Sunday Part II

Turns out we weren’t done with the day yet. After lunch we headed over to the nearby park with Cian’s sleigh. Up to the top of the hill we went and then rapidly downhill Cian went. Again and again. The snow was soft and yielding, so every time he crashed, and he crashed a lot, he would happily tumble through the snow and emerge with a big grin on his face. I wasn’t grinning so much as I had to alternately haul or carry Cian back up to the top of the hill each time.

Sanae took a couple of turns on the sleigh as well though with less crashing and more shouts of “My arse, my arse!”

The comined effects of this and the morning walk on the beach rendered Cian unconscious by 5.30pm. He managed to wake up for dinner, but was back in bed and lights out for dreamland by 8.00pm. Which meant Daddy could sit down and watch a movie on a Sunday evening, something I haven’t been able to do in a long, long time. (Sanae’s arse was too tender to let her sit down and watch the movie).

Sunday

This was a better day, a much better day. Woke up to find that the snow had stopped, the wind abated, and although still cold, the sun was shining so our spirits soared. As I ate breakfast (cereal, bran,banana, slice of apple, blueberries, strawberries, slice of toast, half a muffin) I began to think spring-like thoughts, involving waves and catching a couple. Not a bad day, after yesterday’s big blow there should be still some swell, the sun would keep me warm and going for a surf would enable me to justify eating the other half of the muffin.

I ate the other half of the muffin.

Put on my wetsuit (though ‘put’ doesn’t do justice to the effort involved in getting into a 7mm, top-entry, winter wetsuit. It’s like wrestling your way into a dead squid), posed for some cover shots for the magazine ‘Mad Bastards Monthly’, and drove down to the beach. Where there were waves…and nobody else. Perfect. Into the water. And there I stayed for the next hour and a half. Sanae and Cian came down to cheer me on and then went for a walk on the beach. Well, Sanae went for a walk. Cian alternated between being pulled along on his sleigh or standing stock still and demanding Mammy carry him back to the car.

I did enjoy the session, but from a surfing point of view it wasn’t all that good. I have been two months out of the water and it showed. Upper body straight was, I dunno, hiding in my lower body perhaps, so my paddling in to the wave as it broke was more of a feeble splashing, like the dying throes of a geriatric seal. Which meant that the number of waves actually caught and successfully ridden was in the single figures.

Still, I was outside, in the water, on my surfboard, the sun was shining and that was good enough for me.

Saturday

Saturday was one of those cold, windy winter days that keeps everybody inside. Unfortunately, days like these are all too common this time of year. They have a cumulative effect so that by now, at the end of February, cabin fever has set in and we all get quite irritable in each other’s company when we are forced to spend a Saturday or Sunday inside. Cian was running a bit of a temperature so even a trip to the local shopping centre was out of the question.

(An aside: Cian had developed a rather bizarre interest in washing machines ever since we bought a new one last autumn. Every time we head down to the local shopping centre he insists on going to the Electrical Appliance store and heading straight for the washing machine section. It’s not all bad though, as when he has exhausted all the entertainment possibilities an unplugged and inert Panasonic dual washing machine and tumble dryer has to offer, he allows Daddy to go and sit in the massage chairs for five minutes).

Three months of winter and even Sanae begins to resemble Jack Nicholson’s character in the film ‘The Shining’.

Another Winter Walk in the Woods

Sunday saw the three of us take off, yet again, for the wild spaces. This time we headed down to the cliffs that encircle the town and one of Muroran's main attractions - Chikyuu Misaki (Cape Earth). As attractions go, it tends towards the mundane rather than the spectacular, but hey, this Muroran, we'll take mundane, we've no other choice.

Around the Cape are a number of walks that wind their way through the narrow, steep valleys that carve their way through the coastline. We set off on one of these and as long as we were going downhill, it was all smiles and laughter, and happy family kodak moments. However, as soon as the path began to ascend, well the happiness drained away, spirits (and legs) began to fail, and 'Sherpa' daddy had to carry boy and baggage back to the car.

Of late Cian has developed a mysterious 'belly pain', that flares up anytime he feels there isn't getting the amount of parental attention he deserves. His threshold for 'belly pain' is quite low - myself and Sanae holding a prolonged conversation, Daddy reading the newspaper, Mammy watching the news, Daddy writing this blog (which is why I am writing this at 5.00 in the morning), etc. This consistent pain can only be relieved by stopping everything and (a) lifting him up; (b) giving him a back scratch; and (c) subsequently playing the 'hiding' game with him in our bed. I'd prefer just to give him a big spoon of castor oil.

Corrections

I am currently corroding my sanity by correcting some 180 or so English writing compositions from my students. Some are good, some are alright, many are lazily bad, and a painful few make you wonder what the hell these students have been doing in their English classes for the past seven years. They start learning English as a foreign language from the first year of secondary school, so by now, when they are finishing up their first year in university, you would think that they might have got the hang of the basics - word order, personal pronouns, plurals, capitalization, elementary spelling, etc. But no, such linguistic details are right up there with string theory, differential calculus and an enlightened attitude to foreigners in the category labelled "things it is impossible for mere rice eating Japanese mortals to ever comprehend".

A sample:

"I comes to college foot. It is 15 minetes lost".

"And when becoming the second grader, I want to put power in table tennis to say nothing of study more".

"I belong to Kyudo club. Kyudo makes me hot".

I would like to be fire work man after graduating from college. It is my dream in child food".

And

"In addition, the day of the snow falls down and it embarrasses it. Do the side back only once and it fell down. The hand didn't apply it because it had a clear case in the left hand and it had the shopping bag in the right hand. The waist and the the arm were thrown and it was painful. Fortunately that the head had not been thrown during unhappiness".

Some of this is just sloppiness, an impatient scribble just to fill up the page, hand into the teacher and get the hell out of the class. But most of it directly results from a fundamental flaw in how English is taught at the secondary level.

There the emphasis is on discrete item translation, be it the word or sentence. Discourse analysis (how the language is used in a natural fashion for communication, spoken or written) and the social contexts in which various forms of language are used, is completely ignored. Why? Because the Japanese teachers have very, very limited experience of using English as a living language; rather what they have learned, and what they in turn teach, is what I term 'textbook' English - a passive collection of discreet grammatical rules and decontextualized reading passages that has little relation to 'real' English.

The result is sentences like the above, and headaches for me.