I got up early this morning and read my email. That was a mistake. Sometimes my email contains things I would rather not read and I don’t want to start my day feeling angry. So, to take my mind off this I decided to find something to do that would be useful but would also allow me to stop thinking for a while. I ended up mending the hem on Marty’s new trousers. He had tried to do this with a combination of safety pins and some sort of clip like thing that is usually used to hold sheets of paper together. I used a needle and thread.

Some women take toiletries with them from hotel rooms – I take sewing kits. I’m not sure which hotel the kit I used came from but it was really good. Usually these contain one or two needles. This one contained six and all the needles were already threaded. This small improvement really impressed me. I could have threaded the needle myself but sometimes they are awkward and not having to do this saves me time. And if you need to sew in your hotel room you are probably trying to repair a button, zip or hem of something that you had thought you could just put on and wear.

Sewing was one of the things I learnt to do at school. I think in the past I have dismissed some of the things that I learnt at school because I don’t use them directly. It’s easy to think to look back at some seemingly obscure thing that I was taught and wonder what the point was. But the things we learnt in our past become the foundation on which we build new learning.

I have been trying to decide what to study next. As I have recently completed a law degree I was seriously considering a law masters in a computer related area. But that was mainly because it seemed to be a logical step as I was planning on combining two areas of previous knowledge. I think I would be able to do it but I don’t have any passion for the law at the minute. I considered a music degree but really I need to attend a university to do that properly and my limited Japanese prevents me from doing that at this time. I think I’ve decided on philosophy. I asked Marty to print me out the application forms last night. His response was to tell me that it was already hard enough to argue with me and did I really need to learn about logic as well?