Forgot to mention what I
Forgot to mention what I did Saturday morning, after the Cardiacs gig. Had to dash back up to Sheffield to babysit. Somehow got to St Pancras just as the barriers had shut and the train was beginning to pull out. So I had an hour to wait for the next one.
I stuck my bass guitar in the left luggage (at £4 for the hour, a complete rip-off, but then my back muscles had already torn themselves to shreds, and as I still had to carry around my courier-bag complete with laptop, clothing, 2 hefty books and about a dozen assorted cables, I felt justified. Then I headed off in the direction of Russell Square to find myself a second breakfast.
On the way I passed the language bookshop, and staring at me from the window was a kids book of Japanese. Brainwave time. Mark had been asking me to stick some Japanese text into the designs I’m doing, but I wasn’t too happy about doing it at random without knowing what I was writing. So I headed into the shop to look for a book.
Of course, it wasn’t as easy as all that - I suddenly felt like I wanted to actually learn Japanese, and then I realised that I had not only the sounds to learn, also a script (or 3). Ah well, as I’m in it for the design, I thought I’d do the unusual thing and start with the written language and then maybe branch out into the spoken. I almost bought Basic Japanese through Comics but in the end settled for
Beginner’s Japanese Script.
I strode out of the bookshop feeling purposeful, and made it a little further along the road to a small French café who make some of the best pastries in the world. Had some kind of spinach and cheese feuillete, which was served with a really simple accompaniment of lettuce and cucumber but… so fresh! I dunno, maybe I was just in one of those mindsets where anything could be amazing (bit hung-over from the night before as well), but it tasted better than anything I could imagine. Especially the lettuce! Had an almond croissant with my pot of tea, and sat there working my way through Japanese exercises.
The book is great. I didn’t seriously imagine myself sticking with it, but the first few exercises were so simple, relating scrappy pictograms through their development into Kanji symbols, like… hmmm, hold on, how do I encode some Kanji into this HTML… nah, sod it, 1 impossible thing before breakfast is quite enough. Anyway, I stuck with the book, kept on going for half of my train journey (the other half I was bashing away on the laptop, doing Hillman Curtis Flash tutorials in a very restricted space). Now I’m busy looking up local Japanese teachers. And, wouldn’t you know it, the University of Sheffield has one of the biggest East Asian studies departments in Europe!
I also had some fun looking through Japanese titles on Amazon - stuff like this. Mind you, looking back I think perhaps I should just have bunged some random Kanji symbols into my designs - after all, if the Japanese can throw together Anglo-sounding band names like “Rancid Japan” and “The Michelle Gun Elephant” then the least I can do is return the favour.