tomroyal.com

Wrote this for the Government e-petitions thing, but it's prohibited by the terms and conditions*. Perhaps the private sector could step in?

Education Secretary Michael Gove MP has proposed that, in this Jubilee Year, the UK taxpayer should fund the construction of a new Royal Yacht at a cost of around £60M.

Although this would provide a welcome boost to our shipbuilding industry, the UK should, in 2012, be aiming higher. We, the undersigned, propose that the money be spent on constructing a 'Jubilee Rocket'. The Jubilee Rocket would showcase the best of the UK's innovation and technology industries, and its construction would create many thousands of jobs.

By aiming straight for the Sun, it would surpass rival space programmes, putting the UK back at the forefront of international innovation. The rocket would be one-way only (these are times of austerity), and the prestigious role of pilot would, naturally, be awarded to Mr Gove.

* 'Jokes' are banned. I was actually rather serious.

IT is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London," wrote Henry James in 1881. "It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent."

Every so often I receive an email from the Press Complaints Commission with a list of its latest adjudications. As a tech journalist it's not as useful as the ASA's list*, but it is interesting reading nonetheless. And last week, while scrolling back, I came across a really remarkable bit of work. Witness this headline and lede, from the Daily Mail:

Most Britons still oppose gay marriage. Simple enough. And the footer to the piece:

The Daily Mail is happy to clarify that only a minority of Britons support gay marriage. But, hang on, it's a larger minority (46%) than those who oppose it (45%). So it's not correct to say that a majority of Britons oppose gay marriage. So the headline is utterly wrong, and so is the lede paragraph. Call the Press Complaints Commission!

Except that, well, somebody already did. Credit to Will Knock, who saw the original piece back in September, elegantly pulled apart its lies, and registered a formal complaint. The PCC duly considered his complaint and, according to its notes, arranged for the 'correction' quoted above to be published:

RESOLUTION:

The matter was resolved when the PCC negotiated the publication of the following correction:

A recent article based on an Office for National Statistics report stated that most Britons still oppose gay marriage. While the ONS report did show that only a minority of Britons are in support of gay marriage, the more detailed statistics from the EU pollon which it was based suggest that the percentages for and against are about the same – 46% and 45% respectively – with a further 9% who ‘don't know'. We are happy to clarify the position.

And thus, to everybody's relief, it's all sorted out. Except that the article itself remains unchanged. And except that the Mail has published only a pathetic, contorted get-out statement (Jane has three apples, John has two apples – so I am happy to clarify that the number of apples held by John and Jane – two and three respectively – are about the same) which does its utmost to conceal the relative size of the figures, and which is buried below the piece.

And of course except that the headline, which is still as wrong as BREAKING: EARTH FLAT, ORBITED BY SUN, ELVIS LIVES IN LEWISHAM still stands there, lying to every person who reads it. Well, that's a 'resolution' of sorts, I suppose.

Good journalism strives to always be correct, even if the result looks silly (witness the NYT's 30/12 My Little Pony clarification, for example). Even lazy journalism attempts not to be wrong because journalists don't generally like to be seen as stupid (witness all the hastily amended 'Wendi Deng joins Rupert Murdoch on Twitter' pieces of the other week).

Episodes such as this prove, once again, that the Daily Mail sits some distance below even that standard, and the PCC evidently lacks either the will or the ability to make it do better.

(Original DM piece, with unchanged headline, still available here.)

* ASA adjudications redux: Broadband company X (BCX) complains about claims of advert from broadband company Y (BCY). BCX complaint upheld, declares it a victory for transparency and the consumer. Next week, BCY complains about similar advert from BCX. Complaint upheld, declared as victory for transparency etc. Repeat until death.

I'm sick. Not, thankfully, depressed – just suffering some kind of headachey, throat-swelley, leg-wobble-y, virus-y lurgy. And so, in between struggling to the kettle and fending cats away from the Night Nurse, I've been catching up on some reading. Yesterday, this:

The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

- Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace

Which is both wonderfully written and, given its context all these years later, even more sad.

Pic: The Telegraph covers the original press release

Back in March 2011 I wrote about a sudden flood of news articles claiming that Facebook was being cited in 20% of US divorce cases. After doing a little digging it transpired that the whole thing had sprung from the continual re-hashing, muddling and alteration of a UK press release of late 2009 (which even got a 'Bad PR' nomination here).

