Can you see the real you?

The soundtrack for this piece can be found here

Here's something I only noticed recently. As with so many things, it's probably blindingly obvious to other people, but I guess I'm a late learner... What occurred to me the other day, then, after 46 years of self-reflection, is that either I don't see the real me, or, depending on your perspective, no-one else does. What I see almost all the time is a mirror-image, which is ever so slightly, but distinctly, different. (I realized this when I accidentally inverted an image for my home-page, and noticed that it seemed much better, by which I mean, more familiar. Most photographs seem wrong somehow, not the face I know, but no-one else's either.) Unless one is blessed with perfect bilateral symmetry, we all look that bit different. And so the face I believe I present to the world is just not what people see. Here are two examples to illustrate: in each case, the first (a) photo shows the outsiders' view, the second picture what we each see in the mirror. It's not much, but there's a world of difference...especially beneath the surface.

A. Sean, as we see him.

B. Sean, as he sees himself.

A. Julian, as we see him.

B. Julian, as he'll see himself.

(Of course, the children are stunning, whatever way you look at them :))

PS. For further evidence, if you click on my profile picture (top left) you'll see the "improved picture" on my home-page. (I know where the door really is, and on which wrist I wear a watch...)

Comments

Reflections on Thought: Work in Progress

"An incredible trick" The starting point for this piece is an observation that Simon Kirby made a long time ago in the introduction to a BBC Horizon programme Why do we talk? , a documentary that I have used for nearly 20 years in my language acquisition classes at Konan. It is a scene-setting observation, one which seems self-evident and innocuous, and to which I paid next to no attention until a few months ago. I can walk up to someone I don’t know, and I can make a sequence of noises…that I’ve never made before…by pushing air through my mouth. I will take a thought in my head…and make it go into their head . That’s an incredible trick. It would be incredible, if that was what happens. Yet a moment's reflection - or perhaps twenty-plus years of rumination, I'm not sure which - tells me that this is completely wrong. We do not take our thoughts and cause them to go into other's heads. That would be amazing. Instead, whatever is involved in verbal communication i

Musical Triumph....

it wasn't, but a family triumph most certainly. After four weeks of occasional rehearsal, Sean, Julian and I appeared on stage in support of Justin's first piano recital. The quality of the performance does nothing to detract from the historic significance of this event: 10 years ago, I could not have imagined that Justin would be able to take piano lessons, nor that Sean and Julian would have rallied round in such a way to support their brother. Justin has brought out the best in all of us.

Starting over

Blogging is no different from any other activity: once the momentum is lost, it's hard to get going again. So pushing, grinding, out these first few lines is even more difficult than I had anticipated. Yet looking back on the posts from last year, I can see some value in the enterprise, as a family document, and from the fact that some readers come back regularly to browse... So let's begin with the headlines, in brief. After months of torpid indecision, Ayumi and I decided not to return to our professional lives in England—though we spent a very pleasant two months there in February and March—but to give Japan a go for a bit longer. In December last year, I was offered a permanent job at Konan University in Okamoto—Kobe's Hampstead, if Kitano is Chelsea), where I have now started teaching English and Linguistics courses to a delightful bunch of students, in the company of friendly and extremely welcoming colleagues. First day at Konan (Okamoto) The professor I'm

Devenish

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