Skip to main content

Off to buy some leeks (family post)

 Dear mum

Following on from Sunday's pictures, I thought you might be interested to see some shots of our daily life. I've just come back from a 30-minute walk with Mutley to/from the shops to get some vegetables for supper.

1) 4:15 pm. Setting off, heading east. We're off to the shops in Okamoto village. The road outside our house runs beside the railway line. This is typical of the amount of traffic during the day.


2) About 100 metres further on. The total walk to the supermarket is about 1km (5/8 mile).



3) Entering Okamoto village. A few more people around, almost everyone wearing masks. As you can see, most of the village contains one-way streets, cars have to share with pedestrians.



4). Okamoto village, looking south. People are coming up from the local train-station, the one that Julian goes to school from every day.


5) Turning around, heading home. We are one block further south, now heading west.


6) Looking south to Justin's school.


7) Passing the GP surgery (blue sign) -- five minutes from home.


8) Turning north, back to the house. This is the route that Justin takes to school.


9. And we are home!



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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