Clap hands

In my difficult class (also my favourite class) on Fridays, there is one guy who towards the end of last semester decided that ALL RIGHT, IF I INSIST, he will speak English - but only in a funny voice.

I thought about this, when I heard him being silly in English, and decided to not to discourage him. I remember being very impressed by something one of my own teachers once told me: that when you start to learn a foreign language you sound like an idiot or a child. It is inevitable. And as teachers, it is important to remember that our students are not idiots or children (except when they are), and to treat them respectfully and give them a place to feel safe experimenting with the new language, and where they can sound like idiots or children without feeling threatened or stupid.

I've noticed that my lower level classes act more idiotically than my higher level classes, and I suspect that is because they are very aware that when they speak English they sound childish or idiotic, and that therefore by being silly intentionally they are making themselves feel a little more in control of the situation. I can understand this. When I speak Japanese I frequently feel stupid, and clown around to cover my embarrassment.

Anyway, when this guy started speaking English in a silly voice (a VERY silly voice), I told myself it didn't matter as long as he was speaking English. And his English was improving. His silly-voiced English was getting better. When he had used his normal voice his way of coping was to be silent and cool, but now that he was clowning around he was doing pretty well. (I just hope that it doesn't become automatic, and he remembers to use a normal voice if he's ever in a situation where he has to use English outside the classroom, because his silly voice is PRETTY DAMNED FUNNY and he does funny faces to go with it.)

On Friday, he decided to try a new trick with his wonderful silly voice talent, discovered, I suspect, in my classroom. He decided to imitate a mosquito.

He did a MARVELLOUS mosquito imitation. I was writing an explanation on the board at the time, and the class was uncharacteristically silent and focused when this loud whining started. It was amazing. It sounded like a helicopter-sized mosquito was circling the room.

Bugger! I thought. Damn that boy! Just when I got them all paying attention he has to ruin it by distracting them!.

I could tell nobody was paying attention to me any more, and I didn't blame them. Mosquitos are distracting at the best of times, and this was a BIG one. I still had my back to the class, but my image of this mosquito was distracting me, too. It was HUGE. I kept writing, slowly, and pondered what to do. My first impulse was to turn around and glare and tell him to stop that nonsense, but I knew he would do a funny face and say, "Oh, sorry!" in a funny voice and that would be just as distracting, so I kept writing. But I had to do SOMETHING. This mosquito was driving me nuts.

Finally I stopped writing. I didn't turn around, though. I took a deep breath and yelled at the board, instead, as loudly as I could:

"SOMEBODY KILL THAT MOSQUITO!"

There was a shocked silence. The mosquito stopped whining, and the entire class mentally translated the sentence. The silence dragged on.

Then the mosquito started up again, but after a couple of circles of whining around the room there was a sharp, loud hand-clap, and it stopped abruptly. Then it made a sort of pathetic dying whine, and stopped entirely.

The class erupted in laughter, and I'd lost them altogether.

It was hilarious, but didn't really solve my problem. I had to work hard to get their attention again. Also, I had to stop laughing before I could turn around and face the class.

Later I was telling a colleague about this.

"It was hilarious," I said, having imitated the whining mosquito, the subsequent hand-clap, and distracted several other patrons of the restaurant we were in. "I really enjoyed that. Shouting made me feel better, and didn't hurt anybody's feelings. It was PERFECT - except it wasn't really good teaching. I mean, where was the English?"

"There was English," she said. "You shouted in English."

I thought about it. It was true! I shouted in English, and somebody responded appropriately, and everybody understood it and laughed their heads off! It was a successful lesson!

What a good teacher I am!

I love having supportive colleagues. They can make a lesson feel successful because one sentence (of several hundred, probably) that I spoke in the classroom was understood.

Become happy everybody probably

I stole these shamelessly from my students' backs, disconcerting them by standing behind them and scribbling in my notebook, giggling:

It is able to become happy everybody probably, when many circle and heart gather.

No wonder they find English incomprehensible. So do I.

The one time G-child prepapers to come into full-fledged.
DANGER
Handle at your own
RISK

-------

I had a haircut today. I told my hairdresser how happy I was to be finally getting it cut.

"It's getting really long and straggly," I said. "I can't even remember when you cut it last."

"February," she said promptly.

