A Natural High

"A natural high," my friend said over coffee last week. "That's what you need. That's what everyone needs when they're feeling low."

"What a terribly good idea," I said, wiping some of the chocolate-cherry mocha from around my mouth and leaving the rest of it in a moustache shape that would later embarrass me in front of the children. "How very smart you are."

So this weekend, I went para-diving from one of the base mountains of Mount Fuji. At 1,500 feet, it was about as high as I could get.

There's not much to say. There was nothing to say when I sat in the van and climbed the mountain to the jump-off point. There was nothing to say when I jumped from a 1,500 foot cliff face with nothing but a double duvet attached to my back, and there was nothing to say when I realised that I was floating thousands of metres above the ground with Mount Fuji looming huge and snow-topped in front of me, and miles and miles of Japan stretched beneath me, and bright blue sky above and around me. There was nothing to say when the instructor asked if I was alright because she thought I might have passed out, and there was nothing to say during the fifteen minutes while we floated back down to the ground like tiny little spiders attached to our flimsy little web sack. There was nothing to say at all. Words totally disappeared. All I could do was make small, fishy, gasping noises, and try to communicate to my worried instructor via exhalation just how silent it was, and how peaceful, and how calm, and how utterly, utterly unterrifying.

And how happy it had made me, and would keep making me as long as I could keep remembering it. Which would be: forever.

"I did it," I said to my friend on my return.

"Eh?" she replied, redunking her tea bag. "Did what?"

"Found a natural high." I showed her the photo of my parachute. "And you're right. It was just what I needed."

There was a pause while she looked at the photograph, and then she frowned and looked back at me.

"I was talking about multi-vitamins or something," she said eventually. "An extra banana at lunch or something. But yeah." She looked back at the photo.

"That'll probably do it too."

Nakedness

Sometimes in the process of rebuilding you have to start again.

Japan gets a lot of things very, very right. Waste disposal, transport, taxes, public service, food, restaurants and incredibly effective face wash: Japan nails them. The cities are clean, the crime is low, the countryside is beautiful and the past-times are genuinely entertaining. This is a country where themed 'Love Hotels' (paid for by the hour, anonymously) aren't seedy or embarrassing but romantic and fun; where drunken karaoke is weekly; where adults can read comics on commuter trains without shame; where fat, naked men push each other around a stage for public amusement. Christmas isn't even a holiday here, but Japan still has the best cookies, lights and generally festive twinkle-fluff I've ever seen; I've eaten the best pizza of my life in a country where it's nothing short of a novelty. If the world was a playground and the countries its children, then Japan would be the really irritating little kid that gets everything right in class, wins all the football medals and still manages to not get their head put down the toilet. (The UK would be the fat, spotty one following around whoever was the scariest that day: probably America.)

Nothing in Japan, however, is quite as right as the Onsen; a hot spring public bath. Because traditional customs in Japan are based on Shintoism, cleanliness is of utmost, sacred importance, and public bathing in hot mineral water is therefore an ancient and still fervently upheld Japanese custom. It is commonly thought that the hot minerals heal, restore, regenerate and cleanse, and the communal nature helps to create ties of harmony and peace between strangers, thus strengthening Japan as a whole.

Which was all very well and good, but my first accidental visit to an Onsen - four days after my arrival in Japan - led to me bursting into tears, weeping incoherently at the receptionist and then running out again. All I knew was that I'd gone for a swim and found myself in a room full of butt naked old women, scraping themselves down laconically with sponges and staring at me.

'W-w-was i-i-it a a a jjokke?' I sobbed down the phone to The Boy, sitting on my suitcase and weeping into my coat at Nagoya train station.

'Was what a joke?' he replied in confusion.

'Th-th-th-the place you sent me!' I cried. 'What was it?'

'An onsen?' he said in still more confusion.

'B-b-b-b-but they were all naked!' I choked, welling up again. 'Why? Why would you do that to me?'

'Oh baby,' he said after a good five minutes of laughter that cost me about 500 yen in phone bill; 'onsens are naked. That's the point of them. It didn't even occur to me that you didn't know that.'

