Here I am this New Year's Eve sitting alone in my living room, much as I would on any other evening, but reflecting on how different this New Year's feels, not just following on the strangest couple of years most of us have surely ever been through and where people at least here in Japan are still not getting to go out, but also at this time of life. For one thing, gone, maybe, are the days of New Year's revelry, of blithely signing up for the mad all nighters, invariably then enjoined with reckless abandon. A couple of these - one or two of the crazier ones I’ve had since coming back to Japan in 2006 - good ole Facebook reminded me of today. 

 

First there was the 9-hour marathon music gig our band Mutiny played at the Seamus O'Hara Irish pub in Meguro, Tokyo in 2009 -  or more correcly the 'Tiny' as we named it, since just three of us out of the five could make it. I remember the desperately bleary ride home, stinking of stale cigarette smoke and struggling badly just to stay awake on a train full of wholesome, bright-eyed, full night's sleep-rested families on their way to greet, in customary Japanese style, the first sunrise of the year. By the time I could get on a train I'd hit the wall hard, all I could think of was my bed. Oh how I craved it, and how gratefully would I tumble into it just as soon as I could crawl there. I decided that late afternoon, thick-headed and rising barely in time to glimpse the first sunset of 2010, that despite it having been a rollocking great night enough was enough. I didn’t want any more New Year's Eves like that. 

 

And to be fair I’ve been quite true to my word. For since then I've only had, as far as I can recall, just two. One, the other memory Facebook jogged today, was guesting with my friend Ryumaro and his band at Daisy's Cafe in my Yuigahama Beach neighbourhood in Kamakura in 2012. He called out to me as I was passing by on my way for a bit of a bar crawl earlier in the evening and invited me to sit in, but when I duly showed up just past midnight it emerged that drummer Yukari-san was going to be late. He was playing at the flagship Kohaku New Years show on NHK TV and it was gone 2am before he finally showed, and we ended up playing the gig from 2.30 till 4.00am, to a full house - or as full a house as Daisy's can accommodate - about 20, maybe 30 counting spillover into the road outside. This was followed by pre-dawn hot sake shots round a beach fire and blearily gazing upon the first sunrise of the year. Fortunately my bed on this occasion was a mere walking distance.

 

My own reflections tonight though, over a couple glasses of very decent red wine, turned to the more distant past, and a couple of truly memorable New Years Eves from there. 

 

The mad night that was NYE 1985 instantly sprang to mind. I was about to move to London to do a short course in TEFL (Teaching English As A Foreign Language) in preparation for my coming to Japan later that year and, having just given up my own place, I was at my parents house in South Wales. So along I went to the local pub, where there was a fancy dress night going on. I went dressed as Basil Fawlty. The whole experience, in particular my 'performance', was augmented as a result of a rather unusual snap decision I made earlier in the evening. Though generally speakin i had long since left such predilections behind, I decided to ingest a half tab of acid (LSD) I'd discovered that afternoon while going through some old stuff in the attic, tucked away, appropriately enough, inside my very decently thumbed copy of Jack Kerouac's 'On The Road'. I feared that over the intervening few years it might have lost its potency but, almost like a fine wine, it didn't disappoint. Instead it really helped me get into the role, as in a spectacular, almost scarily authentic way for about 6 or 7 hours I 'became' Basil, amusing and terrorising, probably in equal measure, everyone I came into contact with. I walked away with first prize. 

 

Another was the turning of the millennium, 1999 to 2000. I had just moved to Hawaii and the island of Kauai, and that night, after a few twists and turns, I found myself on the North Shore under the fireworks on a most crowded Hanalei Bay, which almost ressembled a refugee camp. Once they'd finished - in true Kauai style and in complete contrast to what would've happened in the UK - just about everyone disappointingly buggered off home to bed, leaving the sands suddenly deserted. Undeterred though, I somewhat intrepidly managed to gatecrash what I thought was Graham Nash’s New Year’s party at what I thought was still Graham Nash‘s house there on the Bay. Turned out though, as I was about to learn, that he’d sold the place a few months before, to ER producer John Wells, and though he’d been there earlier in the evening he’d also now 'gone home', presumably also to bed. I did however run into my friend Christian, football mate and proprietor of the iconic Tahiti Nui bar in the town who was instrumental in getting me in, and we ended up consolidating the ringing in of the new millennium sipping on $500-a-bottle tequila, courtesy of the aforementioned Mr Wells,  through the wee hours there under the Hawaiian stars to the strains of Kenny Emerson's Hawaiian steel guitar. 

 

However, quite my most quirky and unlikely New Year's Eve experience has to be 2004. Early that December I'd arrived back on Kauai after one of my 'visa exiles', since being a UK citizen on a long term visitor's visa meant I had to frequently keep leaving then coming back in to avoid overstaying and falling foul of their system. This had got a lot more difficult to pull off post 9/11 though and a cunning plan had now been hatched to get me permanent. 

 

I set to thinking how I could occupy my time whilst this was in process (I wouldn’t be able to leave the US zone anymore without my new application dropping out of the system) and make a bit of money too. My answer was to play music. I was already in a band, playing mostly just once a week, but I'd got to know the scene so I decided to try and put a solo act together. My plan was to play Irish folk and other assorted other Celtic traditional ditties to the unsuspecting hoards of American tourists, many of whom claim Irish roots, and see if I couldn't make a go of that. So throughout that December I was not idle and by the end of it, New Year’s Eve, I was all set to take my new show on the road! The road in question was the few miles down the hill to Caffe Coco in Wailua.

 

(The pics here are from ten years later. Back in 2004 the Caffe was still under its original ownership and wasn't this garishly decorated, but rather a wholesomely mellow, understated bottle green. The garden too was quite different, a lot of clearing has taken place in the intervening years).

 

This was where the band I was in, The Lost Pelican Band, played every Saturday night and had done since 1997 when it opened (and would continue to until 2014 - surely some kind of record). The kind owners, Ginger and Bill, had given me my first gig, the first of what turned out to be very many over the next two-something years, and whenever I was on the island after that too. 

 

The Caffe had a very lovely outside garden, tastefully appointed with several tables nestling beneath the mature trees and hanging vines. The building itself was an old Hawaiian-style wooden house, the interior of which, as well as housing the kitchen and storage spaces, had one large room with a long table, able to accommodate large groups.

 

 

As it turned out, New Year’s Eve that year was, to say the least, damp. A big heavy low pressure system was hanging over the island and I really wondered if we were going to go ahead at all. I arrived at 5pm and we were all in agreement that it was unlikely many people would show, or at least choose to sit out at the garden tables even if they did, but I was given the option of whether to play or not. It wasn’t actually raining, and when it was it was a very fine and misty rain, but it was distinctly chilly for Hawaii and though sitting out there in the garden was not exactly a very enticing prospect, I resolved to go ahead and do it. 

 

The gear, I decided, would probably not get a soaking in this kind of rain - always a concern in a climate where sudden violent showers could visit in a heartbeat and wreak havoc on the unprepared - and there was a decent canopy of protection over the stage area anyway. Moreover though, I figured this was an ideal opportunity to give all the new songs I’d been practising and trying to get up to speed something of a run out, a kind of a free hit, without much attention or scrutiny from punters, other local musicians, or indeed anyone.

 

That evening, the word was that there was a large group reservation for the main room inside the house, but alas, as we thought, there were very few takers for the garden tables. There were a few in early on and a couple of hardcore friends came down to lend moral support, but all in all it was certainly what you might call a 'quiet night'. In contrast, inside the house it was eveident a party was in full swing. At one point, in the gloom there under the eaves at the side of the house I glimpsed to my surprise a guy in a kilt, traditional Scottish 'Hogmannay' New Year's Eve attire. This was rather unusual. I don’t think I’d ever seen anybody in a kilt in Hawaii before. 

 

It was obvious the staff had their hands full with the group and I didn't see anyone out in the garden for the whole first half of my show. When one did appear, Dan, the dashing young all-American surfer dude barista/waiter, I asked him what was going on in there. He told me the cast of the TV show 'Lost' were in, the first season of which had just debuted in the big wide world and the word was they had been on Oahu filming the follow up. (Due to this chance occurrence, Dan actually managed to secure for himself an appearance in the series). I'd vaguely heard of 'Lost' but didn't know anything much about it.

 

An hour or so in, out there 'in the garden all wet with rain', I'd played through all the mournful Irish folk songs I'd been learning and, mainly to warm myself up, I picked up my bouzouki and started playing an Irish reel, a lively traditional dance tune in 4/4 time. No sooner had I done so than three guys, all dressed in kilts no less, emerged from the house and came prancing down the centre aisle of the garden towards me. When they got to the stage they bowed low, then proceeded to dance with some abandon. Soon they were all jigging around merrily in front of me, linking arms and swinging each other around as they went. Wow, I thought, how amazing is this! 

