You are feeling a bit talked out today.

So here is a nice pink building to cheer everyone up.

You are commuting again.

And just as you think that your reverse culture shock has delivered all the after tremors possible, you find yourself consumed by irritation once again.

Because British people do not know how to use the underground properly.

Obsessed by this personal space nonsense, even at peak time rush hour they are insistent on maintaining that 18 inches of sacrosanct free air around them.

This drives you nuts, of course, but at least it has led to a new game. Sidling up to someone who is blithely occupying the space of three people and watching them inch slowly away from you. And then observing their neighbor also move uneasily away. Then move closer again.

This way, you can get a whole carriage of people corralled at one end, and, incidentally, make room for at least another ten people to get on.

But take note people. Letting travelers get off before you get on does NOT mean standing immediately in front of the doors and tutting as they are forced to actually lightly brush the obstacle as they squeeze their way past. Although in your case you will stagger dramatically at a critical moment and kick immovable objects on the ankles if given half a chance. You are a cruel woman before your second cup of coffee.

Of course, people who stay put slap bang in front of the doors on the inside when they have no intention of getting off, forcing their fellow passengers climb over them as they scramble through the doors also have a special level of hell waiting for them in your personal universe.

But what is possibly the most annoying thing is how Brits in Moscow complain about the crush on the metro. You, on the other hand, look back in nostalgia to a more civilised country where people actually venture to communicate with each other in order to find out who is getting off next and then rearrange themselves accordingly.

Anyway, the only way to deal with this blot on the British character in a way which does not send your blood pressure soaring, you have found, is to not use the underground at all.

Which was working very nicely, thanks. Except that you have found that your overland commuter train is even worse.

Mainly because you can always get a nice comfy seat near the window when you get on.

Unfortunately this just adds to the difficulties of extracting yourself two stops before everyone else later.

Especially when you have been so engrossed in marking that you look up to find the train standing at your stop.

‘Bollocks!’ you shout, startling the suited and booted no end.

‘Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, fucking fuckity fuck,’ you chant, only slightly more decorously, as you attempt to reach the doors in an upright position, with all your possessions, without squashing anyone’s inappropriately delicate hand luggage and treading on as many toes as possible.

Although that wasn’t as embarrassing as having to stand there in a puddle of early morning disapproval while the train chuggs slowly to the next stop when the doors irrevocably shut just as you had elbowed the last person between you and them sharply in the ribs.

Incidently?

Left arm up, right arm down.

Tsk. Tsk. Tsk.

Your shoulder hurts. Mostly it aches. Occasionally it feels as though someone has replaces whatever nerve connects the base of your neck to the base of your shoulder-blade with a ribbon of white-hot metal.

Clearly spending two hours on a rowing machine, lifting weights and contorting yourself into improbable yoga positions was a mistake when you had woken up feeling a little stiff on that side.

You know what’s wrong. You spent too many years in your teens holding that arm above your head for hour upon hour whilst sawing away at a double bass*. Now your shoulder protests in the damp and has a tendency to throw a full on hissy fit if you sleep in a draft. What it has to say when you over use it in any more energetic way is quite unprintable.

So you are sitting on the bus on your way to work, trying to get comfortable and failing and having a very vivid, sensory flashback to bass playing extravaganzas** where you and your musical, underaged colleagues would stagger out of another interminable rehearsal session*** and flop into tortures positions in a vein to relieve whatever aches and pains their various instruments had brought on. Because playing an instrument, any instrument, means moving your body into abnormal positions and then holding it there. Eventually, that start’s to hurt. Or gives you callouses.

And then 15 minutes later you’d all get up and go back in and do it again.

To be fair, people did try to point out that sitting properly helps. But you are one of nature’s slumpers and this was a hobby. Not worth readjusting your whole posture for. Besides, at 16 you don’t really believe in repetitive strain injury. You’ve hardly had time to repeat anything. In any case, you suspect that it only delays the inevitable. Just like sports injuries. Eventually some crucial part of your anatomy is going to go sproing****.

But would you, you were reflecting, do it again?

Oh hell yes. It was a lot of fun. Music still is an enduring, if extremely amateur, interest. Of course, the people weren’t all that, but you can’t have everything*****. Shoulders like yours are why god invented Deep Heat.

But, and this is the 64 thousand dollar question, let the Star?

And that’s a trickier one.

*Or in the case of Tavener’s Protecting Veil, millenia.

**OK. There were other instruments involved also.

***In the Protecting Veil, the bases have to hold down the same note for 45 minutes at a time. This sort of thing may be a doddle for the violins – who of course would never dream of putting up with a piece of music so pedestrian and lacking in twiddles – but bass strings are thick.