She keeps records? How embarrassing! I thought it might have been April, or possibly March, but FEBRUARY?

Then she added,

"Time is frying."

Actually, my hairdresser's pronunciation of English is extremely good. She pronounces her rs and ls perfectly. She just forgets where they go, sometimes.

She did a great job on my hair. Now when I wear it down I look like a normal person instead of a scruffy, aging hippie.

Good news, bad news, weird news

The good news is that the online Daily Yomiuri newspaper DOES have archives these days. I hadn't noticed, but the site now carries more than just today's news. I wonder when they changed it?

The bad news is that they have started truncating their stories, or at least this one, the most fascinating story to turn up since the LAST time it turned up. (I wrote about it here.) It gets weirder and weirder.

Man 'hit lover who hired killer to off his wife'

The Yomiuri Shimbun

A 32-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of assaulting a woman with whom he had been having an affair after learning she had hired a hit man over the Internet to kill his wife, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department said Wednesday.

Sadatoshi Machida, an ambulance worker at Shibuya Fire Station, assaulted the 32-year-old woman, who was a coworker, at a hot-spring resort in Shizuoka Prefecture on Sept. 2, breaking one of her ribs.

According to the MPD, Machida found a contract for the murder of his wife in the woman's bag while performing first aid in June. He arranged to meet the woman at a hotel in August and hit her, bursting one of her eardrums.

Machida then invited the woman to a hot-spring resort in Izunokuni, Shizuoka Prefecture. In order to console Machida, who was upset about the murder plan, she complied.

(Oct. 13, 2005)

This story made my jaw drop several times when I read it in the hard copy version yesterday morning at work. There were some sentences I had to reread to make sure I was reading correctly:

According to the MPD, Machida found a contract for the murder of his wife in the woman's bag while performing first aid in June.

How can they write stuff like this, that raises more questions than it answers? How did he manage to perform first aid and rifle through his girlfriend's bag at the same time? Who was he performing first aid ON? Her? After he'd beaten her up? But no, we learn that he beat her up AFTER finding the contract, so presumably he was performing first aid on someone else.

I wonder if the patient survived? Machida's reaction to this discovery was to invite the woman to a hotel and burst her eardrum.

The next thing to make my jaw drop was that after he had burst her eardrum she felt she needed to console him, by meeting him at a hot spring resort, although I suppose this kind of makes sense, in a masochistic kind of way.

"I'm sorry I wanted to kill your wife. I can see you are very upset. Let me make it up to you. Let's go on holiday together."

"Good idea. Let's go to a hot spring resort. You're paying."

"Pardon?"

"I SAID LET'S GO TO A HOT SPRING RESORT. ARE YOU DEAF OR SOMETHING?"

But the story gets even more bizarre, and this is the bit they left out of the online version. Consider yourself lucky to have me, your faithful connoisseur of the weird, to type it all up for you:

Machida started dating the woman when she was assigned to Shibuya Fire station in September 2001. But since last year, he started charging her around ¥2000 an hour for the pleasure of his company. He received ¥200,000 to ¥1 million each time they went out, and she had paid him a total of ¥5 million as of November.

After beating her up at the hot spring inn, he said, "I'll stay with you until tomorrow morning. Pay me ¥5 million. If you don't have it, borrow from your relatives," the police said.

Machida has admitted to the charges, the police said.

The woman was arrested on suspicion of violating the Law Concerning Punishment of Physical Violence and Others for hiring a hit man. The MPD also arrested an Internet site operator Akio Okudaira, 49, and a self-described private detective Takaharu Tabe, 40, on suspicion of fraud.

(Now close your mouth.)

She PAID him to go out with her? Why? Blackmail? But if there was any blackmail involved, wouldn't it be the other way around, since he was the married one?

And also, if he was charging ¥2000 an hour for 'the pleasure of his company,' and she paid him ¥200,000 to ¥1 million each time, then does that mean they 'went out' for 100 to 500 hours each time? That's about four to twenty days per date! (Or were they just very, very bad at mathematics?)

However... let's put this and the previous story together and try to make sense of this. Here's how I understand it.

