I spent hours at the end of last week trying to translate a Japanese children’s story. Tonight I am trying to write one. I decided to pick something vaguely Irish to write about though it took a while to work out what story to tell. My first thought was of the legend of Finn MacCool. This was never told to me as a proper story but more as a series of snippets – “built the Giant’s Causeway”, “created the Isle of Man” – and neither of these scenarios inspired me. In the end I decided to write a short story based on a Leprechaun I have called Seamus. This pulls in a variety of elements from Leprechaun stories including a pot of gold and a red ribbon. So far I have only managed three sentences in Japanese. I need to finish this by Tuesday morning.