You are beginning to notice how much more pleasant it is to be out and about with the Star lately.
This is perhaps because the Comet has learned to crawl, or rather, slither and you have discovered that her calmness was all a front. She has clearly just been spending the last five and a half months wisely, looking at things she couldn’t reach and making a mental note to head straight for them the minute she got mobile.
The last few days have been characterised by you tripping over a small body as she commandos her way towards another book or toy, or finding her wedged into the space between the sofa and the wall intending to gnaw on a power cable.
She also climbs. She has a good line in reaching up, snagging the edge of the coffee table with one hand, using that to gain purchase with the other and then hanging there, little legs scrambling for grip. Oh and she can damn near get herself into a sitting position too. She lists a bit, and eventually ends up with her nose in the carpet, but it won’t be long before she can do it.
She is, in fact, even more energetic than the Star was, and that was something you didn’t think was possible. Although you will give her the fact that she can be indoors in, say, an art gallery, without needing to shout as loudly as she possibly can, just because it is dark and quiet and she can.
The Star, in contrast, seems to have developed a bit of maturity. You like to think that the Star’s relative calmness these days is due to your water torture approach to discipline.
It seems that somewhere after the five millionth time you insisted on his holding your hand and did the whole right, now we stop at the edge of the read, check for cars, remember not to step out into the road randomly, you don’t want to be squashed like a bug, stop at the road, look there’s a car, it’s a road, stop, look, wait for Mama, it’s a road, there are cars, you might be squashed like a bug, stop, wait, look, wait, stop, stop, stop, SQUASHED LIKE A BUG, stop routine it has actually gone in. The Star will stop at roads now without you having to scream at him and lunge for his collar. He even roundly told you off the other day for walking in the middle of a (temporarily closed off) road and insisted on using the pavement.
In fact, the Star is entering the age of reason. Or rather, the age where threats, bribes and shameless flattery actually work. Or perhaps it’s just that he’s now over his initial whalelike reaction to the world and is channelling the bowl of petunias*. It’s a lot easier to resist the shiny shiny when it isn’t also quite so new and therefore exciting.
It’s not perfect, of course, but generally his only remaining fault is his tendency to accelerate over the horizon in pursuit of a pigeon. Or a goose. Or a swan. Or any bird that is foolish enough to be big enough to catch a toddle’s eye.
So it is with a rather heavy heart that you realise that just as the Star enters childhood, where you can see the light at the end of the bum-wiping, spoon-feeding, clothes-dressing phase of motherhood for one child, you get to do it al over again with the Comet.
Well, of course you have already been doing it with the Comet, but there’s a big difference between a baby who stays where you put her and one who if you are in the slightest bit attentive will be investigating the contents of the sharps drawer before you know it.
‘No apples either. We need to go shopping. How about a satsuma?’
‘Yes!’ Cherubic smile of satisfaction. ‘A sat-suma! I yike sat-sumas.’
There are times when you get to feel really smug as a mother, and when exchanges like this happen at top volume on a busy bus, that is one of them.
You feel justified in accepting the accolades that must surely have been rolling in upon you from your fellow passengers. You put a lot of effort into the Star’s food and eating habits. You do a lot of cooking. You do a lot of cooking from scratch. Junk food in your house is pelmeni, Russian style ravioli. You even make your own hamburgers.
As a result you have a son who will refuse fish fingers*, can’t stand ketchup, has only recently discovered fruit juice is nicer than plain water, prefers the bitter dark Russian chocolate to the exceptionally sweet Cadburys and whose favourite foods are apples,** brocoli, tomatoes and home-made chicken noodle soup.*** He doesn’t eat biscuits. Or puddings. Not even with custard. He prefers fruit. He likes smoked salmon, steamed salmon, salmon and broccoli pasta and has never knowingly eaten a chicken nugget.
Of course, given that you can feel anxious about absolutely anything parenting related, you worry about this. Will he, you fret, rebel when he is thirteen, eat a Happy Meal and then consume nothing but McDonald’s for the rest of his life, die at 45 an obese blob as a result of your failure to desensitize him to fatty, sugar laden foods?
But the thing is, it’s not that you ban these things from his life. Every now and again you’ll make a cake and offer him some. He’ll nibble the icing and demand some grapes. You can’t even get him to eat sausages unless you hide them in toad in the hole, which is a shame as you like them.
In fact, it weren’t for the fact that he doesn’t really want to be adventurous, is steadfast in turning his nose up at stuffed peppers and adores ice cream, you’d be tempted to jack in the cooking and buy in a years’ supply of microwavable dinners to redress the balance.