'W-w-w-well, n-n-n-n-ow I d-d-do,' I stuttered, and caught the first train I could back to a place where people wore clothes and didn't manhandle their breasts in front of me.

Yesterday, in the spirit of positivity and harmony and 'embracing shit' - as my friend put it - I decided to try again, and I finally understood what the onsen is about. Always a fan of having my bath water too hot, five different mineral pools - one filled with ice cold black mud, and one with extremely hot black mud - did, indeed, relax, rejuvenate and cleanse; I wallowed like a happy little pig until my friend told me I'd gone purple and should probably get out before my head popped.

But it was more than that. The room was full of women of all ages, of all sizes: utterly, utterly naked, and utterly, utterly comfortable with that. Women of 90, children of 10: they wandered, they bathed, they chatted, they scrubbed, and they generally made themselves brand new again. With bathing costumes on it would have felt hedonistic, sordid, pointless, Western. Without them, it felt like a kind of rebirth. Something natural, and clean, and innocent. And yes, we got stared at, but after ten minutes the little old Japanese women were laughing with us at our squeaks in the cold mud, and chatting with us about... well, I don't know what they were chatting with us about, but it all seemed rather lovely.

Everybody needs a chance to start again: to strip away all the hard stuff, and the hurtful stuff, and the stuff that weighs them down, and put it in a locker, grab a towel and immerse themselves in something that will take it all away. And Japan - the country that somehow knows what it is you need before you know it yourself - has it already built into its ancient customs: the cleansing, purifying, harmonising experience of the Onsen.

Pink, glowing and utterly naked, I left the room full of unclothed strangers this time feeling calm, and clean, and ready to begin again.

Character

All loves are alike, but all heartbreaks are unhappy in their own way.

I've not left my bed today, because there doesn't seem a lot of point. It's raining intermittently, I'm crying intermittently, and - although if I could coordinate the two to stop or start at the same time they might cancel each other out - I'm not in the mood for timing.

The worst thing about hurting is knowing that the other party is not. If you get hit by a truck, you want to at least know that you've dented the fender; if you fall out of a window, it's nice to know that you've left an impression in the grass, however faint it might be. If somebody takes your heart out of the fridge, breaks it and then eats it in pieces, it would be reassuring to know that they haven't gone surfing for the weekend to celebrate. When they do - when the truck drives away unscathed, and the grass pings back, and the boy takes his board and a group of friends to the sea - it feels as if you were never there to start with. As if you have dissolved, somehow, into thin air: the way a fly might feel after it has flown into your eye, obliterated itself in your pupil and then been blinked away without even a slowed step.

Too much of anything can be unhealthy, and it is certainly true of the 'character' I am - according to my friends this morning - building. I don't want to build character anymore. I have enough of it already, and too much of it makes you hard and impermeable and brittle: ready to snap at the next disappointment. I don't need to learn to be happy alone: I am already a solitary creature, and struggle to be with others in peace. And - before they say it, even though I know they mean well - I don't want to be made stronger either. I am more than strong enough. It's being vulnerable that's hard for me. It's the weakness I needed to practice.

Somewhere, in all of this - in giving everything you have for love and losing it all, spectacularly - is a lesson to be learnt. There is always a lesson to be learnt, just as there is always a seed in every fruit (and sometimes many: for instance, in a strawberry). But I have to be honest: from my bedroom - a safe zone that ironically was rocked last night as physically as it was emotionally, thanks to a large and rather scary earthquake that woke me up at 4am - I can't see it right now. I'm not sure what there is to be learnt. Whether I should be learning that you should never give anything up for love; that you should protect yourself at all times, in case it hurts at the end. Whether I should be learning to be suspicious, distrusting, hard, strong. Whether I should learn to hide my feelings, or control them, or kill them before they kill me. And never again repeat the mistakes I made this time.

