I offered to get Philip a really nice gift since I've got a bit of money now. After much coaxing, he's decided he would really like a shamisen. A shamisen / sanshin is a traditional Japanese stringed instrument, commonly played using a very wide plectrum-related thing called a bachi.

The shamisen is an incrediably disgusting instrument. The best pegs are usually ivory or horn, although sometimes they settle for ebony wood. The best skins to use are cat skins. Only skin from the stomach area of female cats is good enough. The second best sound is achieved from dog skins. And then sometimes you get instruments with cat skin on the top and dog skin on the bottom. The sanshin variety frequently uses snakeskin. And the best bachi have tortoise shell overlays. At least the strings are made from silk. But that said, the shamisen strings only hold a tuning for a minute. So the player has to constantly retune the instrument on the fly while playing.

Luckily they do make shamisen with synthetic skins, which are both cheaper and more durable than cat/dog/snake skins. But in the search for a more eco-friendly shamisen, it is a bit disturbing to come across Japanese auctions for shamisen that use more traditional materials. Ivory pegs and puppy skins.

I don't usually remember my dreams at all, but I very distinctly remember parts of the one I had last night.

I was traveling somewhere in it, originally with my friends, but I missed the train (although I was standing right there in the station.) So I ended up getting the next train, and met some people who seemed nice enough and were going to the same place, so I sort of hung out with them. Somewhere along the way we had to stop at an inn/pub for the night. It looked like a ski chalet, made all from wood with lots of V-shapes and windows. It was more than a pub too, had two or three stores in it, that were closed because it was night. Everyone else decided to join the party inside the pub, but that sort of thing has never been for me, so I went outside even though it was freezing cold and kind of misty. I put on a pair of black leather gloves (I don't usually wear any gloves at all, even when it is freezing) and went around to the side of the building. And then I saw them - three foxes. They looked grey in the mist an d were darting around as if chasing stuff. But I sort of called out to them and crouched down so I was lower to the ground. And then one of them suddenly came running towards me, the way a dog would when you call its name. Once he was within the light of the building, I could see he was definitely a red fox. He nuzzled up against my hands and then bite one of them and sort of mouthed it with his teeth for a few moments. It seemed affectionate and he didn't hurt me because I had the gloves on. And then he did the same thing to the other hand. It was at that point someone came out the side door of the pub to have a cigarette and the foxes all ran off into the night. There was a bit more to the dream, but nothing particularly interesting apart from the large rainbow coloured lizards (they were pets of someone who worked there) and the rotting corpses that were standing up and that everyone else seemed to think were normal and alive. (Probably because the side of them that faced the pub were OK looking, whereas the side I saw was rotting.)

I saw my very first red fox while I was coming home on the train this afternoon. I promptly burst out into tears and cried for the rest of the journey, much to Philip's great confusion.