31 Years

Happy Birthday to meeeeeeeeee!

Monday birthdays are the worst. I mentioned last week that we’d got Indian food the night before precisely because I was so busy on Monday. I had two classes, then prepping my syllabi and then preparing game and presentation materials for Tuesday.

I’d say Tuesday went off without a hitch, but it’s more accurate to say it went off with no problems. Our Mausritter sessions had split the class into four groups of players and those groups had stayed the same throughout the five sessions we ran, the Game Masters had changed but not the students. This was a good thing as, such is the nature of RPGs, different groups took different routes and found different solutions to the challenges. While we kept GMs consistent where we could, they were volunteers and sometimes had to deal with exams, social commitments and illnesses. However, we always had enough GMs for four groups.

Until this Tuesday when half of our exchange students had left because their universities back home had different entrance requirements. It was an easy fix, the age-old “splt-up-one-group-and-distribute-their-members-among-the-other-groups”. If nothing else “It’s good data” I keep telling myself. We also had a few bumps during the poster presentations, my co-teacher and I realised that our timing was a little … optimistic, and a few students didn’t get a chance to ask questions of the other participants as they were rushed towards the end. I didn’t really have a chance to dwell on that because not only was my wife very sick, but on Wednesday the police came for me.

I’m doing a crash course in basic English and interview technique for the Nagasaki police department and I’ve been getting a lot of fun out of being vague about why the police are asking about me and want to talk to me. But ultimately it’s nothing bad, they’ve given me a packet of information that I am not allowed to share with anyone and a brief breakdown of what they want but ultimately the lesson content and structure is up to me.

I’m very excited, I want to get a little more TESP (Teaching English for Specific Purposes) under my belt, and this seems like a good way to do it. If all goes well, I may be teaching a monthly conversation/ speaking practice lesson with them. Which as well as a little more experience means more money in the bank. They’ve specifically asked if I can use some news reports and authentic materials which I’m especially enthusiastic about. My toxic trait is that I think anything can be an authentic material so I’ve been trawling the internet not just for police reports and interesting case studies but Brooklyn 99 clips, funny moments from Hot Fuzz and maybe even a few Gene Hunt compilations from Life on Mars.

Well … that’s a lie. My other toxic trait is that I’ll happily teach students bad words if they ask, hypothetically of course, what the difference between “horseshit” and “bullshit” is. Purely hypothetical. Of course.

Thursday, Friday and Saturday were all largely uneventful. Life settles into a routine of planning classes, running errands, watching sitcoms with my wife (we are currently watching Community with lunch and Psych with dinner) going to Japanese class and coordinating social calendars, which in this case means coordinating two different D&D groups. Sunday hits and I realise that we are a month into 2026.

February is going to be busy. We need to get our cat microchipped for our trip back to the UK (or maybe the US), I need to mark all of my student's work for this semester and (as you can see from the picture at the top of this blog) it's going to be time for the Nagasaki Lantern Festival.