But if I do that, then the heartbreak wins. If I do that, then the love - the next love, wherever it may come from - will lose. Because I will have so much character, so much strength, so much knowledge, that it will not be able to reach me. The delicate things that love grows from - trust, hope, vulnerability, self-sacrifice, weakness, innocence - will have been tucked away so far inside me that nothing reaches them anymore, and I will forget that they are even there.

I will not learn from my mistakes this time. I have learnt enough. I will not be stronger, I will not be wiser. I will not hold my head up and pretend that I'm not hurting.

Because if I do, then I might never be hurt again. And that, I think, would be the saddest thing of all.

Chocolate Orange

Somebody once said that you can live, or you can write about it; and the same is true for love.

Over the last nine months, I have loved somebody very much. I loved them so much that I moved to Japan to be with them; that I refused to write about them or talk about them, in case it made it less real. As if the writing would make them fiction, after so long of feeling like the fiction I wrote was real.

I mentioned a couple of months ago that they broke my heart, but really it was more like the slam on the top of a Terry's chocolate orange: they simply punched the top of it - welded together because of time spent in the fridge, rather than because of essential construction - and have spent the last few months taking away the pieces, segment by segment. The details don't matter, because the details never matter, but they kept going - kept coming back, kept saying sorry, kept saying they loved me too even though it wasn't enough - until it was all gone. Until I realised that all I was doing with my time was touching the bits that were still there and wondering how long I had left with them.

I think they're all gone, now. I think the last piece was taken today, while I sat on the phone to him outside a pub in the rain, staring at the inside of the hat he bought me, and crying. He took the piece, and he said sorry, and I said it was okay even though it wasn't, and then it was gone. He was thorough, methodical: almost surgical, really. And the last piece hurt the worse. I held on to it as hard as I could; I clung to that bloody last piece with all of me, because it's the last piece you need to prove to yourself that you ever had a heart at all. And because - when it's gone - there's nothing to show that it was ever there to start with, except for an empty wrapper and a few crumbs you'll probably throw to a stranger when you're drunk and lonely and missing him.

While he took away the pieces - and did, probably, what a sensible boy does and ate them - I was waiting. Waiting for what, I don't know: for the fragments of utter happiness when he was with me, for the spaces in between when he wasn't and I hurt because of it. To see which bits of me I'd give him the next time he came back; which bits of me he'd take with him the next time he left. And while I was loving, and waiting, and living, I couldn't write. In the last few months, I've written barely a thing. Not a page of a book, not a line of a poem: nothing, apart from the blog that hardly knew he existed. Nothing to do with working too hard, it was about feeling too much: as if the two couldn't exist together. The living - the good stuff - was too alive to write; the falling apart - the Terry's chocolate orange - was too broken for it. So over the last nine months I have lived, and I have loved, I have been taken apart, piece by piece, and - just like many people who spend their time really living, and really loving, instead of locked away on their own - I've written nothing at all.

Now I'm locked away again. He has gone, and I'm back where I always thought I would be before I met him: alone, again, and writing. Wondering how to pass the hours until I really, really understand that he's not coming back. Still touching the air where the pieces used to be, and wishing I had some left to give him, even if just so he could eat them again.

And - as I listen to the sounds of people coming home drunk, happy, and in one piece - I worry whether some people are made to love, and be loved, and others are made to simply write about it.

Shins and knuckles

There are two types of shame.

There's the public type; the hot flush that races over you when your skirt falls down half way through a ballet performance, or when you pee yourself on the first day of primary school, or when somebody loudly declares in front of a classroom full of 12 year olds that they'd rather die than kiss you. It's sudden, it's horrible, and it's exposing, but it never really touches you: not in a way that means anything. It's a flush that runs round the outside of your body, and then it leaves again: a diverted electrical current, over as quickly as it came, and the seed of most anecdotes, and most lingering childhood memories.

And then there's the private type. The shame that sneaks up, quietly, and heats the inside of you. The electrical current that runs through the middle. That can't be ignored, even though you are the only witness; that can't be silenced, even if you're the only one who knows it's there. That strikes to the bones of you, and then stays there.

