Lovely JUBBLIES

Something slightly odd to be eating dinner when my BUBB staff have not even had their lunch! Or indeed when some of the owners of the UK's poorest brollies haven't had any lunch at all, let alone posh nippon tucker. It's almost as if there's a time difference or something between the UK and Japan. But that's these clever, crazy rising sun dudes for you - always ahead of the game.

As I mentioned I am here in Japan on an absolutely vital visit with my vice chair Hillda Ogden-Newton&Ridley. I am talking at a conference on social enterprise and at an event on full cost recovery of expensive overseas jaunts organised by our Japanese sister body JUBBLIES (Japanese Umbrella Backing Body - Lunching In Endless Sushi). Hillda is here to keep an eye on me and is so social enterprise it actually hurts although to be fair the pain is for the greater good and any gain is reinvested for the benefit of society and isn't at all veneer behind which to legitimately makes pots of cash without feeling guilty about embracing capitalism as after all this decorating won't pay for itself, will it?

It is a good six months since I was last pricking around in Japan, trying to foist BUBB ways of working onto the Japanese and everywhere I go I am recognised as being famous. People point at me and laugh and call me 傘の肛門 (use http://babelfish.yahoo.com/translate_txt to translate it).

But I have been able to get stuck into the saki and lemonade (purely medicinal - I start to ache and shake if I don't drink) and eat some frankly disgusting sea food while wearing a bib, being winded and soiling myself. And I will be bigging up my idea for a Global Investment Brolly Bank, Obviously Needed (GIBBON).

No matter that we haven't managed to get one set up in the UK yet despite throwing more wobblies than a teenage jelly factory - I am thinking big. And I will chair it as well if required. Fuck it, I'd chair a sperm bank given half the chance (and a decent wedge).

We are talking to JACEVO about having the our full cost recovery template translated for them to use. Not into Japanese but into plain English. How cool is that! If we were any cooler we'd be riding a motorbike in the Great Escape. And as I speak there is an active twitterer at the back the room busy making facetious remarks. Very childish. Sarcasm is he lowest form of wit especially when contained to 140 characters.

And I am suspicious about the translator. I will say something short and pithy like "I am pleased to be here in the land of the rising gamp" and the sentence that is read back takes about
30 minutes. It's almost as if they are trying to keep me quiet while learning about something else altogether!