No more porkies

Last November I pointed out a piece of nonsensical bureacracy in Wales, when a sausage producer was told he couldn't call his products 'dragon sausages' because they didn't contain any dragons. Well, the Trading Standards Agency has done it again! Val Temple runs a bakery in Dorset and for 18 years she has been selling novelty pastries, decorated with sugar pigs, frogs and robins and she calls them 'pig tarts' and 'frog tarts' and 'robin tarts'. She also sells a special cake that she calls 'Paradise cake.' Any problems so far? Have you guessed what the trading standards officer has told her? She can't call them those names any more because the silly people of Dorset (I'm being sarcastic, I know you are all normal really) might think the tarts contain pigs and frogs and robins and, let's face it, that cake never came from Paradise! Read it here.

So what else will trading standards officers be looking out for around the country? Send in your suggestions and we'll keep them busy as they are obviously seriously under-employed. How about turkish delight that doesn't come from Turkey, or 'death by chocolate' cake that doesn't kill you? It doesn't have to be food, any misleading labels will do.

I've joined the Twirlies

When my 60th birthday arrived, at the end of November 2005, nothing seemed to change. I had expected some kind of rite of passage into 'Senior Citizenship' but no new ID or welcome pack arrived. As I stood in line at the theatre, I half expected a public announcement that I had come for a concessionary ticket and I felt a great sense of achievement when the girl sold me a full-priced adult ticket without blinking.

For 14 months now, I have pretended to be part of the mainstream. I've handed over the full fare on trains, bought ordinary meals and not the 'OAP special' in the local pub and my hairdresser hasn't yet offered me an appointment on 'pensioners' day' for a blue rinse. But today it all changed: I acquired my free Devon bus pass and my Senior railcard. I may not have any grey hairs yet, but boy do I feel OLD!

I'm the same age as Helen Mirren for goodnes sake, does she have a bus pass? Does she stand at the bus stop at 08.59 with all the other Senior Citizens calling out 'Am I too early .... tooearly..... twearly .... twirly?'

The Grockles are coming!

I live in a beautiful part of England, on the coast of North Devon. We have lovely countryside and fabulous beaches. Unfortunately the minute the weather turns warm and sunny we are invaded by Grockles. These are surfers and holidaymakers and they come in all shapes and sizes.

First there are the family groups who stay in holiday cottages, hotels or the holiday parks. We don't see much of them if the weather is good and they can toast themselves on the beaches. They only come into the village when they are so badly sunburnt that they need to see a doctor. They can be a bit of a nuisance when it rains, then they seek 'entertainment' because, coming from towns and cities, they don't realise that walking in the rain in the country can be fun! So, they create long traffic queues into the nearest town, hit the shops and get into another long traffic queue to return.

Less popular are the people who arrive towing their own caravans. These are not good on our narrow lanes and there is mayhem every Saturday when those leaving for home meet up with the new arrivals and the drivers' tempers are truly tested. I have never understood why anyone would want to tow a caravan; apart from being the most detested of roadusers, the caravans they bring are a fraction of the size of the static caravans in the holiday parks. Why cram your family into a box on wheels when you could have bedrooms, a bathroom and kitchen?

Then we get the 'campervanners', the dreaded surfers with their sunbleached hair, bronzed bodies and Aussie accents. They arrive en masse in tatty old VW camper vans, belching out exhaust fumes and loud music. They arrive before the holiday season proper starts, taking all the jobs in the holiday parks while local youngsters are still at school or college. They live in their vans, taking every available free parking space near the beaches, so that locals and paying holidaymakers have to use the expensive official carparks.

We are told that all of this is good for 'the local economy' but I haven't noticed any benefits. Thanks to the demands of the holiday industry, our water bills are the highest in Britain. Our roads are choked with traffic from April to September. The local shopkeepers bump up all their prices as soon as the first grockles appear. We can't get into our favourite pubs and restaurants ... I could go on ...

Roll on September when they all go home and peace returns. Phew! I needed a bit of a grump after that serious post I finished yesterday!

Young People Part 2 Language Development

Following my brief look at the changing pattern of family life in Britain, I'd like to turn my attention to children's language development, since the two are inextricably linked.

Human babies are amazing creatures: given normal hearing and average cognitive ability, they progress from 'mewling and puking' to being masters of their mother tongue(s) in less than four years. After infancy, new language is learned in a different way, which most of us find quite difficult. Whether we subscribe to the Chomsky or the Bruner theory of first language acquisition, or think, as I do, that the truth lies in a combination of the two, there is no questioning the fact that all over the world, in primitive tribes and civilised societies, babies acquire speech and language in a seemingly effortless way.

So why is delayed language development among children of school-entry age the major concern of those involved in Early Years education in Britain today? Communication difficulties affect social and educational progress and are frequently associated with behavioural difficulties in children of secondary school age. The usual suspects of television, working mothers or simply being a boy have been blamed and in Australia the answer has been discovered in middle ear infections. In fact all of these issues can be seen to be inter-related.