In the supermarket this afternoon I had both types of shame in quick succession. A flush that heated the outside of me, and then - immediately - heated the inside of me as well. Rolling my basket around the aisles in bored, hungry distraction, I smashed straight into the shins of a little old man who was trying to do his weekly shop without physical injury. My cheeks went pink - appalled by the fact that I had hurt somebody weaker than me because I wasn't paying attention - and I apologised as profusely as I could, graciously accepted his apologies for being in my way, and then (feeling the flush die down: it was an accident, after all) made to turn away again.

As I turned away, I saw the little old man look at the contents of my trolley in unmasked surprise, and - looking down - I saw the contents as if I hadn't just put them there myself. Pasta. Pasta sauce. Pizza. Pesto. Soup. Bread (muffins, actually). Cheese. Chocolate. Frozen vegetables. A veritable culture shock of Western junk food; food that was as strange to him as Japan was to me. And then I looked at the contents of his basket: fish heads, seaweed, rice, noodles, chicken knuckles. Things that, to be frank, I couldn't actually define, because I didn't have even the vaguest idea what they could be: they were just Japanese foods that I didn't recognise, and so I no longer even looked at them properly.

And, looking back at my trolley again, I realised that the food in my basket was the same food that was in my basket at University. It was the same food that was in my basket in London; it was the same food that was in my basket when I lived at home with dad, and it was the same food that was in my basket when I lived with my friends in Bristol. I had moved to the other side of the world, and I - without even thinking about it - had continued doing exactly what I had done in England. In fact, I had gone out of my way to do it, because you can bet that the aisle for chicken knuckles and green tea here is a damn sight bigger than the aisle for pesto. I was in my little Western bubble (worse: my little Holly Smale bubble), and it didn't matter where in the world I took myself, that won out. I was simply moving myself and my habits around the globe, and never really letting the place I was in touch me.

The flush of shame in the middle of me was bad, but it only got worse as I continued walking in a trance around the supermarket. How had I apologised to the old man? In three words of Japanese, repeated profusely and at varying volumes. I didn't have enough Japanese to apologise properly, or to really understand what his response had been. Knowing enough to get by on a day-to-day basis, my Japanese learning has stopped: laziness, and habit, and tiredness mean that I know as much of the language now as I did two months ago. And so, like my culinary tastes, my mind has shut off from Japan too. I might as well have been in Tesco, this afternoon; a Tesco simply moved ten thousand miles to the right.

It wasn't who I thought I'd be: somebody with the courage to move themselves geographically, but without the courage needed to pull themselves out of a bubble of habits that has taken 27 years to build. I thought it was enough to get on a plane, but it's not. You can change the world around you, but unless you change how you see it as well then you might as well stay in the same place. And I'm ashamed. I'm ashamed that I've gone so far on a journey and then closed my eyes once I've arrived there.

I wish I could say that I put all my shopping back: that I fiercely returned the stupidly expensive pasta sauce - that has travelled just as far as I have - and filled my basket with knuckles and heads and dried octopus instead. I didn't. I'm not that brave yet.

But the first step to breaking out of a bubble is knowing you're in one in the first place. And the next time I accidentally take a chunk out of an old man's shins, I'm going to know how to say sorry properly, even if I'm full of pizza.

So that - next time - the shame is only on the outside of me, instead of in the middle.

Fluff

No matter where you go, there inevitably comes a time when a traveller - at least the average, poor traveller - has to choose between eating and culture; between affording basic bodily requirements, and the need for something that represents the deeper psyche of the country they are attempting to absorb. In Australia, it was a sausage on a boat and swimming with dolphins. In Russia, it was buying a large bottle of vodka and then passing out in a toilet (even though I was 17). In Jamaica it was a carved wooden giraffe and dancing to a kettle drum, and in America it was having a large family domestic in the middle of DisneyLand, just outside Space Mountain, and then purchasing a 12 pack of doughnuts. It's all about choosing an experience or item that personifies the very soul of the place you're in, and you can't put a price on that.

