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This year’s Cowley Road carnival will feature “60ft puppets” and a new launch event on Friday night, announces organisers, as £90,000 additional funding from the Arts Council is revealed.

Oxford’s annual Cowley Road Carnival will be even bigger and better this year after news arrives that the Arts Council has awarded the charity an additional £90,000 toward the cost of funding arts events around Oxford.

Johannah Aynsley, executive director of Cowley Road Works, the charity which has been running the carnival since 2009, told the Oxford Times, “We are delighted to receive this funding - the Arts Council now believes that carnival is a valid platform for sharing the arts and I think that's a step change in philosophy.”

Of the £90,000, £43,000 of the Art’s council funding will be put towards a launch event in collaboration with Emergency Exit Arts. “We are hoping they will bring 60ft puppets for the launch, which is expected to happen in the grounds of Magdalen College School,” said Aynsley. "The £43,000 will also cover the cost of creating huge festival flags."

The remaining funding will be used to fund projects including a slam-poetry training scheme, a trainee carnival producer scheme in collaboration with Oxford Brookes, and a Fanzine created by Young Women’s Music Project, who were featured last year in our documentary for Creamer TV.

The £90,000 from the Arts Council will be added to sponsorship from nearby Oxford Brooke’s University and a £30,000 grant from the City Council. Attendees will also be encouraged to 'to pay a pound to keep Cowley Road Carnival around'

Following the controversial cessation of Bristol’s St Paul’s Carnival in 2015, Cowley Road has been the the second largest carnival in the country for the last two years, behind only Nottinghill Carnival in London. Despite this, it remains little known outside the city.

The Cowley Road is known in Oxford for its ethnically and economically diverse population. Its large Afro-Caribbean and South-Asian populations lend the area its many popular restaurants and bars, including the Jamaican Hi-Lo, a rumoured popular haunt for David Cameron during his time at Oxford University.

In recent years the road has become well-known for its music venues, including the O2 Academy and the Bullingdon Pub, playing host to many new and more established artists that visit the city.

The rich culture and vibrancy of the road makes the area a popular destination for Oxford students looking to live out of University in their second and third years. In recent years some have worried that the road’s “bohemian chic” identity has attracted the middle classes and driven house prices up to some of Oxford’s highest.

In 2016 I went to Cowley Road Carnival to talk to people about their reaction to the Brexit referendum outcome the previous fortnight. Over the course of the day we talked to people from all different backgrounds and walks of life about what the Cowley Road means to them and why the annual carnival matters. The outcome I think is a beautiful snapshot into a modern community that derives its strength from difference and diversity and, at least on this occasion, one or two drinks.

You can watch the film below.

So had a really nice moment now where two of the naughty third years had gone missing and i was playing tennis and the teacher came out to find me because she thought i would know where they are because they really like me and we always chat. But no they're still missing.

It is nice that they all like me now though, especially after the beginning of the year. I feel like it took time to strike the right balance between cool and carefree with the kids while also not looking like a workshy spick to the other teachers. Now even the badasses come and linger around me and chat random shit about trainers in Japanese that I don’t understand but maybe that’s part of the allure, I’m so disinterested I can’t even be bothered to understand. 

I also love shaking hands, which they just think is normal for English people now, and also freaking them out with eye contact. Like really I’m only 7 years older than some of them so I think at first that’s why I was intimidated by bravado and stuff but now I’ve developed this weird authoritativeness that I impose by staring for just a bit too long and singing to myself in the corridor.

But yeah I don’t think I’ve ever had as much fun as being professionally condescending. I think like the first time I confiscated something was probably a turning point in my life. You can’t know until you’ve done it how good it feels to just put out your hand and without saying anything have someone hand over a paper ball or note or whatever and just walk away with it. I don’t know if it’s the fact that they respect my authority or if it’s just a straight forward power rush, but let’s just say at this point I’m probably confiscating at least one thing a day. Sometimes I just take student’s pens and shit and then give them back at the end of the lesson. If you’ve never confiscated a basketball, I honestly don’t think you’ve lived.

I had the nicest day today because the kids were off schedule to take part in sports tournaments and I got in with about 4 hours sleep and an unsettling mix of alcohol and caffeine in my body and was just about to hand myself over to the school nurse when I had the clever idea of asking if I could go out and support the tennis team. Genius idea by me of course because on my own four wheels there’s no way anyone can keep track of me. I did actually go to the tennis for about an hour and then, you guessed it, home to beddy-poos and a good hour of caffeinated trance with purple eye mask elasticated to my face. Stupid really because I feel no less shaky and then I had to drive the whole way back to the tennis club and then spend like 10 minutes at table tennis and 10 minutes at the football, just in case someone did try to corroborate my story and I could obfuscate that lost hour and a half with my unnegateable acitivity. What can I say I'm a criminal. A very anxious one, but a criminal nonetheless.

