I did a huge pile of work and also travelled a lot in March, so Chinese took a back seat. I even took my Heisig book away with me and optimistically carried it in my hand luggage everywhere I went, yet my schedule was so full that I didn’t get a look at it. I did, however, make it to the Freer-Sackler Museum in Washington DC, which has a collection of Chinese, Japanese and Korean artefacts, being particularly strong on ceramics.

I’m back home in London and opened my Chinese books again today. Not having studied for a month, I felt daunted and couldn’t remember any characters. I faffed around for a while, not knowing how to proceed, then I recalled that I’d devised that colour coded system just before I went away, so I made 24 coloured boxes in my sketchbook and copied the characters into them along with the pinyin, just to get myself back in the habit of writing Chinese. It took me quite a while because I’m up to 250 characters now. Tomorrow I’ll try to remember what they all mean.