Sunday walk to Rokko Farm (3.5km, not a vending machine in sight!)
Back late to the mountain after a first day's teaching, with Justin sleeping rather fitfully across the room, I lack the energy needed to complete the new piece I was intending to publish today. In its place, prompted perhaps by the news of yet more dramatic shaking around Fukushima—the anthropomorph in me wants to ask Poseidon whether he doesn't think those poor souls up North have suffered enough?—and by the countless moral quagmires of Lybia, Gaza, Yemen, Bahrain and Ivory Coast, I offer a piece originally served up in November 2008, which is mostly a vehicle for a Raph McTell cover. Music and literature will solve none of these problems, but they do provide perspective, and make things a little easier to bear: enjoy!
An interest in life...
This I found yesterday at the beginning of Graham Greene's novel Our Man in Havana, which happened to be sitting on Ayumi's bookshelf at her parent's home, and which I picked up faute de mieux.
—I could give you a medical certificate, said Dr. Hasselbacher. —Do you never worry about anything? —I have a secret defence, Mr Wormold, I am interested in life. —So am I, but... —You are interested in a person, not in life, and people die or leave us — I'm sorry; I wasn't referring to your wife. But if you are interested in life, it never lets you down. I am interested in the blueness of the cheese. You don't do crosswords, do you, Mr Wormold? I do, and they are like people, one reaches an end. I can finish any crossword within an hour, but I have a discovery concerned with the blueness of cheese that will never come to a conclusion — although of course one dreams that perhaps a time may come...One day I must show you my laboratory. —I must be going, Hasselbacher. —You should dream more, Mr Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.
[The fact that Dr. Hasselbacher's optimism is later ruined by the shallow carelessness of the protagonist Wormold does not detract from the hope the paragraph conveys.]
Summer Lightning
The second item, only tangentially related, is a song by Ralph McTell called Summer Lightning. It was on the B-side of Streets of London—when there still were B-sides—and was McTell's only real hit (in 1974). Unlike Streets, which is quite mawkish, this song has a simplicity and private sincerity to it that makes it more appealing. The important thing is the message.
Here's the text:
Move over here, c'mon sit down beside me, Come closer now, come and put your arms, put your arms around me, You've had a bad day too, and I feel the same as you, c'mon sit down.
It's just that when I get mad I end up saying things if I thought about I wouldn't ever say, And I think that you already know that, though I'll say it anyway, I'll say it anyway...
(repeated)
Don't let the day go down, the two of us still fighting, It's not a storm at all, no, it's only summer lightning, And we've still got the night, so there's time to put it right...
"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
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.
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
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