I spent the last twenty years advising parents and teachers on language development in children with impaired hearing and the twenty years prior to that teaching deaf children. Only 1 per 1000 babies is born with severe sensorineural deafness but as many as 1 in 4 children suffer some degree of temporary hearing loss due to otitis media with effusion (OME), commonly known as 'glue ear.' While the children with permanent deafness were my main concern, I was involved in the assessment of children with glue ear and in advising their parents and teachers on how to minimise the impact of the hearing loss on their educational development. Between 1990 and 2006, the number of referrals I received to assess children with conductive hearing loss caused by glue ear increased from an average of 30 per year to 30 per month. Working with audiologists and paediatricians to discover the reasons for this increase, I concluded that the actual incidence of episodes of glue ear had not increased but the impact on the development of speech and language was greater than in the past.

Having to devise a new way of working in order to cope with the numbers of children being referred from 67 schools scattered over a large rural area, I produced information leaflets for parents, presentations for health and education professionals and a guide on language development for teachers in Early Years settings. Within months, I was overwhelmed by requests to attend meetings and address conferences; sadly, this was not a tribute to my wit and charm but an indication of the level of concern among a range of professionals dealing with ever-rising numbers of children with poor speech and language skills.

Otitis media with effusion, OME or glue ear, is usually a minor medical condition and doctors are right to resist pressure to rush to surgical solutions. It is a condition that requires good management rather than intervention. It is an educational rather than a medical issue. The behavioural and cognitive sequelae of OME were established many years ago by the Dunedin Project and confirmed in many later studies. What has changed in the 33 years since the Dunedin study began is the scale of the problem. As I said earlier, the incidence has not increased but the impact has.

Language development and hearing

(For any outraged scientists who might be reading, this is the Audiology for Dummies version)

This illustration gives an indication of the relative pitch (frequency measured in Hertz) and intensity ('loudness' measured in decibels) of common sounds.

You can see the all-important 'speech banana' which shows the range of speech sounds in the average adult voice.

The white section indicates what would be considered the 'normal' range of hearing responses, with the heavy line representing a typical audiogram for a young child i.e. a similar response to all frequencies at minimal levels.

Responses mainly in the yellow section would indicate a mild hearing loss, the green section a moderate loss and so on. A typical audiogram of a 4 year old with glue ear would show a fairly straight line around 40-45 dBHL. The child would have difficulty in hearing any of the sounds above the line showing his 'threshold of hearing'. (Surgical intervention - myringotomy and insertion of ventilation tubes, 'grommets' - would normally be considered appropriate if the hearing loss was greater than this and persisted for more than 6 months)

The speech banana shows that vowel sounds and the voiced consonants b, m, n, l, g, ng, r, and j are clustered together in the lower frequency and the higher intensity range of the banana. Therefore they are the easiest sounds to hear and those are the first sounds that babies produce in their babbling. It is no mere chance that parents are called dada and mama! You will also see that f, th and s are the highest pitched and the softest sounds; these are the last speech sounds to appear in a child's repertoire and cause difficulties for many children.

In order to learn spoken language, an infant needs to hear clearly articulated speech at a level at least 15 decibels above his threshold of hearing. Imagine you enter a room where the radio is on at a barely perceptible level; if the programme is a discussion of your favourite topic, you will recognise some of the words and begin to make sense of what you hear. On the other hand, if it is in a foreign language or full of technical jargon from a subject you know nothing about, you will pay no attention because it will be a meaningless background noise; if you want to understand, you will turn up the volume. So it is with young children acquiring speech, a very mild hearing loss during the critical period for speech acquisition will disrupt that development.

The impact of modern lifestyles on language acquisition

This is an oversimplified comparison between what I will call 'traditional' childrearing methods and modern lifestyles, most real people are somewhere in the middle:

Babies are prone to brief episodes of very mild hearing loss; their eustachian tubes are narrow and easily blocked by mucus during a cold or when teething. In traditional situations, babies were carried around for most of the time, close to the mother, grandmother or older sibling and the proximity to the speaker compensated for the mild hearing loss. Most modern babies spend a lot of time in carry cots or bouncers at a distance from adult voices so their speech is not heard clearly.

Traditionally, infants spent most of their time in an intimate family setting, hearing and interacting with the same person or small group of people who would adapt their speech to evoke responses from the baby - what is termed 'motherese'. While not correcting the infant's utterances, the mother would automatically model the correct language, we call this the 'maternal reflective' input to language development. Infants in day care, whether nurseries or with childminders, do not get this intimate, individual nurturing treatment.