Anyway. This is relevant because, as well as the fact that it doesn’t do to miss an opportunity for a good boast when you are a mother, you are about to wean the Comet.
Which means breaking out the baby rice and having at her with purees and not giving baby led weaning a chance.
Baby led weaning, for the child rearing fashion challenged amongst us, is where you cover the floor, the walls and any siblings in plastic sheeting, plonk a bowl of (unsalted but otherwise unadulterated) spaghetti bolognaise in front of a seven month old, stand well back and let them have at it. And then give them a bath and nuke the kitchen from orbit.
You would find it amusing, and as the Comet already has a good line in lunging for the nearest banana, or trying to face plant in the Rice Krispies, or flinging herself sideways to go after a piece of flying pasta, you doubt you will be able to resist giving her a spoon and a plate of cauliflower cheese sometime very soon, just to see what she makes of it.
But by and large, you don’t want to mess with the magic formula that has produced the Star and his disgustingly well-balanced attitude towards food.
Plus, there is the issue of the mess.
*Unless he’s at his Granny’s. For some reason he likes fish fingers at Granny’s.
**He ate four today. You are not sure this is entirely healthy. And nearly an entire bag of satsumas yesterday. On the other hand, surely this is better than him eating four lots of sweets?
***OK, and crisps. He doesn’t get to eat crisps very often though, so he has stopped asking for them. You save them for situations that call for really big bribes.
You have certain reservations about Remembrance Day.
This is not because you are anti-war, anti those/these wars or anti Britain particularly, although some of those are somewhat true.
Remembrance Day in the UK is in some ways a historical anachronism, instituted at the end of a war which saw every family in the UK touched but where the outcome was largely inconclusive, devoid of any real sense of victory and without much material benefit for returning soldiers. The result was massive emotional investment in war memorials and the rituals surrounding them as a focus for the grief of the nation, a nation who didn’t have much to cheer about. This set the tone for the way war has been commemorated in the UK ever since, yet it is noticeable that the Second World War, a war which had some fairly obvious winners and losers, and which resulted in things like the welfare state being set up, did not produce a rash of war memorials. Names tended to be tacked on to the old World War One monuments.*
It’s this almost exclusive focus on the dead that you consider, at best, a little hypocritical, and at worst, rather dangerous.
It’s easy to say, isn’t war awful, look what it leads to, those poor dead boys, wasn’t it tragic, let’s wear this symbol, bow our heads, say we are sorry and feel morally cleansed by our acknowledgement of the horror. You worry that by wallowing in one day’s mourning, we, the non combatants, feel that we absolve ourselves of involvement in the issue of war the other 364 days of the year.
Plus, whilst you appreciate that the day is a comfort to those who have lost family or friends in war, and that this is not an inconsiderable point, nevertheless, the dead are dead. Remembrance Day can’t help them now. You consider that the focus on the dead means we lose sight of our responsibilities to living solders. Where, you wondered, is the day to support the troops currently under fire on our behalf, to celebrate the maimed, the traumatised, the returnees from war?
The thing is, you think that history is repeating itself, in that the longer we engage in a protracted, depressing and inconclusive war, the more focus will be put on Remembrance Day, to the detraction of actually doing anything about it, or about the increasing numbers of young men exposed to the unpleasantness who have to come back and try to get on with their lives.
Not to mention the people who actually have to live in areas of conflict.
So you buy your poppy and you wear it. In fact, this year you bought two pin on poppies, two stick on poppies, a Remembrance Day balloon, a sticker and a pennant, because when you discovered that you only had a five-pound note, rather overwhelmed by your largesse and the Star’s obvious excitement, the Royal British Legion‘s representative kept producing new items as you attempted to stuff your money into his collecting tin. You approve of their work.
But you don’t think November 11th is the best day to do our best thinking about war, our roles and responsibilities.
Image via Wikipedia
*You did quite a lot of research once on the meaning of First World War memorials, it bothers you that much. Some of that research ended up here.
So this evening you have been too busy noodling around with your new iPhone to actually be bothered to write a proper post.
You took it out for a walk today (your children came too) and spent a very happy half an hour in an autumnal graveyard taking photographs. With your new iPhone. Hey, it was atmospheric. And the squirrels were obligingly plentiful, which meant you could concentrate on your new iPhone without too many distractions from the Star. You would put some of the pictures here, but you haven’t got round to figuring out how to sync your new iPhone to the computer yet.
