One of the most seemingly pointless yet utterly delightful books in my possession is How to Wrap Five Eggs. You can probably guess its theme fairly accurately by title alone. Books can give pleasure from their content, but also for how they make you feel and what they make you think about. A beginner’s Guide to Japan manages to remind you of and tell you about really random things.
Inside every petrol/diesel flap on a car is a slot or a hole for the petrol/diesel cap to rest while you’re filling up your car. And not just the cable that stops the cap from falling onto the ground. Who knew?
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“The mother of Jesus … was visited by an angel and is seen as a saint; the mother of the Buddha died at his birth. Is it any surprise that Buddhism is about learning to live with loss, while Christianity is about salvation from above?” writes Pico Iyer.
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I watched The Green Mile in a cinema in Japan and lost all control over any semblance of discreet tears. It wasn’t pretty. Or quiet. I told some Japanese students of English how it was a good film but I found the ending too sad. They told me that Japanese people appreciate a sad ending. I appreciate a happy ending.
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I was hungry one evening, at that time living with two flatmates (in Japan, as it happens), but knew I had only a few slices of cheese and a few slices of ham in the fridge and nothing else that required minimal effort and no cooking. One flatmate, the nice one, let’s call her Anna, at that moment eating a slice of toast and butter, told me she had a couple of slices of bread left if I wanted to make a sandwich. The other flatmate, let’s call her Cruella, at that moment eating a cheese and ham sandwich, said that she’d just used up the last of her bread, ham and cheese. I thanked Anna and went into the kitchen to make a ham and cheese sandwich. I found my ham wrapper, my cheese wrapper and Anna’s bread wrapper on the side, all empty.
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A friend and I set off in our miniscule under-powered hire car from Kraków airport in Poland, planning to stop off somewhere for dinner and to set up camp. It got dark. We were inadequately prepared where a sense of purpose or destination was concerned. These were also pre-smartphone/pre-cheap-or-inclusive roaming days. It was around 11pm and all around the motorway was darkness, but, lo, a light ahead? We turned off a slip road towards a bright street lamp in front of a house. I don’t remember whether we knocked on their door or someone just came out, but either way we assembled our tent in their back garden and were shown to the toilet and bathroom. The next morning, my friend and I sat in the sunshine on a big wooden bench with the generous, kind family whose garden we had camped in and all ate a feast of breads, meat, cheese, garden vegetables and boiled eggs. Bizarrely, they told us we were the third car of passers-by to have ever camped in their garden.
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I know of someone who cleans their toilet brush amongst the dishes loaded in the dishwasher.
Sometimes the rediscovery of rarely-recalled memories and insights into the lives of others is as much a joy as the reading of a good book. I enjoyed A Beginner’s Guide to Japan. It’s about Japan and yet it’s also about people and quirks and really random things that make your mind wander in a delightfully unpredictable way.