At both the soccer and then tennis today though, different kids, from different schools asked me a question I've not encountered yet and I was struck by the coincidence. I get a lot of the do you have a girlfriend, do you want a Japanese wife questioning, which reflects on the centrality of family in Japan but which obviously sends me into a panic about homophobic subtexts. But today was the first time I was asked how much I earned. En masse. Well twice. But one of them was like give me money. But to be fair it was a joke. 

I don't have anyone to talk about the actually interesting things that happen with my job so here are my theories in order of probability. 

1) There must have been a TV story about how much foreign teachers earn in japan, I know its contentious because we do earn more than we should. 

2) I was wearing Adidas trainers so maybe because it was like a casual day they all thought I look cool and flash and wanted to know how I could afford my extravagant (second hand) footwear. 

3) I looked so hungover and miserable the only possible incentive they could imagine for me to come to Japan would be a significant pay packet. 

4) My wallet was in my back pocket and looking hefty. 

5) A homophobic attack (I’m working out the details). 

It would be nice wouldn't it if there was one person who was in the same position as me who I could muse about these things with. Not moan (although that would be nice too) but you know just discuss.

Which is why I decided not to stay another year like two days after I wrote that and never posted it. Hooray. I think I need a bit of England after all these psychological mind games with myself. Reminds me of this documentary my friend told me about about a girl with seven personalities. Each day of the week she wakes up and thinks she's someone else. On Monday she's Susan the hairdresser, on Tuesday Barry the Bricklayer, on Wednesday she's Nathan the frontman of an ageing heavy metal band. 

Did I ever tell you the story about my mum's client who refused to open her mail unless it was addressed to Kate Bush. For some reason this woman wasn't in an asylum and it fell on my mum to contact the council and ask them to change the name on the envelope. Apparently after that everything was fine. 

Ah so I'm sat at my desk just musing and having imaginary conversations, usually arguments, in my head and then come up with a really witty, usually very sassy, put down and catch myself whispering it out loud and doing sassy faces ("You can take a horse to water, but you can't make me be your friend"). Sometimes I even laugh. Like at the beginning of every month I make a poster with all the names of the teachers who have birthdays that month written on it for the staffroom, and I found it really funny today because the only teacher whose birthday it is this month is the really serious vice-principal who I only ever talk to if I want something like holiday, or lunch. And I made like this really massive Easter themed colorful cartoon happy birthday poster and stuck it up in the kitchen which isn't that funny but it is because imagine if I did that because I was trying to butter him up. Eurgh, what the fuck is that metaphor.

I do cycle through facial expressions though. Even when I'm writing this. I just did a full on screw face for that eurgh for instance. And when everyone else is having a meeting in Japanese and I'm just playing imaginary arguments to myself in my head and getting heated and laughing at my own jokes in a way that must make me look a bit crazy. It's probably quite a good reputation though, to be a bit crazy, not eccentric, that sounds attentiony, just a bit odd. But not socially incompetent. Just unpredictable. I'm not sure where the line is drawn between crazy and foreigner but I know people find it amusing that I'm friends with all the grannies in my village and that I keep bringing plants home and smile like an idiot when I don't understand and mutter to myself. O and then at lunchtime I just went and ate some noodles down by the river and literally by chance the place where I was sat was outside a teacher from my schools house and she came out and was like what are you doing here? 

So yeah obviously I've still got the thing of wasting my life here because it's such a change of pace from England and I spend all my time in an office etc. BUT look at these things I'm starting to realise that already make it worth me being here suffocating in a self imposed isolation. 

1) I realised I am actually great at writing, I just read back over everything I've ever written and subsequently wrote off as self-indulgent under-researched tripe AND it's all brilliant, like i'm good at writing. I don't want to give anyone else any credit for this but that bit in The Glass Bead Game where its like you need to be a bit stupid to be a good leader and that's why academics should never be leaders or do anything is quite true actually, like all this time I was saying o I'm so embarrased I could have such strong opinions about things I knew so little about, but like mine and Louise’s new years resolution (be more ignorant) I think it's actually so important to believe in things really strongly and argue them forcefully even if you change your mind or realise the next day really we dont know anything - like this blog I'm writing now! But imagine if I'd stayed in England and just gone on to something equally unfulfilling after VICE having accepted my conclusion from those three months that I'm simply a shit writer. And I said that to Louise loads as well but now I'm like wait I'm great at writing. Whatever that thing is I'll write it. So it's good because I think the next thing is gonna be aiming bigger than articles I'll do like a novel or something or a screenplay, but I should also write something about this naked man festival I’m going to for Vice. 

