Gifts: Every time you recieve a gift you should give a return gift at approximately 30% of the value of the first gift. Of course, this system leads to an infinite sequence of gifts of decreasing worth. Case in point: when we moved in we gave our neighbour a box of sweets, she countered with a bag of oranges, we gave back a smaller box of sweets, the bowing had hardly finished befoe she had summoned her mother who came rushing with half a watermelon. I now have to give her an apple, I anticipate a plum in return, then I'll give just one small sweet, perhaps a fruit pastel and she can give me a cherry etc.

Also, every time we pay the rent we get a hand towel. We have eight hand towels from the landlord now. I'm not getting sucked into this one: I give a handkerchief, they give a tissue etc.

We all know that the Japanese invented football. Well, not really, but they had a game called kemari which was a cultured keepy-uppy game played in traditional garb around 600AD. This is the Japanese character for kemari which, in case you don't have the Japanese fonts installed, looks almost exactly like Hide Nakata doing a fancy move while wingeing about his team mates.

Then the Chinese added the goal posts and the British added the rules and the Argentinians added cheating and that's why we never win but I don't really mean it because they're actually very good now.

"If you wait on side of mountian with mouth open, eventually roast duck fly in"

"If you walk around with your mouth open eventually a meat pie will fall in"

"Rabbit, tree, snack"

These are actually Chinese proverbs about patience and free food. The first one, I am told, is probably made up by some Westerner whereas the second is authentic (roast duck is western but meat pies are Chinese?) The third one is a nifty three character way of saying "If you wait behind a tree eventually a rabbit will run into it and you'll get a free snack".

The Japanese version emphasises the patience aspect and not so much the free food:

"you have to wait for 3 years of continual rain on a stone before a hole forms"

My advice is to hide behind a tree with your mouth open. This gives you three opportunities for free food. Not sure why you need a hole in a stone.

Nothing really coherent this week but just 3 nuggets:

1) Saw an advert in the Japan Times, "Wanted: 15 Native Americans for proof reading work." What are they translating ? Totem-poles?

2) People like to dress up at weekends. Fine. It's called cosu purei (costume play) Fine. Some people like to dress up as policemen and then go around acting like policemen and pretending to arrest people. That's not fine.

3) I have heard and have read that some people enjoy keeping rabbits for pets and are also to be seen walking them in the park on special rabbit leads.