Explaining the name

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When I was a child, and into my teenage years, we used to spend a week or two of the summer holidays messing about in boats on Lough Erne in County Fermanagh, in the South-West corner of Northern Ireland. We would rent a motor cruiser and travel up and down the lough, mooring at small public jetties, or in the reeds and bull-rushes around one the small islands along the way. There are two loughs: the wider, rougher Lower Lough, North of Enniskillen, and above the lock gates, the Upper Lough, which is more a series of streams and tributaries than a lake. It is a incredibly beautiful place: serene, untroubled—a tad melancholic perhaps on an overcast day, too quiet for many, but one of the places where I have been the happiest in my life.

It is now a mental refuge, a place to retreat to, and to reflect. I shall forever be grateful to my parents for bringing us on these holidays, particularly to my mother who never loved the roll and sway of the boat, the cramped cabins and galley, and limited washing facilities, and who—as a non-swimmer—always feared for our safety, as we kids would jump on and off the boat to tie up, or row off round a corner in the dinghy to spot herons, or swim in the muddy brown water on the very rare days when the sun broke through the clouds.

The blogs are named after islands or shorelands on one of the two Loughs. Devenish island and Inismacsaint are both religious sites, dating from the 6th Century: Devenish is, as Wikipedia states, one of the finest monastic sites in Ireland, and probably in the world. Yet, in contrast to Glendalough for example, it is virtually unvisited: on most days we spent there, there was perhaps one other boat tied up.

Virtual Visit - Devenish Island Monastic Site - Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland

In nearly fifty years, I have never spent time in a more special place.

PS. If you are interested in following my stories after Devenish, check out some of the other island jetties on the Upper Lough.

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

Devenish

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