That original release, from a service called Divorce Online, claimed that one in five divorces cited Facebook as a cause. It got picked up, twisted, confused, muddled in with other statistics, then shot around the web from ZDNet to CBC News to the Guardian as a US-based non-story.

And now, like a dumb-news-fail-Zombie, it's back.

Divorce Online, having flirted with variations on the theme – gaming causes divorce, anyone?* – appears to have decided to stick with the classics, and at the end of 2011 it issued the same Facebook-causes-divorce news as a press release. The twist: this time over one-third of divorces cite Facebook as a cause.

A survey carried out by UK divorce website Divorce-Online in December 2009 found that 20% of behaviour petitions contained the word “Facebook.”.

A follow up survey in December 2011 has found that number has increased alarmingly during 2011 to 33% of behaviour petitions have been found to contain Facebook in the behaviour allegations. 5000 petitions were queried as in the 2009 sample.

The most common reasons where Facebook was used in the allegations were once again relating to spouses behaviour with the opposite sex, but also spouses now using Facebook to make comments about their exes once they had separated and using their public walls as weapons in their divorce battle.

And, lo and behold, the story's off and running again. Enter Cnet:

A third of British divorces name Facebook as a factor. Thirty-three per cent of divorce petitions in 2011 include the word Facebook, according to new figures.

The most common reasons for unhappy hubbies and wrathful wives to include Facebook in their divorce proceedings are inappropriate messages to members of the opposite sex, comments posted about each other, and Facebook friends reporting when a spouse has been up to no good.

And repeat offender ZDnet:

Summary: Facebook is cited in 33 percent of divorces in the United Kingdom. This is for the year 2011: the statistic increased from 20 percent for the year 2009. Will it be over 50 percent by 2015?

Facebook is increasingly being blamed as a reason for, or as evidence when, filing for divorce. In 2011, 33 percent of behavior petitions contained the name of the social network; this is a whopping increase from 2009, when only 20 percent mentioned Facebook.

And even the LA Times:

Status update: Facebook breaking up a third of UK marriages

So much for marital bliss. In Great Britain it's all about the Facebook dis.

Apparently, there's no such thing as a no-fault divorce across the pond. Facebook is taking the blame for breaking up a third of marriages in which "unreasonable behavior" was a factor.

The popular social networking site is getting an unfriendly rap because it's a major way that spouses uncover incriminating messages and photos.

And so on and so on. The fascinating thing, though, is how every single outlet has managed to take a story that is, if utterly inconsequential, at least factually correct, and make it simply wrong.

The original press release from Divorce Online makes no claim that one-third of UK divorces have been caused by Facebook, or cite Facebook – simply that Facebook showed up in one third of the the petitions it examined in this year's 'follow up survey'. The data being searched was, as the MD was happy to clarify when I emailed him, all submitted via his Divorce Online website.

So the truth – that over one third of some petitions submitted to an online divorce website (and so by, at the very least, those with access to the internet – one might suspect they are even fans of doing things online) mention the word 'Facebook' – is turned into 'One third of all UK/British divorces cite Facebook', which is an altogether grander and entirely unproven claim. Slow handclap, guys.

Special credit goes to ZDNet for this:

What’s important here is not the actual fraction of divorces (33 percent) Facebook is being blamed for, but the fact it is growing (from 20 percent to 33 percent). Back in December 2009, Facebook was blamed for 20 percent of divorces in the US. It’s impossible to rate the accuracy of these numbers without analyzing every single divorce case in both countries.

That is, of course, a link to the March story, which is itself corrected to state that it relies on the 2009 stats from Divorce Online. Which were UK stats, not US. And from the same source as this article. And it's not impossible to rate the accuracy of either: you just ask the people who sent the press release how they came up with the numbers.

Kudos to the PR agency, though, which has managed to get its client mentioned all over the place for, presumably, the cost of an online survey, simply by re-working the idea that did well in 2009. If it ain't broke, etc.

Killing Zombie News once and for all is, of course, relatively simple: journalists just need to read the press releases they receive, then check the facts behind them rather than immediately reblogging the same stuff and sitting back to await the happy buzz of rising Google Analytics. But that takes time and effort. So, watch this space: I have a sneaky feeling I know what we'll be reading in late December 2012.