Except that you can, actually: it's about 4,000 yen. For 4,000 yen, I am now the proud owner of a giant, bright pink, fluffy, all-in-one Hello Kitty babygro. A babygro, I hasten to add, that I will have to wear solidly for almost two weeks, because it's Halloween, I teach children, and you can't teach children at Halloween in Japan without dressing up like a massive Hello Kitty. Or you can, but it means faffing around every morning with green make up and various witchy accessories, and then not really impressing any of the kids anyway because... well, you're not Hello Kitty.

In a land where the key religion appears to be that of Cuteness - where crisps have faces and books are comics and grown men have furry toys hanging from their briefcases - I have been baptised in a blaze of glory, and will arise - pink, fluffy and ridiculous - on Wednesday morning, knowing that I am now truly a resident of Japan. Further: when Halloween is up and I no longer have to wear an outfit that I have to unbutton from the neck in order to go to the toilet, I am going to take my pink fluffy self and my remaining food money and spend the Halloween weekend in a pink, fluffy bar somewhere in Tokyo, drinking pink things, pouting, and generally being as adorable as I can.

Because you can't put a price on culture: especially the kind of culture that doubles up as incredibly comfortable pyjamas when it gets a bit nippy inside.

Butter tubs

Epiphanies sometimes turn up at strange times, and a big one arrived this evening as I was washing a tub of butter.

Sniffling at the last few dregs of my dying cold, I realised that I'm not in Japan to have my heart broken or fixed, or to learn a new language, or to teach children. I'm not in Japan to eat rice balls, or to spend the majority of my time converting yen into pounds and back into yen again in my head, or attaching small, cute and sparkly things to my phone and handbag and purse and keys. I'm not in Japan to learn how to eat food I don't like, and I'm not even in Japan to experience a new culture, or meet new people, or see new things. Those things are important, and will be done - and are being done - but they're not the reason I'm here, even if they were the reason I came. It all became suddenly clear to me this evening as I rinsed out my butter pot and put it carefully in my 'plastics' bin so that it could be recycled properly on Tuesday when the nice men come and pick up my rubbish.

For the first time in my life, I am living on my own. I'm not living with a boyfriend, I'm not living with flatmates, I'm not living with friends, I'm not living with my parents. For the first time in my life, there is nobody cooking for me, nobody paying the bills and then writing down my share of them on the back of a Sainsburys' receipt and circling it in blue, and then circling it again in blue, and then circling it in red and leaving a shitty note next to it. There's nobody cleaning up my mess or telling me to clean up my mess, nobody telling me when to get up or when to go to bed, or whether I should go out or stay in or watch tv or go dancing or eat more vegetables or eat less chocolate. The washing up is my washing up; the toothpaste all over the sink is my toothpaste; the toothbrush lying in the toothpaste all over the sink is my toothbrush; the electricity that they are threatening to shut off (at least, I think that's what they doing: all the Kanji is in red, anyway) will be my lack of electricity. If I don't wash my duvet cover it starts to smell, and if I drop my underwear in a pile on the floor, it's bloody well still there when I get up the next morning.

I came all the way to Japan for a culture shock that I could have got in a bedsit in Stoke on Trent, because it's not about the language or the food or the fashion or the random earthquakes. It's simply that, for the first time in nearly twenty eight years, I have been forced - for the sake of sanitary survival - to stop thinking and acting and living like a child.

It's a painful realisation. Seven weeks of skidding around my new life like Bambi on ice - breaking things and burning things and dropping things and trying to work out how to use a rice cooker and a washing machine and an air conditioner, and sulking and crying and moaning in the process - and it was all because I am, basically, a spoilt, lazy little kid who hasn't got a clue how to change the bag in a vacuum cleaner because if I leave it long enough then usually somebody else will do it for me. Twenty eight, and the most important thing learnt from working with small children is that I still behave exactly like them.

