Watching the Wheels

Still sitting in Sheffield, return to Japan on hold for a week, it's hard to write anything insightful or coherent in face of the enormity of the Japanese earthquake/tsunami/nuclear accident. The scenes are quite horrifying: it is difficult to imagine even a fraction of the distress, loss, grief and suffering of so many lives interrupted. We can only be thankful that so far no-one close to us—physically or emotionally—has been caught up in this (Kansai is 450 miles away from Sendai), and pray that this is as bad as it gets.

As I've noted so often in recent posts, because I'm made so acutely aware of it so frequently these days, life is phenomenally uncertain and fragile: worrying about how our children may or may not turn out, or cope, as adults is much less important than how we pass the time in between times; it may also turn out to be completely irrelevant. With that in mind, we drove out to Chatsworth and spent a gorgeous Spring day in beautiful surroundings. A happy distraction from the grim horror of explosions at nuclear plants, but no less real for all that. Time for more John Lennon, methinks...

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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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