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The advantage of being a child

Summer in the Alps, July 2018

I am slowly becoming more knowledgeable about pronunciation, intonation and stress patterns. The only stress patterns I had previously considered were the stress patterns of my own documented life. The overwork and over-obsess and the bang fizzle pop of oh no Catherine has been doing too much again.

In language learning, stressed syllables and words are those with a tad more emphasis. In the English language the words you stress are the ones that carry meaning. If you can’t sense the stress change then you lose part of the meaning.

We show this stress too by the rhythm of the language

Between any two stressed words in an English sentence exists the same length of space, regardless of how many little bits fall in between. Spanish, on the other hand, is like machine gun fire, it’s steady and repetitive. When you apply the machine gun technique to the English language, you get something that sounds flat and ambiguous. When you try to stress time the Spanish language, you end up changing tenses and creating a lot of blank looks.

Intonation especially is a nebulous creature

Look it up in a teaching book, and the first thing you learn is that it’s hard to recognize. Or no. It’s hard to recognize by the human rational thinking brain. The lizard part of you which doesn’t know much about dictionaries or teaching theory understands it instantaneously.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

Faked intonation, purposely changing the pitch of your voice as to manipulate, just sounds wrong. This, I guess is why actors really have to get into character. Intonation is hard to comprehend, hard to fake, hard to model, and hard to learn.

But without it we’re blind

The true meaning of language is hidden from us. This is the part that I think children learn faster than adults. Children are more willing to imitate, so they listen with more than just their ears. Adults often have their brains distracted running multiple tasks, emotions blinded by an earlier disagreement or a nagging doubt. Children are comfortable play-acting the words. Adults focus on the words themselves and forget the playfulness.

My tutor recently reminded me that intonation is also a kinaesthetic process. Sometimes when we’re trying to understand intonation it’s better to watch people speaking and notice the movement of their head or hands rather than focus on listening to the pitch. Again, when adults restrict their body movement because they are aware of their own body language or through their own insecurity, they limit their opportunity to learn this way.

No wonder language learning is so tricky

You cannot simply memorize words and structures, you have to play.

Work, play and rest

Tortoises
Tortoises. Owned by a ninety-year-old Italian woman who invited me into her garden to photograph them.

I work, I play, and I rest.

Or at least, this is my noble goal. Many people would claim, I think, to do the above, yet, for all their good intentions, find themselves procrastinating their work, criticising themselves instead of playing, and worrying when they had intended resting. I’ve been thinking about this because I’ve noticed myself not doing things I would have done impulsively before.

When I’m working, I’m working solidly. My efforts are wholehearted. If I decide, for example, that I’m going to write, I write. I don’t sit staring at social media. I don’t faff around following some tangential thread through the internet. I don’t suddenly decide that I need to do something else, urgently and simultaneously. I love physical work too. It’s one of the reasons I have loved some of my travels so much. I’m content when I’m busy painting a wall or sanding the skirting boards. Living on a farm for a couple of months, where I was physically working every morning, felling trees, building log piles, caring for the animals, felt wonderful.

But we also had good food and laughed together.

It’s strange perhaps, but I’ve noticed that when I’m playing nowadays, I’m more likely to laugh. I’m a little harder to embarrass. I sing along to my music, without worrying too much about how I sound, or how I only know half the lyrics and have no idea what the familiar tune is. When I paint, I’m gentler with my expectations. I play games. Occasionally I immerse myself in a computer game, sometimes it’s social and board games. My Mother and I sit on the living room floor and play dominos. I cook playfully, experimenting and creating. Reading the rules and letting them loosely guide me. I smile more frequently because I feel at ease, not because I’m trying to make someone else comfortable. Maybe I’m just less uptight?

And then rest. Sleep is complex for me because it comes bundled with nightmares and tense dreams. I try to take my mornings slowly to give myself the opportunity to recover if my night-time thoughts have been rather tense. I am training myself to paint with oils, but to rest I might crayon in a colouring book. I read a lot, partially because of the love of reading, partly because it keeps me still and rests my defences. I read more thought provoking material to learn, but I also read entertaining lighter stuff too. When I rest I try not to be doing other things. Simplicity is my goal. Good music. An immersive story. Finding shapes in clouds. Sometimes I tell myself it’s okay just to sit quietly. Especially in company.

Whatever the change is, I’m grateful for it.

Can I play too?

A yellow bike on a yellow wall in Verona on the way to my new Italian home.
A yellow bike on a yellow wall in Verona on the way to my new Italian home.

I’m babysitting. I guess that’s the best word for it because if I say I’m an au pair it suggests that I’m doing a lot more than I actually am. Either way, whatever the terminology that you choose to use, this afternoon it’s me and an Italian kid.

It seems we’re surprisingly similar: both independent and introverted. The kid’s got a powerful sense of focus, such that I can imagine most adults envying him. I watch him play with his lego. He follows the instructions with impeccable attention to detail. He rarely makes a mis-step.