The woman hired a hitman on the Internet, paid him, and got a contract. (What sort of hitman issues a contract? Did he sign it, I wonder?) Machida found the contract to kill his wife (while performing first aid) and was incensed. The woman agreed to go to a hotel (for 100 hours? 500?) to 'console' him, and he beat her up, bursting her eardrum. Then they went to a hot spring resort and he beat her up again, breaking her rib. After this, she went to the police and complained about the non-performing hitman/private detective. The police promptly arrested her on suspicion of inducing a person to commit murder, and now have arrested Machida for beating her up, so presumably she decided to complain about him, as well. The police also arrested the non-performing hitman for fraud

Hold on... fraud? Oh, but of COURSE. He took the money but DIDN'T KILL THE WIFE. Boy, I bet he's kicking himself now. Bugger. I knew I shouldn't have chickened out. Being arrested for fraud sucks.

You couldn't make this stuff up. ISN'T IT WONDERFUL?

Naughty

Today I got the urge to do something naughty, but I didn't do it. Actually, I didn't do it because I didn't have a marker pen in my bag, but never mind that. I'd prefer to think I had a fit of responsible maturity and decided to behave myself.

What happened is that I spent Sunday marking students' homework. In this homework, they were writing advice. They looked at a picture of a fat slob with dirty hair and grotty clothes slouched in front of a TV eating junk food and smoking, and gave the person advice about how to clean up their act. This was to practice the forms I think you should... and Why don't you...? and so on.

Most of the students wrote,

Why don't you quit smorking?

- EVEN THOUGH it is spelt correctly in the textbook. For some reason this is a word they often insist on spelling wrongly.

So today, as I walked through the sparsely populated campus early in the morning, the naughty thing I wanted to do was to add an r to all the NO SMOKING posters I saw. Actually there are only two or three that are written in English as well as Japanese, but I really, really wanted to add that r. It would give my students an excuse for getting it wrong. It would be a retrospective excuse, but still, a retrospective excuse is better than no excuse at all, surely.








(I'm working there again tomorrow. I wonder if I have a marker pen around here somewhere?)

He must have cheated

Village Idiot tagged me with what has turned out to be a really awful meme. He told me I have to go back through my archives and find the fifth line of the twenty-third post I wrote, and post it. Coincidentally, this happens to be one of the most boring I have ever written:

"It's historical, sure, but so is practically every place in Japan."

I thought of cheating and making up something better. Who is going to go back and check? I thought. Then I thought maybe somebody would, and expose me as a blog fraud (oh, the shame!), and then I thought of cheating by editing the post so that the fifth line of the twenty-third post said something scintillating. But I couldn't be bothered.

That would make a good epitaph for me, actually. She couldn't be bothered.

Come to think of it, I suspect Village Idiot of cheating. Who could COINCIDENTALLY come up with such a great fifth line of the twenty-third post? I didn't check. I can't be bothered, but I think somebody should, quick, before he catches on to the editing trick.

Useless an English teacher

The part-time teachers' room at the place I work on Tuesdays has a secretary. I have been using her recently as I've been cleaning up old student records and so on. I take her the papers with students' personal information on them, and ask to use the shredder. She always takes the papers and tells me not to worry about it, she'll dispose of it herself. I also give her paper that can be recycled or used again.

I am apparently not the only person who has been getting rid of old papers, because recently she has placed a couple of cardboard boxes in prominent view, with neatly handwritten labels, in which we can deposit student records and scrap paper to be disposed of. This is typical of her. She is a friendly, helpful person.

However, I am a little puzzled by the labels. I know she doesn't speak much English, but does she not realize that she is surrounded by English teachers, any of whom would have been happy to help her?

The label on one box says:

USELESS A PRINTED SYNOPSIS OF A LECTURE.

And the other one says:

USELESS A PERSONAL ITEM. REDUCE TO ASHES.

I was going to say something about this (after I'd turned off the grin that had suddenly spread all over my face), but then had the sudden thought that perhaps she had asked one of the Japanese teachers of English to translate the labels for her. I tried to think through the ramifications of the loss of face my correction could cause, but it was the end of a long teaching day and I was too tired, so I went home instead. Now I feel stupid. I should have just told her, quietly. I am useless an English teacher.

I'll tell her next week.

Dolls

Cheryl wrote a lovely post about being five, and Doris followed it up with her experience of being five (which wasn't so pleasant), and mentioned her brother mangling her doll and the trouble it got her into.

