JustOneThing: A Lively Day Teaching, Bathing and Playing...

Daily Prompt: "lively"

Yesterday was a lively day packed with several events and episodes, some planned, and some rather more spontaneous.

This was my plan for the Monday 2nd March, the Year of Grace 2022:

I left home around 7:30am with a bag bulging with chess gear - playing pieces, vinyl boards, and chess clocks.

Although Monday was not a national holiday there were far fewer commuters on the tram that morning as a lot of people had taken to day off to enjoy six or more consecutive holidays.

Teaching English

My first class was second years. We read a passage about the Lewis and Clark Expedition that crossed the North American continent in the early nineteenth century. The grammar structure was two clause sentences using the "past continuous and past simple tenses. I then got the students to write short stories using that structure, and then tell each other their stories and ask questions.

The proceedings were made rather more lively by the screams of one of the girls at the back of the class who claimed she had seen a cockroach, or, to use the grammar in question,

"While the students were writing their stories, one girl suddenly screamed when she saw a cockroach."

The second class I taught were my first year communication students. In that class we read a story about a failed attempt to reach the north pole by hot air balloon. The topic was "failure and success" and the grammar point was "past simple verbs."

After working with the text for a while I got the students to write about a past "failure" that had helped them to find "success", but because this class is lively and engaging, we got sidetracked when I corrected a student by telling her she should agree with the negative statement of her partner by saying "me neither" (or "neither do I" etc) rather than saying, as she had said, "me too". The whole class started to write down the response patterns that I put on the board.

Actually, I really enjoy it when the class gets enthusiastically sidetracked in that way.

They spent the last part of the lesson telling their stories to each other and generally kicking up a racket in English and Japanese.

Off to the Spa!

As soon as that class was over I hopped on a tram that took me further south to a spa called "Ho no yu" where I relaxed in the sauna and the outdoor hot baths for an hour or so...

After that I lounged over a Japanese lunch of chips, "thick cut bacon," and cucumber, oh, and the first cleansing beer of the day...

Back into the City Centre

A lively post-prandial walk got me back to the tramline and I hopped onto a tram back into town a few minutes behind schedule for my next rendezvous, a chess party by the river with the young lady who had graced me with her company the other night and a few other lasses and lads.

As I made my way up the crowded Hondori shopping street towards the river I felt somewhat irritated by a cyclist who did not dismount but was hovering just behind me as I weaved my way through the crowds.
Then the cyclist made to pass me, but drawing level stayed with me. When I looked I saw that I was being filmed and that the cyclist was none other than another of my graduated students from a few years ago, a lively lady called Maria who's into BMX biking.

So she spontaneously agreed to join us for a while, just to hang out rather than play chess, and I'm glad she did, not only because she is lively company, but because my other young lady had been stood up by her pals who were supposed to join us that afternoon. She and Maria had a good time comparing notes about their times at our vocational college and about my classes.

As well as playing some games, we did a bit of chess study, including this problem created by the Hungarian-American grandmaster Susan Polgar when she was just four years old:

White to move and win in 2 moves

Can you crack this one?

A little later we were joined by my good old pal, Don, and so we played a few games of chess with a time handicap on the chess clock for the stronger players.

Around 5pm we were joined by one of my young besties, Shaun, and carried on playing until six thirty or so.

Tram Plans Sabotaged By Russian Queen

From then on my plans for the rest of the day gradually unravelled.

First of all, the bar we intended to visit was shut, so we diverted to a nearby Turkish restaurant, an excellent fallback option for our chess circle.

Things were winding down after dinner and I was thinking about catching the tram home (as intended) when our chess-playing Russian Queen came tripping in, appalingly late, and wearing the most absurd set of high heel platforms that she could barely walk in. (Actually, she'd fallen arse over tit off her platforms on the way to the restaurant, grazed her knee and been escorted to the door by a solicitous gent.)

Since I had invited her to play chess, I agreed to escort her to another bar with the help of my English pal Don, there to imbibe in a merry tipple or two and play chess after my favourite manner - in a noisy bar where people tend to crowd round to watch the action, with lots of distraction and banter, and all the time playing with a time handicap, bashing out the moves at top speed.

If I won the game, the time handicap was adjusted. We started off playing with 10 minutes for Miss Russia and 4 minutes for me on the clock, and got down to 10 minutes versus 2.5 minutes, which proved a bit too much for me to pull off.

Peaky Blinders Lip Synch Video Creation

And so it happened that the time for the last tram came and went... and my friend Don also went and so I was left with the Russian Queen who wanted to make a "Peaky Blinders" lip synch social media video with me in my Peaky Blinders cap. She proposed that we do it on the balcony of another bar, so that is what we did, with her holding onto my arm for dear life as she tottered on her ridiculous platforms down towards the party end of town...

And here is the lively result of our enterprise:

https://www.tiktok.com/@top5programs/video/7093500222193650945?is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1

And a while later we hopped into our respective taxis and another 23 hour day of lively madness and mayhem drew to a close shortly before rosy fingered dawn arose from her couch and lifted the veil of darkness from the oriental sky.

David Hurley

#InspiredFocus
#JustOneThing