* This essay column is written by a longtime foreign resident of Japan.

In deference to my career and personality, and taking into account that I have produced a male heir, the Spousal Household Agency of Setagaya after much soul-searching, and showing unusual flexibility and consideration, has relented and allowed me to travel overseas. So when you read this -- assuming that you are reading it in Japan -- I will be 10,000 km away in my hometown of Doncaster in the North of England.

I don't go abroad -- home to England -- as much as I used to or as often as I would like, or for as long as I would like. I try to get away in the summer when my son, Tom, is out of school so he can come too. But this year I was told that Tom would be busy preparing for junior high-school entrance exams in February. So although travel broadens the mind, widens the intellect and expands horizons, my son will spend his summer "vacation" with his head stuck in a book at some juku.

And my wife? Although she spent 18 months studying English in London, which is where I met her in 1982, she's never really warmed to my home country. A visit to my hometown is usually two weeks of complaints about the weather, the food, the trains and my drafty old family house. The highlight of any overseas trip for her is the duty-free shopping -- going and coming back. The last time we went as a family -- in 2001 -- she was the last to board the flight to London because she was tied up buying a Cartier watch in the duty-free shop at Narita airport. Once she'd got the watch, I don't think she'd have been bothered if the flight had left without her.

So this year I am on my own, which is probably for the best as this is a working vacation. We've had some work done on my house in England and I'm needed to complete the tidying up.

The house is quite old. It was built in the 1930s and my family bought it in 1955. Over the years it's had general maintenance -- rewiring, new doors, slates replaced on the roof, new chimneys, several new coats of paint -- but like us all it is beginning to show its age. Its joints and joists creaked, the floorboards were cranky, its windows had lost their sparkle and complained in the wind, and it took a long time to warm up on cold winter days. So what would have once been "reform" had degenerated to renovation, restoration and even reconstruction.

A young, growing family could have managed its eccentricities, but my mum had a stroke a couple of years ago and she needed a home that was more user friendly.

It's not a big house. In English terms it's a three-bedroom semidetached: three bedrooms and a bathroom/toilet upstairs, and downstairs a living room, dining room, kitchen, pantry and conservatory. But the work dragged on for months and months. Perhaps I should have contacted the Daikaizo Gekiteki Before/After show on TV Asahi -- you know, the show on Sunday evenings that gets some famous architect and a cast of thousands to miraculously reform a family house in a matter of days -- and offered them an overseas challenge.

We had new double-glazed windows fitted throughout, new floors put in downstairs, gas-fired central heating installed, a toilet was added downstairs and a new bath and shower unit upstairs, and the kitchen was remodeled. In addition, all the interior walls were replastered and the exterior ones repointed, and a damp course was installed.

The contractors are long gone, but my mum was left sitting in the empty shell of an almost new house, and that's where I come in. I may not be a plumber or a carpenter, or a builder or an electrician, but I can slap paint and wallpaper on walls, move furniture and lay carpets. And if I do a good job, who knows, perhaps the crown princess of Setagaya will honor my old English home in Doncaster with a state visit.

I'd welcome any comments or opinions, in Japanese or English, about my column. You can write or fax me at The Weekly, or e-mail me at jtweekly@japantimes.co.jp

The Japan Times Weekly: June 19, 2004
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