When our family of two became a family of three, Mrs M persuaded me that a fridge-freezer upgrade was essential if we were to cope with the enormous quantity of baby food M Jr would soon be consuming. A quick visit to the local second-hand shop and 45,000 yen later (52,000 if you include the price of delivery and of having the old one taken away for recycling), we were in possession a Sharp fridge-freezer so enormous that it made…
For the past twenty years or so, the city in which I work has been running an exchange programme with its twin town (or ‘sister city’, as they prefer to say here) in the States, so for much of last week I had the chance to act as interpreter, when a group of ten students and two teachers came for a whirlwind tour of Ibaraki. Not that they were short of interpreters: at the first-night welcome party there were four…
My passion for football has been on the wane in recent years, something that may or may not be due to the fact that in my humble opinion, most players in the UK are overpaid, overprotected, ignorant, racist, womanising, alcoholic thugs with barely enough social skills to buy a pint of milk and barely enough footballing skills to play their way out of a paper bag. Taking this into consideration, and seeing as England are currently battling it out in…
Mrs M and I live in the countryside, where it is pretty much impossible to lead a normal life unless you have a car, and while I do manage to cycle to work most days, when we go out shopping, sightseeing or to visit friends and family, it is almost always in our still prized and resolutely unglamorous Toyota Platz. The most convenient thing about driving here – if you’re British, at least – is that they do so on…