Devenish

Click to play This was me, a few months ago. In 8 hours' time, I'll run my first ever quarter marathon. Ayumi too. I expect it will be no triumph, no tragedy either. But it will be a good point to get back into blogging, maybe, even if it only amounts to a few lines. It's been a pretty significant year, so far, in lots of ways, and I owe it to others to log it properly. Watch this space! Update: one down! Officially, I finished in 1:09, three minutes after Ayumi. But that's because I ran past the finish line, and kept running with the full Marathon runners for another kilometre or so :( RunKeeper tells me I did 11 km in under 56 minutes, which is what counts. Next year, I'll have to pay more attention to the signs.

Click to play If this were a Tuesday night like others recently, after the kids are in bed, and I have most of the week's teaching already under my belt—a strange expression little attended to—I might have abandoned work for the evening, opened a can of beer, and settled down to an episode of Breaking Bad . I understand that the fifth series aired and completed in the US about three years ago, but Netflix came late to Japan—in fact, it still isn't available, officially—so it is only in the last couple of months that what critics call the 'best tv drama series ever made' came to my attention. Not that I needed a critic, much less than army of them, to tell me I was witnessing an historic phenomenon—in all my life I have never seen an American-produced series like this. Breaking Bad is, in the truest sense, an awesome piece of theatre. There are no two-dimensional roles, and every adult character is as believable, and weirdly attractive, as they are fatally flawed...

Click to play [My all time favourite male singer-songwriter, Leonard Cohen, covered by my favourite female singer-songwriter, Anna Ternheim] Dream on... The miracle—miracles, if we're thinking of achievements as events—is (are) language acquisition, mine and Justin's. It's been nearly 4 years since we moved to Japan, and I'm still waiting for the miracle, the day when I stop hearing Japanese as familiar noise in need of translation, and simply hear the message itself, and can respond reflexively, the moment when I don't have to summon every ounce of pragmatic inference, and common sense just to make a weak probabilistic stab at what Justin's nursery teacher might possibly be telling me about his day, or about what needs to be brought with him on Monday next (temporal adverbs, I'm good at...). It's all a far cry from my situation in the winter of 1981 when I first arrived at a German boarding school (Landerziehungsheim Gut Honneroth, Altenkirc...

Click to play 'Beauty is not [only] in the eye of the beholder; a song is only as deep as the interpreter' —things one learns from teaching. Still here, after all the years? Nicht zu fassen!

River Cam from Jesus' lock Two weeks ago, I returned to Cambridge, to participate in CamCos3 . The visit was not the first in the thirty years since I graduated (June 1984), but it was symbolic nonetheless: my first invitation to give a theoretical talk at my alma mater — I had previously given L2 acquisition/processing talks at RCEAL before the merger with MML, but never stood before an audience on the Sidgwick Site, beside the Raised Faculty Building, and within shouting distance of the UL, the places where I spent the better part of my study time. More significantly, it was the first time since 1984 that my mother had visited Cambridge: we spent a great day before the conference, catching up and wandering through the Italian and French collections in the Fitzwilliam museum.  (The things that one can do without bored children in tow...). Cam from Garret Hostel Lane Bridge The visit was also an opportunity to stir old memories, or finally lay some to rest: I'm still...

Rokko Island Running Track (50 metres from Sean's school, (snow dusted) Rokko Mountain in the distance). Most Sundays, like yesterday, I am standing on this spot around 10:15, on the starting line of a 5.1 km (3 mile) run. My times are improving at the moment, which is some compensation for the effort.) Click to play * Today being my mother's birthday, the very least I can do is to breath some sign of life into this dormant blog. Of course, it's not the least I could do—and really, I know it's very far from adequate, but it's perhaps the best I can do, faute de mieux . For a variety of reasons, some of which I'll briefly enumerate, and some of which are good—whether these are the same set of reasons, you can judge better than me—I find it increasingly difficult to compose a decent article. I know I can do it—or rather, I have been able to in the recent past—but when push comes to shove, it's that much easier to retreat into one of the...

Click to play Especially at this time of year, in the turgid wake of New Year's resolutions—too hastily made, so quickly shed—it strikes me that the hardest, most revolting part of being a parent, at least outside of the emergency room or doctor's surgery, is the extraordinary level of hypocrisy involved in the role. I spend a good part of every day, the better part of my time with my children, telling one or other of them to get on with tasks they'd rather avoid, and avoid or stop those that are taking up their valuable time. When I say tell, I mean (usually) yell: after the third of fourth repetition of the same request, sanctimony, frustration and volume have all increased in due and direct proportion to one another, and to my exasperation. "Get up now: it's time for school!" "Hurry up in the shower!" "Have you done your homework?!" "Stop wasting your time on Minecraft, and do your work!" "If you just concentrate pro...