I was given a doll when I was five, too, but I'm afraid the person who mangled it was me. I never did figure out what you were supposed to do with dolls. They couldn't climb trees, were useless on bicycles, and when it came to games they just sat there, staring spookily.

In fact I was given two dolls, one by an aunt and the other by a grandmother. (Neither of them knew me very well. OBVIOUSLY.) One doll I mangled in the chain of my bicycle when I took it for a ride and the silly thing just didn't hang on tight enough, and the other ... well, I cut its hair, expecting it to grow back, and then I poked its eyes trying to figure out how they closed when you lay the doll down, and managed to somehow (gag) poke them RIGHT INTO ITS OWN HEAD. I was puzzled and somewhat sickened. I'd only had the doll a couple of days and already it was bald and had holes for eyes, and its eyeballs rattled around in its skull. What kind of toy was that? Useless, creepy thing.

My mother was horrified when she saw what I'd done. She had wanted to take a photo of me holding it to send my grandmother, along with the thank you letter. She took the photo anyway, quickly, before I destroyed the doll completely. With a hat on the doll and from a distance you could hardly tell that it was just a doll corpse.

I gave the other one a haircut, too, in an effort to improve the way it looked, and then it also required a hat. Then I applied Savlon and bandaged its wounded arm and hand very carefully, but it never did heal, and neither of them grew back their hair, so I lost interest.

Garnish

Today I was telling a friend about my first meal in Budapest, when my friend and I had goulash. I wrote about it here at the time, but didn't give details. I did briefly mention the problem we had with the 'garnish,' and that is what I was telling my friend about today.

She wanted to understand, and when I explained that I didn't understand it myself, she suggested writing about it on the blog. "Maybe someone will be able to explain what it meant," she said. She seems to think I have a large readership (ha!) which includes people familiar with Hungarian food and language. Well, of COURSE. Only clever, worldly-wise people read my blog!

So here's the story that requires explaining.

As I mentioned in the original post, we were walking around looking for food in the wrong end of town, something we realized when we passed a szex shop. (And you thought I'd lost my spelling prowess, didn't you? I hadn't. I was being SCRUPULOUSLY accurate. And it wasn't the tricky keyboard, either.)



Right next to the szex shop there was a place that looked kind of like a restaurant, but it also had a big 'Health Club' sign up outside. I did not take a picture of it that evening, but did take one the next day, when it was clearly a restaurant and the Health Club sign had gone. That restaurant sign was not there at night.




Inside you could see a few tables and chairs, but it was very, very dimly lit, and we were peering through the window trying to see if it was open or not when a waiter came out. We asked him if this was a restaurant, and if it was, was it open?

"Yes," he said, and whisked us inside. He did this so fast and authoritatively we didn't really have a choice. Also, he was gorgeous, and we were totally disarmed by his dimples. (I suspect that if he'd ushered us into the szex shop we would have gone like sheep.)

Inside, we were taken through the darkened room with the tables and chairs, which was empty, and through into a larger room in the back, which turned out to be... a restaurant! Down the back of the room there was a large sign with an arrow pointing to the "Health Club," which was apparently through the back of the restaurant. The sign had a picture of a man flexing his muscles. The rest of the restaurant looked like a normal restaurant, if somewhat run-down, except that one wall was covered in revolutionary pictures.

I took photos when the waiter wasn't looking, which was frequently. He kept disappearing, and there were very few other customers. (I wanted to take a picture of the waiter, too, but was a little concerned about how that request would be taken. I mean, it felt kind of wrong for a couple of women who'd been wandering the szex shop area of town to ask a hunk if they could take his photograph, and I was feeling a little intimidated already.)





The waiter brought the menu, which was HUGE. It went on for pages and pages. It was not a normal menu. It was a novel.

We settled down to study it. Fortunately for us, there were English translations alongside some of the Hungarian. Have you ever seen Hungarian? Do they have to try to get every letter of the alphabet into every word, do you think?



Unfortunately the menu translations had been done by someone whose command of English was somewhat wobbly.