What’s clear however, is that he’s going to do this on his own. He was reluctant to let me even open the packet, let alone touch his bricks. But I can understand. When I’m working on a project I often find interference terribly frustrating. I also hate asking for help.

However, when you’re in this position of watching over a kid, and preferably bonding with said kid, you rather want them to play with you. Nobody likes not being wanted as a play companion, least of all the new babysitter who doesn’t speak the language and is reliant on the kid, who knows a handful of English words, to say when he needs anything.

So I spent a good long while in this predicament. I know the pleasure of peace and quiet and time to play alone, but as the responsible adult I want to be responding to something.

The good news was that the kid, who’s terribly polite, didn’t seem to have any objection to me being around. There’s no crying for an absent parent or telling me to go away. If anything, he mostly seemed mildly bemused by me.

To satisfy my need to parent, I found ways to make myself useful. I got him a drink – I don’t want the parents coming home and the kid complaining of a headache. I sliced an apple and gave it to him. He ate it quietly, whilst continuing with his lego. I sat on the sofa and read my book.

And then, a few hours later, he suddenly decided that he wanted attention. The change was remarkable. Suddenly he wanted to go outside and play football with me.

Football? Yes! Something I can do!

Playing. Nothing but good, wonderful, delightful play.

Sliding in snow
Me meeting real voluminous snow for the first time.
Photograph by Kaisa Vänskä, used with permission.

We go for a walk around the neighbourhood, in a perfectly civilised fashion

Two young women who haven’t seen each other for some time, who never have spent all that long together, but whom somehow fit together as if we’ve been friends for years and years. Conversation goes back and forth: life and its tribulations; philosophies and their failings; the weather. Being pen-pals we know about each other’s lives, we understand each other’s stories, and so this conversation is a continuation of an ongoing discussion of life.

And then, as we’re reaching the apartment, I spot a washing line and decide what I want is to nip inside and grab my camera. Bemused, but accepting, my friend grabs her camera too. The washing line is covered in snow, more snow than that sprinkling England had, and I’m thinking suddenly of the Mother. I want to take a picture of this washing line specially for her. I imagine she, and possibly only she, will appreciate it.

And then we’re outside again, and the blue-haired Finnish photographer, who has welcomed me into her home, is laughing at me.

A grin forms over my face when I look at the snow

The air here is fresh, quiet. I was a witness to this landscape on the train from Helsinki. I travelled north. The sun rose and the snow deepened. I saw the white roads, the banks of snow, the tall trees and frozen lakes. My friend met me at the train station and we took a road trip with sandwiches and a flask of tea. I marvelled at how she drove on ice, how the tyres just worked. How everything was white, and yet, at the same time, in the ever changing sunlight, nothing was. My delight continues. I cannot quite believe my eyes. There is so much snow – less she says than years past – more than I could imagine.

She’s a wonderful photographer

Her pictures capture the quiet silence of this place. The shadows and light of the low sun. The sparkles in the crystals of frozen condensation. The small glimpses of life through the flutter of a bird’s wings. Nature’s sculptures – buried trees – worthy of a permanent position in a sculpture park.  And, between laughing at me and my disbelief, she’s teaching me. Showing me that to make the snow appear white I need to have the histogram for my photo closer to over-exposed than underexposed. Warning me that when I take my camera inside I must keep it zipped tight in its bag, so that it warms slowly, for preferably at least an hour, and doesn’t get damaged by the moisture.

And I snap away. My photos under-exposed, then over-exposed as I switch from taking pictures in the shade of the building to pictures dominated by the sunlight bouncing off the bright, sparkling snow. But in time I find balance. The controlled, yet imp-like smile of my friend gives me permission to take my time. There’s no rush here. She laughs at my delight as I squeal about the snow being like glitter, or because at last I have managed to take a picture of her that’s not a silhouette. I sound like a child, amazed and free.

Then she points to a mound of snow, which some local children have made into a slide

She suggests that I try sliding down, although she doesn’t try herself. She plonks herself and her camera down in the snow, as if the snow were a sofa that one could sink into with ease. Cautiously I climb up, taking care of my footing, I sit slowly, and then, gently I slide down.

And then I run up, my boots springing off the ice. And slide down.

It’s somewhere between minus seven and minus twenty but I have forgotten about the cold. I run up and slide down.

My dear friend gets me a plastic bag. And I run up, lay the bag down on the ice slide, sit upon it and go. Again and again and again. Until my clothes are sticky with sweat and my breath catches in my chest. And I’m laughing. Frost forms on my scarf. I’m talking in quick spurts, occasionally checking that still buried in the cold snow my friend is happy for my to be so indulgent. But she grins as she snaps more and more pictures and tells me I can go again, if I want. Like a grandmother who has seen it many times before and yet is still moved by the childish delight.

I decide I love snow.