So that's what the butter tub told me. As I carefully rinsed it - remembering, now (unbelievably, with all the freshness of a new realisation) that if I didn't, it would leak all over my floor and then I would just have to spend longer cleaning it up - I suddenly became aware that I was doing something incredibly adult. That I was doing something unreasonably boring that I didn't want to do, because it was the responsible thing to do and would save me time in the long run. And that I was doing something - anything - without the ingrained and utterly innate conviction, somewhere deep inside of me, that somebody else might do it for me. And it wasn't the first thing I'd done, either. I'd paid my gas bill on the way to work. I'd put money in my piggy bank instead of spending it all on pretty little notepads and cheesecake. I'd even hung my clothes out to dry and then remembered to take them back in again before it rained and they all stank like dog. I'd started growing up already, and I hadn't even realised it. I'd just noticed that my bedding smelt a lot nicer.

Being adult isn't a lot of fun: not at this stage, anyway. The boring stuff seems to take up an awful lot of time: almost all of it, in fact. But I've realised that that's why I'm here, and why I should stay. Because - before I head off into the backpacking paradise of Asia (which is just a playground for other spoilt kids like me who don't like washing up) - I need to learn how to be an adult, like all the other adults out there who are nearly thirty years old. I need to pack away the bit of my brain that still wants to sit on the sofa and throw biscuit wrappers at the bin from six feet away, or - at the very least - insert a new bit of brain that tells me to go and pick them up again afterwards. And I need to learn how to fend for myself, instead of hoping that somebody will come and save me and I won't have to.

After all - as with anything - if I can just learn the rules of adulthood well enough, then I can start breaking them again. But, when I decide to leave the washing up for three days because it's my goddamn washing up and I have better things to do, at least now I'll know that I'm being a kid about it.

Presents

The problem with the mind is that it has a body of its own, and it doesn't really matter how positive your attitude is: germs are germs, flu is flu, and snot hooked out of the noses of children and immediately wiped on your hand is likely to make you poorly, sooner or later. Six weeks of gliding through a shimmering sea of bacteria with merely a faint cough and regularly bad nightmares has finally culminated in a flu the likes of which I have rarely had before: a flu created and harboured and presented - in little tiny open tissues, like badly wrapped gifts - by a hundred sniffling children. I don't even know which one dealt the final mucussy blow, or whether it was an admirable joint effort: the kind of joint effort I can guarantee they won't be making when we display their respective (shambolic) plays in Spring.

Either way, I'm sick as a dog, and - because my company deduct a hefty amount of money from my pay packet if I call in sick - I dragged myself into school this morning and watched in foggy, feverish interest as the children reacted to their usually loud and genki teacher suddenly begging them in husky, cracked whispers to "please, for the love of all that is good and painless, be quiet." Where usually I prefer teaching the little boys (they tend to be more affectionate and less manipulative, although they break wind far more frequently), today - unusually - I noticed with vague interest a marked change in attitudes; the boys, realising that I could no longer scare them, started to run amuck, while the girls - conversely - became maternal and started petting me and fetching tissues and reprimanding the boys. One of the older ones, in fact, put her hands on her hips, clipped her English into shortened vowels and became so much like me in a bad temper that I feared for the impact I had already made on a young life in such a short time: my short fuse was not supposed to be one of the skills I was passing on.

Anyway, until the fever lets up and I can take an easy part in basic human activities again -breathing, speaking, entering a train carriage without pressing my forehead against the cold window - I am taking to my bed, and letting the children fend for themselves. As tempting as it is, this is a gift I don't really want to send back.

The Hokey Pokey

A long time ago, people thought that the earth stayed still, and the stars revolved around us; that - for anything to change - we had to wait for the universe to move. Then, of course, we learnt with some confusion that we were not in the middle of the universe, that it was us that was spinning, and that for things to change we had to turn ourselves in a different direction, face the sun and see things in a different light.

Three days it took me to realise that I was facing the wrong way, and that the stars did not revolve around me. Three days of crying and looking at plane timetables; three days of eating chocolate until the smell of it made me sick; three days of wearing pink sunglasses on the train at 8 in the morning so that nobody could see my even pinker eyes. Three days, and then I was trumped by my two favourite children: one in tears, and one in sadness.