We decided that since we were in Hungary, we should have goulash. That was easy. However, goulash was listed as a starter, and we wondered how big it was. We asked, and the waiter told us it was a starter. We asked how big the dish was, and he told us it was the usual size. This was not very informative, but he was reaching the end of his English so we decided to order something else as well, just in case, but not a main. (Actually I can't remember if we ever got that far in the menu anyway.)

We found a couple of pages dedicated to garnish.

"Garnish?" we asked each other. "Is there some other use of the word 'garnish' that we don't know about?"

The menu was not helpful. I can't remember if that part of it had the English translations (some parts didn't) or whether it was just unusually obscure translations, but we couldn't figure out what 'garnish' was supposed to mean. We decided to ask our long-suffering waiter again.

"What is garnish?" we asked him.

"It is..." he waved his arms helplessly and shrugged, "...It is GARNISH."

We frowned. Then we pointed to one menu item in the 'garnish' list.

"How about this," we said. "What is it?"

"Oh no, you don't want that. It's noodles," he said.

"Noodles?" we said. "Sounds good!"

"But it's NOODLES," he said. We asked for further explanation but ran into language problems again. He clearly did not want us to have the noodle garnish, but we could not extract information about what would be a suitable other dish. But he was so against the garnish it was making us curious, so in the end we told him firmly that we wanted the goulash, a salad, and the noodle garnish. Oh, and a bottle of wine.

He looked exasperated with our choice, but gave up trying to convince us that noodles were a bad idea. His expression said that we were making a horrible mistake. He'd tried to stop us but we just wouldn't listen. You could see him metaphorically washing his hands of us as he left the table.

We sat thoughtfully, pondering what could be so awful about noodles, and after a while the goulash appeared (BIG bowls), along with a large basket of bread and the wine. We tasted it all, and it was FABULOUS. Exactly what we wanted, and quite clearly enough for our needs. (If that goulash was a starter Hungarian people eat like sumo wrestlers. I think that must have been another menu translation glitch.)

Eventually the salad appeared, which was satisfactory, and the 'garnish,' which was decidedly odd. It was not noodles. It was... I don't know what to call it. It might have started off as noodles, I suppose, but if so, the noodles had been chopped into bits, about rice-sized. It was made of some kind of pastry, or dumpling-type material. The plate was huge, and there was a MOUNTAIN of this stuff. The waiter had a told-you-so expression as he delivered it and almost but not quite rolled his eyes as he departed, probably to have a giggle in the kitchen about the idiot tourists.

We stared at the plate.

"Noodles?" I said. "NOODLES?"

"Well, I suppose we should try it," my friend said, doubtfully. We were both full already, from the wonderful goulash, and there was still bread and wine left. And salad.

We dipped our forks into the mountain.

It was remarkable. It had NO FLAVOUR AT ALL. It was like ... chopped up cooked dumpling dough, with no sauce, no salt, and no taste. It was not noodles. It was not garnish. It barely qualified as 'food,' although it would have made great landfill.

Our 'garnish' sat on the table for the rest of the meal, a hard-to-ignore reminder of the lesson we had just learned. LISTEN TO THE WAITER'S ADVICE, EVEN WHEN HE DOES NOT MAKE SENSE.

I wish I'd taken a photo of the noodles, but I didn't, and nor did I note the Hungarian name. I was too busy regretting having ordered it.

But I really would like to know two things:

1. What is garnish, in Hungary? That was no sprig of parsley!

2. What WAS that stuff, and how are you supposed to eat it?

Any ideas?

Question

In polygamous societies, what happens to all the extra men?

Nobody has ever been able to explain this to me satisfactorily, and it just DOESN'T ADD UP.

They make me happy

One of my students surprised me yesterday, several times. His English isn't that great. Like most of my students his grammar is pretty awful, and he has trouble putting a sentence together. However, he knows a few juicy phrases. I don't know where he gets them from, but he has learned them by heart and takes every opportunity to use them. It takes me aback every time, because the phrases are so perfect, and yet so ... wrong.

He told me that he was taking French as well as English, and I asked him how he was getting on with the pronunciation. He looked pleased, and replied,

"I'm afraid that it's totally beyond my powers of comprehension."

The whole class gasped with admiration.

He came out with several of these during the class, but I forgot to take notes. I'm starting to be wary when he gets that pleased look. It always means he's about to say something staggeringly literate. Nobody will understand him except me, and I won't know how to respond.

