THE EXTRACT OF POMELO ROOT

Perfume Posse, one of the best fragrance websites that has ever existed, is both informative about perfume and frank about emotion. It is one of the main reasons I have continued to read it for so many years (even if I have rarely – if ever – actually commented : if it’s a faff to log in a response on any forum I invariably lose my spontaneity in the heat of the moment and give up immediately).

Whether discussing marital breakdown, financial impoverishment, leaking bathrooms, escaping wildfires, hilariously (if poignantly) wry self deprecations on the challenges of getting older, the posse weave their daily life stories with perfume mania and scents of the day into a vast tapestry of experience you might call life.

One post that particularly touched me recently was the brilliant Portia’s startlingly candid piece on the terrifying lows of depression and potential ways to dig herself out of the troughs of black despair when they hit – seemingly on a regular basis. I don’t suffer from depression as such, but I do from anxiety, particularly this year, when there has been so much to be worried about, and I thoroughly appreciated the brutal levels of honesty in that post – the beautiful transparency of feeling. It takes a lot of bravery to just put yourself on the spot like that – once you hit publish it’s as though all the world knows your vulnerabilities – but it is also profoundly cathartic, truly touching others. I have been meaning to get in touch with P to convey my appreciation for that piece of writing whose unfettered honesty went right through me like electricity one day while reading it on the train and shifted something within me, but with everything that has been happening in the lead up to being in here have not managed to get round to it (my Facebook Messenger also doesn’t work outside the house for some unfathomable reason): perhaps one of you could point her to this post.

The Empathy Of Friends

In the middle of February when I had begun my enforced ‘sabbatical’ and had to apply for social security here to get through this difficult year of surgery and stress management I found myself tumbling down into deep holes of heart-throbbing apprehension and uncertainty very frequently. Suddenly not working after 32 years of continuously doing so was not as delightful as it might initially appear. As d went to work early every morning leaving me my usual cup of tea, a void would open up; a geothermal fissure of loneliness and fear of the future that was difficult to fill. I can’t write in that state; I forced myself to exercise (which is already proving useful in my rehabilitation here as I have decent muscle strength); otherwise I would just cook; drink; binge-watch Netflix Scandinoir.

I have D, who has been amazing. I have my family. And I have a lot of really good friends. Some back in England and other places that I maintain regular contact with, some closer in physical proximity on Japanese shores (my best male J-friend and colleague lives right next door).

Aside standard socializing, though, I have also wanted to take this ‘year off’ as an opportunity to explore new avenues of thinking and ways of living – as well as writing about my life here in Japan – which means opening myself up to the unknown. I have done some psychotherapy, with varying results. I have consulted a psychic recommended by someone on the family – fascinating, I may come to that later, the biggest revelation being, and the first thing she said when she saw me, that I am psychic myself – which isn’t entirely a surprise.

I am also interested in cults, sects, religions. Fret not : my core of bedrock skepticism – no, not skepticism, but of an unstupid questioning of everything –everything !- means that my gullibility and impressionability are very low. I detest uniformity and conformity too much for start , always have, which is why I had my legs slapped by Mrs Llwellyn a few times at my primary school in the black country for being cheeky / disobedient / daring to have a brain of my own. As my thighs smarted and the eyes bore holes into shame, I am sure I felt equal part guilt and humiliation, and if I had been familiar with the expression at the time, f*** y**.

I am mesmerized by cults because anyone who has watched any documentaries on this subject surely knows that they follow the same pattern. A sociopathic narcissist with sadistic tendencies exploits the vulnerabilities of desperate truth-seekers and then draws them into her arbitrary system of dogmas and ‘beliefs’, often losing all their money and being sexually assaulted or held in slavery or forced to hang or poison themselves in some pointless and ridiculous doomsday scenario. So predictable !

And yet one of my best friends in the UK – a musician with impossibly penetrating intelligence and intuition was in an Indian cult for eighteen years and had to go through many deep mortifications and realizations :when we talked about all this in a Birmingham Irish pub two or three years ago I was practically speechless – and just let her talk. That she has managed to build her life back up again in such a spectacular manner is a testament to her spiritual strength and genuine artistry ( can anyone doubt the power of music ?)