So that's number 1, number 2 is I'm great at most things and I have a great personality. This is really an extension of number one because I realised it when I was thinking about how great at writing I am. When I'm true to myself (yeah that bollcoks again) I think I am an exceptional individual. As much as anyone else is of course, but in a specific way to do with me. The problem is because I'm so insecrure it means I'm really impressionable to more secure people. That means I have to be really careful in new/ uncomfortable situations if there are secure people around because I have a tendency to kind of become a weak impression of them. This is my number one complaint about Robin, which is unfair because its not his fault really but because we have overlapping traits and he's quite secure I'd say he tends to bring out a kind of mini-him in me, one that is needy and drinks loads and also through quite minutaie characterists which I resent so much but can't resist except occasionally through a really angry version of me that isn't exactly better. But because we are similar in some ways like our humour is very similar I find it really hard to draw the line between what kind of things are me and what are him and I hate it hate it hate it because I think my personality's great when I'm doing it properly.

What else. Ok 3 I've learnt that I'm doing a crazy adventurous thing that I won't regret and will prob be a big section of my biography. You can try and take it away from me and compare it to a gap year or a working holiday but it's not really it's probably one of the most adventurous things you can do precisely because its not travelling, it's living and staying in one place for fucking ages as a person living there. And Japan is like the strangest culture in the world because it developed in a vacuum with no outside influence and then like adopted this butchered version of capitalism to become one of the most powerful countries in the world. In terms of self-education I don't think theres a culture so different to ours. It's like observing civilisation if it had taken an entirely different trajectory and it's making me a much more rounded person than anyone else.

So I was thinking about how Japan is like a really egoless society in the way that a lot of pseudo spiritual people in the west kind of aspire to, but it’s interesting because as far as I can tell in my limited generalisations, it doesn’t seem to bring the enlightenment everyone expects. Actually it just seems to be like an alternative way of organising large groups of people living on top of one another.

Which is something to be ambivalent about then I guess, except I do also think the kind of ego-less sociality Japan is built on can sometimes veer into people acting out of fear. Sounds kinda bad and I don't particularly like it but the idea that everyone works for one another means people can be sometimes overly adverse to telling others what to do for fear of hurting the group harmony. Which, in turn, means that people can sometimes communicate in quite underhand ways and you have to learn to read minds a bit or face being shunned. It also means you have to be very perceptive to the influence of your behvaiours because maintaining the harmony is so importnat.

Because people are never upfront about things a lot of my less nuanced foreigner friends basically just see Japanese people as quite passive aggressive, but at the same time I kind of think its the flipside to a large scale industrial society operating with a very social philosophy next to the kind of organisation in the west where relationships are shared with money and people are at best the medium. Everything in Japan revolves around community and other people, it doesn't work if people are isolated from another.

I do sometimes wonder if the stupendous emotional swings I go on is healthy and middle way and all that Buddhist stuff but as far as I can remember those times when my life hasn't been super rollercoaster up and down I've got really bored and found a way to get depressed about that. Yoshi is really good though because he's so fucking calm and it has the ability to lower my energy so I'm not constantly looking for something to do. I love doing nothing but for some reason I can't do nothing on my own for very long without getting weird and anxious, or maybe that's just here. Because I'm out of the routine of doing nothing it's difficult to just do nothing on the weekend and then go back to doing something in the week, you know.

I'm like half way through that glass bead game book by the way which is a miracle because its so fucking long and dry but there are some good titbits. It's very anti-revolutionary in a way, the kind of thing I would have got really annoyed by two years ago, like the reasoning that archaic institutions are tried and tested and not just obsolete legacies. It's not conservative, but quite moderate if you know what I mean. The last time I had a philosophy it was along the lines of tear everything up and start again, but then like Plinio I was snared by the glamour of an idea (anarchy) and the charisma of an individual (Russell Brand, my hero), oh and a lack of any knowledge of the world. Just living now as a pretty average person with a comfortable life and a full on job, I can see why people are like stop tearing shit up, just let me work for 40 hours and week and have a house and some food and maybe a bath and then just leave everything else the same. But yeah there are also some good bits about religion and meditating that I liked.

