We take a coach trip to go and see the impressive Abba Voyage at a purpose-built stadium in London.

Virginia and I travelled to and from London by prebooked cab. This worked fairly well. The guy who took us down was 20 minutes early, not a problem. He insisted on dropping us before the Strand outside the Savoy Tap pub, and had us tell Panther Taxis to get the one who fetched us to collect us from there. The guy who collected us still did it from outside where we were staying so looking back this just added confusion and worry. A very friendly guy, not sure of his ethnicity, we had a tour of his East London homeland. I was also unsure of his driving where there didn't always seem to be a hand on the wheel.

In a different time and place I was a pupil at Norwich School. We had a music teacher called Bernard Burrell who put up with us as he endeavoured to teach music. I appreciate this teacher because one year the syllabus included Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition". This piece started life as a piano composition, people know it best from the orchestration by Ravel. In a certain lesson Mr Burrell was generous enough to play a rather different version, a version with sounds I had never heard before. A version by a progressive rock group called ELP which included the bewitching strains of a Moog synthesizer. It just blew me away! You may debate what is music. You may debate what is Art. All I knew was as I listened to ELP's numbers was my ears heard something beautiful, something on the edge of liberation, something alive and evolving, something alien and frail. From that day I no longer despised rock music, my horizons expanded, friendships deepened. I had a collection of LPs with striking cover. Keith Emerson's kingship of the keyboard inspired me to learn the piano (I'm not sure my piano teachers and examiners consider that a good thing). To this day I still listen to progressive rock, and especially ELP. But I never saw them live in concert, only in dreams.

My trip to Japan starts a long time ago. Before the last minute panic with the iPad. Before all the research I did on the web. Before I booked the package tour in February. Years before. My father is very much interested in Japanese culture. He has been a major figure in the British Origami Society, and did his best to get my sister and I folding in paper too. He let me stay up late one night to watch "Seven Samurai" by the famous Japanese film director "Akira Kurosawa". That influence has rubbed off on me, film is one of my major addictions. My father also had "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance" to lead me down another path. He has written quite a few koans. I do tend towards the mystical, the transcendental. The mystic East they say, I suspect that mystic there means more hard to understand. My mother gave me money towards going to Japan when I first mentioned I was thinking of going. I failed to make the trip while she was alive (one of my many failures). So this trip is a necessary step for completeness. This exact time was largely dictated by using up days of leave I had carried over from 2012. So I started surfing for package tours in Japan, feeling I couldn't organise the details myself. I chose Magical Japan to go with. Unless I were to do holidays with a range of travel agencies it's hard to compare. They answered my silly questions, were nice enough to deal with. I got them to book the flights but I think I was wrong to do so now - it would have simpler for me to do so. They had to see what was there, then check with me before they booked. I did a lot of research into the cities I was due to visit (Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka) trying to make I could navigate around in a strange land. Strangely I had problems in practice getting around London! I collected Japanese phrases, maps, notes on using trains and underground systems. I planned to make a lot of use of my iPad to hold the notes and documents on.