Yet another rainy week in Hokkaido

Many Japanese people tell me the rainy season doesn't reach Hokkaido. Yet every year when the rainy season pushes up through Honshu it also pi**es down with rain here in south Hokkaido. Grey skies, coolish humid weather and lots and lots of rain.

The Stonechats were still in exactly the same place. If the light had been any good I could have gotten some killer shots.





We ended up at Onuma, lots of common stuff in the forest but it was dark and full of mosquitoes. This Kingfisher was the best shot I could come up with. At 400mm and 1/60 second it isn't great.



Not much to report from Hakodate, the nasty weather has curtailed any photo opps. The Red Cheeked Starlings and Oriental Reed Warblers are still busy on the river.....







And this baby Great Tit was kind of cute.......



I've been watching a lot of violent cockney movies this week. 'Rise of the Footsoldier', 'The Business', 'The Football Factory' and 'Nil by Mouth'. I'm naturally a little jaded after hearing the 'C' word approx 1500 times but it brought back memories of my time in Hackney in the early 90's. One time I went to a pub next to Victoria Park and joked to my friend the barman was like a cockney criminal cliche (I did it out of earshot of said barman naturally). Turned out he was an escaped con and former gangland kingpin who was shot at point blank range a few weeks later.

I've also been watching recent Harry Enfield clips on youtube and have to say I often burst out laughing. I miss this kind of stuff from back home, thank god for the internet. That character selling junk to pretentious housewives in Notting Hill is a work of genius. Their Bil Gates/Steve Jobs characters are also pretty funny, especially the 'i-hump' sketch (hey I'm backing up my hard disk onto an external hard drive as I type this so I suppose I have a small part of nerd in my character too).

I've more or less decided to give up on my other blog. Again. Quite simply the software isn't very good (again) and it's a pain to navigate. And nobody ever reads it anyway. So I'll probably update this one more than once a week from now on......

So England won last night, I watched it on my computer. I'm sure they'll win on Wednesday and with Ukraine/Croatia drawing It's looking pretty good. Yet on the various footy forums there are loads of people complaining about England being crap and their fans being deluded. Yes I know we're crap but at least we're probably going to the World Cup and this time last year that looked unlikely. And I'm glad I'm not a fan of Portugal, Sweden, the Czech Republic or several other 'big' countries who look very much in danger of missing out.......

The less said about the cricket the better though.........