Longest. 45 minutes. Ever. Until you have to do it again in the next practice session.

****Or, if you are playing rugby, crunch.

****Waves at any passing musicians.

Please return to your seat. Coffee and biscuits are being served, after which you will be placed in suspended animation for your comfort and convenience This is your autopilot speaking. Please return to your seat

Departure will take place in two hundred and fifty-one pages’ time.

In the meantime, have a lemon-scented napkin on the house.

Unfortunately you will not be writing a blog entry today.

Your Dad lent you the latest Terry Prachett.

No it can’t wait. It was out in June.

Last year you spent the whole of November virtuously not thinking about Christmas. Sidling past the tinsel, the seasonal food aisles, the oversized Santas, the holly themed car and leg waxing sets and the jolly reindeer socks in shops, averting your eyes when the really jingly adverts came on TV, stuffing your fingers in your ears to protect yourself from carolling muzak, and filing any festive catalogues straight in the bin.

You made yourself so deaf to the siren call of Yuletide bacchanalia that before you knew it, it was February and you had barely even had time to buy the Star a musical Rudolf bib. Despite the fact that your twelve days are extremely extended owing to the way that the Russian Orthodox Church stubbornly clings to a version of the Julian calender and celebrates Christ’s birth on the 7th January. You would be more sympathetic to this if they were consistent in refusing to respect leap years, but it’s just the ones before 1914 they don’t admit existed. Still, at least it doesn’t lead to arguments about whose cultural traditions you will trample all over this year. B puts up with the Victorian turkeyfest because he knows you will do it all properly later.*

So this year, you waited virtuously until after the 5th November and then you bought yourself the Christmas editions of some glossy food porn mags and a festive Good Housekeeping. You have found your collection of old cards ready to recycle into new ones. You have bought the Star his first present. You have made a mental note not to hang the glass baubles this year. You have earnestly discussed the production of the family plum pudding with your Dad, who has enthusiastically taken over British Christmas from your Mum this year following her retirement from the match due to a hip operation**, and who has looked out his microwave recipes, lovingly saved from the last time Mum was indisposed. You have started a gift list for your nearest and dearest. You have located your carol CDs, although you did decide that it’s still a bit early for actually playing them yet. You have contemplated the price of cute snowman wrapping paper in the shops. You have browsed your Christmas catalogue from Lakeland Plastics.

But in the midst of all this breathless anticipation there is something you want to say.

There’s preparation, there’s stimulating the market, and then there’s selling fresh festive turkey and cranberry sauce sandwiches intended to be eaten right now for lunch.

Who buys these things? Why in the name of all that’s sacred would anyone decide that the day after Halloween would be a good time to scoff one of these with their breaktime coffee?

I’m sorry Greggs. It’s just wrong***.

*On New Years Eve. See under ‘Communism’ and ‘institutionalised athism’.

**She’s recovering nicely, thanks, and plans to direct from a chair.

***And there should be an apostrophe in there somewhere too.

So, the Star makes appropriate noises for a selection of animals and thinks all forms of transport make basically the same sound.

It’s cute, but you can teach dogs to do tricks too.

Yesterday the Star was rolling around on his Babushka’s bed getting ready to have his afternoon nap. As well as screaming his head off when Mummy attempts to stuff him into his pajamas and encouraging Mummy to sing by rolling his arms around while grinning like a loon, he likes to play a game where he buries his head in a pillow, bum in the air, checks surreptitiously to see if someone is watching and then bounces upright, with the look of delight that means ‘Ha! Fooled you again!’

While he was doing this, B asked, idly, ‘How does Babushka sleep?’

And the Star, with no prompting whatsoever, made a snoring sound. Not just any kind of snoring sound either. A loud, extremely penetrating, buzzsaw sort of snoring sound.

You actually fell off the bed laughing when B sprung the Star’s new addition to his vocabulary on you a few hours later.

You have a bit of a love/ hate relationship with a man named Stephen Krashen.

Not that he knows you exist, mind. He’s a luminary in the field of research into language acquisition*, although his entire body of work seems to consist of him stating the bleeding obvious and then giving it a seriously researched kind of name, preferably accompanied by a nice, completely unprovable, formula and being hailed as a visionary**.

To be fair, when he started out he was battling against the prevailing language teaching method called audiolingualism. Based on behaviorism, it was a pedagogical style a bit like training a dog not to shit on the carpet. A student makes a mistake with cohesive devices, has his nose thoroughly rubbed in it, listens to a lot of Beethoven, and eventually becomes too traumatised ever to use ‘however’ to join two ideas in one sentence ever again.

