Eulogy for a Sneaker

Tomorrow I am leaving Japan for the third time.

For me, leaving Japan has strong associations with throwing away a well-loved pair of trainers.

In 2004, it was a pair of dark blue Sketchers which had never given me so much as a blister. At the time they were the most expensive pair of trainers I had ever bought, and I had loved them. But all loves must come to an end.

In 2009, it was a pair of turquoise Nike Air Force, which I had originally bought to adorn my feet whilst playing basketball. They were, are, and perhaps always will be, the most garish pair of trainers I have ever owned.

In 2011, it is a pair of Nike+ running shoes. Bought in January 2008 for, well, for running. Bought because I'd gone to Fukuoka to play futsal on a Wednesday, but futsal was cancelled that day, so instead I bought expensive trainers and went to the pub. Nike+s, we have travelled hundreds of miles together, thanks to you the onset of heart disease and diabetes may have been put off for a few years. We have run on tarmac in Japan, sheep sh*t in Wales, and paved streets in Salamanca. Your soles are worn down, your seams are torn, you are filthy and you smell terrible, but I have loved you. I hope you can join Turquoise Air Force and Dark Blue Sketchers in Trainer Heaven.

Amen.

You know you've been watching too many films when...

On the bus last night I was unable to stop myself reading over the shoulder of a man who was composing an email to his girlfriend. Sadly nothing smutty at all but I was fascinated by the amount of time he took to choose his words. Now, I'm fairly anal about writing and I pore over what I've written, worrying about whether or not the reader will understand my arrangement of words in the way I intend them to, but I am nothing compared to bus-email-man. Not a sentence did he fail to delete and re-write multiple times. He couldn't decide whether to put 'ningen' (humans), 'hitotachi' (people) or 'nihonjin' (Japanese people) to describe the crowds of Homo-Erectus (no matter how hard I try I simply can't consider them 'Sapiens') at the train station. He couldn't decide whether to describe the station itself as 'nigiyaka' (busy) or 'uzai' (annoying) - eventually opting for 'uzaka' in the local dialect, another fascinating choice. All in all he took about 15 minutes to write a fairly simple phrase - there are too many people at the station, and it's very annoying. (I completely agree, I myself feel that the station turns me into an idiot magnet: every day without fail at least four or five people will manage to walk into me. And yes, the extension of that metaphor to suggest I am the polar opposite of an idiot, ie a genius, is intentional.) Anyway, back to bus-email-man. He closed the email with an even more interesting phrase. "ashita kiku-chan wa eki wo souji suru kamoshirenai." 'Tomorrow, Kiku-chan will probably clean up the station.' Now this is open to a certain degree of interpretation in my cynical, second-guessing mind. Sure, Kiku-chan may just be an ordinary cleaner, one of the hordes of workers essential to our comfort and well-being whom we nevertheless do our best to ignore as much as we can. Kiku-chan may be one of the construction workers who have done a great job of completing the horrifically ugly refurbishment and nauseatingly trite redecoration of the station in time for the launch of the Kyushu shinkansen (bullet train) today. But, on a more sinister reading of the line, Kiku-chan may well be a member of a sarin-gas wielding sociopathic cult, which has been planning a terrorist attack to 'clean up' the 'humans' at the 'uzai' station, to coincide with the launch of the new line. Don't laugh. Yes, I am paranoid, but it's coming up to the the 16th anniversary of Aum Shinrikyo's attack on the Tokyo subway which killed 13 people and injured 6000. Remains to be seen what will happen... Meanwhile I'm glad that Friday is my bus-only day and I'll be no closer than 3 miles to the station throughout the day...

Bit of a pointless one, this.

Ah, lovely lovely Sunday.

I have only recently rediscovered the joys of an un-hungover Sunday, but it didn't take me long to get into the flow of taking this finest day of the week, and making it do what I want it to.

Today is to be a day of languidly scrawling on a few Christmas cards, while catching up with a couple of recent albums that I've not yet got round to listening to. I shall have a bit of a read later, too, and perhaps catch up with a few friends.

This having-time-off thing's a bit of a lark, isn't it?