Natural wariness of cults aside, I have lost none of my inquisitiveness about them. They fascinate me – which is why one of book chapters is going to be devoted to bearded weirdos and other humourless individuals who yield themselves up to enigmatic and charismatic with usually tragic results. D and I have penetrated the environs of the freaks at the Museum Of Art in Atami, whose grand edifices are a masquerade for a Messianic Creepfest that naturally isn’t averse to siphoning off all your savings; I have been to a Jehovah’s Witness gathering at the Grand Temple in Fujisawa after inviting a mother and son into my house one day for tea after they kept pestering me every Sunday (:”Ok, come in; and I will go with you for one meeting just to see for myself what it is like; after that, though, if it’s not for me, perhaps we can leave it”).

After hearing that precisely 144,000 souls would be getting to heaven, and the rest of humanity would be resurrected to limboland or purgatorial waiting area, crawling out of the earth like a mass Thriller flash mob and saw in their eyes that they believed every word of these random pronouncements, I told them I would leave it.

*

Melanie and I still plan to go ‘cult window shopping’ – I would like to try Happy Science next for research purposes – but we are also very interested in the esoteric, the beyond, what might constitute a meaning of life : clue, I don’t think it lies in Balenciaga handbags or collecting the full range of Louis Vuitton fragrances – but what do I know ? We have to fill our brains with something, be it soccer, Pokémon, ululating for Donald in a materialist mega church (GAD WANTS YOU, yes YOU !!! TO BE WEALTHY !!! Wire some cash to us right now and the Lord will show his benevolence !)

I am interested in Buddhism, and live on the top of a zen-infused mountain. Which isn’t to say that I am about to renounce the world and meditate in the seiza position for days (with these knees?), nor that I will ever fully accept any man-made scripture – as beautiful as the sutras may be, to me they are just one possibility and are arbitrary : I don’t think I could ever accept anything as literal gospel – but that doesn’t mean that I am not interested in the precepts or fundamental philosophies of a said religion (I like many of the teachings in Islam, Judaism and Christianity), but especially Buddhism, which is why M and I headed off to our friend J’s Soka Gakkai meeting one Sunday morning up in Tokyo.

It was good to be with one of my best friends – despite my bravadery there is always a fear of brainwashing that lurks at the back of your mind – especially when ensconced in the heart of a religious group’s main gathering and prayer space (or at least one of them). Everyone was very friendly, there was a human scatttiness to the loosely organized proceedings that appealed, although when the chanting began : nam, myoho renge kyo, over and over, accelerando, de-accelerando, rising in pitch and speed and then slowing and lingering, all present chanting in perfect unison, a chill did spread along my spine. Part of me found it hypnotic, and I could gradually feel reality loosening , like I was being suspended in something — the chant is for increased inner awareness, and I could feel some of that happening ( if I were stuck in a truly dire situation, I can imagine repeating this lotus mantra again; it does do something to the spirit )- and yet despite my appreciation of certain aspects of that morning and my willingness to perhaps go there again – I am hardly about to become a member. And neither is M. But none of this is what I am wanting to write about today in any case. All of this is just a prelude.

THE UNHYPNOTIZED

After the meeting we went for a cheap lunch at Saizeriya at my request (an unimaginably cheap Japanese Italian chain where a glass of wine is 40p and a spaghetti bolognese under £2 (and it tastes really good). The whole of Japan practically lives in these diners and I could and probably should do an entire piece about it.

Saizeriya is a good place to economize and also to catch up with friends. It’s so noisy that no one can overhear your conversations with the same canzoni forever on repeat on the sound system that d and I can now sing along to : with little money prior to securing my social security I appreciated being able to have lunch and pay my own way – not that I am averse to being treated- but there is a limit.

In fact, I have some very generous friends. So much so that when we all got deeper into conversation – M and J were meeting each other for the first time, and it turned out that they both went to, and were very appreciative of, the same French chiropractor /reiki healer/spiritualist / hypnotherapist up in the burbs of East Tokyo – one had gone for a chronically cricked neck and been cured; the other for ‘energy work’ and swearing she had some trapped, destructive energy released in the process. Hearing about my various distresses, but knowing I was strapped, and despite the high cost, they both spontaneously offered to pay for two sessions with her if I were willing to plunge into such new and uncharted psychological territory.

The Cynics

I get very bored by my otherwise hyper-intelligent prospective Tokyo University students when the majority of the usually science course students stubbornly refuse to even entertain the idea that anything can be real beyond the proven scientific. Equally, I find the Candles N’Angels Stevie Nicks brigade – if they automatically believe every last unicorn rainbow and garden fairy to be real – a little …. silly, but then I do know that we all exist on certain points on this spectrum – as we do on the moveable ground between religiousness and atheism : and ultimately, each to their own.

