Inglebrough/Fuji

When I lived in Hong Kong, the bank that my father worked for had this scheme whereby, when you went on holiday, the company would pay for your accommodation or your flights. This resulted in at least one whirlwind holiday when we visited four countries in two weeks but, on another occasion, we flew to Japan for a fortnight.

We went to stay with some friends of my parents called Molly and Steve, who had lived next to us for a while on Mount Kellett in Hong Kong. First off, we went to stay at their house in the suburbs of Tokyo. The thing I remember most clearly about Tokyo is that even when there was no traffic, no one would cross the road until the green man was lit. (Steve told us that tourists who broke that code could be thrown out of the country!)

Then we went to stay at a holiday house - which I think was owned by the bank - in a different part of Japan. Unlike Tokyo, it was snowy there. Really snowy. The roads had been been cleared but vertical faces of snow, taller than me, bordered them. When we reached the house, we found the front door had been dug out but all of the downstairs windows just looked out onto a dark wall of snow. I remember putting on snow shoes and going for a walk with my brother. We found a playground covered in snow, so that only the hooped handrails at the top of a slide were visible.

I'm not sure where else we went. I remember visiting a MacDonalds ("Mackoo-doneldo"), and going up to a temple but not much else. I do recall that one day Molly drove me, my brother and my mum (and maybe Molly and Steve's daughter Lauren) out to Mount Fuji. It was a long drive, I think, on roads crossing a snowy landscape, occasionally passing through small towns and villages until eventually we stopped somewhere around the foot of Mount Fuji. It loomed above us, thickly covered with snow.

I was reminded of that trip today when I saw Inglebrough in the distance. Although it's nowhere near the size of Mount Fuji, I expect it was the fact that it was covered, albeit patchily, in snow and also the way it is raised above the landscape, brooding slightly.