–

Update: once again, the zombie news is up and shambling. Special congratulations to Forbes.com, which really should know better:

One-third of 2011 divorce cases in England implicated Facebook as a cause, according to a survey conducted by a U.K.-based divorce website. The 5,000 people polled cited three reasons for listing Facebook in divorce petitions, including sending inappropriate messages to the opposite sex, posting negative comments about exes on the social network, and friends disclosing a spouse’s behavior.

While Digital Trends again manages to compare the latest 'data' with the same stuff from two years ago, as misreported in March via that AAML release:

According to a similar study conducted by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers during 2010, over 80 percent of members have used social networking evidence during a divorce case.

.. and we should also mention Mashable, which although managing to avoid the common mistake of spinning the statistics out to represent the entire UK, does seem to have invented a new form of churnalism: reading stuff from the press release with some swanky graphics and chromakey work:

Great work, all.

* Yes, the Daily Mail ran with that one (warning, hateful website link)

Because these are ridiculously hard, if not impossible, to find on the TFL website, I've put the weekly, monthly and annual costs in a spreadsheet:

Data from from a PDF letter published here. Monthly and Annual rates calculated per that document's instructions. Thanks to Rachel H at Londonist for the link.

I started 2011 in Las Vegas, covering the Consumer Electronics Show and, amongst other things, attempting to record a piece to camera in front of an occasionally exploding artificial volcano (it's all here). Since then, it's been a fascinating, if unusual, year. A few months later I was filming a robot monkey in Taiwan (covering Computex 2011), but around the same time something even odder than that happened -  I took a temporary step away from daily work in tech journalism and joined a small team bringing the British Journal of Photography  to the iPad.

The following six months have taken the app a long way: from sketches and mockups through UI prototypes and dummy issues, out of the country and back, via Quark, Xcode, a whole lot of HTML, MySQL, PHP and jQuery, a couple of tablets, three versions of InDesign and two busted Macs but, finally, we launched a huge, free debut issue in September. This month we released the first paid-for edition, along with Apple newsstand subscriptions, a free Preview Edition and, last but not least, a custom-made iPad edition of Computeractive, the UK's biggest selling computer magazine, also in iOS Newsstand.

Oh, and I launched a few apps of my own, too.

And now, just shy of Christmas we're closing the year with the BJP at the top of Apple's New and Noteworthy list, with well over 20,000 downloads and just announced as one of the ten best news and magazine apps in Europe by research firm iMonitor. It's time to wrap up, tidy up, clear the servers, fix the limping Macs, and look across the plans for 2012. Robot monkeys or not, it should be interesting.

I've now been learning Japanese for about three years – long enough to get a decent grip on everyday verbs, adjectives and nouns, and to start wrestling with kanji (80ish, so far). But there's only so far you can get by speaking for 90 minutes per week in classes. So, I hatched a plan: to get to Japan as cheaply as possible and spend a few days practicing.

In the end, I managed to tour pretty much the entire lower half of Honshu quite inexpensively, and it was a great experience. In case it's handy to anyone planning something similar, this handful of blog posts – you can see the whole series here – will outline where I went, what I did, and how I kept the budget down.

Old Japan in Nara

Planes and Trains

My original idea was to fly in on the cheapest, crappest route possible, take the train to Kyoto and spend some time there. This went completely awry, but in a good way. First, air fares plummeted: I was able to get a direct flight from Heathrow to Narita for around £650, which is far less than we paid the other year, and even then the plane was half empty.

Cranes, Hiroshima

Booking on Virgin Atlantic gets you a choice between Virgin and ANA flights – in my experience Virgin's Tokyo planes are similar to others in the fleet – a bit knackered, with not enough legroom to sleep and mediocre food – while ANA's plane was immaculate, with more legroom and better (Japanese) meals. Given the choice, pick the latter – ANA were better than JAL, too.

A rainy Tokyo on the day I landed

Secondly, I found that getting a Shinkansen from Tokyo to Kyoto costs around £200, so you might as well pay £250 or so for the 7-day Japan Rail Pass, which gets you unlimited travel on all JR lines, with a few minor restrictions.  I planned for eight days, but after my original flight was cancelled ended up with nine, during seven of which I could travel pretty much anywhere. In the end my route took me from Tokyo, through Kyoto, Fukuchiyama, Kinosaki, Hiroshima, Nara and Yokohama, then back  to Tokyo for one day before leaving.

