Barbeques and the Sunday Game

Summer. After watching the waterlogged Munster football final replay this morning, it would seem the season has decided not to visit Ireland this year. In fact towards the latter part of the second half it was getting so dark down there in Killarney I figured Ger Canning and Martin Carney were forced to use military night vision glasses just to see what was going on.
Here in Muroran by contrast, we are being blessed by a warm, though not too warm, sun filled summer. The only down side to the lovely weather is that all three of us have to look at most of it from inside a classroom. We are still two weeks away from the start of the summer holidays and are impatient for them to begin.
Recently on Saturday evenings we have taken to having a barbeque in front of the house. Not the kitchen-cooker-on-wheels, gas-flamed monstrosities like back home, but rather a small charcoal fired grill, ideally sized for three. And proper skewers of meat and onions, not the bloody chunks of engorged steak. Like so much else in Japan, the emphasis is on quality rather than quantity.
We also set up the computer outside (in the boot of Sanae's car) so that after we have eaten and Cian has fetched up another couple of bottles of suitably chilled Heartland beer, we can settle back in the day's fading light and watch The Sunday Game on the GAAGO website. And there in the glimmering twilight we can marvel at the lonely genius of Joe Canning, shake our heads in despair at the squandering of all that Clare hurling talent, and wonder what Tomás O'Sé is thinking when he stands in front of his wardrobe.