Skip to main content

The Fire Raisers (reprise)


About 40-odd years ago, when I was little older than Sean is now, I took part in my first school play at Campbell, an English adaptation of Max Frisch's ,Biedermann und die Brandstifter' (The Fire Raisers. I was in the chorus, dressed as a fireman, and the shortest by a long way. My parents only identified me under an oversized helmet about half-way through the play, and then started to worry about my height). By coincidence—or perhaps not, it may be a perennial favourite among school drama teachers—it is the current school production running at Canadian Academy on Rokko Island, where we all go on Sundays for Sean and Julian to play football, and where I puff around a 5km running path with some of the other fathers. I was reminded of this last night, when Sean appeared on local tv and in the evening paper (see below), setting fire to stuff inside a public building.
Happily for us, this incendiary act was completely legal: his appearance was as a member of the winning team in his school Rokko-san Elementary School, the first group to make the fire to light the school's wood-stove. No fire-lighters, no matches, just wooden sticks, friction and tinder. (Somehow I don't think the Health and Safety people would look well on this in the UK.) His school is one of the few left in Japan—probably in the developed world—to depend on a wood-fired stove to heat the building in winter, and being half a mile up the mountain and an average of five degrees colder than anywhere else in Kobe, it is the first to light the fire, signalling the beginning of the season. Thus, all of the local media send cameramen, photographers and junior reporters up the hill for a view of young wannabe arsonists, and what do you know: Sean triumphs again.

Full story (in Japanese) here:

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Turbulence (Thanks for all the fish, and more)

[Note: this piece is not about about my family, nor does it involve literary or musical criticism. I’m not anticipating any attractive illustrations or other lures, and no musical accompaniment either. So if that’s what you came for, look away now. There will be more such articles in the future, I hope, but this is not one of them. You have been been warned.] Tokushima Naruto Whirlpool (Shikoku Excursion) Events of the last few days have left me, both literally and figuratively, in a painfully disordered state of mind. In plain English, I’m stressed, and my head aches. Actually, it twinges, rather than aches, but the precise description matters little; at all events, the pain ‘comes and goes’, as they say. (Where pain goes to, when it goes, is a puzzle in itself. I have this anthropomorphised image of Pain, like some peripatetic poison dwarf, doing the rounds of the neighbourhood: “Hi, Nigel didn’t want me this hour, so I’ve decided to drop in on you for a while. Don’t worry thoug...

Remembering Dad (Thinking about Madeleine II)

Over the past few days, I've been thinking a lot about my father, Gordon Duffield, who died earlier this year, far too soon, before we had a chance to talk. You might think that in nearly fifty years, we would have had a proper conversation, but though I told him about myself (too much at times, at times too little), and though he always listened, he only rarely shared his innermost thoughts, his personal beliefs as a man apart from his parental role, as a father and breadwinner; even then, when he revealed anything of himself, it was only in writing, never in conversation. My father was the kindest man I have ever known, the most forgiving of others, the hardest on himself: in all my life, I only once saw him lose his temper, and it was not with me. (If I can get through a single day without berating one of my children, it is a rare achievement.) He was a good man, without a trace of self-consciousness, generous and tolerant to a fault, and—until his last weeks—optimistic b...

Cambridge Blues ('Foundationed deep')

"I" Staircase, Trinity Hall, Cambridge  This weekend past, I returned to Cambridge with Ayumi, Julian and Justin for the first time in seven years. The occasion was a college reunion dinner, marking approximately 40 years of life since matriculation (1980, 1981, 1982, 1983 entrance years): about half of us (~50) from each annual cohort turned up to compare notes, reminisce, squeeze our sagging frames into formal evening wear, and report biographical highlights. It is worth noting that this was a self-selecting group: those with sufficient time, opportunity, income (it wasn't a cheap weekend break), self-regard and retained affection for their alma mater to trundle up; as bushy tailed and 'Hail fellow, well met', as age and misanthropy might allow.  Sic transit gloria iuvenum. I didn't have a great time, nor yet was it a disastrous waste. This is hardly surprising, since the curse of middle age is profound ambivalence about almost every extra-familial event or ...