今日は出歩かずに家に籠っておりました。二日酔いではありませんが、やはり三杯は飲み過ぎでありました。
昼寝をしましたが座椅子で毛布ではやや寒い。
その座椅子で毛布にくるまって家の中に籠っていても世界と繋がっていろいろな方と言葉が交わせると云うのは凄いことだ！
顔本の英語クラブで、ある団地の生活を映した短いビデオを拝見した。祖母の誕生日のビデオのようで興味深く観たが何処の国の事なのか解らない。コメントを入れてお尋ねした。すぐにベラルーシとの御返事を頂いた。
もう一つの顔本クラブ、英国ブライトンの猫好きクラブでは猫の刺傷事件がメンバーの関心と同情を集めている。その猫は数ヶ所を刺されて逃げ帰ってきたそうで、手術と治療で一命は取り止めたとのことだ。
猫を誘き寄せて殺すと云う行為が珍しいことではないようで、ブライトンだけのことではないようだ。
猫のクラブに３つ入っているが、段々と嫌になってきた。猫の写真は宜しいし猫は優美で野性的で愛くるしいが猫好きの人間は嫌いになってきましたよ。
?The suburbs, where madness meets cat murder －by Eva Wisemae? Sept 18, 2018 連続猫殺し犯
There’s a killer stalking suburban London. Or is there
London
There is a serial killer stalking the suburbs here, leaving small heads in quiet gardens. Often, he keeps the tails.
When I told a friend I was writing about the Croydon cat killer, as he (or a copycat) appears to be holidaying Washington State, her lips collapsed into a little moue, and the she looked away. “What?” I pressed, and she paused before replying, earnestly, “But what if he comes for you?” It was a risk I’d considered, having just celebrated our kitten’s first birthday, but one I am willing to take, because this story － some believe the same man has killed more than 500 cats over the last four years － is compelling and terrifying. And it encourages obsession: It pricks at ancient anxieties.
In midcentury America, the suburbs were seen by some as a dangerous social experiment － this style of living brought sickness. Suburban men fell ill from the stress of commuting; suburban women, trapped at home, had it even worse. In a best-selling 1961 study the authors renamed these regions “Disturbia.”
The place of suburbs in our collective psyche has been on my mind recently, as last year, with great internal drama, I moved out of the city, got a cat for my daughter － pets, of course, traditionally being tools for children to practice grief upon － and settled all the way down. In Britain the idea of suburbia has none of the David Lynchian perversion or drama? of the United States. But it's still thought of as an in-between place, a punch line, where small neat gardens reflect the dimensions of their owners’ minds. Suffocating, but safe. Until a predator shatters the illusion.
The first deaths happened in a place called Croydon. A South London suburb that, for David Bowie, “represented everything I didn't want in my life, everything I wanted to pet away from.” It was a “complete concrete hell,” he said cheerfully in 1999. “I suppose it looks beautiful now.” (It doesn't.)
Accounts vary on when pets began to turn up on their owners’ doorsteps, cut in half, decapitated and disemboweled. But by late 2015, patterns had begun emerging － the killer appeared to be moving in centric circles around the capital. One Facebook group nicknamed him “Jack the Rippurr.” A local couple formed an improbable team of South Norwood Animal Rescue and Liberty, or Snarl. “She’s a cat person,” Tony Jenkins explained of his partner, Boudicca Rising (between them the middle-aged couple house 31). As the victims added up － Ukiyo, belly sliced open; Oscar, decapitated; Charlton, head and tail missing － Mr. Jenkins and Ms. Rising recorded the deaths, collected remains, performed post-mortems, and approached the police, but it was their petition of more than 40,000 signatures that led to an official investigation.
And for a period, the police took them seriously. Last November, a detective sergeant, Andy Collin, expressed his concerns that the killer might, eventually, “cease getting that gratification and escalate the attacks to humans, specifically vulnerable women and girls.” But today, as deaths continue to rise, more figures of authority are backing away from humans as the cause. Writing in The New Scientist this summer, Stephan Harris, a retired professor of environmental sciences at the University of Bristol, declared that the deaths that have captivated the capital for years are in fact the work of foxes. “We have known for decades that foxes chew the head and tail off carcasses, including dead cats,” he wrote, claiming no killer has been caught “because there is no ‘killer.’” (Mr. Jenkins and Ms. Rising loudly disputed this interpretation.)