Shinkansen – the best train service in the world

I really cannot recommend the Rail Pass enough. I must have used well over £1,000 worth of train travel, all for one fixed price, and on many trains you don't even need to pick up any other ticket. For those that do, you can use it to make reservations on Limited Express and Shinkansen services – the fastest Nozomi ones are exempt, but that doesn't matter much as you can use the almost-as-fast Hikari and Sakura services. The Rail Pass must be purchased before you travel to Japan – it is not sold there at all – and must be started within three months of purchase. In London, visit the Japan Travel shop under Mitsukoshi Department Store (which also sells tickets to the Ghibli Museum, if you haven't been!).

New Japan in Ginza, Tokyo

Armed with a pass I spent 15 minutes in the JR Kyoto Eki ticket office booking ten or so journeys, which got me a guaranteed seat on even busy trains – reassuring when you're lugging a large rucksack. And the trains, of course, are fantastic. Even the oldest, crappiest (not very crappy) local ones run on time, while the Shinkansen are more comfortable than most aeroplanes I've been on (especially the reserved seating on Sakura services). It's a great way to travel.

The local train from Kyoto to Inari

Hotels and Hiking

With travel sorted, I aimed to travel not on the cheap, but relatively cheaply – no more than £120 a day, including accommodation. This is, fortunately, pretty easy – most cities have cheapish business hotels that have many single rooms that run from £50 (out in Kansai) to £90ish (Shinjuku, Tokyo). The Sunroute chain, in particular, is handy: you can reserve rooms online in advance with no deposit, and they're all good, no-frills places (think Travelodge, but often a bit nicer). Outside Tokyo and Kyoto I also found some cheap ryokan accommodation, which makes a nice change.

Add on one cheap restaurant meal a day, breakfast in a coffee shop and some onigiri for lunch, and you don't have to spend a fortune, even with the horrendously high Yen – but bear in mind that sightseeing and transport can be expensive. A day visiting temples in Kyoto, for example, must have set me back £50 at least just on entrance fees. Similarly, non-JR travel (Tokyo's subway lines, for example), quickly become costly if you're moving around a lot.

Okonomiyaki in Hiroshima – cheap and delicious

To cover my route you'll need luggage you can carry (a decent rucksack) and to be happy to walk 5km or so at a time carrying it. My route also required a couple of eyeball-hurtingly-early starts, and judicious use of train station lockers to hold  baggage when passing through towns. All big stations have these, although they fill up in the mornings, and they can be hard to find – ask 'すみません、コインロッカーはどこですか' (sumimasen, coin-ro-kah wa doko des ka?). Backpack sized ones normally cost 600Y for storage until 1am the next day.

Oh, and one other recommendation: just before leaving I grabbed a copy of the new Lonely Planet guide to Japan, as I've had good experiences finding cheap places to stay using their guides in the past. Although it has a few odd omissions, and a few sections were already out of date (just goes to show how long editing, proofing and printing can take, I guess), it proved really handy and I'd recommend it.

So, that's that. I flew in and out of Tokyo – more on that city here.

(This is part of a guide to travelling Honshu on a moderate budget and in limited time. Click here for the whole series).

Arriving

International flights arrive at Narita, outside Tokyo. It's worth claiming your Japan Rail Pass in the large JR office here (follow signs to the trains, and it's before the ticket gates) – I took the chance to wrangle with my bad Japanese, but I overheard staff speaking excellent English to another traveller. If you're not starting your pass immediately, the N-EX and Suica deal (£50 or so) gets you express tickets to and from the city (Tokyo or Shinjuku stations, reservations required) plus the Oyster-like Suica card with cash on it at a discount price. If you're not sticking around in Tokyo there are also Limited Express services into town.

I visited Tokyo before in 2009, so skipped most of the sights – see my old post here for Ten Tokyo Travel Tips, including Tsujiki, the Ghibli museum, etc. I did, however, find a few things I'd missed before.

Inside the Imperial Palace

The Japanese Imperial Family is notoriously reclusive, and the Tokyo palace is not open to the public. You can, however, tour some of the grounds inside if you book online (here) several weeks in advance. The tour is in Japanese only, but there's a fairly basic headset guide in English.