 

I finished that tune and went straight into a couple of Irish polkas, the second of which has become famous from having been featured in 'Titanic' movie. They seemed to be having such a frollicking good time, so even though I didn't have any more dance tunes up my (short) sleeve I knew at all costs that I had to keep it going. I went back into the first polka, then followed it up with a lengthy reprise version of the second. There was no let up in their revelry but I was aware I was running out of road, so exercising the time-honoured principle of 'always leave them wanting more', I made a bit of a fanfare to let them know the ending was nigh, which they got, and I exaggeratedly strummed that definitively final chord. All three at once clapped, then ceremoniously bowed in my direction once again with a 'Thank you, my good sir!' from one, in a very passable 'Irishy' sounding accent, which I assumed was for my benefit. Then, without another word, they turned and pranced away back up the path towards the house and disappeared inside. 

 

With the sodden garden now deserted but for my two mates, who had long-sufferingly braved the elements huddled at a table in the far corner under one of the mature trees, I decided it was time for a break. I was more than a little curious about the group in the big room so I went straight up the counter and enquired of the staff. To my delight, and no little disbelief, one told me the bekitled gentlemen were none other than three of the hobbits from the 'Lord Of The Rings' movies. I suddenly recalled that I'd heard Dominic Monaghan, who played the part of Meriadoc Brandybuck in LOTR, had been in 'Lost'. The other dancers, it turned out, were none other than his hobbit mates Billy Boyd and Elijah Wood, who played Pippin and Frodo respectively and who were along for the ride with the 'Lost' crew on Kauai that New Years. 

 

Alas though, their spot of dancing had been their last hurrah for the evening, for even though it was still fairly early I was quickly told that the group had already left. Damn, what a shame, I thought, I'd have loved the chance to pop my head in and have some kind of exchange with them. But actually on reflection, the interaction was probably perfect just the way it was. It was certainly quite an auspicious if slightly bizarre way to kick off my solo venture, which saw me gig almost nighly on Kauai and latterly in the Irish pubs of Honolulu for the next two years, and it remains a delightful memory.

 

It's 30 years this week since the powerful Typhoon Mireille came barreling into Japan. It hit on September 27th 1991, packing some of the most powerful winds ever recorded here, as well as bringing major devastation to several parts of the country. It was a major experience for me personally too, one I'll never forget. Basically it kicked my ass and marked a sea change shift in my attitude to typhoons, which up until that point had been somewhat brash. 

 

Typhoon season in Japan is generally from late August through October, with the six week period from early September to mid October being the most intense. The English word 'typhoon' derives from the Japanese 'taifu', 台 (tai) 'pedestal' and 風 (fu) 'wind'. Quite why Japanese put these winds on a 'pedestal' was a bit of a mystery to me, until this one.

 

The first one I remember was in mid/late September, soon after moving out of the center of Hiroshima city up to the northern suburb of Kabe in 1987. This was my second typhoon season. I don’t remember anything from the first, though it was already nearly the end of September when I got here. 

 

I recall the gravity in the words of Kayumi, the secretary at the school my friend and housemate James and I were working at, when she warned us that a typhoon was coming and gave us the low down on how we should prepare for the onslaught. How diligently we followed her every instruction. Back in those early Japan days, merely the ring of the word ‘typhoon’ was exotic, and kindled feelings of awe and apprehension, coming as we both did from a part of the world that didn’t have them. 

 

Japanese houses typically have metal shutters on the outsides of windows and sliding doors that when typhoons come you can fasten solidly. These are not only to protect the glass against impact from heavy objects in flight but also from the bending and possible shattering effects of the winds and we were urge to close these up at the first signs of escalation. However as there was no air conditioner the house soon became almost unbearably hot and stuffy. A tentative peer at the scene outside revealed that house roofs were not flying through the air all around us, so we figured that for a while at least we could probably open one of them up to occasionally open the sliding door itself for a few seconds. It was heavenly to get some cool - or maybe just different - air into the place and the sudden inrush of wind was kinda exciting. So feeling a bit like naughty schoolboys, we continued to gaze out on the proceedings as they developed, or didn't. 

 

I remember watching fascinated as a bamboo grove was sent bending almost to ground level for the duration of a gust, about ten or fifteen trees in unison for a period of several long seconds, then released. Kabe is situated on the western bank of the main Ota River that flows down through Hiroshima city before breaking into a delta of five rivers at the central area, so this provided a natural channel for the winds to advance unimpeded. The sounds it made, now whistling, now roaring, were pretty impressive. Then, after a while, just as we assumed things were just getting going, I recall James saying, ’Hmm, is it my imagination or is this easing off?’. In little more that an hour the show seemed to be all over. So that’s it? Surely not. But it was. I couldn’t help a feeling of underwhelm, even in a weird way disappointment.

 

Kayumi soon checked in with us. Despite saying things like 'wasn’t that terrible?', and 'were you guys okay?', she did soon add in response to our undisguised underwhelm that it had turned out to be not as bad as feared, and that we'd been lucky. However, coming from Wales, and having spent pretty much of the seven years prior to arriving in Japan on the west coast with the Irish Sea for company, I was left thinking that these typhoons didn’t much compare in their ferocity and fury with the north Atlantic winter gales that would regularly blow in six months of the year. We never freaked out much, or did any preparation like suspend all regular activity and hunker down for half a day. We took a few precautions yes, but pretty much just got on with stuff as normal. So for a while, a good few years in fact, when it came to typhoons I must confess I was a bit blasé. 

 

Over the next five years typhoons came and typhoons went, and nothing happened to cause me to revise my view. Every time there was a warning and (Japanese) people around me got all intense and serious about preparation I kinda went through the motions not to worry them, but inside I wasn’t overly concerned. I remember one time confounding everyone by not cancelling my 3-day road trip, in my trusty van - futon, bicycle and guitar in back - to Kochi in Shikoku island, which has a Pacific coast. That one, the van did rock'n roll a bit as I recall, quite a lot really I guess, but hey, it was all fine, even kinda fun, just like I knew it would be. 

 

Then came 1991. 

 

In mid-September of that year I was living in the town of Saijo, Higashi Hiroshima, in the best house I’ve ever had in Japan. It was owned and built by an American church - nothing whatsoever to do with me I hasten to add - and as there was currently no pastor in place they were renting it out. It was great not just because it was large - there was a big living room, open plan with a spacious kitchen, and two decent sized bedrooms upstairs all of which didn't conform to standard Japanese room sizes - but, crucially, because it was built to western specifications. This meant the door frames were like 6ft 6 high, which at 6ft 2 meant I didn't have to be looking out not to bang my head all the time, a constant hazard in the places I’d lived till up until then. The kitchen countertops also were of a serviceable enough height that you didn’t incur backache just chopping your veggies (though I had to keep a wooden box handy for my girlfriend to stand on). It was a great house to live in and we called it 'The Castle'.

 

At the beginning of that year I’d made the decision to leave the language school I'd worked at for the four years since coming to Japan in '86 and enroll as a ‘research student‘ at Hiroshima University, actually more a front for ‘working as a musician’. To make sure the rent got paid I'd assembled a smattering of English teaching jobs and on that particular day, September 27th, a Friday, I was in Hiroshima city, about a 40 minute drive away, at one of them - three classes at a university that in two years time I would become a full-time teacher at. 

 

All week l’d heard the usual frenetic proclamations from all my Japanese friends about a fearsome typhoon that was on the way, but in my usual fashion I hadn’t really paid it much heed. On the day, everyone at the university too was full of foreboding. They even canceled the last class to allow everyone to make their way home safely and it wasn't till I was full time there that I realised what a radical move on their part that actually was. Still figuring I’d heard all it before though, I didn’t really follow their advice to do likewise. Instead I took the opportunity to stop off in the city centre for an hour to browse a guitar shop. Even so, I didn’t really idle, and when I did finally arrive back in Saijo the winds were beginning to pick up. 

 

I’d arranged with a mate, Higaki-san, to drop in at his repair shop in the town center on my way home to pick up a piece of musical gear I‘d had him do some work on. When I arrived he was visably distraught, and clearly hugely relieved to see me. 

 

“Paul! Finally you're here. Didn’t you hear there’s a typhoon?”. 

He quickly handed me my gear. 

“You’d better get home as soon as possible. I’m closing up right now”. 

 

I was a little taken aback by his how frenzied his manner was, but I had been a bit surprised to be honest how sharp the gusts of wind were I’d just caught making my way to his shop. I apologised for keeping him waiting, got right back in the van and headed the mile or so home. 

