FINALLY, SOME CLARITY.

In the lead-up to Christmas, when most people have been excitedly buying and wrapping presents, I have been in a kind of funk. No, not as in the music, a kind of depressive fog. Why? Well, on the one hand, it will be my first Christmas without Nutsy, but on the other, I have just been feeling that I'm getting older.

With just under three weeks until my next birthday (when I officially enter middle-age) I have had some cause to reflect and it has been a bit unusual. I remember reading a story about a boy called Jimmy, when I was in Year Three, whose grandfather was visiting from the farm and he was unhappy about it. "But you like Grandad." "Yes, but he's always, "When I was a boy…." and his mother said, "Okay, this weekend, you are a boy like Grandad was." And the lesson would be that his grandfather would see that today's generation of kids could survive as he did in his youth, and that Jimmy would be grateful for the things he has. As I think back on my life, I know that not every stepping stone in my life was dazzling and easy, but I got there. I didn't get into the university course I wanted first time, but I got there. I reflect on what I had when I was twenty and think, had I been diagnosed with Asperger's at six rather than 35 and had I been accommodated rather than crammed into a round hole as a square peg, life would have been easier. The first and main problem with university was, at first I entered a university that didn't have many people studying Japanese and the university changed it to mix us in with business students, many of whom weren't my kind of people. Okay, I entered a university that suited me better, but for the size of it, later, and people doing Japanese there were doing it either as an Arts Degree or as part of a combined degree with Arts, such as Law, Commerce, Science, Economics or Engineering. Had I had a support worker who'd said, "Yes, Japanese is very important to you (albeit you had some run-ins with some not so nice people) so what we need to do is see if you can join the Japanese Society, where you may find some people who are like you." Also, with my first university, I love history and old things and my first university was a steel reinforced concrete jungle.

My experiences at my second university included a trip to Japan, which I loved and was grateful for. People have said to me that I should go again, but aside from money and health, being gluten intolerant, I could have trouble finding foods that I can eat. I wish I had have been able to stay in contact with my homestay family, but, I was only there for a week and that's not really long enough to form strong bonds.

I am also aware that I am more strongly drawn to things than people, so in some ways, it's more important for me to have Japanese things around me, like my car, my glasses (I want to buy a pair of jeans that are made in Japan, too and I might also have them for when I drive my father's Falcon), but there's nothing wrong with that, either. What I know I need to do is replenish some of the Japanese things I have around me. I will be buying a new furoshiki and some other new ornaments in the new year, as well as those jeans. I had been considering (well, a few contradictory things happened here, I remember a year after I had come back from Japan saying to my father that I hadn't heard from my homestay family for ages and he said, "Well, forget about them," but then, around nine years later, I was talking about something we did and he asked if I ever heard from them, and I said, "For a few months afterwards, yes, but not anymore." He then asked me if I'd thought about doing so, and I said, "I doubt they'd remember me after all this time," and he said, "I'm sure they would." Then, last week, I had a dream where they appeared in it, and I wanted to see how the city where I stayed was, and surprisingly, it hasn't changed much. He then asked me the same question. The only way I would really be comfortable broaching the subject with them again would be to put something out to a third party in Japan and say, "Would they be interested in contact again, albeit possibly far more limited?") re-establishing contact, just to possibly know if they remembered me and remembered the event I went over there for, but I don't know how it would go. I remembered watching a documentary about a woman who took an elderly Australian widow to Japan to meet her family and they were all very nice, but after she had gone home, they asked if they would do it again and they said, "No." I can compartmentalise it and say, "Okay, I was there for seven days and I loved it, and if I were to go again, I would probably want to meet on neutral ground for a catch-up and little more.