What’s that you are burning? －燃やしているのは、なあに？－

I tell my son bedtime stories every night.  I listen to an audio book I think he might like, and then try to remember and summarise the story. 

Recently he has been enjoying listening to stories from “33 Strategies of War” by Robert Greene.  Each chapter has different anecdotes and examples from history to illustrate one strategy, such as “Know your enemy,” and “Don’t fight the last battle.” 

One strategy we talked about recently was “Burn your boats.”  When Cortez left Cuba with a small group of armed men, he was hoping to conquer the Aztec empire in what would become Mexico.  But he didn’t trust that his men would give 100 per cent effort if they had an escape route.  So after landing in dangerous territory, he deliberately destroyed the boats that had taken them there.  Now his men didn’t have the option of running away and taking the boats back to Cuba.  They had to fight and win, or else die trying. 

A non-military example of “Burn your boats,” was Dostoevsky.  When he started to feel too comfortable as a writer, he spent all of the money he had saved up.  Then he had no choice but to write and sell his writing at a fast pace, because he had no other money to fall back on. 

How does this strategy work for English learners, I wonder?  Burn Google translate, and force yourself to work out the meaning of English by yourself?

 

Back Streets or Luxury? ー裏道か、豪華さかー

My recent trip to Vietnam with my wife and 9 year old son reminded me of travelling through South-east Asia twenty years ago.  I could see at that time, and I spent about three months backpacking through Thailand, Myanmar and Cambodia.  Since losing my eyesight, and also having a young child, I have taken easier holidays in Japan or in resort areas with good hotels and facilities for tourists. 

In Vietnam we stayed in three different hotels – a small, cheap hotel in Hoi An, then a more luxurious hotel in central Da Nang, then a cheaper hotel near the beach in Da Nang.  The switch from cheap hotel to luxury hotel amazed my son.  When he saw the second hotel, and we were invited to enjoy the free afternoon tea (with a chocolate doughnut), my son kept saying, “I am rich!  I have become rich!” 

The thing which reminded me of backpacking years ago was wandering around a place where people didn’t speak English, and having random encounters and experiences.  There was a banh mi, or Vietnamese style baguette restaurant just across from our hotel in Hoi An, and we decided to give it a go.  It was lovely, and much nicer than the banh mi restaurant recommended by guide books and frequented by tourists rather than locals. 

We wandered through the back streets near our hotel in Hoi An, looking for a launderette.  We found kids kicking a ball up and down a narrow street, dodged passing scooters, found a place to get our laundry done, and bought some wonderful coconut flavoured iced coffee from a street vendor. 

Things became much easier once we reached the luxury hotel in Da Nang.  The beds were bigger.  I broke a glass at our first hotel by kicking it because I was sharing a bed with my son, and sleeping with my feet next to his head, and the night stand with my glass of water.  We could all stretch out and relax in the second hotel. 

The breakfast was also a delight in the second hotel.  I tried dishes such as roast duck, sticky rice, dumplings, and pho noodles. 

But despite the greater luxury and convenience of Da Nang, my wife and I much preferred the back streets of Hoi An.

 

Hoi An Soup －ホイアンスープ

Our taxi arrived in the evening at T and T Villa, a small, three star hotel in Hoi An. 

We checked in, and walked up two flights of stairs, since there was no elevator.  The staff, seeing that I was blind, kindly asked if we would like to move to a room on the ground floor.  I said it would  be fine using the stairs – after all, there was a constant noisy beeping from car and scooter horns at ground level. 

After a short rest, we headed out into the city.  Our first task was to find a mini-mart, said to be about a ten minute walk away, so that we could buy supplies such as bottled water.  Imagine a Japanese lady helping her nine year old son along, with her blind husband tapping his cane and holding her shoulder as they make their way up unfamiliar streets.  The roads were very uneven, and there were many scooters parked on the pavement, meaning we had to constantly step into the road for stretches until the pavement became free again.  Crossing busy roads was very difficult the first few times, since there were no pedestrian traffic lights and several lanes of beeping scooters. 