'The Castle' was on a hill, in a slightly raised area anyway just on the edge of town, and as I drove now I could really feel random gusts impacting on me. The last stretch was a couple hundred meters along a slightly raised and exposed road through ricefields, just about wide enough for two cars to squeeze by each other and with a few feet drop on either side. All of a sudden a particularly strong gust sideswiped me and, I swear, the two wheels on the passenger side lifted off the ground. As they hit back down again the van lurched to the side and I momentarily lost control. For a second I was peering directly over the edge into the ricefield to my right from my drivers seat directly over the front wheels. At that instant though, base chakra survival instinct kicked in to override logical brain function and I witnessed myself steer left to correct it. Jeez! That was a bit much, I thought.

 

My heart thumping, I had to battle to keep the van straight on that narrow road in the wake of several more erratic blasts, some fairly prolonged and insistent though fortunately none as violent. With about another 50m to go, all of a sudden I couldn't get myself home quickly enough. Soon, with a mighty sigh of relief, I turned into the narrow access road to the house. The parking place was at the rear, immediately on the other side of which was the shelter of a high wall, banking for the Sanyo Expressway about 20m down below. I got out of the car, the winds were already making some crazy sounds through that channel. It felt really quite menacing.

 

I put my key in the door totally unprepared for the madness that was to greet me. The instant it was open I was met by a crazy rush of wind coming right through the house from the front. In the morning, as often happened in the hot season, the sliding glass patio doors to the garden were left open, with just the screens across. There was nothing unusual about this (for foreigners anyway), the threat of crime was virtually nil and this kept the house cool. But now those screen doors, three of them, were doing a merry dance, furiously and violently shooting back and forth on their runners, making a loud click-clacking sound as they went and adding a kind of madcap percussive element to the wind's loud whistlings. In the living room itself anything light (like paper) and not weighted down was madly flying around, joined in flight by a ragamuffin assortment of dry leaves mostly that had found their way in.

 

I rushed over and closed the doors as quickly as I could, laughing out loud at the absurdity of the situation and secured them shut. I then realised then that the screens, being on the outside, would likely get damaged so I quickly ran round to the garden, took them out and stashed them against the far side of the house away from the main direction of the wind. 

 

With the front door main entrance at the back, the garden was in the front and looked down a gentle gradient of mostly rice fields, a fair few houses scattered about too, towards the center of town. It was from this direction that the wind seemed to mainly be coming from now, and pretty damn strongly too, certainly worth a rating of 'pretty stiff' on my Atlantic gale default scale. One way typhoon winds differ from those of gales is that they are erratic and come from many directions at once and it's this that makes them unpredictable and hazardous to venture out in. Gales on the other hand are usually prevailing winds gone mental and roaring in one way, off the sea. 

 

Outside the noise was intense. I stood out there for a few minutes taking in the scene. It wasn’t raining yet, the air was overly warm, ominously so, and the atmosphere rather eerie. It was then that I happened to glance up from the garden towards upstairs, where my bedroom was, to see a calamity in progress. There were the same sliding glass doors up there too that opened onto a veranda and in one of them was set an old style, window-fit air conditioning unit. This fits snuggly into a hole cut into a door-shaped thick plastic moulding that then sits in the frame as a replacement door as a seal against the outside, with the sliding door itself permanently open, and it's held in place by four screws at the corners. I noticed that not only were the screen doors hammering back and forth on their runners up there too, but the plastic moulding appeared to have come loose and was banging away, and this had dislodged the airconditioner. It says something about the noise the storm was already creating that I couldn't readily hear this, I only realized when I caught saw it.

 

In alarm I rushed back in. Bounding up the stairs, I could now ‘hear’ my bedroom, and it sounded like a bunch of chimpanzees were having a tequila party in there. I got to the door and turned the handle but it didn’t open, it was like it was locked. There was no lock on the door though. It was being held that firmly in place from inside by the sheer force of the wind. I put my shoulder to it, and with more pressure than I would have imagined necessary it gave way. 

 

Inside was just insane. Instead of the chimps there was a poltergeist at work. Like downstairs only double, everything that wasn’t weighty or held down was in the air and flying, and in the middle there was a veritable whirlwind of dry leaves whizzing around, those already discarded scattered everywhere and new ones arriving all the time through the open veranda doors. The sound was outrageous. Here was my bedroom, the crazy winds thundering in through the gaping void in the south facing wall and whistling madly through every crack and crevice the doors situation could conspire to create. 

 

More than a bit freaked out and not laughing much anymore, I quickly removed the screen doors, somehow still in place, and clipped the sliding door shut on the one side. Then I realized that to sort out the other side the only thing I could do was remove the whole bloody air-con and it's moulding. For that I’d need at the very least a good solid screwdriver and I was going to have to go and find one sharpish. Pretty sure I had one somewhere in the van, I shot downstairs and outside again, to be at once assaulted by the winds. The same gusts that had nearly shunted me off the road earlier had by now found their way with a vengence around the back of the house and into my parking place, and were hurtling mightily through the channel between the back of the house and that high wall. With difficulty I lifted up up the back door of the van, but they were so powered up by now that they literally rocked the van to and fro as they rushed in through the open tailgate and I had to swiftly jump in and shut it behind me, and formidable 10-second struggle to get it down again ensued. With the winds shut out, I frantically ripped open the covering of the spare tire well where my paltry tool collection was stashed and there, sure enough, there were a couple of decent screwdrivers. The wind proved too strong to allow me to open the back door from the inside to get out again, stupid to even try, and I couldn't budge it more than a few inches. So I clambered over the front bench seat and left by the driver's door. It was only a few yards but what a relief it was to make the safety of the house again. 

 

Back up in my room the poltergeist now had a few friends round. I could do nothing but leave them to it and I started doing battle with the moulding, where its three still functioning screws were holding it very tightly in place The screw heads, I realised at a glance, were on the veranda side and they were red rusty. I hadn't fitted myself, it was in there when I moved in, so God knows (literally) how long they had been in there.

 

As my experience getting in and out of the car had just shown, the winds had by gone to a whole other level and I realised once on the veranda that outside amidst this maelstrom of swirling wind dervishes was no place you'd want to be. Unscrewing this damn thing was soon proving a challenge. Where it had come loose and was banging, the plastic around the screw had broken and come away completely so at least I didn’t have to worry about that one, but two other three were rusted solid. I remember thinking “WD-40”, at the same time knowing I didn’t have any. It took as much sweat inducing adrenaline-fueled Aries heave-ho as I could muster to loosen them but finally, after much cursing and praying and everything in between, 10 or 15 mad minutes later I had managed to wrestle the whole thing free. By now it had gotten quite dark. All the while my mantra had been ’PLEASE let me get this damn thing out before the fuckin' rain starts!’. I gratefully and speedily closed the doors, clipped them shut and breathed perhaps the hugest sigh relief I've ever breathed, as a silence finally fell upon my poor desecrated bedroom.

 

At one point during my tussle with the plastic moulding,I’d suddenly caught sight in the gathering dusk of something airborne coming up the hill towards the house. As it approached it saw it was surprisingly large and black, obviously a tarp, but what a menacing, nebulous 'shape' it created, jet black against the turbulent dark greys of the darkening sky. I watched amazed as it steadily approached, then went flying about 20 meters over the roof and on its merry way. It was such a freaky vision, a real ‘Wahhhhhh!!!’ moment, not unlike a visitation from one of the Nazgul, the 'Black Riders' from Lord of the Rings. Well, perhaps it wasn't quite like that really.

 

It was certainly such a relief to finally have the whole house secured. I gazed on the room, what an unholy bloody mess it was. With the doors wide open all the time I was grappling with the aircon the leaf/paper/trash content had multiplied alarmingly and it was as if everything coming up the hill on the wind had ended up in there. Mercifully though there had been no rain. I was only too aware how much worse that would've made it. Unthinkably so. 

 

Then I remembered about shutters, that the house would have them. I hadn’t actually used them at any place I’d lived since Kabe, but if any occasion was worthy of them, I figured this was probably it. I’d never even checked them out at this house, but in the now almost diminished twilght, with the wind whipping fiercely around me I ventured back outside to have a look at what we had. 

 

There were two downstairs rooms, one a traditional Japanese-style six mat tatami room, the other the large main room with the kitchen at the far end. Though the casing they were stored in was metal, I discovered, the doors themselves were wooden. The ones for the tatami room that I went to first were a little worse for wear, but I pulled them across anyway. I knew there would be a way to fasten them properly in place, but with no flashlight at my disposal I couldn’t find it. So picking up a piece of stone from the garden I wedged it hard under one side. ‘That will have to do’, I thought. 

