Before starting with a personal tutor, I’d been learning Japanese for a good long time, straight from a home study guide. With the over dramatised conversation pieces on the included CD being my only intake of spoken Japanese each week, I was getting to the point where I thought that all Japanese companies had an English guy named スミスさん・Mr Smith working for them, all Japanese companies were headed by one 高橋さん・Mr Takahashi and that often Mr Smith would go to Kyoto, or Osaka, or an art gallery with his good friend, and colleague, チャンさん・Ms Chan. It was a perfect Japanese world, in which everybody talked so politely to each other, everybody lived in this lovely seaside town called 東京・Tokyo, and seemingly, nobody had a first name. Unfortunately for me, however, this crazy world was not enough, and now, for about a year or so, I have parted each week with my hard-earned cash in order to further flex my mental muscle and improve upon these (rather formal) beginnings, with the assistance of a personal tutor.

I’m making good progress, or at least I think I am, and, every week, I go with massive expectations of being the next best thing, but I never seem to leave that way. Of course, there are good weeks, and there are bad. Sometimes I just look blankly into my teacher’s eyes and hope to goodness that from somewhere, Realisation is going to come flying over, in his spring-loaded catapult, and whack me straight across the back of the head. Other times, I understand fully the entire lesson, and Happiness curls up in my stomach and fills me a sublime, warm feeling. Usually, however, I fall about halfway between the two.

In the early days, when we were studying elements that I’d already covered in my home study period, things seemed extremely cosy, and dare I say it, easy. Of course, it was only after this stopped happening, when we had advanced beyond the realms of Mr Smith and his posse of gaggling Japanese women, that I realised at last that actually, Japanese is bloody hard at times (and that Tokyo may actually be on the coast, but it certainly isn’t Skegness).

And that really, leads me to my point. I hate missing lessons. In fact, I spend more time worrying about missing lessons than I do worrying about the actual lessons themselves. It’s not the way I work. All through university, of course I went out and drank myself into a coma with the best of them, but I never missed a lesson, no matter how far away Sobriety had done a runner. I just couldn’t cope if I thought that I’d missed out on something.

So this week is going to be tough, as yes, I have to miss my weekly lesson. I’m going to Glastonbury, you see, the biggest open-air music festival in the whole of the UK (notice how I say ‘whole’ like the UK is some huge Pangaea-like mass, taking up half the world, or something; it’s an ingrained thought process for all Britains from an early age to think that the UK is bigger and better than the rest of the world, apparently there’s no cure, so apologies..)

Glasto (as it’s affectionately known) is going to be a blasto, but that doesn’t make the deep chasm that will develop in my learning, any easier to withstand. I just know that I’ll come back next Tuesday, unable to hear and without a nuance of understanding left in my brain, having to go back to work on Wednesday and thinking all the time: “not only have I not had a lesson, neither have I had time to prepare for the next!”

In fact, I even thought about sacking off the festival, and staying behind to have my lesson. And then I thought perhaps I could hook up my teacher’s house with some satellite link, and beam her straight into the festival. Or maybe I could go down there for a couple days, come back for my………………………… No stone, as they say, has been left unturned.

So, fellow jbloggers, you see a man in desperate need of some advice. What shall I do next? How shall I cope? Does anybody have any idea what will save me from my learning draught?