Lessons aquatic

At my schoolhouse, known locally as the Hearn and Chamberlain School of Foreign Manners & Refined Conversation, I was entertained by a most curious scholar known as Captain Nori "Nevermind-the-coordinates-pass-me-the-shochu" Tsunami. A seadog from way back, Cap'n Nori Tsunami has sailed the seven seas with the Nipponese Navy, and it seems he spent most voyages flat on his back starboard-side, a bottle in one hand and a sick-bag in the other. "You see, Sensei," he regaled me, "my stomach was a nuisance. Weak, and so feeble! I would lurch stern to bow clutching my poor belly. 'O-naka!' I would cry, 'Why so knackered, oh-so soon?"

As his schoolmistress, I dared not suggest to him that perhaps the culprit was more likely to be, as per the sailor's parlance, due to sucking the monkey with the landlubbers. The captain stressed, however, that his weakness was purely from reasons gastrological, and assured me that his nautical nous was as sharp as a cabinboy's sewing kit. "The sea took friends from me, it has even took bits from me! Oh, I felt a sickness! But a rosewater sailor? Not I!" he asserted, and thence became further distracted from our lesson, fast becoming stuck in a reverie of dancing girls, flower girls, singing girls, from Chile to Lombok and round the Cape of Good Hope. "Drinking, fine company, drinking, conversation: these things I like; the sea, mph!" he moaned, thumping his tummy.

The captain confessed that, now in his retirement and continuing some maritime pursuits on the side, he was more comfortable with working on the water.

"You have made your peace with the sea and its accompanying gastrological ailments?" asked I.

"Of course, no!" bawled he. "I carry tourists around the castle moat on my boat. It is a small boat. The water, it is calm. There, no wave can bother my belly." He winked at me.
"Now, what were we talking about, Sensei?"

I tapped my pointing rod on the relevant page and reminded the captain that the conversational topic was "Sports - Which is the Most Diverting in your Earnest Opinion, and Why is this So?". At once, Captain Nori Tsunami's eyes lit up with a most feverish glow.

"Wrestling!" he announced.

"Oh?" said I, "Did you tackle a few tars in your time at sea?"

"Naturally, no!" he replied, "Rough-housing it on the Poop deck? I don't like. Mud wrestling, now, I like!"

My pointing rod trembled on the page as the captain pontificated on the rudiments of mud-wrestling, the sheen of the wrestlers' bathing costumes when the mud is spread about, and the shame that this sport is not included in the Olympics, nor is it a regular weekly event at his favourite snack.*

The captain was in the middle of cursing snack-owners across the country, and my pointing rod was about to snap under my tense exertions, when the school bell tolled, and along the corridors, my fellow masters and mistresses bustled from their classrooms in the direction of the Common Room. I dabbed my brow with my Erte handkerchief, straightened my hemline and wished him good day, then went at a cracking pace to recover from my oratory ordeal over a freshly-brewed hot coffee.** Phew!

*Oft unseemly bars, frequented by over-the-hill kabuki actresses, tippling Shinto priests, and the like - see further Sir S's notes on the matter.
**Swiftly dispatched from those modern Clockwork Cafes adjoining the school.