 

I went on to the main room ones but could only get two out of their slim metal storage cage, the last one was solidly wedged in, and exposed now they were already rattling away rather dangerously. I was torn between leaving them like that in the hope they might give at least some protection to the plate glass, but figured that even though they were heavy, without each supporting the other they might well get blown around and could prove more a hazard than a help. In the end I thought 'fuck it, better put them back', quickly retreated inside again and pulled the curtains across. With no more immediate emergencies to deal with I figured I could finally relax, at least a bit. Okay then, a nice cup of tea, I thought. 

 

No sooner had I made my pot of tea though than the power went off. Oh crap. It was a shock. I hadn’t factored in at all that this might happen. In the tatami room I had a meditation space/sanctuary set up and there were candles. I lit on the altar, it was a comforting sight. Also in that room I had a number of foam rubber mats, used not only for my meditation but also for when people stayed over. So I spread some of those out on the floor with a couple of pillows and a futon and decided to make myself comfortable in there. I’d often hang out by candlelight, I still do, so it wasn’t much of a shift really. But for the power outage though I probably wouldn't have ensconsed myself in that room, but I was surprised how comforting and womb-like it felt and it proved a good move.

 

Despite the escalating cacophony outside, there was now real peace, finally. I knew typhoons didn’t tend to last that long. Usually they're fairly fast moving and will typically pass over in two to three hours at most, in stark contrast to Welsh Atlantic gales that can roar all night long, and through the next day too in some cases. However, I did have a knawing feeling that this bugger was only just getting started. 

 

From the solace of my sanctuary I listened intently as the noise duly increased. All kinds of noise, the simultaneous mad whistling, whooshing and deep roaring of the wild winds, accompanied by tapping, thumping, rattling and clanging of all the stuff they were kicking around, and up and down. It was easy to decide that I’d be staying put there that night, especially considering my bedroom was all but out of action. I made one foray to use the loo, and was at once amazed how many drafts had suddenly sprung throughout the house, the flame of the candle I was carrying soon sputtering, lurching first one way then the other, before it went out on me. 

 

As a child might pull the bedclothes up over their head and shimmy down into a secure, magically-enhanced world within, I immediately retreated back inside my sanctuary, rising just once to shove a paper wedge in the inside runner of the sliding door to stop it from rattling. Slipping inside my futon and settling myself down for what would become the rest of the night, with water, my tea and all the munchies I could muster from the kitchen cabinets for company, I lay down and closed my eyes. 

 

The next several hours were a blur. They became a body of time that appeared neither particularly short nor interminaly long, but rather time shorn of its customary perception, as one might perceive it during a fever or otherwise altered perspective. Throughout it, it seemed I was always at least semi-conscious of this monster ‘the noise,’ as it bore down. It invaded my awareness, something unleashing a particularly intrusive clatter or thump to shock me back from my inner plane reveries. Still in semi-consciousness, my awareness returned to my physical predicament a few times. Whenever it did, there it was, the monster, still hammering away full bore. But mory overriding perception of that night was that time stood still, there was no time. Weirdly, there was almost an accompanying sense that there had been no time either when this incessant rattling thumping thundering whistling whooshing and clattering had not been going on in the turbulent world outside of the unwaveringly still sanctuary where I drifted in and out, safe inside the lighted aura that my altar candles cast.

 

Next thing I knew, I had really awoken. The beast was gone. I sat up. All was still. There was a change in the air, and it there to be felt. The heavy wooden shutters hastily pulled outside had sent the room into almost total darkness, save for the merest millimeter of a crack between them now of brilliant white light, and it was through this that morning was indeed announcing itself. And it was quiet, an almost impossible quiet. 

 

I rose and tentatively opened up the sliding door to the hallway. Sure enough, it was light, and blindingly it came streaming right in. I went out into the main room, pulled back the curtains and surveyed the scene. In the garden a couple of the small trees had broken and there were masses of leaves and assorted other stuff strewn all across the lawn. But apart from that it didn’t look all that different. The clock on the wall was ticking away, 5.15 it read. 

 

I opened the main door at the back and went outside. What a bright morning! All was still, so very still, and ever so fresh. Gone, it seemed, was the lingering summer humidity and I gratefully breathed in the freshness. I checked on the van. It was there, it hadn't got hit by anything, all was as normal. Then, as I turned to come back in I glanced to the side down our little access road, where the furiousness of the winds had almost forbidden me to even stand when I'd gone to look for the screwdriver hours earlier, and there was next door’s metal toolshed, upside down, unceremoniously dumped in the middle of the roadway. 

 

I went over and took a look, wow. The metal frame was a bit mangled where it had obviouly landed. I walked out past it to the main road, the one I‘d nearly got blown off 12 hours earlier. What a mess it was, the road itself was strewn with branches and leaves and there was all kinds of debris everywhere, those mostly small stuff. There was no one around. As far as I could see all the neighbourhood houses were okay. They all still had their roofs anyway. I stood there for a good while in the deliciousness of the impossibly fresh air, the sky above too just buzzing blueness.

 

As I turned around to walk back to the house, I glanced up towards the mountain up behind us. This was Ryuo-zan, with its viewing platform, which provided a wonderful panoramic view of the town of Saijo and surrounding area, even beyond to the Seto Inland Sea with its countless islands and Shikoku away in the distance. This was a place I loved to go up to and just sit, particularly when I was manager of the English school and contemplating issues I bet all managers of schools (and other places too) probably inevitably get to have to contemplate. I had found real solace up there in the gift of the perspective it had offered. From that vantage point the school building had looked about as big as a Lego brick, and as such could be picked up and placed in the palm of your hand, or otherwise dealt with. 

 

Up on the very top of that mountain, further up away and above the place of my contemplative bird's eye view, there stood three very fine pine trees, tall and distinctive. These could be seen against the sky from just about anywhere in the town. This morning, however, they were gone. Ryuo-zan was missing its front teeth.

 

I went back into the house to make a cup of tea. I tried to switch on the stove but the power was still off. Then I turned on the tap to wash up a few dishes, but within a minute the water tailed off. What, so no water either now? 

 

It turned out the storm had wreaked real havoc, not just with us but across large areas of Japan. The most prominent casualty in our area was Itsukushima Jinja, the famous shrine that sits so gracefully on the water at Miyajima had been smashed to pieces. There were floods, landslides and structural damage to roofs and general damage to property all over the place. As the news came in, I realised how lightly we’d got off, especially since the house was in a pretty exposed position. 

 

The electric came back on a day or so later. By far the biggest issue though was the water. We didn’t have any for six weeks. That was a real problem, more than I would’ve ever imagined. One thing people always say to do as part of typhoon preparation is to fill up the bath. I'd only ever done that once, that first time in Kabe. In the madness of the previous evening 'd completely forgotten that nugget of advice, so there was no water at all in this house right from the off. 

 

The loo was the biggest problem. It was an old style pit toilet, often found even nowadays in country areas in Japan, that has to be pumped out about every month, for which the so-called ’honey wagon’ swings by. There was a small automated flush that would wash down from the bowl and we had to do that ourselves from a plastic bottle, it seemed for the longest time. Getting the amount of water right so it didn’t cause overflow was a trick to learn. 

 

We weren’t the only ones to suffer these outages by any means, but this part of Saijo was the last in the whole area to get the water supply back. Ironic actually, as Saijo is famed for the quality and abundance of its water - it's home to some very famous Japanese Sake breweries for this very reason - and there are several large reservoirs around there. However, we found out through this that Saijo water doesn’t come to us, at least not first off, but rather goes down to the more populous coastal towns of Kure and Mihara. 

 

Bottled water wasn't really a thing back then, so what happened was the City government set up lines of giant tanks at several locations around town. The one we used, for folks who know a remarkably changed present day Saijo, was at the northern end of the road now known as the Boulevard, which just existed then as a short, abnormally wide (for the time) stretch between where Coco’s family restaurant now is on old Route 2 and about 50m shy of what’s now the entrance to Saijo station. The tanks were there, right up against a barrier fence, with nothing to speak of behind it at the time, and the old Fuji department store to the left. We had to take our own 20-liter plastic containers, ’politanku’ in Japanese, and line up for ages to fill them, with a limit of three per person. As the weeks went by and our neighbourhood still didn’t have water, more and more areas did so it was easier to fill up at friends' houses. 

 

That powerful typhoon had a number that at the time that I understood to be "19", but it now seems to have been changed to "20". It also later became known as 'Typhoon Mireille'. But whenever you want to call it, it's still infamous for the havoc and chaos it wrought, not just to Hiroshima but many other parts of the country too. 

 

It certainly changed my attitude towards typhoons. From then on I never took them lightly ever again. However, such is their nature that for every powerful one, you get a run of others that are kinda damp (literally) squibs. You can never tell how it will go though so you have to prepare the same way for them all. And take your eye of the ball at your peril.