The Nijubashi bridge from the palace

It takes you around behind the famous Nijubashi bridge (no photos allowed, but everyone snaps away anyhow), around the front of the main palace building then to the back where, apparently, the Emperor has a rice paddy to work in (shades of the French monarchy, there). The tour is worth it just for the chance to get a closeish look at two of the keeps perched high on the ramparts – both are stunning.

Keep, inside the palace grounds

After the tour, if the Higashi-gyoen is open, you can go straight through to that. It's not the prettiest garden I saw, but it is worth a stroll around. One word of advice, though: finding the correct gate to start the tour is a nightmare, as some small maps don't have the gates labelled. It's worth getting there early in case you have to walk miles to it. Also, large luggage is prohibited, so drop it in a coin locker at Tokyo eki.

Inside the palace somewhere

Baseball at the dome

Arriving and leaving from Tokyo means that you know the dates you'll be there, so I also booked a ticket at the Tokyo Dome for a baseball game – the cheap seats cost about £12, and you can book online here. I was in town for the Yoimuri Giants vs Hanshin Tigers series (Tokyo vs Osaka) – essentially the Yankees vs Red Sox.

Grudge match at the Tokyo Dome

I've had a soft spot for MLB on the television for some time, but even if you're not a fan it's well worth catching a game either here or in Hiroshima. The myriad songs and chants – one for each batter up – are continuous, hour after hour, and legions of keg-backpacked bartenders scurry around the stands delivering beer for a wallet-melting £8 a go.

Beer, 800Y. Hang on, 800Y?

I backed the Tigers, who lost thanks to a home run in the 10th after playing a great game (gah), but it was still a great experience. It's also nice to note that, even in this most fiercely fought of matches, fans could mingle happily – a mother with her young, Giants-supporting daughter was alongside me in the middle of the Osaka crowd.

Onsen. Wait, in Tokyo?

God, I love Onsen. I didn't previously know, though, that there's one in Tokyo. The O-edo Onsen Monogatari is on Odaiba (take the Yurikamome to Telecom Centre) and is half-onsen, half-theme park. Pay your way in (go late, as it's around 1500Y after 6pm), pick up a yukata and you're free to roam a kind of Disney recreation of an Edo-period castle packed with various food, beer and knick-knack sellers.

Onsen meets Disneyland on Odaiba

Towels and cloths are provided in the inner onsen changing room, and the male side has at least six indoor baths, a cold bath (ouch) and two outdoor ones. Go there on the evening of your arrival to soak away the jetlag – sitting in a hot outdoor bath in the cold rain makes any 12-hour flight worthwhile.

Also worth seeing on Odaiba: the view

Other facilities (mostly upstairs) include foot massage machines, vending machines of course, and a bizarre 'relaxation room' in which old men snore contentedly while failing to watch NHK on the in-seat TVs. Everything inside is purchased using a barcode wristband then paid-for when you check out.

Food, Hotels and Travel

God knows Tokyo isn't cheap, but you can go a long way on onigiri and instant ramen (all business hotels have water heaters for just this purpose). I also found good food, cheap in the big department stores around Shinjuku and Ginza – hit the basement, not the restaurant level – and around Shinjuku station (great ramen for a tenner or so).

If you're looking for a cheapish, decentish hotel, try Sunroute's Higashi Shinjuku – it's right by exit B2 of the Oedo Line station of that name, and is classic business hotel fare for about £70 despite the location. The Plaza Shinjuku branch, just a few stops away, is a little posher but runs £40 or so more per night (use the JR New South exit for that one).

JR Shinjuku is absolutely massive – I think it's the biggest station in the world, or something – so obviously has a large reservation office where you can book onward tickets, but beware – there are a lot of platforms, on many levels, and about a million entrances or exits. Don't try to rush for a train or book a tight connection unless you know it well.

Anyhow, the morning after the onsen before, I packed up early and caught a shinkansen from Tokyo station to Kyoto – for more on that city, see here.

(This is part of a guide to travelling Honshu on a moderate budget and in limited time. Click here for the whole series).

I arrived in Kyoto on my second day, via Shinkansen from Tokyo. You arrive at the huge JR Kyoto station, from which you can link to the local JR lines, the private railway (pass not valid) and the subway (ditto). Coming in at around 1pm I dropped my backpack in a coin locker (there are several sets – try the side of the station if the main area is full) and headed out on the local train to Inari. It's a few stops, and trust me, you want to travel light for this one.

