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back again…

November 30, 2003

this is me
a nice cafe

Well, I’m back from the big city. The things I did there included:

  1. having my first really good cup of coffee since coming to Japan (picture of cafe, below);
  2. buying a jacket while mildly drunk (which I think might be the key to successful clothes shopping – I made the decision so quickly!);
  3. taking part in, and winning, a pub quiz. I was in a team with three other teachers from remote islands, and we were clearly destined to win (the clearest indication of this was when team-mate Alex said ‘Montreal’ – the correct answer – before the question had even been asked). When our victory was announced I was suddenly handed a microphone and managed to come out with something along the lines of “while it’s always nice to win, it wasn’t our really our knowledge that won this quiz for us so much as the extreme ignorance of our enemies.” Great: this to a roomful of people who might otherwise have been my friends…

Almost as soon as I got back something typically bizarre happened on the island. On Tuesday evening a local man went out fishing on his own, and didn’t come back. The sea was extremely rough, and so, fearing the worst, the fire-brigade and various islanders launched a search party. On Wednesday afternoon they found him, and the news came through a bit at a time: first – that they’d found him; second – that he was alright; third – that they found him at the top of a hill; and fourth – that he was running around up there without any clothes on.

While it seems unlikely that the story behind a man’s decision to tear off his clothes and run for the hills is a happy one, and I don’t want to laugh at mental illness, I still find it pretty funny just because of the huge discrepancy between anything you might expect to have happened to a man who disappears while fishing in rough seas, and what actually happened…

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