Weeknotes by Mo Morgan

• Apart from in college and an ill-judgement during a lockdown, I’ve never bothered trying to be clean-shaven. Another lockdown ill-judgement was to try and grow a ‘proper’ beard, but the two sides of my face are yet to reach an agreement about whether it should be curly or dead straight. Attempt abandoned. These days, the grey hairs are more resistant to trimming than the others. My cat has white whiskers from her brown cheeks: I wonder if I would end up the same.
• Another episode of The Grand Tour turned up on Amazon Prime, which I half-watched. It’s essentially based on the road-trip segment of the Top Gear format. But somehow its lost all its production values. The good camera work, the good edits, the good grading, all discarded. It looks like YouTubers made it, which makes me wonder why it’s still worth showing.
• Lovely London lunch with a friend I’d not seen since the beforetimes. Covid prevented get-togethers for a while, but asynchronous communications continued. So it kind-of doesn’t feel like so much time has passed. I’m losing track of who I’m losing track of.

Van notes

[In which Mo builds a campervan]

• Post MOT, work continues. The big learning from this project, now in its third year, is how seemingly minor things cause massive delays. Getting stuff painted before assembly can in some cases result in weeks of waiting. If it were a full-time project and nothing else were happening, it’d be fine. But fitting painting coats around real life, while the other jobs stack up behind, can start to feel very static. Then occasionally there’s a huge leap forwards in the space of four hours.
• Next, I have to figure out how to build the lightest possible kitchen.

• From Osaka, flew to Ho Chi Minh City. The first thing that’s striking is the traffic: there are road signals and markings, but herds of cars submerged in swarms of mopeds pay little attention. The next striking thing is the humidity, and the third is the wealth inequality. I felt conspicuous.
• My sense is that Vietnam gets nicer the further from the cities you travel. Maybe I should have had a go at that 20 years ago. Still, it’s interesting to spend a day in a different city. Walked around some of the most famous sights. At the historic post office, three recent graduates stopped me for a conversation to practice their English. Sweet kids. I said some things that were on my mind about privilege.
• Then took to the observation floor of the incongruous Bitexco Financial tower as the sun went down. Strange city, this. Both highly functional and deeply broken. I feel like almost everyone is being held down, somehow.
• I fared better on the 12-hour flight back to Heathrow than I had on the way out via Hong Kong. I find the jetlag easier westward; I might even have slept a bit on the plane. When you’ve spent time somewhere like Japan, the amateurishness of Heathrow is stark; it took an age to disembark. Then a series of train-rides home; all seeming a bit half-arsed after the Shinkansen.
• Two weeks is the amount of time I need to break from work. It takes ten days for my brain to stop trying to solve work problems, and the full fortnight for me to forget whatever it is I do. So I returned to my desk feeling fresher than I can remember.
• Had the great pleasure of lecturing again for the Accelerate programme at the Judge Business School. I do a hot 90 on DIY brand-building for the benefit of startups and young ventures. I’d rejigged the deck slightly since the last time through, to take out the bits that always seem to drag. I might have cut too deep: it’s now a little ranty. But hopefully useful to people. I always get nice feedback from folks, so I hope they can make use of it all. And it keeps me sharp.
• Instructed a solicitor to put together a will, which felt grown-up. I’m going to put in an annual reminder to update it. This first version is a functional answer to “what are we supposed to do with all Mo’s stupid stuff?”. Over the course of the coming year, I’d like to think more deeply about important people and what they might find sentimental, useful or funny to inherit.
• Took the van in for MOT. I have found one of life’s great necessities: a honest garage. I have used them for three years and I intend to keep returning no matter where I am living. This year the van sailed through, which I suppose means the work they did last year has held up. I should really buy a car, too.
• Went to see Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City; a film that’ll surely polarise. Many movies (maybe most) put their themes, characters and memorable moments into dialogue. Here, I sense Anderson is showing a story rather than telling it, and that will certainly polarise audiences. Loved it.

• Still in Japan. Next stop: Kanazawa.
• Japanese hotels, I’m finding, don’t have wardrobes. They have a rail, parallel to one wall, with four coathangers. Travelling with about a weeks’ worth of evermore crumpled clothing, I’d love to let the air get at it. My t-shirts still smell like aeroplane fuselage. I spuriously packed shampoo; next time, I’m bringing a clothesrail.
• It’s also proving hard to ‘go out for dinner’. There’s not much in the way of casual dining, unless you count casual drinking, and restaurants tend to be booked up. Fallen foul of that a couple of times. Need to make a point of eating at lunch, quite early. I’ll get the hang of it.
• One restaurant I was pleased to find and book into was the exceptional and plant-based Love For All. That name, reminiscent of the hempcloth-and-dreadlock dross in Camden, belies its superior dining experience. Fanciest things I’ve eaten for a while. Lovely.
• It’s very rare that I find a hat that fits. But as the top half of my face was quite red, it was worth another go. And wouldn’t you know, two showed up at once in the camping consession I was passing in some department store into which I’d wandered. So I guess I’m a hat guy now.

  

• Took in Kanazawa’s star attractions: Kenroku-en garden followed the castle park. Like every other ancient building, it has stood there for hundreds of years while having also been built within the last 20. There’s a refreshing honesty to the Japanese approach of maintaining, restoring or just rebuilding these treasures once they’ve fallen over or most often burned down. A building remains, despite having been entirely rebuilt ten times.
• Another marvellous Shinkansen, covering 365 miles (roughly London to Edinburgh) in four hours.

  

• Hiroshima station has two stamps. One depicts the peace gardens, the other features okonomiyaki, a griddled savoury pancake with ingredients including Worcestershire sauce. It seems right not to cram these ideas into one. There’s the Hiroshima forever reeling from the horror of the A-bomb that killed 140,000 people. Then there’s the bustling Hiroshima that stands today.
• Arrived in the middle of the flower festival. Roads closed; stalls and people everywhere. The city’s name carries such sombre baggage, so it was stunning to arrive into such vibrancy. A highlight was a community samba band, thumping loudly across the Peace Park. Peace, it seems, needn’t be peaceful.
• The displays in the Peace Memorial Museum uses the most direct language. It is a stark place and I admit there were some sections where I couldn’t linger. One sentence has stuck with me: “nuclear weapons and humankind cannot coexist indefinitely”.

  

• Took a tourist boat out to the island of Miyajima, known for its large Torii arch standing in a shallow bay. The place is teetering, but still just on the right side of, the line between rural community and being overrun by tourism. There is no Hilton, yet, but there’s also barely a shop that isn’t all souvenirs. It was very hot.
• Happened upon a good CaliMex place. I’m comfortable not eating Japanese quisine every day.

  

• Onward to Osaka, somewhere I’d been keen to revisit. Had a really good time here. Immediately went up to the large red ferris-wheel on top of the HEP Five department store. Other highlights included a long time accumulating more stationery at Itoya, excellent sushi at Kantaro, Pokemon and Nintendo stores, and a hotel both with a proper clothes-rail and (on request) an additional ten hangers! It’s the little things.

  

• A whole day spent at Universal Studios Japan. It must be at least 30 years since I went to a theme park, but Super Nintendo World seemed too good to miss. And it was certainly the highlight: the Mariokart ride, a mix of high-tech trickery and augmented reality.
• That’s this week’s Japanthology. Join me next week for the trip home including a sneaky layover.