 

From Wikipedia..

"Mireille produced record wind gusts at 26 locations, with a peak gust of 218 km/h (136 mph) in western Honshu. The winds caused record power outages across Japan that affected 7.36 million people, or about 13% of total customers. Mireille also left extensive crop damage totaling $3 billion, mostly to the apple industry, after 345,000 tons of apples fell to the ground and another 43,000 were damaged on the trees. The storm damaged over 670,000 houses, of which 1,058 were destroyed, and another 22,965 were flooded. Throughout Japan, Mireille killed 66 people and injured another 2,862 people, including ten deaths on a capsized freighter. Elsewhere, the typhoon killed two people in South Korea, and its remnants brought strong winds to Alaska."

PART TWO:

 

Physical violence has always unnerved me. I’ve never really been fan of fighting, in any shape or form and this had always been a bit hard on my dad, especially since his dad, my grandfather, had been a Welsh heavyweight boxing champion for a number of years. Try as I might though, I could never really share his love of the sport. I always shunned fighting as a kid, only reluctantly taking up the challenge of a fight with other kids on a couple of occasions when the gauntlet was thrown down to me. As there didn't really seem to be any actual reason for doing it, I was half-hearted both times and relieved when neither went beyond a brief skirmish of a few exchanged punches. I remember seeing a particularly brutal fight when I was about 10 that had really freaked me out, when two local village kids really went at it. One soon got the upper hand and started stamping on the other kid’s head and kicking him over and over in the back, yet no one in the crowd of kids surrounding them went in to break it up. All they did was keep on whooping and yelling and this went on until the kid delivering the kicking got fed up and gave up of his own accord.

 

A lot of stuff goes on unseen on a football pitch - digs in the ribs, stepping on toes, verbal intimidation, spitting, grabbing balls, and sometimes worse. This is all part of the game, though it was something I hadn’t really encountered much, yet. The 'dark arts', such as they are, weren't a part of things at U-16 level, but now here we were in a different world competing in Men's League and this new season was to be quite an eye-opener and a steep learning curve for me. Even though most of our opponents, aware they were playing against 'kids', made allowances for this to an exent, many did resort to bullying when things started going awry for them, since with our youthful exhuberance and the fact we had been hand-picked for our ability we often played them off the park and made them look stupid. This was only compounded when, around November time, we went to the top of the league. At first I didn't really want to know about this aspect of the game, but Freddie, as coach, kept trying to impress on me in his gentle way that I had to learn to be more assertive. Things could get pretty feisty at times though and I found myself thinking about it more and more. 

 

I was over six feet tall, lithe and agile and I'd already gained a bit of a reputation for being able to claim the ball in the air. This and my shot stopping were two of the main strengths of my game and I would come out and pluck out out of the air about anything my side of the penalty spot if the trajectory allowed. Cries of 'away from the keeper!' from opposition coaches and players alike to corner and free kick takers would often ring out. So to try and stop me doing this I was increasingly finding myself with company, particularly on corners, where they couldn't be offside from the kick. Heeding well one of Ron Healey's gems of wisdom that had stuck with me, 'you can always go forward but it's bloody hard to go back', I would position myself about halfway between my far post and the center of the goal, a position that became my springboard to attack the high ball and make it mine.

 

One midwinter's day, there we were defending a corner in the opening 15 minutes, their first of the game. Their big brute of a centre forward duly came and stood right in front of me on my goal line, landing his studs across my ankle to announce his arrival, then continuing to bob around and jostle me as much as him remaining fairly inconspicuous would allow. With all eyes in the direction of the kicker, he suddenly brought his arm back and delivered a painful elbow to my guts. In spite of him, my focus was on how many players were in the box and who they might be aiming for and I didn't see it coming at all. Though shocked and a little winded, I saw this as a challenge to take up and decided to retaliate. Barging him in the back, I stepped alongside him and as he turned I brought my own elbow back into his midrift, though in a hopeless, utterly unconvincing way with about as much charge as someone delivering a newspaper. In a collosal overreaction, the guy let go a half wail and stumbed a pace to the side in a feigned attempt to stay on his feet, a reaction I was totally unprepared for. Unluckily for me the referee had spotted it. Pointing his finger in my direction he blew his whistle, purposefully raising his hand to stop the corner being taken, and he marched right over and unceremoniously produced a red card.

 

It was one of only three occasions I ever got one of these. The second I did deserve, for a rugby tackle on a player who’d rounded me on an agricultural pitch in an agricultural cup tie in some agricultural mid Wales village nearly 10 years later. The third was much more colourful however, and amusing too, as well as thoroughly merited, and is perhaps worth a brief departure from this narrative to tell the tale of. 

 

It was the mid 90s, and now living in Japan I was playing in what was mostly a team of non-Japanese in a 'top of the table' Hiroshima City League game against Minami High Sschool OB. They were the premier football high school in the city and we won the league or were thereabouts every year so there was always needle between us, which usually ensured it one of the more interesting games on the calendar. That day the score was tied at 1-1 and things were already getting a bit heated when the officious amateur (and I use the term as disparagingly as possible) short-arse of a referee penalised me for picking up a backpass that had taken a massive and obvious deflection off an opposing player, enough that there'd been almost no appeal from their players for the free kick. For me this was one poor decision too many he'd made against us that day, mostly for our 'typical foreigner over-aggression', including a dodgy penalty for a hard but fair tackle for their goal, and it pushed me over the edge. I angrily bellowed my objections in his direction and though he would never have understood my choice words yet outraged that I would dare raise my voice and talk back to him, he instantly sprinted the 25 yards between us and stared me down from the edge of the box. I expected a warning or something but he said nothing, he just stared at me gloweringly. At this the red mist began to rise and I met the challenge head on. The ball was still in my hands and I proceeded to welly it as far as could downfield. This was enough for him to produce the card, which he promptly removed from his pocket and pompously waved in my direction, then turned his back as if done with the situation. With Welsh dragonfire now raging forth from every orifice, I rushed towards him. He turned, and to his credit, he bravely stood his ground, I was after all considerably bigger than him, though I can still recall his now frightened eyes and quivering lip. After delivering an even more inspired verbal tirade and teammates approached to attempt to interveve I ripped off my shirt, heavily laden with mud and gravelly sand, and hurled it at him full force.

 

During the latter part of the first half of that 1975/76 season, I found myself drafted more and more, usually at short notice, out of the youth team and the rigours of the Barry and District League into the Welsh League side. By New Year I was pretty much a fixture, and for the next season and a half I held the shirt. 

 

It soon became obvious to me to that the Welsh league players didn’t know anything about my Cardiff City experience. I’d assumed they would, and the fact they didn’t, not even the manager Alan Williams (no relation), frankly surprised me. It dawned on me one day when he was addressing words to me in the group in one half-time teamtalk quite soon after I made my debut, telling me how I wasn't 'playing parks football anymore' and that I had to ‘listen to everyone' around me. That was fair enough, of course, they had way more experience than me, but he kept making reference to the fact I had none, that I had 'just come up from the under-16s' and had to 'learn quick'. As this persisted I'd feel myself mumbling under my breath 'I’ve had six weeks of personal coaching with Ron Healey at Cardiff mate, thank you very much, and played twice in a virtual City first XI!'. 

 

A part of me wanted to tell at least him this, perhaps to justify my being there and gain a bit more respect in his and maybe all their eyes, and though I thought about it I never did. A big part of this was because I couldn't be sure how they would then view me for having ‘turned down Cardiff City’. From the perspective of many of them, working class lads with no truck with further education and stuck in crap dead end jobs who would kill for a crack at professional football, it would probably just serve to make me look like a real twat. 

 

This realisation bit even harder following a chance meeting in the Butts car park just before Christmas with Peter O'Shea, the secretary of the Under 16s league. The Barry and District Men's League that the youth team were in played on the Butts fields in the afternoon and I ran into him as I was leaving in the early evening dusk. I hadn't seen him since he'd helped liase with the professional clubs the previous Spring. He walked past me at first then did a double take when he saw it was me.

"What the bloody hell you doing here?" he asked quite brusquely, obviously shocked. 

I told him I was playing in the newly-formed Barry Town youth team. He was unimpressed. I followed up that I'd also been playing Welsh League, no reaction.

"What happened down The City (Cardiff) then?", he asked sharply. 

"We heard you'd gone there. It didn't work out?"

 

I briefly, and truthfully, told him the story, how I'd done the pre season, that they'd then offered me the apprenticeship and how I'd turned it down to stay in school, that I was in sixth form doing my A-levels (examinations for university entrance). He looked vexed, and turned his head away to the side. There was a silence, an uncomfortable one. He scrunched up his face into a grimace then scratched his cheek before turning back to me. What he came back with surprised me.