You had planned to post to Twitter and Facebook and the like from your new iPhone on the way home, just because you now can, but the Star, who normally cannot be dragged away from the place where you can see trains, today decided that two minutes was quite enough of that and he wanted to get on with scootering.
Since then you have been tapping away at your new iPhone’s screen finding out what all the little icons let you do, marvelling at how controlled the scrolling is, swearing every time you need to type an M on the keyboard and hit delete instead and trying to find an app that converts the keyboard into Cyrillic.
You have even made a call using your new iPhone. To Russia, none the less, using Skype. How cool is that?
Oh and you also made dinner, played with the kids a bit, put them to bed and so on.
And yet here you are, not writing this post on your new iPhone. This is because you have developed cramp in your thumbs.
You took the Star to his first fireworks display yesterday.
It’s not the first time he’s seen fireworks. You took him to the Ancestral New Town last year for rockets and Catherine wheels in the back garden. He loved it, so for 2011 you decided that it was time to take him to the real thing in the Big Park Near You. Oh, and the Comet. The Comet really benefits from being a second child. There is no way the Star would have been out so far past his bedtime at her age.
You set off with a good half hour to go, thinking that you would just pop on the bus and get to the place you and B had decided would be a good one to observe from.
This happened to be on the other side of the river to where the display was actually taking place. You are cheap, you see, and didn’t feel like paying the £20 entrance fee (‘kids go free!’ Yeah. Right).
First snag. You had insufficiently considered that everybody else in your corner of London would be doing the same thing. You were eventually forced to walk an extra 15 minutes to the other bus-stop, miss another two buses due to overcrowding, muscle your way into the last seats on the top floor on a third, roar off round the corner, and then get promptly stuck in a traffic jam.
You got off the bus.
You began trotting towards the river, determinedly dragging the toddler. But at some point, you and B decided that you weren’t going to make the far bank in time and cut left through the houses in order to go and ooh and ahh from the boundaries of the park.
As it happens, when the display started, the fireworks marshals were too busy removing the fencing in anticipation of the exodus to come, and so you and quite a lot of other people ended up standing just inside the park, with a pretty good view of the bangs and wizzes.
The Star really enjoyed himself. He ended up on his Papa’s shoulders shouting WEEEEEEEEEEEEE! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! and DAAAVAAAAAI, DAAAVAAAAAI!* at the top of his voice throughout.
The Comet started stoically at the pretty lights. Very occasionally, she blinked. You had your hand over her ears, but still, you’d expected a bit more reaction.
Then it was time to go home.
You meandered back along your side of the river, watching the party boats sail by and allowing the Star plenty of time to throw leaves into the water.
Then you got to your bus stop. They’d closed the roads round the park and the traffic was pretty chocka, but your bus was coming so you weren’t too worried.
The bus was terminating there and turning round again rather than trying to force its way through the jam any further. They do that. It’s irritating. It’s especially irritating when you have an over stimulated toddler and a baby to get home. Eventually you decided to bite the bullet and just walk.
You walked and walked and walked. B carried the Star, but the Star is 20kg these days and he could only do so far before you both had to find new incentives to keep the kid on his feet a bit further. Sadly, pigeon chasing is impractical at night. There are no pigeons.
You made it to another, different bus stop after a while. The Star entertained himself, as he is wont to do in such circumstances, by commanding passers-by to STOP! As ever, a few revellers did so, which just thrilled him right down to his little socks.
Your bus came.
And went again. Too overcrowded to even stop.
You ended up getting the Inconvenient Bus and then Yet Another Bus after that, arriving home at 10.30pm.
The fireworks finished at 8.30.
Next year, you will probably be partaking of your parents’ hospitality again.
He’d asked PetROV how to pronounce his name, and come away with the impression that the way that he, Martin, and every other English speaker says it (‘PETrov’) was, in fact, correct.
‘After all he should know,’ he ended triumphantly.*
You can think of a number of reasons for the discrepancy between your understanding of the pronunciation and Martin’s**.
You are wrong. This is clearly not an option.
PetROV is wrong. Now he has been living abroad for a while. You strongly suspect that he has given up worrying about the mad things English speakers do to his name. If Martin said ‘Am I saying this right? PETrov?’ you can well imagine him thinking himself lucky that his name wasn’t being pronounced ‘Peters’ and nodding enthusiastically.
Martin is wrong.
Now you do not rule out option two, but in fact you are going for door number three as you would not be at all surprised if the truth is that when PetROV growled ‘PetROV’, Martin heard ‘PETrov regardless. And here’s why.
