...because I've finally decided to write about food.
And I'm going to do it even though I'm probably one of the worst candidates to compile a culinary guide.
The fact is, I don't know much about food. There are blogs that whip up lines such as 'Served in a small Staub cocotte, the livers were buttery soft'. This will not be one of them. (Those livers sound great though.)
I don't know much simply because, for most of my life, I haven't been interested enough to learn.
It's a bit odd, given that I grew up in Singapore, where eating is the national hobby that cuts across all social strata. Over and over, I listened to diners talk about the meal that they were eating, the meals that they'd eaten and the meals that they planned to eat. Eating all the while.
And I was mystified. I'd be happy if the dish in front of me happened to hold something tasty but I couldn't go on and on about it. And I just couldn't seem to find the enthusiasm to seek out new dishes and new restaurants. Or to boldly go where no food critic had gone before.
Or to boldly drive to a neighbouring country for pig innard soup, as a friend suggested we do.
(Anyway, the only kind of pig innard I like is the liver. Whether it's served in a Staub cocotte or not. The other bits, you can keep.)
In other words, the only blogger with worse food writer credentials than mine would be someone whose nutritional needs are all met by air, water and sunlight.
Or, in technical terms, what we experts call a plant.
But I came to Japan in the spring of 2005 and in the space of two weeks, everything I ate worked. If I were to rank the things that passed my lips, the meal with the lowest score would still be considered competent. And at the other end, the food not only went off the scale but broke it and turned it into fertiliser for baby scales.
Though no angels showed up, it was still an epiphany.
Or rather, a series of little epiphanies and after a while, I learned to recognise the process. Step 1: insert food into mouth. A normal, everyday motion; no cause for further comment. Step 2: something starts to happen to the tastebuds. Step 3: the whole body stiffens - what's going on with those tastebuds? Step 4: the whole body is stiff. It can't chew, swallow or spit the food out. Step 5: nothing is going to make me spit it out because...we have a winner!
It's a bit like having a heart attack and being revived with defibrillators all at once. Let's see... If a heart attack is cardiac arrest, what's the tastebud equivalent? Tongue arrest? Tonguegular arrest?
I like tonguegular arrest; let's go with that.
In that 2005 trip, the most spectacular tonguegular arrests happened in Kyoto. Though it's Osaka that has the gourmand reputation and Tokyo, all those Michelin stars, it's Kyoto - refined, restrained, balanced on the edge of a knife - that makes me do what I thought I never would: write about food.
What I'd really like to do is come up with food trail maps, just like those sightseeing guides for walking tours. And in an ideal world, the city's tourism authorities would fund the whole enterprise.
But it doesn't look like it's going to happen and I can't really approach publishers with a book proposal because of, well...what I said in the second line of this post.
Still, with little funds and even less knowledge, I'll do what I can anyway because when you discover magic, it's only human to want to share it.
(It's also human to want to keep it to yourself. If I find a great place with only four tables, it may come under this category.)
So this blog will be about the shops, restaurants, cafes and holes in the wall that make me glad that my nutrional needs aren't met by air, water and sunlight.
There will be recommendations. There will be addresses. There will be, if I remember to take pictures before digging in and making a mess of it, pictures. And if I'm feeling especially diligent, there will be maps. But not the fancy ones you can enlarge and shrink with your mouse. My maps will be blob-and-line sketches on the closest bit of paper at hand because blogging alone is testing the limits of my technological capabilities.
But despite the negatives I'm racking up - little money, less knowledge, computer skills inherited from the Stone Age - I may be the right person to talk about food, after all.
Because if something can wake up a culinary dullard like me, it has to be magic, right?
