Eldon Reeves

If you’re interested, here’s a little blurb about myself and this blog…

I was quite a good musician on quite a few different instruments, but then university started to be obstructive.  Kept up the flute and piano a couple of years, and then realised I couldn’t really afford lessons any more, and neither could I spare the time.  This year I picked up my saxophone again round about Christmas and was reminded what great fun this musical malarkey was, so I’ve been blasting it out as often as possible (usually to put off doing degree work).

Previously I was also learning Japanese, because I liked Nintendo and Nintendo came from Japan.  Then, I noticed that wheras I only knew a couple of Japanese people, I had plenty of Chinese friends.  My very patient friend spent quite a lot of time trying to teach me Mandarin, but with little success (because I never put the time in); I’m now studying Cantonese much more successfully, and with luck I’ll return someday to the Mandarin.

As for the title of the blog – there is an oft-quoted Chinese proverb which says “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”. Wise words, but they fail to emphasise the most important thing – that the rest of the journey is also made up of single steps. It’s sometimes difficult to keep this in mind over the course of long journeys – we want to reach our destination faster, we want to reach it now, even when it’s not physically possible.

My long term goals are to reach an advanced (or perhaps even professional) level on the saxophone; for Cantonese, my long term goal is fluency and literacy. They are my thousand mile journeys – and the only way to get to the end is by taking them one step at a time. One part of this blog is a journal of progress; another part is about how I go about these two projects; another still is just to write about language and music on a more general level.

Anyway, pretentious blathering over – hopefully there’s something here that’s interesting to you.  Thanks for visiting!