Over the past year we have dragged lots of our guests out to Big Echo to take part in the Japanese pastime of karaoke singing. The ability to have a private room makes it much easier to encourage people to sing and also means that we don’t have to listen to strangers crooning strange Japanese songs. This, however, doesn’t protect us from hearing our friends sing strange foreign songs.

When Geoff visited last year he had taken the time to learn a song in Japanese. I was very impressed. I have been here over a year and only recently managed to get the whole way through an Angela Aki song without stumbling badly over the words. So far I haven’t tried to do this in front of any of my Japanese friends. Though I do sing in Japanese for my language teacher – but then the Japanese version of “Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer” is a bit easier than an Ayumi song. Marty can’t sing Japanese songs. Once he makes a mistake he stops dead and gets completely lost. But still it’s amusing to listen to him try.

At the weekend Tony impressed us by singing the Romanian song “Dragostea Din Tei”. He also managed to find the Holly Dolly song “Dolly Song” but the “lyrics” were only written in katakana and none of us have a hope of reading it that quickly.

It is always good fun but sometimes we spend more time laughing than singing. Andrew’s version of “Take on Me” was probably much more amusing than it was supposed to be. I don’t think he realised that Morton Harket had such a wide range and watching Andrew raise his eyebrows in a vain attempt to hit the high notes certainly made me laugh. I think though that the funniest performance so far has been Norwin’s version of “Wuthering Heights”. I really does have to be seen to be believed.