But we did get used to it.  The locals were very friendly and helpful.  Sometimes a scooter would stop to block the traffic to allow my wife to get us at least half way across the road.  You could stop half way and just let the traffic pass in front and behind you until a gap on the other side became available.  At other times, local pedestrians would gesture for us to cross the road alongside them, as they zipped between the vehicles with a practiced ease. 

We made it to the mini-mart.  We got our water, some snacks, and a bottle of nep moi, a Vietnamese rice vodka.  It is about 30 per cent alcohol, and a few glasses each evening helped me sleep soundly! 

It was already getting late, so rather than look for any particular restaurant, we decided just to stop at a random restaurant that seemed to be selling noodles.  So we had our first meal in Vietnam in a pho restaurant that turned out to serve only vegetarian dishes.  I ordered something that was a light soup with noodles, vegetables and several different kinds of tofu.  It was delicious.  My wife shared a different noodle, vegetable and tofu dish with our son.  It was as nice a meal as you could hope for, and the total cost for the two dishes was 50,000 Dong.  That’s about 315 Japanese Yen or 1 Pound and 50 Pence in U.K. money. 

It was stiflingly hot and humid.  My wife said that as the lady cooking our meal was ladling vegetables and tofu into our noodle soup, a big bead of sweat was running down her face.  As the sweat reached her nose, my wife wondered if it was going to drip into our soup.  It didn’t, and she smiled as she gave us our meals. 

As we were walking back to the hotel, dodging scooters and bumps in the road, the sweat was dripping down my back too.  There were smells all around – coffee, spices and frying food everywhere.  The roads were a chaotic bustle of noises.  I felt like I was in a human soup.  And I loved it. 

As a blind person on holiday with others, I can sometimes feel quite left out.  Everyone else is sightseeing – literally looking at a beautiful view or statue or painting that I cannot see.  But on my first evening in Hoi An, I felt very much a part of the trip.  I could hear it in the bustle of life around me, smell it in the great variety of foods on offer all round, and even feel it dripping down my back.

Jumbo Questions and Jumbo Plans －ジャンボ問とジャンボ計画－

My nine year old son has finished school for the summer and is at home every day.  I usually go shopping on Friday mornings with a guide, who is a Japanese lady in her eighties.  Today I let my son join us on our trip to the supermarket, and we took him to Mr. Donut’s on the way home. 

My son gets on well with the guide, and was happily telling her about various topics that came to his mind, such as an English test he recently passed and a book he is reading about demons.  After talking about himself for quite a while, he started asking her questions.  Children can be amazingly direct.  Here are some of the questions he asked without feeling awkward: How old are you?  How old are your parents?  So how old were they when they died?  What did you study at university?  So why didn’t you go to university? 

I jumped into the conversation to stop the inquisition.  I asked my son if he was going to study something at university. 

“No,” he said.  “I’m going to leave school after junior high school.” 

“So what will you do for money?” my guide asked. 

“I’ll just win the lottery,”  said my son.  “700 million Yen on the summer jumbo lottery.” 

“700 million Yen is a lot,” said my guide.  “What would you do if you won less money, such as just one million Yen?” 

“I’d buy one million Yen’s worth of new jumbo lottery tickets,” he said.  “I only want to win 700 million Yen.” 

It is nice to have a well thought out plan for your future.

 

Play Like a Penguin －ペンギンのようにプレイするー

I read an interesting comment from the football World Cup this week.  A former striker from England, Chris Sutton, commented on Portugal’s 1 – 0 loss to Spain.  He was irritated that the Portugal manager continued to play Cristiano Ronaldo even at the age of 41. 

He said, "He's waddling around the field like a grandad, that's why Portugal are out. Cristiano Ronaldo does nothing; he did nothing. What is Roberto Martinez doing? How can you pander to a player so much?" 

His comment contains a couple of good words to talk about. 