---

Another student wrote about taking driving lessons over the summer. She wrote,

My counselor, Mr Hashimoto, was very interesting person and I could enjoy driving. First, I put my foot down hard. Mr Hashimoto's face was blue and he said, "You are tremendously scary person." But finally, I could get driver's license and I drive very well now.

Who?

The other evening, just before I went to bed, The Man said,

"I found some CDs of yours today, when I was cleaning up downstairs."

"Really? " I said. "I'll have a look in the morning. Don't throw them out."

"There were two," he said. "One of them is Fleet Macwood."

I needed an extra long pause to digest this information. I knew there was something funny about what he'd said. I just couldn't figure out what it was, at first.

Grafitti, or art?

(As you may have noticed, I've been sorting through some of my photos from the trip.)

I loved Bratislava. We only spent a day there, but it was full of surprises. We walked and walked and walked, and it seemed that every corner we turned there would be something surprising. It wasn't just the cows, either.

We went to see a church. I think it was the Blue Church. It was lovely, but the surprise was not the church. The surprise was the old, run-down building behind the church, which was not mentioned in the guidebook at all. I think we spent more time looking at this building than we did at the church. I certainly took more photos.

Who did this? How? Why? When? I don't know. There was no information, and nobody to ask.

Here are some photos. It was quite a large building, and I could not get the whole thing into one picture. This did not stop me from taking a lot of pictures, though, and here are some of them. (Click for larger versions.)

This is more or less what we saw when we came around the back of the church:



In this one, you can see the church on the right. The buildings are touching. The church, however, is beautifully maintained. The Gogh building (I don't know what else to call it) is not.



I did not visit any art galleries on my trip. This did not stop me from seeing some famous works of art, out in the wild.




We wondered about the rugs hanging out the windows. They were high up, and we couldn't tell whether they were real or not.





The stairs were not real. Or, if they were, I would not want to try climbing them. I wouldn't try opening the door, either.





Here are a couple more close-ups...





And finally, here is the view from the other side of the building, where we discovered there were yet MORE pictures.



I can't find any information about this building on the web, but I'm still looking. One problem is choosing search words. Graffiti, or art?

Walking on water

I took this picture at the little river that runs along my friend's place, in France.

Cricket

When I was in Baden-Baden, sitting in a cafe and eating crepes, I was joined by a cricket, who also studied the map. The cricket wanted to go to Schafberg, I think.

Cat at window (photo)

When I was staying with my friend in France, I took this picture of one of her cats. I can't remember which one this is. Buster, perhaps. Isn't he lovely?

Big fat lies (and how useful they can be)

Carrie got pulled over by the traffic police the other day, and found it an unsettling experience. It reminded me of the times I've been pulled over, in the days when I used to drive. It only happened twice, and I never got a ticket.

The first time was when I was fifteen, and speeding home in my father's car. (Yes, I had a licence - that was the legal age in NZ way back then.) The policeman told me to get out of the car, and I opened my mouth and a big fat lie came out. I was SO surprised. I'd always thought I was an honest person, and had to revise my opinion of myself.

"I, er, just got my... um... period," I stammered, acting all coy. "Do you mind if I don't get out? It's just that, er, I wasn't expecting it and I think I've made a mess of the seat and I'm REALLY embarrassed and trying to get home in a hurry so I can clean up ..."

The very young policeman went bright red and didn't know where to look. He told me to go. I drove off, feeling guilty and astonished and exhilarated all at the same time. Where did that lie COME from? It just popped out! And what if he'd told me to get out of the car anyway and found out it wasn't true?

The next time I was pulled over was a few years later. It was the early hours of the morning, and I got pulled over because I was driving so slowly and was too tired and drunk to bother braking when I went around a roundabout (aka traffic circle). Instead I slowed down well in advance and went around it slooowly. The tyres squealed, which was a bit surprising because I was going so slow. The police car was at the other side of the roundabout, and two policemen waved me down. I stopped, leaped out of the car so they wouldn't notice I wasn't wearing a seat belt, and they asked me if I was all right. They'd been watching me and wondered if my brakes were working. I told them I'd been working late and was very tired, and thought I was going slowly enough to not need to brake. They pointed out that the car's WOF (Warrant of Fitness) had expired the day before (I hadn't even noticed) and that my tyres were bald (I hadn't noticed that, either), which was why the car had squealed so badly around the roundabout. I lied and told them I had the car booked in for the WOF and a overhaul the next day.

