One year older, one year wiser

As the kids say, OMG OMG - I've only gone and missed a key anniversary. Yep, this blog was one year old as of March 2nd. Dang.

This blog has been theraputic for me, allowing me to find my feet in this odd brave, non-English-speaking new world I 've found myself in, and it has allowed me to keep contact with the old one. Recently, the posts have been fewer. Does this mean I'm more at home now?

Maybe.

Certainly, the newbie "Wow, look at this crisp packet, isn't it peculiar" phase has passed. And I've lost any appetite for boosting hits at this site. If I may lapse into a little French, the raison d'etre has changed for this blog. Now, I'm not quite sure what the raison is for it, it may be completely d'etred, but T-Tales is still a loyal friend, and one that I am happy to return to when my other blogs are not the right place for my thoughts. Don't wish to sound pretentious, but, dear readers, you have a right to know what's what.

So what to expect for the next 12 months at T-Tales? A little more introspection and maybe fewer posts, and more of the kids. Don't say you weren't warned.

Pleasant little numbers

I'm chuffed. Last night I was looking at the Tower Tales analytics (that means numbers - you can too, just click on the number of visitors at the top right) and was pleasantly surprised to find my usual Sunday/Monday tally of two relatives and a couple of passers-by looking for low impact aerobics (it's odd what search engines will throw up) was multiplying before my very eyes to more than one hit an hour. Granted, these are not numbers to get Murdoch worried, but for a site that doesn't do sex (as much as it would like, ahem) and has an awful lot of gratuitous chat about my family, what gives?

Well, in a moment of foresight between glasses of cheap Australian plonk from the Seven-11, I registered this blog on the Total Politics site and blow me, political uber-blogger Iain Dale graciously put a link to Tower Tales (see the post below for the link). By the way, get well soon Dad (Grandad). This non-political, non-aerobics-related video shot today is dedicated to you.

Black, white and dead all over

I got a nice e-mail from a good friend, a former colleague of mine at a local newspaper in England, who was one of the best sub-editors I've worked with. He told me he's resigning on Monday and taking up a post in public relations. This from a local newspaper "lifer" came as a bit of a surprise. But, he said now was a very good time to get out of newspapers into the world of PR.

It's probably too soon to write the obituary for the newspaper industry, but certainly the patient is looking rather gaunt. Circulation has been noticeably weakening since the early 1990s. There have been good days, when the global economy was booming and advertising revenue flowed from estate agents, but the lifeblood of numbers of readers has been declining steadily since even before the explosion of the internet. Now as the ad money dries up, it's time to talk of a crisis. Small papers are closing down in Britain and even bigger ones like the Manchester Evening News are fighting for survival, a surprising fact brought to my attention by avid Tower Tales comment-leaver Dr Datsun Kildare (whose amusing name makes up for his atrocious spelling). 

Why should anyone outside of the business care? Information is power, if you don't have any, you are at the mercy of those who do. Can the internet and Tom-Paine-like citizen journalist bloggers fill the shoes of local newspapers to keep democracy alive? They have to, for all our sakes. And on the upside, rather the citizen journalist than the Citizen Kane.

Redesign time, or delusions of grandeur

You may well be asking yourself, hey, what's going on with the blog? Didn't it used to be a Danubian (or at least a Leicester City FC) blue? And what's with the picture at the top, and where's all that extra gumpf down the right hand side that I used to ignore? Allow me to explain... like all editors, I couldn't resist a little tinker with the style. Added to that the auspicious occasion of the first anniversary of Tower English last week, and you have an unstoppable mandate for change. Here are the main features:

• No white text on blue background. Black text on a white background is easier to read, especially for the old 'uns among us who learnt to read with those old-fangled things called books.
• Nice picture behind the masthead (as it used to be called in newspaper parlance). The picture sums up something of what this blog is about - an innocent abroad trying to get to grips with the new surroundings (and is that a yawn, or a gasp of astonishment from Emma? You decide).
• Less gumpf down the side. Fear not, the links and glossary are all still here, just not on the front page - click on the keywords above the posts to find them. Joining them are two more links - "Contact" (for sending me an e-mail) and "About" to explain to new readers the, er, philosophy of Tower Tales, such as it is.
• The eagle-eyed will notice the text fonts are the same as before and the colour scheme is identical to the sister blog, Tower Talk. All part of the corporate identity, folks.