1 – to waddle 

To waddle means to walk with short, clumsy steps, swaying the body from side to side.  The word is often used to describe the way that a duck or penguin walks. 

I like the idea of a football team playing with 10 humans and one penguin, just to confuse the opposition.  At least if his contributions on the ball were substandard, he would be able to convincingly dive in the box to win penalties. 

Example sentence:

Late into her pregnancy, she began to waddle.

 

2 – to pander to someone or something 

Pander is used negatively.  To pander to someone means to let them have what they want or indulge their weaknesses, to keep them happy or avoid upsetting them. 

In the case of Chris Sutton’s comments, he believes that the manager let Cristiano Ronaldo play, even though he was not the best option for the team, in order to please or avoid annoying the player. 

Example sentence:

The prime minister is pandering to members of his own party, rather than doing what is best for the country as a whole. 

Information, Information, Information －情報、情報、情報－

Do you want to know a secret?  Do you want to have access to hidden knowledge that no one else in the universe has? 

Winston Churchill had toast for breakfast on the day he became prime minister.  That was it.  That was the secret. 

People say that knowledge is power, but it has to be useful knowledge.  And most knowledge is useless.  You have to try to find the useful knowledge within the great sea of useless information, like a fisherman patiently catching fish. 

That seems to be the message of a short story I read yesterday, anyway.  In a sci-fi story by Stanislaw Lem, two clever robots are captured by a pirate.  The robots offer the pirate gold, but he refuses. 

“I want knowledge, not gold,” says the pirate.  “I am a university educated pirate.  So I know that real power comes from information, not pretty metal.” 

The pirate demands that the robots tell him everything that they know before he will let them go.  The robots are worried.  They know a lot of things, and it would take a very long time to tell everything to the pirate.  So they come up with a plan. 

“If it is knowledge you seek, we can make for you a gift that will keep on giving.  We can summon a demon which will scribble down secrets and forgotten or hidden information as fast as you can read it.  Only you will have access to all this information.” 

The university educated pirate agrees, and the robots summon the demon.  Then they quickly run to their spaceship and escape before disaster strikes. 

The demon does start scribbling hidden information onto an ever growing pile of paper.  It rained in Amsterdam on the 1^st of July, 1187.  Mary Queen of Scots had three pairs of blue socks.  English teacher William’s grandmother was nicknamed “Gam” because his older brother couldn’t correctly say the word “Gran” when he was a child, and the name stuck… 

And so on.  Before the pirate realizes what is happening, he is suffocating in useless information.  Soon the paper is so thick around him that he is trapped and cannot escape.  He has to spend the rest of his days consuming pointless facts. 

If you ever find yourself scrolling social media “news” feeds and reading endless headlines of celebrity gossip, perhaps you will understand how the pirate feels.

 

Becoming Britaly －イギタリアになること－

“You know, people come to Italy for all sorts of reasons, but when they stay, it's for the same two things."

"What?"

"Love and gelato.”

from “Love and Gelato” by Jenna Evans Welch

 

“You may have the universe if I may have Italy”

Giuseppe Verdi

 

I think that the U.K. is becoming Italy, and I don’t know how I feel about it. 

The news is reporting that yesterday saw a temperature of 36.7 degrees, and people in the south of Britain are currently experiencing the warmest June night ever. 

This is not the weather for traditional British cups of hot tea, and grumbling complaints about how cold it is.  It is also not good for our old houses, built to keep the heat in rather than the heat out. 

At the same time, Britain is about to get its seventh prime minister in the last ten years.  Since Brexit, we have become politically unstable and, according to many observers, ungovernable.  Britain was traditionally seen as politically conservative, boring and predictable.  It was always Italy in the past that changed prime minister almost every year. 

Are Scotland or England going to suddenly win the World Cup this year, instead of failing miserably as usual?  Will the quality of British food improve?  Will the people become more passionate and expressive of their emotions? 

I’m sure it won’t be all bad living in the new land of Britaly.