I also told them I'd been working late. This was true, except that I'd worked until midnight and then partied until 3am, and the non-alcoholic punch was LETHAL. Somebody had emptied two bottles of vodka into it halfway through the evening and I hadn't noticed until I went out into the cold night and found myself staggering all over the place trying to get the key in the car door. I went back into the party and demanded an explanation, and that's when someone confessed about the vodka. But I had to get home, so drove anyway, even though I knew I shouldn't.

The policemen were sweet. They kindly offered to drive me the rest of the way, saying they were concerned that I was too tired to drive safely. I thanked them and refused. I said I was fine, the shock of being pulled over had woken me up, and I would be careful. Actually I would have liked to be driven, but I was worried that if one of them was in the car with me he might smell the vodka on my breath, or I'd start giggling. They insisted on following me home anyway, to make sure I was all right.

Wasn't that nice of them? It is incredibly stressful, though, being escorted by a police car while you're driving drunk along a winding coastal road.

I don't know why they didn't notice I was drunk anyway, or even ask if I'd been drinking, but perhaps it was the car. I had an ancient Morris Minor, a car usually driven by harmless little old ladies, and you took on an innocent aura when you drove one of those. Naughty people did not drive Morris Minors and that was all there was to it.

What do harmless little old ladies drive these days, anyway?

Boots

The weather has finally cooled down a little, and about time, too.

Yesterday morning when I got to the station, I looked down and discovered I was wearing shoes. I was astonished. I could have SWORN I had put on my boots. How did that happen? I'd had no intention of wearing those shoes. They are scruffy, and not very comfortable when I'm on my feet all day. I didn't have time to go back to the house and change, and spent the day being aware of my feet.

Classes went all right, but I HATE these five o'clock risings.

Books

On Friday a man from Missions to Seamen is coming to the house to take away my books. I have far too many books, and they take up too much space. I have decided to be ruthless, and have told The Man to just send all the cartons I've been piling up downstairs to be sorted one day. I have no time to sort them. They're all going.

He has been taping up the cartons and getting them ready for collection. Some of them are piled up by the front door already. I don't know how many there will be. More than twenty cartons. I don't want to count them. I am trying to ignore them.

Yesterday, as he was repacking some of the cartons, he called,

"I think I saw a Doris Lessing book in one of those boxes. Don't you want to keep those?"

"YES!" I shouted. "Which box?"

"I think it's that one. Or maybe that one."

I ripped off the tape and opened the cartons, and looked through. Immediately a little voice in my head started. Ooh! This is a good book! Maybe I'll read this one again... and look! Do I really want to get rid of this one? These are GOOD BOOKS. Do I really want to give them away? Are ALL the cartons like this, so full of good stuff?

Suddenly I wanted to throw myself on the piles of cartons, screaming, "NO! NO! DON'T TAKE THEM AWAY! STOP! THESE ARE MINE! MINE! MINE!"

Then got a grip on myself and put them all back. The Doris Lessing was not there, but The Man found it for me in another carton. I kept only that one. I also still have a lot on my bookshelves, the only ones I actually sorted. I kept about a quarter of those.

I'm grateful to The Man for doing this. I never open these boxes, normally. They just sit there, taking up space. Lots and LOTS of space. As the books are getting packed away and put aside, the house keeps getting bigger.

But I'm glad The Man is packing the books, and not me. If I were packing them the job would never get done. I would start reading and wondering if perhaps I should keep this one, and that one, and ...

But I wonder if any of those missing Leslie Thomas books are in those cartons? I can't go through them to find out. I couldn't bear it. And anyway, The Man would kill me if I untaped any more of those carefully packed cartons.

I have to stop thinking about this now.

Computers and cows

Last night I had computer problems. It is so long since I had computer problems that I had forgotten the usual troubleshooting procedures. As it turned out it was not a problem I'd ever had before, and I had to do a power reset. I didn't know how to do this at first, and have lost the manual for the computer. I never need it.

