In Preparation For Hellfest

I promised myself some time ago - probably around last new year to be honest - that I'd relearn some basic French in order to get by easier when I went to Hellfest.
Well, now Hellfest is almost upon us and until this afternoon, I hadn't even entertained the idea of looking over any french work. A few hours ago, I picked up a couple of good quality (but cheap) books to kickstart my french relearning. After studying the language for five years in school, I'm hoping that it'll trigger my memory and that it'll be easier to learn, within reason, than learning everything from scratch.
In a way, I wish that I'd never stopped learning languages - I feel that if I'd stuck with them all as I picked them up, I could be halfway to fluent in French, German, Spanish, Japanese and Korean as well as moving in the right direction with Greek, Cantonese and Mandarin. When I really think about it, there are so many things that I'm capable of doing and all that's standing in the way is my own mental health issues. It's more disabling than I could ever have imagined.
Like I said though, I'm trying to get back on the horse, and I think that I'm sort of getting there. This interaction overload did set me back but I feel like I can spring forward again, now that I've had a short time to lose myself in the anonymity that the city centre provides.

As for learning French, or relearning or whatever, I'll try to keep this updated and things. Hopefully soon I'll be able to hold actual conversations with people! It's strange, the way they teach foreign languages in British schools - parrot phrases and jigsaw paragraphs. If I went to France, being able to talk at length about my family or what I did during the summer holidays would be so wildly unhelpful that it's almost comedic. And slightly sad too. It's a shame that we aren't taught with immersion although I can see why it'd be impractical. I just feel that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

In regards to Hellfest, I can't tell whether I'm most excited to see the bands, go on holiday to France, or to be reviewing the bands for GetYourRockOut.co.uk. I think it's pretty much an equal measure of all three things along with a whole bunch of other stuff too. Hopefully everything will go better with GYRO this time - it's pretty worrying how my emails keep getting 'lost'. They appear in my sent folder and I'm pretty certain that wouldn't happen if they weren't definitely 'sent'. My email hasn't changed, their email hasn't changed and they're not in their junk folder so lord knows where they're actually going. Of course there's always the possibility that they GYRO people either aren't seeing them because they're getting so many emails from everyone. Or there's the possibility that they're ignoring my emails as a way to subtly remove me from their team. Hopefully that's just me being paranoid though...
With that in mind however, I have wanted to start putting out feelers to find other reviewing sites and other companies that need photographers. I know there's a few local ones but the level of professionalism there is always a bit of a worry. I've seen some companies get really successful very quickly, only to find out they'd been built on a whim and folded within a year. It's scary to put work into something that feels so transient. But then I suppose that's all life is. At the end of the day, nothing is forever.