The List

Everybody should have a list of things that they want to accomplish before they die. I have only just begun to realize that such a list must exist. It is always important to have aspirations and dreams, even if some are unreachable and some are unrealistic, you are not truly living until you're dreaming and looking at the what if, the what can be and what the future could hold.

My list starts off with simple items, simple things that to me now, are tasks that could be completed in months, but I know they will take me years, the first thing on my list, that I have considered for a while now is:

Learn a second language.

I don't want to just know bits and pieces of the language, I don't want to be coherently fluent, I want to be able to understand the language enough to have a conversation with a native and understand mostly what they are saying, without having to revert to english. Because lets face it, we are so lazy as a country, not necessarily through our own fault, but everybody speaks our language, which means not everybody makes an effort to speak a second language. Most countries out there that do not natively speak English will have English as a second language! The second language of the UK? English. I want to learn another language that I can use one day. I think French would probably be the best language for me to learn, probably because as I was discussing with my younger sister earlier, we know various phrases and words that we learnt from GCSE that will help, with additional learning to become fluent (Charlotte is walking around with headphones on listening to a french learning tape, incidentally this is not on my list to follow her lead, rather something i've wanted to do for a while spurred on by her).

The next item on the list will be explained in a later post, I'm currently waiting for the photos from Thailand to be copied over to my MacBook Pro from the Windows system upstairs (for the geeks, I have no transfer cable for my sony digital camera and the windows computer has a memory stick pro card reader, the MBP only has SD... Wifi data transfer is sloow.....)

Richard.