So what do you think of the new look? 

  

Messing with the space-time continuum

I've been tinkering again with the blog. From now on, I will be giving a label to every blog entry. Why? Well, I did like lining up toy cars in a particular order when I was little, er, and I'm aware of the fickle nature of blogs and how an entry of vital import might be missed by a reader who doesn't like to be tied down to chronological order. Instead, you can search by subject matter. Think of it as a virtual card catalogue (for the old fogies who remember such things). Yes, it's that exciting. Anyway, you can click on the label on the bottom of every post and see more like-minded posts in the same category. Not only that, but beneath the oh-so-passe chronological archive list is the labels list, so you may never be tied down to linear time travel again. Kurt Vonnegut would have approved. Oh by the way, I'm backdating all previous entries so eventually everything will have a label. Who says I don't know how to party?

Writer's blog?

Oh, how virtual we have become. Not only do we have a website, a school blog and of course this blog, but shacho has joined the blogging brouhaha with one of her very own. Yoshie's World is up and running and taking hits even while I sup my Chile Cabernet Sauvignon from the Seven-11. The Japanese is a bit hard for me to follow, but she certainly has a prettier layout than my blog. By the way, the more observant of you at the front of the class will have noticed I've been messing with the layout of this blog. I've ditched the news feed at the bottom of the page, binned some old photos and added a new "blog roll" which updates the latest entries to all our blog sites. Oh, and I am still taking votes for US President, but for the time being the poll is nestling in the broom cupboard between the picture of our house and a list of links.   

Names to reckon with MK II

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Virtually friends

I've got 24. My little sister, Jane, has got 53. My Arkansan nephew, Ben, has got 529. DVDs? Overdue library books? Zits? No, of course not, I'm talking about friends on Facebook. I am hard pressed to think of more than a handful of people that I would truly call friends, yet even I have 24 of 'em on the online social network, as it's called (or a waste of time, as my wife calls it). I would have had 25, but one cancelled his Facebook account because he was sick of people he barely knew knowing everything about him. So unlike blogging, ahem.

Number crunching

I was always better at my reading and 'riting than my 'rithmatic, but here are some numbers that affected our lives today:

300 - number of hits on this blog since going online in March

66 - number of students enrolled in our school

12 - number of students I taught today

7 - K-chan's height rank out of 15 girls in her class (kids line up in order of height in Japan)

3 - number of times I sang "Hi how are you? I'm fine" song today

0 - number of lettuce leafs Emma-chan ate ("I don't want it, Mummy, it's too green")

 

About Tower Tales

• What is Tower Tales all about then? Nice of you to ask. It started life as the musings of a British ex-journalist who found himself running an English school, Tower English, in 2007 from his front room (behind the yellow sign above) in Abiko - 20 miles East of Tokyo. This blog's sole purpose was to keep him from losing his marbles by flexing his writing muscle.
  
• What's changed? Not a lot actually. But the blog has adopted the mission of informing and entertaining readers about life in Japan from the point of view of an outsider with a young family, with occasional jaunts into commentary on UK and US politics.
• Oh, so that means making fun of your host country? No, well... only occasionally, to be honest. It's too easy to point at the differences between Japan and the West and conclude Japan has a screw loose. Where there is hypocrisy or irony, Tower Tales is there, but equally when Japan has it right, Tower Tales is happy to say so. 
• Am I free to comment, write or suggest posts? Yes, wherever possible guest views are featured and comment is welcome, provided it is vaguely relevant, interesting, amusing or at least not overly insulting. Add your own comments to any post, or e-mail at patricksherriff@gmail.com with your own ideas.
• Can I cut and paste material or link to posts here for my own site? Yes, within reason. Feel free to link away. As for using pictures or quotes, you can, but only if you attribute them to Tower Tales. You may not pass off anything here as your own work or try to make money from TT's occasional flashes of originality, unless there's something in it for us.
• Why don't you talk more about your school, Tower English? There's a time and blog for everything. The school's blog is here.
• I really enjoy Tower Tales. Can I send you large sums of money? Well, OK in unmarked, non-sequential notes if you insist. Or even better, you could make the odd digital donation, no matter how small, to charity appeals which grace these pages occasionally.