My god i just cant with this one teacher at my school. She’s just such a nervous wreck. Like the most anxious person I've ever met. I swear her head is literally going to explode from the vibration of her stuttering. Actually its more like spluttering. And at first I was like I feel sorry for this woman because if I was that much of a spluttering wreck i would hate myself, like behind the total ineptitude she must just be like fucking punching herself in the face every second of everyday. But i cant even because its so annoying and I have to work with her. And without fail every single lesson her total anxiety ends up causing a ridiculous sitation like she'll get me to repeat something but point at the wrong thing, or ask me to change something in my plan but tell me to change the wrong thing. And then inevitably that will set off another spluttering attack and it will take another 5 minutes to get her to calm down. 

So normally I try to reduce my involvement in her lessons as much as possible so I can just be a calm force and lower the energy of the room while she's flapping about. But this week she watched another one of my lessons with a different year where we played Jeopardy and she wanted me to make a version for her class but then she sat down next to me and micromanaged the whole thing like specifying each question. And OMG shes so fucking stupid she thought the level was too high so she made every question so easy and I was just like you know it ruins the point of the game if every team gets every question right, but at this point I'm like whatever she wants you know. So obviously we play the game and every team gets every question right and she's ruined this game I spent days making on powerpoint and which all my other classes love, and then she's like can I copy this game and she literally copied five different versions of it off my laptop onto hers so now I can't even have it as my backup lesson plan which is what I was gonna do. And I'm like I don't really care that much but let me run my own game in my lesson you know, not least because you have no idea what you're doing. She's so fucking nervous I think she's worried about what will happen if a team loses. Like it's not a game if everyone wins.

And then she's like can we add a bonus question for what time does MR Goodman's mother go to bed, and I'm like cool if we must, and I write it into the powerpoint and everything and it's worth 500 dollars which is worth 100 more than the highest question. And after the first lesson she comes spluttering up to me like "aaa-a-a-a-a-a-a-a can you make this slide blank" so I'm like cool lady I have no investment in making this game good anymore so whatever you say and I make the bonus point blank assuming she wants to ask a different question there. So then we play the game and we get to the bonus question and two ridiculously stupid things happen. 1) She clicks onto the bonus slide and its blank and she's like oh where is the question and I'm like you told me to delete it and she starts flapping and it turns out she meant get rid of the bit on the slide where it says its worth 500 dollars. So anyway eventually she writes the same question up on the board and then, 2), she makes that final point worth 3000 dollars. 3000 dollars. Like baring in mind the most money a team had was 1000 dollars at this point. Like literally what is the point. You just need to know what time my mum goes to bed to win the whole thing. And we were playing deductive scoring anyway so if a team got the answer wrong they lost 3000 dollars anyway. OMG I can't even. I know it's ridiculous but you just need to see her flapping about. At first I was so dismissive because I just couldnt stand her and then I got all sympathetic and Japanese about it and now she fucking ruined my game I just can't deal with it. 

Fahmi's coming like end of this month, he booked his flights ages ago and I can't take holiday so the plan is he's just gonna come and stay with me a couple days while I'm at work and chill during the day go for walks use my bike then do something in the evening when I get back. And then on the weekend ima try and get some friends from the city to all go out and then go on a day trip saturday and back to mine for my choir performance on sunday. Also he's bringing his camera so I'm gonna get him to film the choir. But yeah so he's only gonna be with me for like five days and then travel in Japan the rest of the time, and I think he's coming with his friend but I've not met her. 

Today’s a tuesday so I'm at my little school again, which I just love, like I tend to be busier here but the atmosphere is so relaxed and I don't know I kind of feel like because the other school is really bad like badly behaved students there can sometimes be a kind of adversarial vibe like I have to (slightly slightly) mentally prepare myself for each lesson, and I don't get that at all here. Also the most beautiful snow this morning, makes getting up at some god forsaken hour (7 lol) almost bearable. 

Had the nicest chat with Fahmi last night. So excited to see him, it's so nice to check in with someone after so long and be reassured that they’re still the same. He's still just floating through life starting projects he'll never finish and getting moral qualms about silly things. Recently he went to the Calais jungle for a week and made a film but now he says the whole thing makes him depressed because its like poverty tourism. I'm like well yea, but it's funny cos his heart is so true and he gets effected by things so easily. 

