The cat with two lives

The weekend has been quite hideous. Friday night I couldn`t sleep again, so called home, only to be told my beloved Stussy was being put to sleep in a matter of hours. It seemed wrong to bed down on that news. I knew she`d go, but it was all rather sudden and I had terrible images of her being pissed off and scared in the car, only to relax when she`s taken out and put on the last table she`d ever see... It meant getting up at 7am to be genki genki at the kids` Christmas party was harder work than anything out here has been so far. My poor love. I would have liked to have been there to at least soothe and spoil her in her last moments. Fortunately, once I was playing dodgeball with twelve 7-11 year-olds, it was hard to keep my spirits down. I also managed to avoid having to limbo... I got home from work and collapsed onto my futon, only for the phone to ring and Mum to tell me Stussy had had an injection and a reprieve. It may only be temporary, but that she purred in the car means next time, I won`t have the same concerns.

Sunday, I had to relinquish my day off to another kids` Christmas party. Something of a liberty, but the recruiters hadn`t made it clear that, in spite of the long holidays, I owe Shane 13 days, so I couldn`t get out of it. Karen, Neil, myself and Matt DoS were taken by a hoard of Japanese receptionists to a freezing sports hall, forced into an assortment of ill-fitting trainers and slippers and each given 22 children to entertain. Soon the cold was pushed out by the chocolate-clogged breath of spoiled children and gushes tantrums as the hall filled. Seconds before the party started, one of my regular students sprinted past squealing `Zoooooooow-iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii` with her younger brother in hot pursuit. Karen was jealous that her name is far easier to pronounce.

The party climaxed with four groups coming head-to-head in an It`s A Knockout style tournament, with a snowball race (carrying a small football on a coloured sheet) and a Santa`s Pants race. The kids had to clamber inside a pair of huge shorts (Santa`s, of course) and run the length of the hall and back with a child in each leg. My team had an odd number, so I ended up having to get into one of the legs alongside a bespectacled and overgrown boy-child the size of a small man. I am proud to say my team won, but perhaps only because they were spurred on by a crazed, overly-competitive teacher whose only means of keeping warm was jumping, cheering and heckling the other teams. This place re-writes the definition of cold.

The rest of the week has been a strain. A six-day week would be manageable, had I not started the week with a 3am finish in the George giving an impromptu English lesson to a salaryman who only reluctantly stumped up my half a litre of Sapporo salary. Soon Ken arrived and we stuttered through my `Making Out In Japanese` phrase book, with him mock-declaring love and me genuinely rejecting him. How we laughed. Soon he was splashing out on my Frangelicos and Tuesday was a ruin. I woke up, pained by the light, again in the midst of scattered clothes and crisp packets. In spite of the Japanese being half the size of a Westerner, their packets of crisps are three times the size of Walkers. I have died and come to potato heaven.

Ryusuke, my surly nightmare, has been complaining about me to his parents, it would seem. His father paid the school a visit at the weekend to find out if his son was being a problem and how his English was going (I love this - in England, I might have been punched!). Helpfully, Mayuko-san said there was no problem. Shin-Shiraoka is a franchise school and entirely target-driven, so I should have expected as much, but my limited sleep limited my tolerance also. She did have a word with Ryusuke about his behaviour, he claimed he couldn`t understand me (he is good enough at English to be insolent) and would like more games and then rolled his eyes and tried to barge past me into the classroom. I let him eek out a 30 minute lesson on two language points he only needed to review and some dice drills and alpha-chopsticks. If he wants games, I will sit back and let him play.

Wednesday morning was my Japanese class Christmas party, which was no clearer or more educational than ever. We played `games` which involved translating kanji questions and then answering them. None of the shoofoo quite grasped that although I knew that the question was `name five things that you have in your fridge` my vocabulary doesn`t really include food at the moment! I was gutted when a fat four-year-old kid shouted `juice` and stole my only answer. I fared a little better with the chopsticks. We had to transfer dry kidney beans from one dish to another with chopsticks. The Japanese had lacquered chopsticks, so our team, with a Thai and a Korean, did very well and won that one. We also got some old-fashioned gifts - I got some incense, which I`ve newly converted to since my flat smells of shoes and rubbish if I don`t use it, and a small almost nice wash-bag, that actually turned out to be a small bento bag that I doubt I will ever use. It will make a useful gift for one of my old ladies, should they be so generous as to get me anything. We did have a nice bit of Christmas finger food - sushi, crisps and satsumas - very festive and well worth the torture and ￥100.

d us inextremely clear language that she didn`t speak English very well and had the chef rustle us up meat and seafood omelettes, one with noodles and two without. All of them fabulous. I will okonomiyaki more often from now on. We then tried to find somewhere else to drink - sitting at the hot plate was rudying up our complexes too much - but nowhere was open.

I refused to go to the George, so we ended up in the bar above it, where I had started my karaoke adventure the previous week. Unnervingly, all the staff remembered me and the rather dashing barman raised his fist to me in a `homie`-esque salute, suggesting I had made quite a show of myself (I seem to remember shouting some of the choicer phrases from the `Making Out...` book, which may be why). The owner asked me too many over-personal questions about Cherry Boy, who at this point I suspected had blown me out, and I embarrassedly sheltered behind Sean and Adam`s bulky frames and drank my overpriced flat beer. I had a quick game of darts, which I hoped the barman would join in on, but he quickly scuttled back into his sanctuary behind the bar. I eventually dragged myself away - a second 3am finish on a schoolnight was pushing it, but that`s what happened... - and was greeted by a text from Cherry Boy. We have a date on Monday and I`ve had some very amusing messages from the translation website about his long absence being `every day only of a job`.. and ...`a cold was cured, too`. The poor dear has been ill. I`ve missed his bizarre Janglish messages arriving as I drift off to sleep...