One of the problems people encounter with language learning, when learning a new language rather than acquiring more than one language as a child, is the amount of interference they get from their native tongue.
This is particularly pronounced when it comes to pronunciation.
This means that out of the full range of sounds a human mouth can make, sooner rather than later, they start to fixate on a really rather limited number. And it’s not just sounds either, but things like patterns in sentence and word stress and intonation. Babies quickly get used to a particular way of declaiming a language and, and this is the important bit, they start to lose the ability to really hear, let alone produce, nuances in the pronunciation in other languages.
People tend to think it’s the individual sounds they need to pay attention to in pronunciation. But while you can have a lot of fun discussing sheets with B on laundry day because Russians do not have a long/ short vowel distinction and tend to pronounce the ‘i’ and ‘ee’ in ‘trip’ and ‘tree’ the same, mainly all that mispronunciation of sounds does is tip other people off that you are someone with a charmingly other accent.
Word stress is important for comprehension, much more so than the pronunciation of individual sounds. There are some real WTF moments to be had when struggling to work out what somebody who has just put the stress on the wrong syLAble of a key word actually means.
Now stress in English is achieved in three ways. Firstly, a stressed syllable will be louder than other syllables. So far so obvious. But it will also be longer than other syllables and higher in pitch.
This is not the same in all languages. In French, for example, all syllables take the same mount of time to say, regardless of stress.
Russian has a much narrower pitch range than English. Their lows are not as low and their highs are not as high.
This is mainly a problem in intonation, especially as they also change pitch less often in any given utterance.
And what does intonation convey? Politeness, interest, emotion. In particular, in English we show politeness and interest by starting really high, changing pitch often and swooping up to the full height or full low of our range.
Most Russians, then, tend to come across as flat, monotone, disinterested, rude.
It also means that English speakers sound tragically over excited about virtually everything when they speak Russian. Russians habitually think that English speakers are more tired, more excited, more angry, more everything than they actually are whether they are speaking Russian or English.
And that means it is harder for a native English speaker to spot, let alone reproduce, word stress in Russian. They are only doing two and a half of the three things the English speaker does.
It doesn’t help that in this case, English two-syllable nouns almost always put the stress on the first one.
Now spotting pronunciation nuances, including word stress, is one of those skills that comes with practice.
You are pretty good at it. You have spent 15 years in classrooms wondering why Kirill is virtually incomprehensible and trying to fix it. That’s a lot of time tuning your ear into mistakes.
Martin Brundle clearly isn’t.
Not that he should feel too bad about it. He can hear things in the note of an engine that you wouldn’t even with a pause button and the volume turned up high.
But given that he might feel a little dubious about accepting the expertise of some pseudonymous Internet weirdo, and because you, obviously feel the need to prove to the Internet at large that you are the one who is right, you have decided to provide him, and the rest of the Formula One presenters with some more, some many more examples of Russian people, commentators, newscasters and random fans saying ‘petROV’, sometimes quite loudly, in the hope that if it is repeated often enough they will be able to get their ear in.
You would also like them to pay attention to the fact that there’s a rolled R and the ‘v’ sound at the end is much softer, more like an F, than they are expecting.
But you will be magnanimous in victory and give them till the end of the season to get that right.
The video evidence***.
A feature on Vitaly PetROV on the news. His name is at 9 seconds, 50 secs, 1 minute 25 and 2 mins 34. Or thereabouts.
Another news item. With an interview! See 50 secs, 2 mins 5, 2 mins 42, 3 mins 14, 4 mins 52 and 5 mins 10.
Sports news reports this time. See 10secs, 21 secs, 50 secs and probably at points thereafter as well (and bask in PetROV’s podium).
PetROV is at some promotional event. See 30 secs, 4 mins 18, 4 mins 51, and especially 5 mins 40 – 6 mins where the commentator gets quite shouty. And 6 mins 30. Also, aren’t F1 cars loud?
Last but not least, PetROV is unveiling something in GUM. Organised chanting by the crowd before 1 minute.
*The race is till up on iPlayer for one more day if people would like to witness your humiliation first hand. The section in question is sometime soonish after the halfway point in the race. No, you are not going to be more specific than that.
**Now you are in an actually back and forth dialogue, you are even more sure that you are on first name terms with Marty.
***It is legal, apparently, for you to splice these videos together to make one long ‘petROVpetROVpetROVpetROVpetROV’ drone. Something to do with satirical purposes.**** You would appreciate any help on whether it is possible.