"Look, I can probably get you into Aston Villa if you want"

 

I was taken aback. I didn't know what to say, except to reiterate that I was staying in school and focusing on university. I was aware he'd be at a loss to understand the decision so I probably didn't sound very convincing. In response he ran his hands through his hair, screwed up his face and looked to the side again, as if calculating what to say next. At length all he came out with was "Well, it's your life, son". 

 

He genuinely wished me luck and turned to go, but after a couple of paces he stopped, rather like Columbo, and turned around. 

"Oh yes, we had an enquiry from New York Cosmos too last Summer. After you'd gone to The City it was, so we didn't bother telling you". 

At that, he went on his way. 

 

I stood there a bit non-plussed for a minute. It was all a lot to take in. His obvious bewilderment and that he was so obviously disappointed with me had left its mark. Here was another lifelong football man reacting surprisingly strongly to what had happened, and though his response was nowhere near the same gravity as Ken Whitfield's, it was the same energy and it brought the memory of that night a few months earlier deep under the grandstand at Ninian Park crashing right back in - the naked light of the office, the dark empty echoey corridors waiting for me outside. It left me feeling like I'd had the wind kicked out of me again. As I walked up to the bus stop in the gathering gloom, I couldn't help but reflect on that news he'd hit me with. Jesus, New York Cosmos. Of the fledgling NASL (North American Soccer League), who had enticed into their ranks the likes of Pele and Beckenbauer. Holy. Fucking. Shit.

 

I also got a couple of games in the Southern League team that second season too, both home games against Banbury and Dunstable, neither of which I recall much about now except that they both ended in score draws, 1-1 and 2-2 respectively. Though a much sharper and altogether superior standard of football, it was actually easier to play in. There was a lot less raw violence than in Welsh League, especially the threat of it, and the pace of the game was altogether much quicker. As a keeper that didn't really directly affect me much, but that wasn't true for the other youth team player who frequently got bumped up to the senior teams with me, Phil Powney, a diminutive but quick, sharp striker. After half an hour of his first taste of Southern League football, he was down on his haunches at the corner flag throwing up, solely due to the pace. 

 

Welsh League was by contrast dour and very physical, and certainly warped the definition of football as 'the beautiful game’. As an economically depressed post-industrial region, South Wales is a tough place, and violence, both actual and psychic, was an integral part not only out on the field with our opponents but of the dynamic within our own group of players too. You really did have to give as good as you got, and though I learned to step up to this plate in my own way, it always remained an aspect I could never really warm to or develop any degree of conviction for. As if the game wasn't hard enough, I wasn't prepared what I saw as an uncomfortably aggressive edge within the group with some of my teammates. As a callow, naturally sensitive 16/17 year old suddenly thrust into the breach with these battle-hardened, semi-pro mature men, it really quite unnerved me at first and I didn’t deal with it very well. Full throttle vitriolic verbal dressing room exchanges hovering on the edge of actual violence were par for the course with these guys, particularly if we were losing at half time or had lost, and I witnessed several. Rather than gee me up and sharpen my focus, as was the alledged intention, much of what went on only served to put me more on edge, making me terrified of making a mistake and letting everyone down and then, God forbid, becoming the focus of one. 

 

One character in particular freaked me out. An overly-aggressive, wiry midfielder who wore the No 4 shirt, probably the wrong side of 30 and with a bagful of dirty tricks, he was was constantly mouthing off and was by anybody’s standards simply just a horrible bastard. I can't recall his name now but I can still all too readily see his face, its slightly hideous, pointy features, eyes often bulging wildly as he mad-ranted in his abrasive, gutteral Barry accent, nasty stale tobacco breath mere inches from my face. I don’t recall ever genuinely incurring his wrath, but even so it seemed there was always something he felt the need to pull me up on. He’d always seem to be on the look out for me in the half time break so I’d be on the look out for him. I wished I had the courage to tell him straight to fuck right off, with the physical will to back it up if necessary, but my reaction was invariably to appease the animal and try and steer our exchanges clear of confrontation. In all likelihood he was liked by no one, just tolerated, but I was likely too fresh-faced and wet behind the ears to see this at the time.

 

One thing I did, but almost instantly regretted, was to appoint him as my ‘wall-meister’. This was a term I’d picked up from Ron Healey, one I’ve actually never subsequently heard. He told me as a goalkeeper you need to have one - a designated outfield player who’s not a defender whose role it is whenever there is a free kick in a dangerous position to right away help you line up the wall. He would turn to you, listen to your instructions and quickly pull players into position accordingly. I’m not quite sure how this guy ended up becoming that, maybe I wanted to placate him, even ingratiate myself with him, but that’s what happened. Even though it's always the keeper's shout, as you're the one with the view and can see what needs covering, he was so often obnoxious and aggressive with me in those situations and even critical of my calls. It always served to add an unnecessary and uncomfortable complication to free kick preparation, already a tense situation anyway.

 

As if to balance all this though, there was an older guy, a true veteran and gentleman with it, already probably into his 40s whose name I can't recall either but who was the polar opposite. He quickly recognised my general unease when I stepped up to the team and was always there with the metaphorical fatherly 'arm around my shoulder' when I needed it, which was quite often in the first couple months. A silent, strongman-type, hard as nails when it came down to it but with kind eyes and a compassionate gaze, and it was clear he had everyone's respect. He played in the centre of defence, where he was a true rock, a cool head and with bags of experience. He seemed to win everything in the air, and while understandably not the quickest anymore, whenever he put his foot through the ball it would sail high and far away downfield out of the danger area, bringing relief and respite to our whole backline. His presence always made me feel more secure, both on and off the field, but unfortunately he wasn't a week-in week-out regular and was absent more often than not. I was always happy to see him there though when I went into the dressing room on match day.

 

It’s fair to say there wasn’t a lot of money around in the Welsh League in those days, a far cry from twenty or so years later when Barry went full professional under former Wimbledon star John Fashinu and competed in European competition. There were no professional clubs yet though, facilities were pretty basic to say the least, and we got to play on some outlandish grounds. Pontlottyn's mountaintop eyrie springs to mind, where clearing the sheep (and their shit) off the field was a pre-match ritual and if the ball went too far off the edge of the pitch on the one side it would run about half a mile down the valley. There was another one, I can’t recall where now, where the ground sloped away so steeply in one corner that you could just see the kicker’s head and shoulders and you had to listen for the sound of boot on leather to know it had been launched. Margam Athletic's ground, right on the sea in the shadow of the huge and belching Port Talbot steelworks, was always debiltatingly windy. Generally speaking, the games were bitter, hard-fought battles played on invariably very poor pitches, even by the standards of the day, surfaces that made our own Jenner Park home and even Merthyr’s Penydarren Park look like little Wembleys. 

 

Though it was the steepest of learning curves on many levels, I did get used to it after a while. I never really took to the constant tension though and I can't say I enjoyed it much overall, but I did almost surriptiously acquire the hardened edge and keen battle hardiness that Freddie Halls had so implored me to develop over that couple of years. I didn’t really realise this though until I began playing again in my 20s, and particularly my 30s in Japan. I’ve heard professional soldiers talk about how in certain situations their training ‘kicks in’, and whereas I can’t ever claim to know what that really means, I found that this experience in Welsh League had elevated my focus to a much more competitive pitch that would similarly ‘kick in’. This would often result in me involuntarily playing with a far fiercer intensity and focus at times than my teammates, to most of whom it remained largely ‘just a game’.

 

By far the stand out event of that couple of years at Barry Town came late in the second season. In March 1977 there was a Welsh Cup quarter final against Newport County. I got to play against them again, this time in a real competitve game, but it turned out not to be a happy occasion since I made a glaring error that led to us losing. Not only that, it led to me receiving media criticism, for the first and only time in my life. Nevertheless it was a big thrill to play in this one, an unforgettable if double-edged experience. 

 

Given its magnitude, I was surprised at first to be given the nod. Then at the midweek training it emerged that it was to be the Welsh League team who were going to play, the reason being the Southern League team already had a game that day that they were unable to get out of, as that league was under the jurisdiction of the English FA and this was the Welsh Cup. As it turned out though, we were bolstered by three or four first team players and the team that took the field that day was by far the strongest Welsh League team line up I played in, and included in it too was my favourite centre half.

 

There was quite a buzz around town that week. I even got a special mention in school assembly on the Friday morning as I was playing in it. Also, most excitingly, now in the Newport ranks were three famous ex-Cardiff players including Brian Clark, the scorer of the famous goal that had beaten Real Madrid and now in the twilight of his career, the others being long serving Scottish centre back and former captain Don Murray and tricky Welsh international midfielder and winger Tony Villars, all of whom were there in '75. Their presence helped ensure there was a decent crowd at Jenner Park for the game, as big as I'd ever seen there and by far the biggest I'd ever played in front of. 