Fushimi Inari-taisha

The Fushimi Inari-taisha shrine complex is directly opposite the JR Inari station – look for the red Torii gate. Then look for another, up the hill. Then look for a couple of thousand of them lining the mountain path. It's stunning.

The first torii

The path leads on and on, past dozens of shrines and some scenic views. It's steep in places, and not something to undertake with luggage or nearing dusk. The route is signed, badly, and even with maps everywhere it can be a little baffling, but nonetheless I managed a scenic circuit taking in the very top in about two hours.

Somewhere inside the complex

Kinkaku-Ji, Sanjyu-San and  Kyomizu-dera

Back in Kyoto, you can't walk a few blocks without hitting a gorgeous-looking temple. Probably the best known, though, is the golden pavilion, Kinkaku-Ji. It's a bus ride from Kyoto JR, or a nice walk from the nearby Kitaoji subway stop, passing a huge complex of Buddhist temples en-route. I arrived early, just after 9am, and it was already packed – walking down the approach all I could hear were cries of 'suggeeeeeeiii!' (roughly, 'wow') from schoolkids rounding the corner ahead. And it is, indeed, one hell of a view.

The Kinkaku-Ji. Just stunning.

Most of the other temples lie over the other side of town to the East, and you could easily spend a week checking them all out. With a day and a half in Kyoto, I had to hike about quite a bit. After stopping mid-way at the International Manga Museum (below) I hauled across to the Sanjyu-San – a huge, ancient, Buddhist complex containing a frankly unfeasible number of many-armed statues, plus a Buddah in the middle. No photos are allowed, but to be honest you couldn't capture it anyhow – it's remarkable.

The Kyomizu-dera

The Kyoto National Museum is just across the way from there, but is currently in renovation and was closed as I passed. Instead, I walked to the unfeasibly beautiful Kyomizu-dera temple up on the hill to the East. It's possible to approach via two souvenir-shop-packed streets, but check a map for the path up through the huge cemetery below – it's a climb, but the views are amazing. As was seeing the sun set behind the pagoda from the top of the temple.

Sunset over Kyoto. Such a beautiful place.

International Manga Museum and Nijō Jō

As well as all the temples, it's worth checking out the famous Nijō Jō castle. It's impressive from the outside, with elaborately carved gates, but take the tour to see the inner quarters and walk on the squeaking nightingale-floors. Also, don't miss the inner room decorations: these are housed in a separate museum inside the castle walls (look for the modern building). Photos are forbidden inside.

Carvings on the Nijō Jō

Not far from the castle is the International Manga Museum. This is really more library than museum, but it's a chance to grab, sit down with and read just about any manga you've ever heard of, and then a couple of thousand more, going back decades. Entry (800Y) is good for the day. There are a few shelves of English translations, and English signage in the exhibits, but to be honest you'll need to a bit of Japanese (not much – lots of Manga are furiganated) to get the most from this.

Inside the International Manga Museum

The museum is housed in an old school, and a few rooms are devoted to the history of the building – these are well worth checking out.

Food, Hotels and Travel

From JR Kyoto the subway line runs directly north, then another crosses it at Karasuma-Oike station, running East-West. The rest of the city is served by buses. Both cost <200Y for most trips, but Suica or Pasmo cards won't work (there is a local IC card). As it's on a grid layout, walking is easy, and there are a couple of large covered shopping arcades should you need coffee, a pharmacy etc.

I stayed in the Hearton Hotel Kyoto, which is tucked away about a block from Karasuma-Oike – it's on the sidestreet behind the big sporting goods shop. It's a little worn (well, actually pretty knackered in places), but good value for the £55 or so it costs per night, and the location's good for the subway. I'd recommend it.

For cheap eats there are the usual combini and fast food outlets, plus department store basement food halls on the main Shijo-Dori parade running East-West (check out the posh coffee shop that turns into a cheap curry counter by night!) and some decent ramen places for 15Y or so.

I loved Kyoto, and could have easily stayed longer – but with a public holiday on Monday, all the hotels were full, so I bailed out of town towards Northern Kansai and the onsen of Kinosaki.