Many years had elapsed during which nothing much had happened, except the teaching of English lessons. But one day in winter my wife, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea with milk, something which I did not normally drink. I declined at first and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She brought from the kitchen one of those flat, triangular little snacks called “potato scones,” which look like an item of stationary from a maths class. Then mechanically, tired after a hard day, I raised the cup of tea to my mouth, into which I had just stuffed a large bite of potato scone. No sooner had the tea and snack mixed in my mouth than I felt a shudder run through my body. That was because I had put too much food in my mouth and almost choked. But it was also because the mixture of milk tea and too much potato scone stuffed into my mouth reminded me exactly of my childhood in Scotland.
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I am going to go back to Scotland soon for a break. It will be my first time to go home in about seven years. I am looking forward to eating many of the local foods which I used to eat as a child – sausage rolls, haggis, rhubarb and custard, real bacon, Scotch pies, and potato scones. I am hoping that as soon as some of this food enters my mouth in the right combination, seven books’ worth of nostalgia will explode in my mind. This of course happened for Marcel Proust when he ate a French cookie called a Madeleine with some tea, and became the basis for the seven volumes of “In Search of Lost Time.”
If I left Japan for seven years, I wonder what combination of food would produce a powerful sense of nostalgia for my time in japan? With a glass of sho-chu and a chocolate covered almond, perhaps I will one day remember every English student I have ever taught?
Vocabulary:
to elapse – of time, to pass or go by
to decline something – to say no to an offer of something
mechanically – without thinking
to stuff something into (one’s mouth) – to fill (one’s mouth) with something, so that there is little space left unfilled
No sooner had [A] than [B] – As soon as [A] happened, then [B] happened
a shudder – a sudden shaking of the body
to choke – to have severe difficulty breathing because the throat is blocked
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