Odds and ends- last last weekend

I spent a lot of time on trains, in train stations in the back end of beyond, hanging around waiting for lifts, going from Mamurogawa to Sakata and Nishi-Hama last last weekend. The football team of the school I work at were crowned champions of the city a couple of months ago and the prefectural tournament finally came around, held in Mamurogawa. The three day event clashed with the last chance I'd have to spend some time with friends up in the north and had me poring over train schedules and pleading for lifts that all came good.

It was a scorcher last last weekend. Now it's lifted a little, just right now. On the commute back from school the other day there was one beautiful moment when I startled a flock of swallows or small birds from a verge beside a great expanse of rice fields. They took flight, darted across the path and weaved over the rice thrushes that were whipping and billowing in bunches to the play of the wind. Beyond, the mountains smudged into dark clouds grown fat with rains that would come suddenly and shortly. There was a real feeling of tranquillity, and of threat, made keener for the earth's recent bouts of jiggery-pokery, quakes and trembles. It cools with rain.

I spent a lot of time in Shinjo station. In the station building they had a Shinjo Experience Centre, full of plastic boxes of the most monstrous beetles and bugs I've ever laid eyes on. They had horns and pincers bigger than mice. They swiped pathetically against the plastic walls. I soon got bored and went for a coffee and wrote this:

Sometimes the end of the day would roll around at 4.30 and I'd high tail it out of school. Sometimes I would have planned to stay for soccer club and wouldn't. There'd be something special I wanted to cook for dinner, or someone I'd have to call back home on their lunch break, no other time would be possible. Sometimes I'd stay for soccer club, right until the end, until the meeting at the end when Coach Yamakawa would murmur a few words and Mamuro Sensei would too, until the 'Ground Aisatsu', lining up facing the pitch and bowing and saying thank-you to an empty space and the mountains in the distance, a rugged horizon and a great expanse of sky above. Once, I stayed until 5 minutes before the meeting, decided resolutely that I was having no fun at all and left.

A long time ago, it seems, suddenly Coach Yamakawa was there. One time, after a long absence, he came sporting a metal-grill eye-patch. The kids raced over to the ground fencing and crowded round and it transpired he'd had an operation. He smirked and wasn't very responsive to me when I asked after it.

I wasn't very sure if he could strike a ball well until recently, when I watched him volley in a stray ball off the crossbar and the back of Shunichi's head. Shunichi is the keeper. Another time I watched him kick a dead ball from a one pace run-up and place it precisely in a corner, rolling down the inside of the goal frame and settling innocuously with the merest bounce.

The time that Naoya's big brother started coming I can place more precisely. That was more or less a year ago, once Naoya became a senior player, as he started to become a star amongst the senior players. Naoya's brother has also grown his hair out and wears it better than I and drives a Golf and commands the respect of the team and encourages them and advises them. I once tried to give some words of encouragement to the team in English, at the bidding of Mamuro Sensei. I noticed Coach Yamakawa chuckling and whispering to one of the kids as the team circle broke up and wondered what he'd been saying.

And that's as far as I got in the place I got a coffee in Shinjo station.

At the tournament, there wasn't a place on the bench for me, like at previous tournaments. There are strict regulations about numbers- I remember the first tournament I went to, two years ago, and being ordered from the technical area by the referee and linesman, after behaving exactly as an Englishman would, pitch-side to his team. So I got over that a long time ago.

I watched them win on Saturday and kill off a game they deserved to win at the death, 3-2, on Sunday. Siobhan gave me a lift through the mountains to the beach on Sunday afternoon. A large group of us spent the evening barbecuing, wallowing in the sea and swimming out to a point for no other reason than the fun of reaching it and turning back. There was Suica-Wari, a blindfolded hunt with a stick for a watermelon. We danced around the campfire to Dorrie's old Brownies camp-site sing-a-longs. And we toasted marshmallows and called them smores between biscuits. The next day I woke before the sun had warmed itself. I waved a silent goodbye to all my friends in Sakata, still slumbering in tents and waited at a train station with no-one else, to get to Mamurogawa and watch the team squander a 2-0 lead in penalites to lose the semi-final and a possible place in the North Japan tournament.