The beauty of children is that whatever you feel, they feel it stronger. Their happiness outshines any happiness you can hope to experience; they find incoherent laughter in things that you can only snicker at. Their world is infinitely larger and scarier than yours, and their tears are hurting them more than yours possibly can. Which is why any intense emotion makes an adult feel like a child again, simply because that was the time when our emotions were at their most pure; unsullied by any weariness or experience or knowledge that things will, eventually, get better, and that nothing is as black and white as it initially seems. The knowledge that makes everything - no matter how awful - somehow easier to handle, and simultaneously less beautiful in its ever fluctuating shades of greyness.

Three days after I had cried for my mum, I watched my favourite little boy - Shinnosuke, a sensitive, sweet, sunny, artistic and unfeasibly tiny two year old - curl himself up on the floor in pain and sob into the carpet; crying for his mum as if he thought his whole body would break without her. Trying to pick him up had no effect whatsoever - he was incoherent and rigid with missing her, and his whole body lifted in the same bent and tiny shape like a scared and shaking little hedgehog - so I stroked his hair as calmly as I could and ignored the impulse to curl up on the floor next to him and cry for my mum too. I knew what he could not, at two years old - that I would see my mum again - and so I talked to him quietly until he lifted his little distraught, pink face and tried to explain in Japanese that he didn't know where his mum was, and I tried to explain in English that she would come back. I then held my arms out and asked if he needed a cuddle, to which he responded by climbing immediately onto my lap, putting his tiny arms around my shoulders and sobbing into my neck as if his little heart was falling apart. Trying not to cry with him, I continued my class with the little boy on my hip until - six or seven minutes later - he stopped crying, smiled at me, climbed down and promptly started doing the Hokey Pokey with the bravery of the world's smallest soldier: a bravery I realised in shame that I, twenty six years older than him, had yet to really display.

A couple of hours later, my other favourite child - a tiny, thoughtful and incredibly intelligent little girl, who has an adorable tendency to refer to herself in third person, both in Japanese and English - sat down at the small writing table with me as I tried to explain basic emotions: happy, sad, exited, angry. Giving all of my students a piece of paper with different faces, I produced a range of coloured crayons and asked them to colour in the emotion they felt: a task that was too advanced for almost all of them (being between one and three years old), and which therefore resulted in a mass of yellow and pink squiggles over the page, the table and their hands. Shoko, however, looked at me with a frown as I pointed to each of the faces, and then grabbed a black crayon. Watching her in shock as she scribbled furiously over the angry face, she then took a yellow and drew briefly on the happy face, and then took a blue crayon and carefully coloured in the sad face.

"Shoko sad," she said in a serious voice, and pointed to the blue face.

"Are you?" I said in confusion, still trying to adjust to the fact that a barely-two year old knew how to associate colours with emotions. "Why are you sad?"

"Happy!" one of the older children shouted, scribbling on the floor with yellow.

"Shoko sad," Shoko repeated, ignoring the other child with barely contained contempt. Then she looked at me with a face full of the kind of sadness that I barely remember, and I realised that something inside me felt ashamed for the second time that day.

"Why are you sad, sweetheart?" I asked her again. Then - because I needed to know - I asked my assistant to ask her in Japanese, in case the language barrier was causing a problem. My assistant asked her, and Shoko simply shrugged and looked at me again.

"Shoko sad," she stated in a quiet voice without the slightest self-pity, and then handed the picture to me. "Finished," she added, and went to play with the toy rabbit in the play box.

Between them, Shoko and Shinnosuke ended my three days of crying. Shinnosuke, for having the bravery to dance the Hokey Pokey when he was exhausted and all sobbed out, and Shoko, for understanding that it's okay to be sad sometimes, even if you don't know why.

I was facing the wrong way, that's all. The sun was up behind me all along. And it took a couple of two year olds to make me realise that - when you've got your back against the dark - there is nothing in this world that can't be handled with a pencil, a good dance, and a little old fashioned bravery.