It's just a number, after all.

Hello. One of my favourite things about teaching primary school children, is the frequency and variety of insults - intentional and unintentional - that I find coming my way. Sometimes these can be surprising and delighting ("Why are you taller than my mum?" for example; or, in the moments after happening to be in the line of fire as Hiroto regurgitated his lunch: "You smell of Hiroto's sick"). Usually they have something to do with how indescribably ancient I am, which makes me happy, because I can remember saying similar things as a small child myself.

Having had a few nice episodes in the last week or so, I thought I'd commit them to paper. Um. Er. Not paper. Um. Commit them to some server somewhere out there or something. Yeah. Um.

During a lesson with year 7 last Friday, a lad in the front row was staring at me with much more interest than can be considered decent at 3 o'clock on a Friday afternoon, and after worrying that my flies were undone or that I had bread in my hair again, I finally went over to see what the matter was. He was diligently drawing a picture of me on his desk. I must say, I wasn't particularly flattered by the warts, moustache, and crows-feet.

"Is that me?" I asked.

"Yes," said Okamura-kun.

"Do I look like that?"

"No. Your eyes are smaller than this."

Well, when I was his age we used to call our teacher Grotbags behind her back ... and recalling this kept me chuckling for the rest of the afternoon. I was further amused twenty minutes later, when Okamura-kun poked his head through the classroom door to apologise for hurting my feelings.

Tuesday lunch-time, I went to help supervise a year 2 class. The immediate peril of supervising year 2s eating lunch is that you end up being vomited on, or with bread in your hair. Or maybe you don't, but I do, and with dispiriting regularity. Still, getting to tease 7 year olds more than makes up for the odd mishap, and who knows, maybe some day I'll learn to take a change of clothes with me to work.

A few of the little ones wanted to know how old I am. Whenever I am asked this, I always ask them, "How old do you think I am?"

(If you've ever been or met a small child, you'll know that the inevitable answer is, "One hundred." This seems a pretty universal tendency.)

A little girl studied me for a few moments, then asked if I have children - I do not, and I told her so.

"My mummy is forty-four," another little girl revealed. "Are you forty-four?"

"A bit less than that," I admitted.

"Are you forty-three?"

"A bit less."

"Forty-two?"

"A bit less."

This continued for some time, until between them, the two little girls had brought their top limit down to twenty-nine, at which point they determined that they were getting no-where fast, and went with, "Are you twenty?"

"A bit more than that."

Lastly, over lunch today, I was chatting with some year 7s about Christmas (I was delighted to find that they - admittedly rather tentatively - still believe in Santa). We discussed the differences between Christmas in Japan and Christmas in the UK, and I told them that my mother had made her Christmas cake the previous week-end, and that I was looking forward to having a bit. To which one boy replied, "Oh, your mother's still alive?"

Poor old mum. Yes, she's still alive, and I hope she will be for a good number of years yet.

I don't mind being thought to be much older than I actually am, not at all. It's rather a novelty. Six months ago in Manchester, I couldn't buy wine in a supermarket without ID.

On a similar kids-say-the-darndest-things theme, in the minutes before the afore-mentioned Hiroto had his tummy upset, I noticed that he hadn't eaten his cabbage, and I asked him, "Don't you like vegetables, Hiroto?"

He answered, "I like vegetables, I just don't like the way they taste."

He's a philosopher, that one.

What time is it, Eccles?

One of the most important differences between schools in Japan and those in Britain, is that Japanese schools do not employ cleaners.

This is because making children spend ten minutes at the end of the lunch break sweeping the classrooms and corridors with rather tiny brooms is considered character-building, or something along those lines.

Now, I am not inclined to disagree with this. A bit of a mindless menial task to be getting on with, a nice bit of music on in the background ... it's good for calming the kids down at the end of break, and getting them to focus on the coming afternoon.

I do have two objections, however, which I would like the school governors to consider the next time they meet ...