 

I couldn’t quite believe it at kickoff - there I was lined up against Brian Clark, in a real game. I soon made a damn good save from him too, in the first 5 minutes, one that is etched in my memory and it really helped settle my considerable nerves. Their wide man went past our right back and delivered a well-struck low cross. Clarkie ghosted in just ahead of our first defender and from the edge of the six yard box flicked it with the outside his right foot towards the near post. There was a hint of the ‘time slowing down’ phenomenon about it for me to enable me to get down to it and I did, quickly getting a good hand on it and turning it round the post. Generally crowds at Welsh League games were sparse, the proverbial 'man and his dog' pretty much, but on this day we had a real crowd in the early Spring sunshine and my save was greeted with a roar, the first time I'd ever heard one, followed by a round of applause. I felt the wave of energy go through me and it was an amazing feeling. As the resulting corner was about to be taken he brushed past me and whispered in my ear 'Brilliant, my son'. What a true gent he was. 

 

But then, just before half time, came disaster. We were already losing 1-0 to a Rod Jones goal but still very much in the game when I misjudged a shot from the edge of the box and somehow let it go in over my head. It wasn’t like it was even that well hit. I saw it long enough to go through a thinking process - rarely a good thing - that went something like ‘okay, catch this.. no, it's rising, better tip it over.. no no, I can hold onto it, no..’ only for it to somehow end up just brushing my fingertips. Next thing I heard was the sound of it hitting the net behind me. There was a sudden deathly hush around the ground and the sky fell. It was the turning point in the game. They ended up beating us 3-1 and I got panned for the error in the local newspaper. 

 

One thing about my game, at that time in my life anyway, was that I rarely if ever made errors, so it made this one all the more galling and hard to get over. Apart from that I'd played really quite well. To add to that early save from Clarkie, late in the second half I made another one, though it was already all done and dusted at 1-3 by then. This one too was a bit outrageous and one I had no right to make. I'd always call them 'A' saves, to myself that was, I rarely if ever shared that with anyone, but truth was there was rarely a game when I didn't make at least one these. I must also have come for and collected about 10 corners that day, some at the very peak of my height. Even so, throughout the rest of the game I couldn't shake the error and I never recovered. There is always talk of how you must 'put it behind you and get on with it', but the truth was I didn't really know how to do that. I just wanted the earth to open and swallow me up. I was thoroughly down and depressed after the final whistle and though I managed to hold my tears back until I got home, I didn’t have a very good weekend. Or following week either. When the report of the game appeared in the local paper the following Friday, my despondency turned to devastation.

 

This bitter experience though really set me thinking. It dawned on me that I hadn't been enjoying my football very much, not since the whole Cardiff City experience really. It had generally ceased being fun, and after a deep chat with my Dad I realised I actually wasn't helpless, that I did actually have the power to act and do something about it. Certainly the whole experience playing Welsh League had had a lot to do with it. I’d wake up on a Saturday morning not with joy to put a skip in my step that I had a game that day like I used to, but rather with a heavy churning feeling in the pit of my stomach. I now knew enough was enough, I didn't want to do it anymore. Going away to university helped as a get out and at the end of that summer I left South Wales. I spent most of the next year in Southampton then ended up changing universities to Aberystwyth in Mid Wales. I didn't play again in any serious way for five years. 

 

Though it hasn’t always been this way, looking back on all of this now some 45 years on I do so with genuine fondness. I got to rub shoulders with my boyhood heroes, to hang out with them for a month no less, and to experience and be part of the camaraderie of a squad of professional footballers and see what it's really like behind the scenes. And I can say I wore that Cardiff City shirt and never conceded a single goal in it!! 

 

There's a lot of 'what if..' in life, if you look for it, and God knows I have certainly wandered there with all this from time to time over the years. But to reproach myself for being unable to make a mature decision at age 16 is quite unfair, and absolutely futile. With the offer of the apprenticeship at Cardiff City and a career in professional football on the table, what young Paul needed at that time was an arm around his shoulder, someone to listen to and to sketch out the scenario for him in all its aspects the greatest detail possible and help him grasp the reality of the situation. What he actually got was a tug-o-war, two considerable forces pulling in opposite directions, each convinced they knew what was best for him. Had he fully realised in September 1976 that rejecting the apprenticeship and going back to school, despite accepting to the offer to attend youth team training, amounted to abandoning the dream, I still wonder how he would have felt, and what he would've done.

 

The simple fact of the matter, though I probably didn't realise it enough at the time, was that I was good. Like ridiculously good. I could make magic happen, perhaps not exactly at will but I could connect into it easily enough and the power in that moment when it manifested was immense, and I knew it as the most wonderful yet most natural feeling in the world.

 

My fantasy of 'what would have happened' for several years ran like this: I would play for the Cardiff City Youth team, make a name for myself and then break through into the first team in my early 20s. I'd grow into that and soon find myself performing that same magic for Cardiff on a weekly basis as I had with Sea View Labour in the Under 16s. Then I'd get picked up by.. Liverpool. Yes, Liverpool, and it was only ever them. Not that I'm a huge fan really, though I've always had a soft spot for them since they'd signed my erstwhile hero, striker John Toshack, from Cardiff in 1970 and broke my 11 year old heart. It's true they were the most successful and exciting team of that era and they displyed a unique passion, but all that's actually secondary. I can't explain it anymore than just to say I just had a strong, strong vision of myself as Liverpool goalkeeper, almost like I was somehow remembering something. And from there... where I wonder? 

Sounds fantastic, crazy, far-fetched, yeah I know. But that's the scenario I envisaged, such was the way the outrageous power inside the whole experience impacted my imagination. 

 

Here I'll quote song lyrics from Mike Scott of the Waterboys, one of my favourite musicians, who in later years has actually become a mate. It sums up completely the space I came to know through the 'Tao of Goalkeeping'.

"I've got brilliant intentions, unthinkable plans, I've got sparks and electric shocks just exploding from my hands

I'm preparing to fly, under my own steam, I'm preparing to fly, into a dream!"

My closest inner sense is still that with the right guidance I probably could’ve made it, perhaps not quite in line with the fantasy described above, but looking back at it all now I'm pretty sure I could have, in some capacity. Who knows though. Today I'm just more and more grateful for the wonderful experience it was in the immense journey of what’s happened along in my life. 

 

*As a side note from that 1977 Newport game, in later years a couple of teammates told me separately that John Aldridge played that day. Now, it's true that he joined Newport as a young player and had several successful seasons there before going on to fame in the mid 80s and 90s with Liverpool and the Republic of Ireland national team, who he represented at two World Cups. However, though I just accepted this as fact before the internet age, now it appears he didn’t sign for Newport until 1979. It’s conceivable he could’ve been on trial before that, I don’t know. He would’ve been the same age as me, 18 at that time. I have no recollection of him or anyone that looked like him from the game that day, but then when you're playing you generally just tend to see shirts, not faces, unless the likes of Brian Clark and Don Murray are lined up against you that is.

 

 

POSTSCRIPT - THE ‘REAL’ PART 2

Since I first posted this, Ron Healey has sadly died. Last year it was reported in the press that he got into difficulties during a cycle ride and died soon afterwards from a heart attack. He was just 65. 

 

Also, I was asked in a private message on social media this week where football went for me after this. 

So, as I’m postscripting, here goes.

 

During those next few years, music, which had by now become a rival passion in my life, gained the upper hand. After a complete two-year break I did go back to playing football, but in a very different arena. Crucially, just as I had before the whole Cardiff City thing burst into my life, it was now simply for the love of it, without inviting any pressure on myself whatsoever.

 

To this end, now in college in the mid-Wales coastal town of Aberystwyth, in 1979 I took to playing very much for kicks in the University’s Intermural Sunday kickabout league, for whoever would give me a game. My story had, it seemed, somehow gone ahead of me and with my long hair and bushy beard and being frequently seen round the many pubs, I think I was regarded as some kind of George Best character. Whatever, I soon ended up a regular between the sticks for none other than the Welsh National College Of Librarianship. They were, as they sound, not the strongest team in the world, though, curiously, they did have in their ranks a then-current Mauritius international player called Quincy, who while playing well within himself scored some seriously spectacular goals. The rest of them were Sunday driver no hopers, but here I found myself once more back on park pitches with a smile on my face, throwing myself around in the mud on lazy Sunday afternoons stopping 3-goal defeats from turning into 10. And loving every minute of it.

