Mission less impossible

News just in, I've been given a reprieve from my mission impossible... I just have to mime along to "Sing" (La la la la la, la la la la la, la la la la la). Then, one blast of me blues harp (that's harmonica to you non-Mississippi Delta blues aficionados) and the boss of the show agreed to my sheepish request to jettison some of the more difficult B sus 4 F#Minor-0nce-removed chords in Hey Jude, and turn it into a (simple) bluesy romp ala Status Quo. Rockin' all over the world! Just got to work on the singing part. Why'd McCartney have to sing so darned high anyways?

Re-ordering reality

While collating some good stories about Japan, I thought there's nothing quite as satisfying as a good list. While I have as little power over my life as anyone else has over theirs, when you write a shopping list, you are master of the universe. You are free to order the vegetables according to size, sweetness or even the Dewey Decimal System if you so desire. But why stop with shopping? Here's my list of things worth listing:

1. Books that you told people you were reading, but you haven't actually got past the blurb.
2. Top 10 ambitions you had as a teenager you have conveniently forgotten.
3. The worst jobs you have ever had.
4. Things you wish you hadn't done while drunk.
5. Things you wish you had done while drunk.

For a more useful list that actually goes to 10, click here.

First Kounoyama... then the world!

Spot of tea, old chap?

We started back at work today, but with one small difference. We're no longer just an English school, oh no, we are now tea merchants too. Well, sort of. Our first friends in Abiko, a Japanese-Sri Lankan family, have received a licence to import tea and we said we'd be happy to display their wares and try to find some customers for them. It's all part of the plan. Sort of. Margaret asked me what my five-year plan was the other day, and I said we haven't really got one. If you had asked me five years ago what I would be doing now, I couldn't have predicted how my life has changed. But it got me thinking. I don't know about five years, but here's my ideal result:

• We are a well-respected English language school.
• We have our own premises with a lively tea and coffee shop on the ground floor.
• We operate a thriving English language bookshop from the basement.
• We have a small publishing operation in the attic, producing original teaching material for profit and the odd novel or two for kicks, and for sale in our bookshop.

In short, I'd love to see us develop into a cultural centre for English. It's possible, after all, the British Empire started with just a liking for tea...

Olympic ideals

Is it heresy to admit I couldn't care less about the Olympics? Here in Japan it's on the telly all the time, the front and back pages of the papers and no doubt all over the internet too. Watching the Olympics here means watching a lot of judo and women's volleyball (it's what the Japanese are good at) rather than rowing and running, which the Brits tend to be good at. I'm with comedian Billy Connelly who can't be fussed with it all either. He does a great routine taking the mick out of the opening parade, pretending to march with a flag saying in a childish voice "We can jump higher than you can!" The uncharitable might say I don't like the Games because Great Britain has no chance of topping the medals table, and that leaves picking from the Chinese, Americans or Russians. Hmmm. I've never understood the excuse for international sports that it allegedly brings the world closer together. Nonsense, it has us baying for blood for the nation's honour. Or, as George Orwell put it: "Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting." But I like the World Cup...

Walking before I can run (a car)

Yesterday, the humidity was getting to me so I headed off on my trusty 13-year-old mountain bike to the electronic superstore down the road and bought two fans, as well as some lightbulbs and 100 coffee filters,  then tied them to the handlebars and saddle and wheeled my bike through the backstreets home. In the stifling humidity (I don't know how humid it was, but even thinking about doing anything that requires any movement at all drenches my brow in sweat) I felt like a Viet Cong foot soldier wheeling his Chinese-made supplies down the Ho Chi Minh trail.  We've lived in Japan now for over a year, and I think I can safely say that I don't miss owning a car. It wasn't an eco-conscious decision when we moved here, simply a lack of money that meant buying a car was way down the list of priorities (somewhere behind adding a veranda to the house and digging a wine cellar in the front garden). We've had to turn to public transport (which is no hardship in ultra-punctual Japan) and take advantage a lot more of pedal power. At first we had withdrawal symptoms. "My feet are hurting" was a constant refrain from the kids, but now the car is a distant memory of life in suburban Mickleover. Mind you, I wouldn't object to a quick air-conditioned spin up into the cool of the mountains right about now.

Near misses with greatness

In a lesson today featuring the present perfect, the question came up "Have you ever met anyone famous?" While I didn't bore my students with old war stories, I thought I might risk boring you, dear readers, as you can escape at the click of a mouse, rather than having to wait politely for the end of the lesson. Actually, I haven't met anyone really famous, but I've had a handful of near misses - the Queen drove past me at high speed when I was a primary school student during her Silver Jubilee year in 1977; while inter-railing  around Europe I saw Yasser Arafat in the distance in Vienna, and while on a sightseeing tour to Philadelphia, I swear I saw the Dalai Lama go in to Independence Hall ahead of me. My greatest near miss, though, was while covering the visit of then President Bill Clinton who was opening a Sherwood, Arkansas, school named after him in 1994. While waiting for the Secret Service to allow us out of the school campus I nipped out for a quick cigarette (an evil habit that I have since renounced). When I retook my seat at the back of the auditorium, my editor said, "Where have you been? The President and Hillary just swung by and shook my hand." Dang. Another near miss. 

First things first

Hello all, bear with me here, I'm new to the world of blogging. What's this blog all about? A good question, one that I'm struggling to figure out. I hope it will provide a small window on my world, for whatever that's worth, and I suppose it's a stab at keeping my sanity through exercising my writing muscle. While I figure out what on earth I am going to do with it, why don't you have a look at the news feed at the bottom of the page which has a variety of subjects of interest to me.