Stirk: OK. Right. Well, I was. . . I was born in Birmingham, in the United Kingdom, in England. My father was a Birmingham person, but my mother came from South Wales. And I think they. . . they met during the war sometime. And I, yes, I was brought up in Birmingham. I went to primary school there and also secondary school in the city. Afterwards when I was eighteen, I managed to get into Cambridge University and went there for the next three years. I was a very undistinguished student. I. . . I start. . . started off, interested in languages, so I studied Turkish and Arabic for two years. But after that I. . . I wasn’t doing so well, so I changed to law, which I only did for one year and just about passed the exams at the end. And after that, yes, it was. . . really wondering what to do with the rest of my life. So, firstly I managed to get a job teaching in a secondary school in Birmingham. And I just did that for one year. And afterwards, I thought, a very good idea to get into languages again. So I went to the University of North Wales to do a one-year certificate in teaching English as a foreign language. And after that I got a job in Turkey, at the University of Ankara. And because I had studied Turkish already so I was very happy to go there and I spent two years teaching in Ankara, which was very, very pleasant. And after that I, well. . . the job in Turkey wasn’t very well paid, so I thought I should try and get something, something a bit more profitable. So, then I got a job in Libya in north Africa and Arabic, of course, it’s the. . . the language there. And, well, in Libya, there’s of course a lot of oil money, so it was quite a profitable place to work in. And I stayed there for four years altogether. And after that I found I. . . I had saved enough to spend a few years studying more, so I went to do an MA at the University of Essex in eastern England. And, yes I did, I did my MA and then I started working on a PhD, which I. . . I never got around to completing, in fact. So maybe. . . maybe when I retire, I’ll get back to that. And when I was. . . while I was there in Essex, I met my wife. She was a Japanese student who’s studying English language teaching at Essex. So, then we, we got married and I came to Japan. And that was in 1980. So it’s easy to count since then, yes, it is twenty-nine years in all, almost thirty. And luckily before we left England then, I was able to get a job at what was the Osaka University of Foreign Studies and, well, I’ve been there. . . here ever since, of course, so. . . including when it changed to become part of Handai, of course. So that’s almost thirty years in Japan and I’ve been very happy.

Interviewer: So you have mastered many, many languages and so in total you can speak or at least understand how many languages?

Stirk: Well I, I know French and German pretty well and some Spanish and Italian. And of course Turkish I know pretty well. And Arabic sort of medium. And Japanese enough for speaking but I’ve never, I’ve never mastered reading yet because that’s another thing for retirement – it’s studying kanji properly.

Interviewer: So your mother is. . . she was from Wales?

Stirk: Yes, from South Wales.

Interviewer: So you are teaching Wales also.

Stirk: Yes, yes. Welsh is another language.

Interviewer: Ah, sorry, Welsh I mean.

Stirk: But in fact, my mother though, was just an English speaker. She didn’t know much Welsh apart from a little bit they’d done in school. Because in fact, the South Wales is a rather, or was the rather industrial part and a lot of coal mining used to go in there. So she was from a coal-mining family. And most, most people in South Wales are English speakers. And the Welsh speakers are in North Wales in the countryside, mainly. So I’ve learned Welsh just from interest in between.

Interviewer: I see.