As I write this piece, with the wind tearing strips off the trees around the house, a terrific shaking and howling on the balcony outside, visibility down to the other side of the glass, and the realization that all of the children's books that were sitting on the window-sill are now just that bit softer and wrinklier than they were yesterday, I know that Spring is over as suddenly as she came—at least on Rokko mountain—and has been superceded by a prolonged storm with son et lumière atmospherics of the kind that would not be out of place in a Kirk Douglas disaster movie. The sakura scenes of the last post belong to another country, entirely.
The good news, of course, is that just as in the afore-mentioned B-movie, nothing really bad will happen: "up here on the mountain, we shall be safe, safe as houses" as Peter Cook reassures us (!); even if we don't have a picnic basket, eventually, this storm will blow itself out. Most importantly, there is nothing figurative about it, no pathetic fallacy here, thank you very much. The children especially are thriving, barring minor infections (which kept Julian off school today, snoozing on the sofa). And Justin is doing particularly well: it was Ayumi's turn to take him off to Amagasaki yesterday for one of his monthly checkups, this time with the physiotherapy people: she returned with the excellent news that his physical development is at the level reached by typical DS babies—there's a nice phrase—at eight months, and he'll be six months old on Sunday next. I neither know nor greatly care how this measures up to non-DS babies: all that matters is that people who should are really pleased with his progress, and so are we. More reasons to be cheerful, even as the fire is dancing on the jeraboams...
'Great shall be the tumult thereof, I should think' (hoods purely coincidental)
"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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