Krashen’s big revelation was to point out that, as we learn much better if we are feeling happy, motivated, confident and anxiety-free, some aspects of this approach might not be terribly efficient.

Of course, Krashen also called it ‘the affective filter hypothesis’. Much to your irritation, it’s a phrase that seems to have made its way straight to the hindbrain of your profession and stuck there.

But just because you have a proper cynical bristle at any claims that being pleasant, especially pleasantness given a special name, is the key to saving the planet, doesn’t necessarily make the claims wrong. The reason why he irritates you so much is that you agree with him about almost everything, you just don’t like having to use the phrase ‘comprehensible input’ before anyone else will listen to you about the importance of grading your language when talking to students of a second language.

That said, you’ve always been suspicious of his ideas about the ’silent period’ (TM) in language acquisition***.

You once watched a very amusing video of him explaining this theory. The way he tells it, the entire idea came about as a result of him being unable to get his (Japanese?) neighbours’ kids to produce any words in English for months and months and months and months, despite being on the receiving end of his expertise as a non-teacher-of but thinker-in-depth-about language.

Yet finally they did speak! And it was as if a flood barrier had opened and lo, Stephen did behold that before we are ready to communicate we need to spend a certain amount of time listening to and understanding language first. He recommends that students are not pushed into using the target language in classrooms but that art should mirror real life and they should be allowed to acquire language naturally. Just like babies do in their first language.

Now normally you hesitate to use yourself as an example of how people learn languages because in fact you don’t. Learn languages that is. Or even acquire them. In fact, you especially don’t acquire them. You spent two months listen to Russian the first time round and didn’t pick up a word. You sent seven more years there and still can’t hold your own in conversation. The times when your Russian made any ground was, in fact, the times when you were being forced to actually use the bloody language, which is why your domestic Russian is much better than anything else, including, occasionally, English, thanks to your non-English speaking MiL.

It’s also why children, any children, don’t learn to speak by watching TV. The input can be as comprehensible as you like, but there’s no interaction, no struggle for communication and ultimately, no acquisition. As the BabyEinsteiners found out to their cost. In your opinion, the reason why babies spend so long listening to the language before producing it has more to do with physical ability to produce, combined with a certain mental immaturity. Look at the success of baby signing, for example. Give him the tools to use language before his lips are able to co-ordinate with his tongue and he will take that opportunity. He’s not waiting around for any other reason.

Of course, this one of Krashen’s theories isn’t at all where your profession is now. Now you’re all about the task-based learning. Learning to communicate through having a go at it, being given feedback on a performance and then going again. Forcing students to interact, in effect.

But you are up close and personal to a case of the silent period in action at the moment because the Star is being stubborn about producing his first word.

Or at least, a word that he uses more than once, in an appropriate context, without excessive prompting.

You aren’t too bothered. It’s clear he understands. He’ll point at things you ask him to. He’ll point at things Papa asks him to. He’ll bring you a book when you suggest it. He’ll even put them away when Babushka gives the command.

So you suspect he’s being excessively noncommittal because he is being brought up bilingually.

‘There’s a train!’ shouts Mummy, gleefully. ‘A train!’

‘Poezd,’ says Babushka, a few minutes later. ‘Smotri poezd!’

‘Duck!’ Mummy points out. ‘Ducky duck duck!’

‘Utka!’ Babushka exclaims. ‘Uty uty utka!’

‘Helicopter!’ yells Mummy, gesturing madly. ‘It’s a helicopter!’

‘Vertalot! challenges Babushka. ‘Eta vertalot!’

The Star therefore has wisely come to a compromise. He makes noises which both Mummy and Babushka agree on.

Anything on wheels is now greeted by ‘toot toot!’ Dogs are growled at, cows**** receive something approximating a moo, and he caws when he sees a crow. All things he has been taught, mainly by his Babushka, who is excellent at coming up with toddler friendly sounds.

Still, you will be relieved when you can get onto the next stage of his language development proper.

Teaching him the correct use of the word ‘however’. Naturally.

And now for something completely related:

Tom: The soup is cold, Mommy.
Mommy: Tom, you never spoke before!
Tom: The soup was never cold before.

*He’s also, you gather, a bit of an activist in the war zone of bilingual education.

**Of course, it’s easy to dis the inventor of sliced bread now.

***Sadly, ‘language acquisition’ is another phrase Krashen has patented.

****In pictures. This is central London.

Now this is what you call geeking out.

He he he he he.