1. Well, they are children. The classrooms remain rather grubby at the end of the allotted ten minutes. How about getting a professional cleaner in, even, say, every other week or so? It's just that, between the chalk dust and the ... er ... regular ... dust, I sometimes feel that I'm asking too much of my poor lungs.
2. The choice of music. Basically, it needs to be more strictly regulated. For eighteen months I was daily subjected to ten minutes of a version of The Mickey Mouse March that could have been a ringtone for a Nokia 4210. And pan-pipe renditions of The Carpenters crop up altogether too frequently. This is not something I find easy to cope with on a daily basis.

It's not all doom and gloom, however. Recently one of the schools I teach at has put together a new playlist for cleaning-time, and first up is a tune I know rather well ... 'The Typewriter' by Leroy Anderson - or, as it's better known (by me at least), 'the theme to the News Quiz off of Radio 4'.

This perks me up rather nicely at 2 in the afternoon, I must say. If only the playlist continued with Ron Goodwin's 'Schickle Shamble' followed by 'The Liberty Bell March' by John Philip Sousa, and perhaps rounding off with 'The Ying Tong Song', I for one would be in a much better position to drag myself through the ultra-tedious final three hours of the day. Though I'm not promising to avoid hesitation, repetition, or deviation.

A little bit of a rant about things

Oh, I truly loath Halloween. Not for any particularly earth-shaking reason, just the normal boring ones, e.g. feeling like I have to spend money on a costume just for the privilege of looking like an idiot while I get drunk down the pub, which is something I do quite happily in my own clothes every other Saturday of the year. As far as I'm concerned Halloween is for three kinds of people: small children, students, and fans of horror films, and I'm happy to leave them to it, provided they leave grumpy old kill-joys like me to 'enjoy'* our beer in a pub that isn't orange.

The thing about this year is that it's also a friend's birthday party, which means I don't even have the get-out-clause of ... um, staying in. Now, for the last few years I've tried to get into the whole Halloween feeling, and made a (half-hearted) effort to dress up and fit in. But this year I just don't want to. I think my antipathy is largely due to an article I read on the BBC News website about how spending on Halloween-related goods is propping up the retail sector even though people are feeling poor because of the public-spending cuts. It seems that the British public are going to spend £280 million on Halloween this year, compared with about £20 million in 2001. Well, bully for the retail sector, I'm not going to begrudge them their livelihoods. I just abhor this kind of meaningless and relentless commercialisation (does that mean that I really do begrudge the retail sector its livelihood? Perhaps it does. Sorry, retail sector).

Alright, it's time to stop being such a grumpy bore and somehow muster some enthusiasm for a night out. On a different, not-entirely-unrelated-to-Halloween note, I did enjoy this column by David Mitchell, and this slideshow of spirit photographs taken by William Hope. (I'm not anti ghosts-and-ghouls-and-things, I just don't like supermarkets to dictate which parties I go to, that's all...)

* I'm stretching the meaning of the word 'enjoy' to its limits, there. We grumpy old kill-joys never actually enjoy anything, but heaven knows that's not our fault. It's the fault of all you horrible cheerful happy people, being so ostentatious in your displays of joie de vivre all the bloody time. Stop pretending that life is anything more than a seemingly endless series of dull and meaningless moments that become increasingly unbearable until you die.

If you thought the lasagne sandwich was a monstrosity, look away now.

For breakfast this morning, I bought a croquette sandwich from the Daily Yamazaki store. I have no excuse other than that it was ¥126, I was hungry, and the picture on the packaging looked quite nice.

It turned out to be a 'macaroni au gratin' croquette sandwich.

In other words ...

Pasta in a flour sauce, in mashed potato, deep fried in breadcrumbs, in a sandwich.

Not since the Romans has the concept of putting-something-the-same-only-a-bit-smaller-into-an-already-totally-adequate-food-item been so expertly applied.

I'm happy to confirm that the sandwich was revolting.

PS, I'm well aware that the Victorians also had dishes involving a gnat in a bluebottle in a bumblebee in a sparrow in a blackbird in a pigeon in a partridge in a pheasant in a chicken in a duck in a goose in a heron in an osprey in an eagle in a velociraptor in an old woman who swallowed a fly, but the Romans were longer ago and so fitted my turn-of-phrase more betterer, so there.