This is a story from the other side of the world and, when it was told to me by my sister Nancy, it moved me, for it serves as a corrective to my current obsession with throwing things out. The tale stars a little green bucket that belonged to a boy named Takuya Onodera who was from a town called Minamisanriku-Cho in northern Japan.
The centre of this town was swept away almost five years ago when, on March 11, 2011, the great east Japan earthquake and tsunami struck. The Onoderas’ home was among those that disappeared and, while they survived, many didn’t. The death toll was 15,893.
Ever since, bits of Japanese lives have been showing up on the beaches of the west coast of America and Canada. A Japanese soccer ball washed ashore in Alaska, a motorcycle found its way to British Columbia and part of a dock landed in Oregon. My sister is a scientist who lives on the Oregon coast: she walks the beach daily and became part of a team monitoring tsunami debris, her speciality being the shipworms that arrived in the wood.
One day, at a beach called Crook Point, she spied a small green bucket emblazoned with the word Kerokerokeroppi, a Sanrio cartoon character who is a small green frog. I would have ignored it, thinking it rubbish. But of course it wasn’t and eventually it was traced back to the Onodera family: the bucket had taken three years to travel the 5,000 miles across the Pacific.
Last week my sister and her colleagues travelled the 5,000 miles back to Minamisanriku-Cho to return the bucket personally to the Onoderas. I love the fact that so much care was taken with this unassuming object: it seems that even green plastic frog buckets can hold humanity.
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Riding high
As I drove up the M1 last weekend, I passed an old car chugging along, still able to pass its MoT but not, it seemed, other cars. I noticed that across the back seat was a blue and white scarf emblazoned with “Leicester City”. I smiled, for Leicester is on a roll: first they found Richard III under a car park and now the team that began the season at 5,000/1 to win the league is, er, doing exactly that.
It couldn’t happen to a nicer and less pretentious place. I have liked Leicester ever since interviewing the brilliant Sue Townsend there. Strangely, in the theatre at least, the East Midlands are often the butt of jokes. Indeed, inThe Mother, now at the Tricycle in London, there is a running gag at Leicester’s expense. I think we know who’s having the last laugh.
Sexed down
I went to see Spotlight on Sunday night, thinking that if it won an Oscar (though it was, like Leicester City, the underdog) then it would be too crowded and, if it didn’t, it wouldn’t be on at all. There were less than 20 people at the showing at the Curzon in Sheffield, all of us rapt.
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The best thing, for me, about this portrait of journalism was how it doesn’t sex things up. The reporters are doggedly uncool: in the library, counting lists, or endlessly knocking on doors (real doors!). It’s an antidote to all those people who think journalism is about the internet and not real life. When the film was over, no one moved as we watched the credits roll.
Turn for the better
I spend as much time as possible in Bakewell in Derbyshire but there is one major downside. The drivers and, specifically, the slow ones. Anytime I go anywhere, I find myself behind a car going at least 10mph under the speed limit. And why are they always going where I am? What a delight when, out of the blue, they turn off! The English language needs a new word to describe that feeling: part relief, part exhilaration.