 

My antics didn’t go unnoticed however, and it wasn’t long before I was courted by the University representative teams. One boozy Saturday night in a pub, I was approached and reluctantly agreed to turn out the following afternoon for the University second team who were in a bit of a spot. One thing led to another and by the next season, my third and final year, I was kind of a regular for them. The fact it was more or less a level where I could still follow through with my favoured modus operandi of carefree involvement meant I didn’t fight it though and actually, if truth be told, I found it really quite enjoyable.

 

One particularly pleasant Sunday afternoon late in the year we were away 18 miles up the road at Machynlleth. We drew a fairly uneventful game 1-1 as I recall, but having imbibed a generous quantity of ‘tea’ imbued with a certain local 'fungal delicacy’ the previous evening and still feeling its effects, I spent much of the game dreamily gazing at the magical Tolkien's Shire-esque landscape all around. There's a deep peace in those hills, with an almost mystical, silent hum, and in my semi-altered state I found it utterly entrancing. It was quite simply the most delightful, idyllic place I’d ever had the pleasure of playing the beautiful game.

 

Two years later, after my crazy post-university ‘On The Road’ Kerouac-style year traveling in the States, I was back in the Mid-Wales area and happy to be there. A lot of things had shifted during that time and I had resolved upon my return to resist pressure, mainly from my mum, to 'buckle down' and get 'a real job'. Rather, I committed instead to giving myself some real breathing space and to set about creating a lifestyle for myself wholly on my own terms, for the first time in my life. 

 

A big part of why I’d even followed through with full time education and gone to college in the first place had been rooted in subliminal pressure from my parents. Though intelligent people, social circumstances in their early lives had meant they'd never had the opportunity. They really wanted it for me and that was the road that had been laid out, pretty much from the time I was first in secondary school and started excelling in class. It was simply the way to go and nothing else was on the table, as was demonstrated by what had happened over the football, I had bought into it, for sure, without ever making a conscious choice about whether I really wanted it or not. By the time I was staring down the barrel of going to university, hungry for new experiences and eager to live somewhere other than South Wales, I was still pretty cheerfully going along with it, despite what had happened with Cardiff City. However, while the lifestyle in its many aspects was truly wonderful and I was more than happy to throw myself headlong into that, I was anything but enthralled about the prospect of the studying part and that feeling quickly grew more intense.

 

So whereas I had a really good time, I could never deny that, and I learned to play guitar, which was probably my single greatest focus in those heady years, there was always an uncomfortable undercurrent knawing away at me and no little guilt that somehow I was there under false pretences. By design I was never the most diligent student, something of an understatement that, and my almost total lack of attention to matters of completing even the basics meant I very nearly didn't graduate. I paid very little attention to most of my alloted courses, instead using to the time and opportunities there to devise my own. I read deeply whatever grabbed me at the time, mostly philosophy and metaphysics, spitituality, consciousness expansion and fantasy-based fiction. Now I was resolved to give myself a period where there was no compromise, where everything I decided to put my energy into was truly mine, fed my spirit and made me shine. I wasn't afraid of a spartan, even poverty-level lifestyle, and to this end I lived in a succession of rustic old farmhouses and cottages with few mod cons and roaring open wood fires for heating. Where it would lead I didn' know, but I had a plan and in late 1982 I was following through on it.

 

One thing I had resolved to do when I got back even while still in the States was pick up the footy. I wanted to play seriously again. Another development, though the catalyst for this came after I got back, was to take up distance running. It’s not that I consciously intended to embrace the ‘distance’ part, at least not at first. It started off as a way to get myself back in shape for the football, since the last five years had largely been dominated by music, and the sex, drugs'n rock'n’ roll thing (with a fair bit of real ale thrown in there too), all of which had taken its toll a bit. 

 

In no time I was loving the thrill and discipline of the running. I was still just 23 and my body responded incredibly. Before I knew what was happening I was delighting in doing 15 miles every time I went out. This was invariably at night when most people were already in bed, especially when the skies were clear and the myriad stars filled the heavens, and the magic of the mid Wales hills was truly afoot. This, combined with a new found regime of regular daily yoga and meditation, which I fully embraced from this time in place of my previous more dissolute habits, stood me in very good stead to quickly pick up the football again. I was fitter, way fitter, both physically and emotionally, and more focused than I’d ever been in my life.

 

One night out running under those stars I decided it was time. First off, I needed to find a team. On the strength of the experience in Machynlleth that day I had a flash that it was there I wanted to play, so, out of the blue, for them anyway, a speculative letter addressed to the secretary at Machynlleth Football Club soon dropped through their door. I was careful to avoid mention of anything of my past, just offering my services in the present. I soon received a reply from team captain and player-manager Dennis Jones, inviting me to come to training.

 

With some 2000 inhabitants, among them Led Zep frontman Robert Plant, the delightful little town of Machynlleth nestles in the green Mid Wales hills on the southern edge of the Snowdonia National Park. It was, albeit briefly, an old capital of Wales, when the Welsh chieftain Owain Glyndwr united all the princedoms and he held his National Parliament there for its 10 year duration in the early 15th century - the only time Wales has escaped the clutches of English rule since we lost our independence with the defeat of the Llewelyn The Last in the 12th century. The old Parliament House is still there in the main street.

 

My new team mates turned out to be a great bunch of lads and there followed a quite wonderful couple of football years playing between the sticks for 'Mach'. The local inhabitants, perhaps a bit less used to odd specimens from the student population than my previous domicile of Aberystwyth just down the road, had little hesitation it seemed in accepting me and taking me in as one of their own.

 

It took a few months to get into the team. Obviously they already had a goalkeeper, and Brendan, the fella occupying the shirt at the time, couldn’t have been best pleased to see me show up. I trained hard though, never bemoaning my lack of opportunity, and it wasn’t too long before I got my chance - an away game in early December at Pontrhydyfendigaid, known as ‘Bont’ for short - and I grabbed it with both hands. We ran out 1-4 winners that day and I played a considerable part in that. At once Brendan graciously moved over and I found myself installed.

 

Without doubt the greatest memory from my time playing there came in November 1983, Guy Fawkes Day no less, when we were drawn away to soon-to-be Football League Division 4 side Kidderminster Harriers in the Welsh Cup. It was a hopeless mismatch really and we were soundly beaten, but it definitely fitted my brief - I made countless saves and stopped the 9-1 pasting we got from turning into 19, and then some! I was actually given a standing ovation as we left the field that day by the surprisingly decent crowd, despite their initial jeering of me, ostensibly for my hippie-like appearance (which was a fair cop). This was increasingly replaced by warm applause however as their goals mounted up to secure them the win and I produced save after save to prevent the proverbial cricket score. My heroics earned me the accolade of being the only one of our players to get a mention in their local newspaper, I still have the cutting, but that day was much more of a cathartic moment for me, much more so than I ever let on to anybody at the time, maybe even to myself.

 

 

Kidderminster Harriers v Machynlleth matchday program, November 1983

 

While I was at Machynlleth we progressed as a club from the local district league to the Central Wales League, the Mid Wales equivalent of the Welsh League in the south that I’d come to detest so much while playing for Barry Town in my teens. This time though it was different. I was older, stronger, and much more my own person. It's fair to say too though that in largely pastoral mid Wales the level of physical and psychic aggression that typically accompanies football was nowhere near as intense as in industrial, fast becoming post-industrial, South Wales. Once the Central Wales games began in the 1984/85 season, I thoroughly enjoyed the step up in level and welcomed the challenge of pitting myself against the best teams in the area.

All in all I had a very fulfilling few seasons playing with the Mach lads. I'm in touch with some of them to this day and I have a great fondness for the town. I'm very grateful for it all. The whole experience went a long way to enabling me to enjoy playing football again.

 

 

Machynlleth FC before a Central Wales League game at Aberystwyth Town, 1984.

 

In September 1986 I left Wales for Japan, where I continued playing football and it was all very interesting, different to anything I’d experienced thus far for sure. Without doubt the greatest adjustment was swapping the soft green/muddy Welsh pitches for hard compacted gravel, and wearing American football padding to try and protect myself on them. Even so, despite all my best precautions they would still manage to take the skin off my elbows and knees and in particular my hips with alarming regularity and I would inevitably wake up the next morning stuck to the bedsheets. It's my contention that the profusion of these gravel surfaces at school grounds all over the country and the paucity of real grass fields is a major reason why Japan, despite having excelled in producing top outfield players in recent years, has never yet produced a decent goalkeeper.

 

Over a decade later there followed a seven-year spell living in Hawaii. Here, given the almost constant rainfall, the pitches were lush, mostly anyway, and it was a mighty relief to play on green grass again. And as it had done in Japan, football was once more instrumental in opening up a route for me into the local community and I loved my years playing under the Hawaiian sun, particularly the inter-island tournaments. 

 

Maybe there's another chapter or two here, there are certainly more tales to be told. 

 

Thanks for reading.