My own ‘policy’ in this regard is to keep an open mind : I went to the Buddhist sect meeting, I sang with the Jehovss, I Zoomed with the psychic, so I very gratefully accepted the invitation to go up to the outskirts of Mitaka – two hours at least away from my house – to have my first hypnotherapy session with Emanuelle.

The Slaking

I will come to our encounter in a short while. First, I feel that I need to explain why I thought being hypnotized might be useful for me in the first place.

The truth is, as some long-term narcissi might recall as I did write about this once eight years ago before my double osteotomy surgery, I have a severe case of dehydrophobia – otherwise known as dehydration anxiety, and it is this, rather than the actual cutting up and potential dangers and painful complications of surgery, that I have been fearing. I am nervous before an operation, as anyone would be, but the principle source of my mental discomfort is the nil by mouth water policy of many hospitals (in Britain this is changing : many researchers now believe that some hydration, sips of water before and after surgery is actually beneficial to the patient rather than feeling like scorched evaporated river, desperate beyond desperate for water to the point of real crisis, as I was in 2017 when I thought I would die from lack of water (nine and a half hours of surgery and then four hours of slaking sand hole, lips like burned biscuits and a brain that was ricocheting in its edges like dry peanuts in their shells). I didn’t give a shit about the leg agony : I just. wanted. water.

Which is why when I came to this hospital, and spent the entire day here doing reparative health tests, bright and breezily going from floor to floor, from blood test to cardiogram to bone density diagnostics to getting ready to sign the confirmation sheets, I was the perfect patient until they told me that I would have to wait for eight hours on the bed before the operation without water, and I told them that unfortunately, that would be impossible.

Plethora of phobias

The good thing about my particular affliction – in the literature but barely mentioned – is that for the vast majority of the time, no one need ever know anything about it. If I am carrying a bottle of Evian – filled with tap water from home – on the train or the bus or have several bottles stacked away in my backpack nothing could look more regular and normal. I am claustrophobic up to a point – must have an aisle seat on a plane or at the cinema – but that is about it. I can get in a full-ish lift, on a crowded-ish train ( even though my pulse rate is admittedly really quickening just thinking about it): usually I will simply wait until a less sardine-like situation presents itself and get on with it. For these reasons I don’t think of my own phobias as particularly problematic or severe – and I haven’t collected any new ones over the years. I don’t like the sensation of powdery surfaces but as a teacher have learned to use chalk ; I was attacked on the head by a crow last year – as was J, strangely, coincidentally – but didn’t develop any ornithophobia. I have been stung by wasps or bees at least four times in my life – all throbbed terribly – but am totally blase about them to this day, even when I shouldn’t be – there are life threatening killer Asian hornets here and we had a nest – but I was just trying to usher them out of the room with a newspaper even though they could have your eyes swelling up like a balloon. I stop and take pictures of snakes crossing the road. I will screech at big spiders on the wall – a primeval fear that is shared by so many human beings, but it is nothing like an old girlfriend of mine who was reduced to sobbing and asphyxiating hysterics when her older brother showed her a horrible arachnid on the wall during her 17th birthday party. She apparently couldn’t go into the room for several days.

Pedro Almodovar And The Bitch Bite

I am very curious as to why/ how phobias develop and also why they don’t (needless to say, I am enormously interested to hear about any phobias you suffer from openly or in secret or have experienced in other people as I am baring my soul here).

An episode :

In 1999 I was in London having an evening to myself. I had bought a ticket to see All About My Mother at the Screen On The Green in Islington and had decided to just kill the hour or so before the film began by having a look along the high street and sitting down for a beer somewhere. For some reason or other I leaned down to peer at the menu of Burger King – a place I never go to, having worked there as a part time job in my late teens and vowing I could never eat again as that ‘grilled’ smell had so permeated my brain – but as I bent forward towards the window the next thing I knew was a ferocious dog had leapt up and bitten me on the leg. The new jeans I had bought the day before were torn by the bitch; and I was bleeding. Looking down at the fang bared mutt – I remember it as a bulldog but it could have been anything – I erupted in fury and stormed into the ‘restaurant’ shouting about the asshole that had left their what should have been nuzzled canine outside with a piece of paper stuck to its head saying ‘ don’t touch me, I bite’ then though I knew I should go straight to the nearest hospital as I hadn’t had a tetanus jab for a very long time I instead went back to the cinema, my leg slowly trickling throughout Todo Sobra Mi Madre. I didn’t get to the Whittington Hospitai much later that night, when a laconic Caribbean nurse said to me ” You should see what the human bites are like”.

