Hi, I’m James, a doctoral student at the MRC LMB. I have started this blog to share my fascinations, of which biochemistry is but one. In fact, I must confess that, long before I knew anything about biochemistry, I was fascinated by language and writing. One of my childhood dreams was to become an author. Well, I guess that’s sort of panned out
In my youth, I was a bit of a bookworm. Fantasy was my thing – think The Hobbit and His Dark Materials. I loved being transported to far-off times and places. Spending so much time with my head in a book clearly affected me, because to this day I still dream of writing one.
My love of fantasy also introduced me to my kryptonite: videogames. In my early teens, I was obsessed with Assassin’s Creed, and in 2015 the release of The Witcher 3 had me reading Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Last Wish; I even visited Poland after my IB exams, I guess hoping to find a real wiedźmin. Just like any narrative medium, videogames have the potential to deeply move; the final chapters of Horizon Zero Dawn brought me close to tears.
Although I’m a British national, I was born in Zürich, Switzerland. Growing up there exposed me to German, in which I am ashamedly far from fluent, and over the years I have had the pleasure to learn bits and pieces of French, Spanish, Hebrew, and others.
For a while, my interest in language has been limited to a kind of party trick. My signature moves are revealing the ambiguity in I saw a man jump through a window and convincing people that Dogs dogs bite bite is a valid sentence (as are its infinite recursive extrapolations). Until a strange episode of University Challenge that seemed perfectly addressed to my curiosities, my father considered my obsession with the Glagolitic, Georgian, and Korean alphabets a waste of time. Actually, he still does, but admits that I could have absolutely smashed that round.
So, I have decided to start a blog as somewhere for me to discuss the wonders of language. Let’s see what becomes of it. Hopefully I won’t just be shouting into the void. If you want a better idea of what exactly this blog is about, please check out its first entry – utile notu – where I discuss my aims for its future.