As I write this I am right at the end of a two-year sabbatical from my teaching and other duties at Meiji University, in Tokyo. I’ve been spending this time in York, in the northeast of the UK, where my two younger children, Laura (16) and Tim (14) have been attending school. My Japanese wife Kaz, unable to get a sabbatical from her own university job in Japan, has been instead having a sabbatical from being a housewife, joining us during her holidays.

In between cooking, shopping, general housework and all the attention needed to help teenagers to find themselves, I have found myself with generous amounts of time to work on the development of a parallel learner corpus of Japanese English with corresponding native English and Japanese versions, to design a teaching website, to study Japanese and to learn how to create user-friendly databases.

The Macmillan English Dictionary defines a sabbatical as ‘a period away from work when people such as college or university teachers can study, rest or travel’. I could also give it this personal definition: a sabbatical is a period away from work when two years fly by with astonishing speed and unfinished projects expand into larger unfinished projects!