Floors

Six weeks.

The general prediction was three, but I was hoping for seventeen or possibly eighteen: nineteen or twenty if I could find a pot of Marmite somewhere. But six weeks it was: six weeks before I cracked and demanded that I be sent home to England, and I didn't care how I got there. In the luggage compartment of Ryan Air; in the large handbag of a lady, shared with a small dog; tied up with string and dragged behind a Eurasian bus: any which way, as long as by next weekend I could have a cuddle with my mum and a cup of tea and a conversation with a person in the local newsagent, just because they would understand me.

"No," my dad said immediately. "Absolutely not. We've not even finished redecorating your bedroom yet."

Mum pushed him away from the computer with one hand, muttered "don't be so sodding insensitive, Mark," waited until he had stropped out of the room and then sighed at the webcam. "Sweetheart," she said, "I'm with your dad on this one."

"Aha!" I heard dad shout from the kitchen. "You see?!"

"Mark!," my mum shouted back, and then pointedly shut the living room door. "We'll send some money darling, enough for you to buy food. But I don't think you should come home. You need to give it a chance there."

"But. I. Want. To. Come. Home," I gulped incoherently. "I. Don't. Like. It. Here. I. Hate. It."

"No, you don't," mum said in the voice she used when I fell out of bed, broke my nose and was still fast asleep when she came in to investigate: kind of soft and warm and worried and a tiny bit amused. "You do like it. You're just having a bad day."

"I'm. Not. I. Want. To. Come. Home," I gulped again, wiping my nose on the back of my hand and then wiping my hand on my jumper.

"You'll regret it if you do," mum pointed out reasonably. "Anyway, there isn't a lot to come back to. The weather here is awful. And we're sanding down the floorboards."

"I. Want. To To To To To C C Co," I announced, and then exploded into tears again.

"Tell her we've already booked tickets for a visit at New Year," I heard dad shout through the wall.

"That is not the point," mum yelled back.

"It is the bloody point," dad said, putting his head round the side of the door. "What are we going to do in Japan if she's back in the spare room in England, making a mess again?"

"B-b-b-but," I wailed, putting my head in my hands; "muuuuuuuuuuuum, please don't make me stay. I'm lonely and I'm tired and I'm broke and I don't understand what anyone is saying and I w-w-w-wanttocomehome."

"Make her stay," my dad said, and then peered at the webcam. "Can she see me?" he asked mum.

"Yes, and I can hear you too," I muttered crossly.

"Stay," dad ordered, with his eye taking up the entire screen. "You're out there now, you might as well stay."

"How long for?" I sniffled.

"Until you don't want to come home anymore. Then you can come home." Dad paused thoughtfully. "Or," he said, "until after January the 3rd, because if we fly back before that it's really expensive."

"Just give it six more weeks, sweetheart," mum said, glaring at dad as he started muttering about floorboards again. "You're done six weeks, you can do another six. And then if you still want to come home, you can."

"At least the floors will be nice by then," dad said, perking up a bit.

Six weeks. Six whole weeks. So much has happened in the last six weeks, it seems impossible that I can know what I'll be doing or how I'll be feeling in another six. The shameful truth is: I've had my heart broken, and when your heart is broken there is nowhere you want to be other than home, there is nobody you want to see other than your family, and there is no worse place to be than on your own, penniless, lonely and stranded abroad. But, ironically, the comfort comes from that same source. Because - when you've had your heart broken - there's nowhere that will make you happy anyway. And nobody who can make it better, even if it feels like they might be able to when they're not there.

So, England or Japan, Welwyn or Mitsukyo (from one shithole to another: I am apparently incapable of living anywhere nice), it doesn't really matter where I am for the next six weeks. I just have to keep my chin up, work as hard as I can, eat as rarely as I can, spend as little as I can, and wait until my life isn't on the floor again.

As my dad reminded me, though: the beauty of constantly ending up on the floor is that you can always look forward to the day when it'll become shiny again.