Trainspotting

Yet though I am not exactly Fido’s Best Mate and Julia’s 300 ft tall Jeff Koons cockadoodle made me want to shoot it when it jumped up and scratched me when I went round to her house (never again!) – I have never come down with canophobiav ( I was also chased by a snapping turtle I mean a ‘dog’ as a child when I was about 6- it bit my cousin Caroline instead); I can stroke my friends’ more amenable pups (unenthusiastically ) but don’t come out in cold sweats from the sound of the merest whimper.

In contrast, I was to learn of the severity of D’s potent needle/injection phobia first-hand.

Trainspotting was all the rage at the time. It was being raved about – part of the Britpop Boom – Oasis/Blur/Pulp (yawn) that was travelling around the world : the Danny Boyle Glasgow film that was equally beloved in Japan as new apex of UK culture. I would be asked if I had enjoyed it – but I only saw the first ten or 15 minutes. Emma was there too : she will verify or negate/ embellish or detract from my account, but this is how I remember it:

We had scarcely settled into our seats at the Clapham Picture House South London when the opening credits began – and d had what seemed to be an epileptic fit. He started convulsing violently in his seat, eyes going into the back of his head. I panicked and shouted that we needed a doctor : it so happened that there was a dentist on the end of the row. E’s husband had been having actual epileptic fits at the time so they knew what they were doing.

This was not my proudest moment. D was carried out and laid on the steps; as green and grey as a battered El Greco Christ. Unconscious. thought he was dead. And I couldn’t handle it – —

— so ran away !

Great job, Neil.

Soon gathering my senses, I ran back from the Clapham Common where I was flailing and hyperventilating and returned to the death scene where those present had fanned d back to life : an ambulance was called, and Emma, Hugh, myself and a swooned thin person on a stretcher were taken to a hospital for tests. There was nothing wrong. It was the needles from all the shooting up scenes in the film.

I caught him when he started to faint at the local doctor’s after a flu injection. He had to be taken to a special lie down area for all the Covid vaccinations. The nurses were very understanding – trypanophobia is one of the most common of the phobias, along with acrophobia – fear of heights, agoraphobia, arachnophobia, and aquaphobia (the very opposite of mine ! which Duncan also shares to an extent, along with his mother).

It is here though that things perhaps get unfair. Some phobias are more acceptable than others : understandable, when last night I discovered perhaps the most unusual :

Others include

-definitely an excuse for me not to do housework – :

.. and it’s probably good that I am not genuphobic either.

…. I personally adore ferns – but the list goes on ( how do we humans ever make it through life ?)

The point is, I suppose, that though some phobias seem strange beyond belief, for the person having a meltdown at the duckpond they are very real. I know two people with emetophobia – the fear of vomiting, though that feat of someone else throwing up more than you chundering yourself; Helen has misophonia, an utter hatred of, and inability to tolerate, loud smacking noises made from a person’s mouth, particularly while eating (there are specially designed headphones for this condition);

(still in the process of writing this : rather than nomophobia – a fear of not having one’s smartphone I have a hatred of this f****+++ device sometimes when it goes all glitchy and feel like throwing it against the wall – bear with me before you develop full Chapmanphobia !)

A fear of needles is taken more seriously than a fear of having no water. I can’t really relate to the whole injectionphobia thing : I am hardly fond of syringes, especially when they hurt – I have had some botched attempts this week that have left my arms bruised as well as my leg; but I would rather have an IV in my arm and multiple injections throughout an eight hour flight on a budget airline to Singapore than not have enough water to drink because they only accepted a particular payment I didn’t have and was gasping from start to finish.

The Scent Of Pomelo Root Extract

Two seasons having been paid in advance by my extremely kind friends, I left my house three hours before the appointed time so as not to be late (the Japanese address system is extremely difficult to fathom and it was in the middle of nowhere. It was good that I took a taxi, to ascertain where the house was – in the middle of an Eastern Tokyo suburban street ) and just kill a bit of time by looking around.

Thirty minutes later I went back and rang the bell.