The Boy and The Coconut Tree

I will be glad when June 2024 is over, I am sitting here on June 29th 2024 and I am physically and mentally exhausted from the events of this month.  At the very end of May my Uncle Stan died, he was 83 and prior to his death he was a relatively healthy old man, but a fall and brain bleed and possibly poor care at the Sunderland Royal Hospital led to him fading away pretty quickly, admitted on Friday May 24th and died overnight on May 26th. He was an incredibly kind, funny man and we had a very odd relationship as he would always claim I know everything I know because of him, it was a running joke since my teens and I tried to send him a postcard from wherever I visited in the world as I knew as a former coal miner and shipyard worker, he had never left England and I know he appreciated my postcards.  His funeral was the first I've attended as an adult and it felt odd, being a grown-up can be hard, I comforted my aunt and my mum and had to navigate the usual family politics of a bi

I recently spent 11 days in Japan and this is a compilation of my thoughts over those 11 days. Days 1 and 2 So my first question about Japan is why is it the land of the rising sun, why does Japan have the monopoly on rising suns? It rises everywhere right? So my arrival into the city centre could have been better, I took the express Metro line not the local and ended up in NoIdeaWhereIamI aka Nihonbashi and had to go back on my self and the exit that google maps said I needed didn't exist so I wandered around Ginza trying to find my hotel and find road signs (they are impossible to see). So after landing at Haneda at 520pm, I got to my hotel at 8pm. Room is lovely but small and was once a smoking room so it smells like my grandad's house, on the upside, I am 5 minutes walk from the largest Uniqlo store in the world and the hotel has an amazing breakfast buffet, fish for breakfast indeed! Ginza is the area with all the posh shops, streets and streets of it, the S