So i have this thing about textbooks because when you were a kid did you kind of believe that there was a world out there where Ahmed went to the shop to buy 3 oranges and an apple and Deepa used percentages to calculate how much more pocket money she got than Xinzhi. I feel like those textbooks actually affected me more than children's stories in my conception of the world as a child because like I think if you would have asked me at the time I would have laughed at the tweeness of those sorts of questions but at the same time I felt like somewhere out there there were people living like that. People who were most consumed by simple arithmetic and whose family and social lives revolved around asking for directions in French or figuring out whether a 2 for 1 deal was cheaper than buying unbranded products. And I don't think it's like I feel sad that that's not how the world is, I think it's just like I feel nostalgic for a time when I thought the world was that simple.

So like part of it is it made me feel like I lived in this simple friendly world, and that maths and english and all education was just in the service of mundane day to day tasks. Like I had no sense that if you kept studying maths you would start trying to unlock the building blocks of life, I just thought the end goal was how to go shopping on your own. And it is kind of, like for some people that is the most education they will ever get and that's the most service they will ever put it into use for so like cool theres nothing you can do about that. But like it really presented the world as this struggleless place without politics or famine or war or struggling for purpose or anything like that, and I'm not saying there's anything you can do about that (like I dont think they should make maths questions about arms deals) but I'm just saying I really fell for that universe. 

And even now when I look at these textbooks in school with these picture perfect cartoons I feel nostalgic like I've confused my actual childhood with the ones from the textbook but maybe that's because I kind of have like at that age I reckon those narratives really drive you, you never question as a kid the fact that you're going to school for 8 hours a day and then on the weekends you just get dragged around Sainsbury's for the big shop. Because 1) the world is still exciting, but 2) there are no yearnings for anything beyond that, that is the picture perfect lifestyle of Xinzhi and Ahmend and Deepa and her older brother who's twice the age of Ahmed's sister but half the age of Xinzhi. And that's just what my life was going to be like for the rest of time and there weren't any big questions or struggles, I'd be a cartoon doctor or a cartoon postman with my cartoon wife and dog and a simple family who took holidays in France and obsessed over train timetables. 

Like I'm glad I'm not a simpleton but at the same time I would obviously be happier if I was as dumb as when I was 10.  For instance this worksheet I'm making now. 

(w)     I get up at seven.

(a)     I leave home at seven forty-five.

(t)     I go to school by car.

(c)     I get to school at eight fifteen.

(h)     We have lunch at twelve fifty-five.

(i)      I study Japanese after school.

(n)     I usually read a book after dinner.

(g)     I go to bed at about eleven thirty.

Like theres something quite nice about being able to distill my life into something so basic but it also makes me so sad that this isn't the reality of my life, of all the worrying and not being able to sleep and thinking about the point of things and homesickness. LIke I'm not saying I'm sad all the time I'm just saying theres something quite heartbreaking about this sanatised version of life and my inability to live up to it.

Eurgh theyve blocked more things on my computer at work. Before it was just facebook and twitter but now its Youtube and dropbox and loads of clip art sites for some reason. Kinda stupid cos I can still get my news sites and PDFs of books it just means I can't use videos in my lessons and have to store everything on a USB. Ive no idea why they do that though anyway. Japanese people would never go on facebook at work not because theyre not supposed to but because it wouldnt even occur to them. 

I mean it's an entire society built on the mythology of work, flunking undermines their whole belief system. I heard someone say Japan's like communism pretending to be capitalism, its communism but they use the idea of money and profit as euphemisms for group propogation, like "we must work harder to increase profit margins", when what theyre actualy saying is "we must work to show our commitment to the good of the nation". 

Anyway perversly I don't really mind. There was talk of blocking all internet access at work and all the foreign teachers in the prefecture were groaning about it but I was kinda like cool this wwill be a challenge. Like I'll have to make all my lessons by hand and donwload PDFs of books at home and bring them in on a USB. Lol. I guess beating the system is kind of what I've built my whole personality on. 

That said I am really warming to the work world. Yeah it can feel inane, and time-filling, but unlike what I was arguing before I'm not sure there are two ways around that. Japan might be better because although they work harder, I dont think work culture has been eroded as much as it has in England. Like there's still a camraderie and being in a school its really good because the job is inherently really social. 

I was thinking like it's funny, before, the way I tried to escape the trap of 21st century ennui was by constantly doing new things, never slowing down, leaving as soon as I got bored. Like if I think about how much travelling I've done, ridiculous, and I hardly have more than a few photos to show for it. I think now all I was actually doing all that time was fueling my lethargy, constantly trying to get the next rush, something new exciting that I hadn't seen before and it was so superficial and surface high and I was actually doing exactly what I wanted to rebel against which in the end was slavery to consumption. It might not have been consuming products but it was the same ideology of out with the old, in with the new.