And yet, somehow that does little to dispel London’s feeling of existential threat. Headlines like “Slaughter in Suburbia” have given way to stories about an increase in murdered rabbits, while the cats continue to turn up, bloodless and cleanly disemboweled. One head was left on the penalty spot of a garden of a garden football pitch. “Does he exist?” we ask ourselves, and then, “Does it matter?” We have invoked him anyway, and he lurks in shadows inside us, and in half-remembered folklore － perhaps our gardens are just his most recent hiding place.
In Michelle McNamara’s true crime best-seller “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark,” about her search for a murderer who stalked the California suburbs, it was the lamp-lit detail, more than even the crimes themselves, that stayed with me － the way the killer prowled his victims’ cul-de-sacs over decades, peering through their windows at night. The most chilling thing was the suggestion that a side effect of suburban architecture is that the houses become stages for roadside audiences after dark, who watch their inhabitants dance from kitchen to sofa, to bathroom to bed. For all the apparent safety of these homes in the sticks, it seems they have the danger built in.
A year ago, after our baby was born, my partner and I moved to the area where I grew up, to a quiet street at the end of the Northern Line where the capital opens out into golf courses and garden centers, and I immediately began boring him with much existential whining about the shame of having returned to the safety of life I’d thought left behind. Then, a month after we moved, our house was broken into. The bed was stained with muddy footprints － the burglar had turned over our furniture and opened my face cream, seemingly confused by the lack of jewelry. That night, tidying up, my partner said quietly, “I wonder what he thought of us.” The city had broadcast its dangers, using sirens and loud lights, but we learned quickly the suburbs hide theirs; here, on school fences, cartoon drawings warn of the threat of accidents and strangers’ cars in cute, childish scribbles. Now we always keep a light on.
We bought our kitten shortly after the burglary, presenting it to our child with a jangly collar and promise of distant grief. “Here you go, love!” I said to my daughter. “Death! Vaccinated, purring death with green eyes, death that thinks shoelaces are mice.” The suburbs had given us the space to teach our daughter about grief － there’s only so much loss you can fit in a one-bedroom flat. And the kitten was easy to love. She crept under our duvet at night and slept on my feet. We talked her in song, and applauded her skill in climbing curtains. It was a couple of months later that I saw the post on a neighborhood website that the cat killer had arrived.
In August, after a Guardian writer pointed out that cat killer story had “parallels with more panics,” The Croydon Advertiser reported that the writer had subsequently “been subjected to foul abuse.” That same week, Mr. Jenkins suggested that, as the killer is someone he believes move around for work, “There is certainly a possibility that a journalist” might be committing the crimes. There's a high-pitched madness here, and I don't like it, and neighbors are curfewing their cats, and there is a confluence of tensions as people look at their cats and see their own vulnerability. Our pets are where we keep the stuff we can't put anywhere else － our fawning adoration, our aspirations for security and unconditional love, our grief. In the suburbs, more than just curtains are twitching.
国内では、今日大木さんと繋がりました。
もう一つ日記に残して置きたいのがボスから発出された私めの紹介メールです。社名は伏せましたがあとは原文ですよ！セールストークで下駄を履いていますが、それでも嬉しいですね。英語もっと勉強しようっと！
?Dear All,
I am very pleased to inform you that Mr. Jun Segawa joined WWW Japan as of November 1st as our new customs adviser.
Segawa-san has over 40 year working experience in Japan Tokyo Customs and 6 years experience in a Japan customs broker. ?While he was in Tokyo Customs, he acted consecutively as Deputy Director of the Customs Clearance Division, the Head of the Customs Brokerage Inspection Office, and the Head of the Customs HS Classification Office, while assuming other responsibilities in his career in Japan Customs. We believe his experience will provide us with a tremendous amount of practical knowledge and insight regarding customs practices and audits, and technical expertise in more complex import matters. Segawa-san has worked in Philippines for three years for the BOC's cargo risk assessment and screening program, so he is very fluent in English. This will also help us to communicate directly with you and foreign clients. ? ? ??
Please join me in welcoming Segawa-san to our team!?
