The morning is quiet. A slight haze blurs the otherwise radiant sunshine of the beautiful, crisp morning. Cows chew the cud merrily in a field, a cat lazily licks its fur clean. The odd car can be heard trundling by in the distance. Everything is quiet. Everything is peaceful. Everything is serene.

Pleasant at first, it starts, yet as the sound begins to amplify, the rhythmic, almost soothing beating of drums seems to become distorted, erratic, demonic even. On the horizon, people can be seen. A tribe. The drums intensify, the cries encroach on the morning. The cat takes one look and scarpers, the cows move to the other side of the field. They’re approaching. And they’re bringing their drums right this way. Their pace quickens, the drums speeding to match their footfall. You begin to make out features. Masks. Spears. The odd sword. You turn to run, but there’s more, coming from all sides. Your heart beats in time with the metallic drum beats. They’re just yards away now. A white flag unfurls, a black skull and crossbones atop four distinct red letters scrawled across it, as if painted in blood: J.L.P.T. You begin to scream. One of the tribesman makes a lunge for you, his knife between his teeth.

And suddenly, you’re awake…

Yup, it’s that time again. The time that makes grown adults run for the hills, and children weep in their sleep. The time when blogs are locked down, friends are forgotten, Twitter is abandoned (“It can’t be!” you gasp), Skype’s lines fall dead and Facebook goes into decline. The time when studies are filled with little yellow sticky notes covered over with kanji. And the dining room, the lounge, the kitchen, and even the bathroom, the hall, the fridge door, the front door, the back door, the shed. The time when work is just an interference to the long, melodic hours spent pouring over the last year’s work. The time when ‘Japanese’ for the iPhone begins to count down the days to the test, equipped with demonic laughter and high-pitched squeals. The time when ‘revision’, that most hated of words, becomes seared on the back of your retinas as a constant reminder. Now my friends, it’s serious.

I love learning languages. Love it. It’s like the elixir of youth to me. Okay so it’s probably the reason why I’ve begun to get such a furrowed brow too, but still, there’s something so frenetic, visceral…even, alive, about language. Without it, we’re useless, with it, well, we’re probably still useless, but the point still remains that I love it. That said, if learning Japanese is the cocaine binge, then revision is most definitely the come down.

August. SOAS (The Society of Oriental and African Studies is the body that runs the Japanese Language Proficiency Test in Britain) announces that JLPT test places are going on sale. There’s a limited number this year, something to do with the fact that there’s now so many people wanting to take the JLPT in Britain that they’ve actually run out of space in which to hold the exam. I carefully fill out the ridiculously over-complicated application form, attach a photo that makes me look something of a Guantanamo Bay resident, and slip that, along with my debit card details, into the self-addressed envelope. The waiting game has begun. The first chalk on the bedpost is always the most debilitating.

In September, I pulled my files out (three files full this year, each worksheet carefully indexed, each new piece of vocab anally noted down in one of my now burgeoning journals) and began to formulate some kind of revision table. God, if there is anything on this planet that I hate more than revision, then please show it to me. I’ve failed to find anything so far. Even Afghanistan for my winter break is looking appealing. My second most hated thing is schedules. I run my job by the seat of my pants, and never schedule anything really. Okay, so the odd important meeting, or coffee with a client, fine, but not to the extremes that some go to: red ink for important, blue for pencilled in, green for ‘I really need to get a life’. For all of my exams (GCSEs, A Levels and degree), I never made a timetable of any sort, just choosing to dip in and out as I pleased. It gave me freedom, flexibility, and a reason to live, however, with the JLPT, that seems to be different. I can’t make it out, and I still haven’t understood why it would be any different, but it is. So the timetable has taken pride of place next to the yellow stickies, somewhere between one covered in a miasma of conjugated verbs and the other with the words: ‘You still need to have a social life!’ scrawled across it (in Japanese, of course); there’s that much stuff affixed to my Mac monitor now, I can barely see the screen.

October. Worry rot has set in. You see, Britain has come to a halt. Much in the same way that when just three snowflakes are falling over London and the whole city locks down and announces that it’s the worst winter on record, when there’s a postal strike, everybody thinks Gordon Brown is choreographing Armageddon from his armchair. It’s not the case, but needless to say, nobody has been able to cope, us Brits have gone into hyper-‘hard done by’ mode, and now there’s a backlog of post so large it’ll need at least forty Santas to shift it by Crimbo. And I know that at the bottom of that pile, somewhere between an electricity bill and somebody’s chance to win a million pounds just by sending their bank details to Nigeria, is my Test Voucher, carefully ticking off the days towards the JLPT and smiling serenely to itself in the knowledge that I will never get it, and will therefore not be admitted into the exam hall. It’s a long wait. Luckily though, I have revision to fill the time…

November comes round and finally that most significant of pieces of paper has arrived. Enter: my Test Voucher! Great. You see, one side of me is momentarily happy, having a party, drinking merrily. The other side soon kicks in though, the realisation, having a heart attack, drinking heavily. Suddenly it’s very real. Suddenly I realise that I’m just four weeks off the test. Suddenly I can’t concentrate. And that’s when my brain tells me that I’ve seriously not done enough revision, that the stickies should have been in red, green, blue, black and brown, that I should have been invoking eduFire for support, that I should have been frogmarching myself into the Japanese Quarter, randomly tapping people on the shoulder and drumming up conversations about ordering food, the economic climate of Brazil, and how their sister’s mother’s aunt’s uncle’s cousin is doing. Oh my God I’m gonna fail.

When I wake up a bewildered Japanese woman is stood over me wafting a serviette in my face. I’ve passed out. “And no!” she screams, before turning on her heels and moving hurriedly down the pavement: “Megumi is not available for a date, she’s 84!”

So you see dear friends, compadres, 友だち, I’m getting myself all worked up; had you noticed, by the way? The JLPT is looming, its shadow eclipsing my entire life. So all I can do really is my best, and keep thinking that come March it’ll all be over…

…

…

…March! Oh my God. The results. The waiting around for three months, wondering whether you’ve passed or not, wondering whether you did enough, whether you answered this question, that question, the other question correctly. But no, calm down, it’s only November: one step at a time. That story is most definitely best kept for another time…

Psst: Make sure you download this episode of RedBox to get your mits on the episode outtakes!

Psst again: Oh yea, I nearly forgot to tell you: my blog feed has recently changed. It can now be reached here, so don’t forget to update to continue getting Caught*Red-handed loveliness fed directly to you!

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