The Man found instructions on the web, and hit the power reset button. The computer turned itself off. For a panicked moment I thought he had killed my computer, because it had been stopping halfway through starting up, and I couldn't turn it off at all before. I could only restart, and have it freeze halfway through the process. But then I turned it on again and EVERYTHING WAS FINE. HALLELUJUH! EVERYTHING WAS FINE!

(I really thought it was the end of my computer there for a couple of hours.)

Today I was reading the student homework I was worried about last week. I have marked more than half of them already. (Ha! No need to panic about that, either.) The students were writing about what they did in the summer vacation. None of them had as good a time as I did, but one wrote something that made me snort. He had visited a farm with his brother, and wrote:

We watched cows and goats. They prowled around.

They have really interesting farms in Japan.

Concert

I promised I would tell about the Kodo concert.

It was, of course, wonderful. But it was also a disappointment. I first saw Kodo more than 15 years ago, when I first came to Japan. A friend had been told about them, and we bought tickets for an outrageous price and went to the concert, not really knowing what to expect but having been told it was worth every yen of the hugely expensive tickets.

At that concert, I remember the drummers coming on stage. Then I was shaken to my bones, and ten minutes later the concert ended. I looked at my watch, thinking it was intermission, and discovered that two hours had passed.

This time, technically they were very good. The audience was on their side, and loved them before they started.

About halfway through the third piece, I found myself being disturbed by the snoring of one of the secretaries, who was seated right behind me. I wanted to turn around and slap her face, but then thought, no, wait a minute, maybe she has a point. Last time I saw Kodo I didn't even notice the rest of the audience was there. A bomb could have gone off under my seat and I wouldn't have noticed.

So what happened to them?

One thing I think happened is that this was a pared-down Kodo. It was not the full group. It was a free concert, and it's not even listed on their web page. I don't know the details. I don't know why it was free, or how the university Coop managed to organize this. Maybe someone owed somebody something.

They are still wonderful, though. I would still recommend that you see them if you get the chance, even if the tickets are expensive. Maybe it was just this one time they were a bit off, and maybe my expectations were too high. And anyway, towards the end it did all start to come together.

It just didn't happen soon enough.

I started thinking of other Japanese music concerts I have been to. There are not many. There's a free festival thing they have around at City Hall every year, in which various groups perform, usually fairly amateur but occasionally surprisingly good. I have been to a few Okinawan music concerts, and they are always good. The most memorable have been those of Kina Shokichi. He is completely nuts, a crazy person, and his concerts are unforgettable. He makes you dance, whether you want to or not. His music gets INTO YOUR BONES AND YOU HAVE TO DANCE, EVEN IF YOU CAN'T DANCE, OR IF YOU ARE DYING, CRIPPLED, OR VERY OLD. That man could make DEAD people get up and dance. He is the human equivalent of the red shoes in the fairy tale. His concerts always end in chaos, with half the audience up on stage with the musicians and his face occasionally appearing amongst the rabble, playing like a maniac, bouncing around like a rabbit on speed.

The best Kina Shokichi concert I went to was one he gave for the benefit of handicapped people, after the earthquake. These people had a very hard time - deaf people were not found, because they couldn't hear rescuers and the Japanese government was stupidly quarantining sniffer dogs when they were offered by other countries. Mentally handicapped people were bewildered and lost. People in wheelchairs were helpless. At this concert there were all kinds of handicapped people, and there was a lot of impassioned ranting, and interpreters for the deaf had their fingers given a real workout as Kina babbled on at high speed, unable to slow down, apologizing, laughing, twitching, bouncing around with the force of his passion.

Then the concert started. It wasn't long before the mentally handicapped were on their feet. They did not have the ability to control themselves. One young man was totally overwhelmed by the music. He was so happy he could not stand it, and ran up to the stage, shouting incoherently. Kina grinned at him. He went up and danced, shouted in Kina's face, Kina shouted back, and the young man ran down again, happy, still dancing. He went back to his seat, but was soon back as the music sped up again and the drumming got wild. Others followed. The music got faster and faster, and soon nobody could stay seated. It was all wild, wonderful, and mad. I was happy for days afterwards.

I asked The Man what happened to Kina Shokichi. I haven't heard any news about him for a long time, or of any concerts.

"He became a politician," said The Man. "Forget about him."

A politician? A POLITICIAN?

HOW COULD HE?