief visit to Urquhart Castle on the shoreline, which was also pretty excellent. Got me all medieval warfare-y, which doesn’t happen often between seasons of Game of Thrones. I made a promise to myself to reinstall Shogun: Total War when I got home, and then we were off to the city centre again. Turkish restaurant for dinner, which was a lot of food but really, really good. Very sweet beer; very nice. We did try for the ‘greatest pub in the Highlands’, but due to a bit of over-sleep we missed the food cut-off.

Which brings us on to the last leg of the trip. We took a train in the morning up to a town called Wick, on the coast. I wasn’t feeling all that well, and the train ride was spent in some considerable discomfort, but we did get to see a lot of the vast Scottish countryside as we passed, which was really something.

Just gonna take a quick break here. Feel free to take the same for yourselves.

And we’re back. Wick, it must be said, was the most dreary, dismal town I’ve ever visited. It wasn’t bad; it did have a nice cathedral, and the pub was a good place to spend the three hours we had before the bus arrived to take us to the ferry. But it was overcast with clouds that looked more like industrial smoke columns, and as soon as we left the station all we could hear was the angry cawing of what must have been a hundred crows, all packed tight into the trees along the road down to the centre of town. We passed a graveyard before we got anywhere, and it had crows like you wouldn’t believe. Scrapping and stealing bits of wood from each other. It was like one of those bandit-plagued wild west towns from the movies, before Clint Eastwood shows up to set things right. But the pub, as I say, was quite nice. Still wasn’t feeling my best, so I’m glad we had that time to rest.

After that it was off on the ferry to Orkney Mainland. It was dark by the time we boarded, so the views weren’t exactly stellar. But riding a ferry was entertaining, even if it was only for about twenty minutes. We shared the trip with a group of middle school boys back from, I think, some kind of school football match. They seemed to have won, as their teacher was having a hard time keeping them under control. Reminded me of my students. Once on the Mainland, a terrible truth. We would have to take the bus for about 45 minutes to get to Kirkwall, and we didn’t have change for the bus. The only money we had was Steph’s 50-pound notes, and having seen a young woman try to get change for a tenner on a UK bus before I wasn’t gonna chance it. Buses, man. Don’t like ‘em. So we traipsed off into a coastal village called St. Margaret’s Hope, where a woman working a hotel bar agreed to change our fifty if we bought something. Now, the whole Scotland/England rivalry thing makes me a touch nervous every time it comes up and I’m on “enemy” soil, so you can understand why I made Steph do most of the talking. I was feeling pretty terrible, though, more through shame than whatever stomach bug I’d contracted. It was a bit of a stressful holiday, for reasons I mentioned earlier, and I think that took its toll on my body.

Anyway, we eventually found our way to Kirkwall, end of the line. Seemed pretty tiny in the dark, and there was barely a soul on the road that night. Fortunately the big Tesco was still open, a shining fortress of light in the darkness, and we took shelter in there to regain our sanity, buy food and call a taxi. He knew where our lodge was, and it turned out to be a slightly stretching walk away. Still, glad to have had the transportation. Pretty soon out of Kirkwall the roads turn to muddy country paths with nowhere to walk, and that would have been pretty rubbish in the dark. We reached the little cottage, Inganess House, and tried to get inside. A bit of a challenge there – we’d been told the keys were in a combination locker in the ‘new shed’, but had a bit of trouble finding it. We took it in turns rummaging around in both sheds the building had, while the other jumped up and down to keep the motion-detection lights on. The first time we got the light back I accidentally made a Slender reference, and that is why, when we got inside, we slept with our heavy bags in front of the bedroom door.

Inganess House was really lovely. It was only about five years old, and had the sort of shiny freshness you expect from homes in US sitcoms. Every room had a TV, it seemed, and a sort of media control box on the wall under it so it looked like something out of Half Life 2. We had sandwiches in the morning while we got our itinerary in order, and then walked into town for a look around. The place does come alive in the daylight, but it wasn’t exactly bustling. Kirkwall has everything you’d need, including another impressive cathedral made of red stone. We did a little bit of sightseeing on our own, but public transport was ever against us, and in the end it was the hired tour on our penultimate day that got us the most around the island.

Our little tour was led by a fellow named Kinley, who it turns out was pretty fantastic. We found a website that listed the official Orkney tour guides, and a quick email around picked him out as being reasonably cheap as well as available. Have a personal guide also meant we could pick some of the places we were more keen on seeing, and there’s a lot of stuff to see on the mainland. Steph was eager to take in the Neolithic sights, so that was where we spent the brunt of our time. There was an old village on the west coast which was pretty fantastic; it pre-dated the pyramids as evidence of human civilization. Also huge standing stones, and a massive cairn that nobody really knows anything about. That one was famous for having Norse graffiti scrawled onto the inside walls, and it was very humbling to see that human civilisation really hasn’t changed at all since it was created all those years ago. ‘Ingird is the most beautiful of women’ is pretty much no different to ‘For a good time call’. Though most of where we went was somehow connected to several thousand years ago, it sounded like Kinley really wanted to tell us about the war. Somehow it always seemed to come up. We’d be driving along a road, and he’d point out that it was a road built in the war. It was a bit of an eye-opener; I don’t think either of us had really understood that Orkey was as much under threat from attacks as London, despite being so far north. It was an exhausting, but truly excellent day, and we even received a photo print Kinley had made as a wedding present.

From the front door of Inganess House you can see the airport. However, we still had to call a taxi and get it to drive us around the impassable land in between, which the driver had a good laugh about. We took the smallest plane I’ve ever flown south to Glasgow, and from there back down to East Midlands.

And now here I am. School’s back up, and by some miracle all three of my OTEs are still here. The third years are currently off in Okinawa, taking in the sun and the cheap American imports. The newcomers seem to be settling in okay, but I fear they’re still a bit nervous around me. Got my first class with them tomorrow, which I’m reasonably confident about. Still, don’t want to get off on the wrong foot. This is a good year, I can say that with real confidence, and I don’t want to lose them to dekihenitis. The second years are doing well, though. Already taught them a few times and it looks like they haven’t changed much.

Outside of school, life has been busy. As ALT Advisor for Kobe City this year, I need to be on hand to give my opinions about things and generally be visible for the BoE and ALT communities. But so far there hasn’t been much for me to do there, just the silent roiling of stormclouds overhead which might rain buckets down on me or might pass on by. A bigger, more immediate responsibility comes in the form of a role-playing game I’m running this year. Never done a long campaign before; never done anything outside of the ludicrous antics of Maid RPG. I’m super-excited, often can’t stop thinking about it, so I hope it all goes along well.

Fingers and brain are hurting. Time for me to call it. If you weren’t satisfied with my honeymoon account, go ahead and ask me your probing, fiddly little questions. Go on.

Thanks for reading.