Modern homes are filled with sound from washing machines and vacuum cleaners to day long television or music in the background. Nurseries are filled with the noise of many children talking, singing and playing. Infants cannot discriminate new speech sounds from background noise, even when their hearing is normal. Glue ear usually has no symptoms other than mild hearing loss and this can easily go undetected because the child responds to the loud noises around it.

Traditionally, children learned a lot of the features of language incidentally e.g. anticipation, turn-taking and rhyming through shared activities like peek-a-boo and nursery rhymes. During my home visits in the last twenty years, I found 7 out of 10 mothers did not know any language games or nursery rhymes and I had to teach them some to use with their toddlers. While Sesame Street, Teletubbies and other children's programmes may be entertaining and can be useful for reinforcing already acquired skills, they are no substitute for child-carer activities.

Another startling change I noticed in modern homes was the lack of a family dining table. Children learn a great deal about how to behave and how to converse during family meals. Adults and older siblings are the role models for language and behaviour and this feature of development is being lost because of poorly designed modern starter homes and TV dinners on trays. It has been interesting to watch the recent spate of reality programmes on television, dealing with 'problem children' or 'problem families'. In every case, the turning point in the programme was when the family started to eat at least one meal a day together at a table.

Managing change

We don't want to go back to the days when women stayed at home, keeping house with washtub, mangle and broom. But we need to look at what else was thrown out when the new labour-saving appliances were introduced. The most obvious change is that women have time to develop interests outside of the home, and some have no choice but to work to pay for all those new appliances. I don't want to pile guilt on mothers who choose or are forced to put their babies into daycare, but I want them to appreciate what has been lost and look at ways of compensating for that loss.

In terms of language acquisition, the main loss has been intimacy. It is in a close, quiet, physical relationship with a carer that babies learn to understand and use spoken language. If possible, therefore, a nanny or childminder with a very small number of children will be a better choice than a nursery with lots of children and many different adults.

Children, especially boys, are prone to develop glue ear between the ages of 18 and 24 months and again around 5 years of age. The symptoms may not be startlingly obvious, look out for lack of response to quiet sounds, and a decrease in vocalisation in younger infants, and for older children turning up the volume on the television, misunderstanding or apparently ignoring instructions, lack of attention or daydreaming, lots of 'what' or pardon?' Often children with glue ear are mistakenly labelled unco-operative or slow learners.

Temporary episodes of hearing loss can be managed by letting everyone who deals with the child know about it. Always get the child's attention before giving an instruction or information e.g. 'Johnny, it's time for bed. Go and brush your teeth.' is more likely to get the desired response than 'Off you go to bed now and remember to brush your teeth, Johnny.' When nursery teachers adopt this way of speaking to all the children in their care, they find a noticeable improvement in behaviour; in fact, it is an improvement in communication. Get close to the child when speaking, to compensate for the reduced hearing level. Check that information has been received correctly. Make allowance for the fact that a child with even a mild hearing loss has to concentrate harder and so will tire easily.

Those children who are arriving at school at age 5 with delayed language need lots of activities that they missed out on in early infancy to encourage language development. There are lots of books available (including mine!) with ideas for parents, carers and teachers to help them do what our grandparents did as a matter of course.

No person will be admitted to the boxes without shoes or stockings

Oh to have been in Kilkenny, Ireland on 4 May 1793 for this performance of The Tragedy of Hamlet, originally written and composed by the celebrated Dan Hayes of Limerick and inserted in Shakespeare's works. I would have been relieved that the parts of the King and Queen were omitted on the direction of the Rev Mr O'Callagan, as too immoral for any stage. The entertainment between the acts would have been singularly entertaining, especially the 'potent bagpipes' playing two tunes at once and the sleight of hand tricks by the celebrated surveyor, Mr Hunt.

I should have been off to the Goat's Beard in Castle Street to exchange my pound of butter or cheese for a ticket. Of course, could I have prevailed upon my sister to lend me her shoes and stockings, I would have added candles and soap to get access to a box.

I like what I like

Two articles caught my attention today. The first was Sam Leith's column in today's Daily Telegraph: Coping with eruptions of meaninglessness. The other was this post on authenticity on The Daily Duck.

Sam Leith writes about the need people have to explain events such as the tragedy at Virginia Tech. It appears that in our inabilty to 'bear very much reality' we look for scapegoats in the form of outside influences, in Cho Seung-hui's case a martial arts film, the Bible and Moby Dick. Frankly, I find it more reassuring to know that one sick or deranged young man went out on a mindless shooting spree, than to think that every violent video game or film has the potential to inspire violent behaviour in everyone who watches it.

One of the comments on the article suggests that Cho Seung-hui was merely copying poses from games and films because, being autistic, he lacked imagination. The inference being that he was neither corrupted nor inspired by sources outside his own disordered mind. And that took me back to Duck's post on authenticity, at the end of which he says: says: I've freed myself to like what I like and dislike what I don't, no questions asked. That's the kind of freedom we all aspire to and hopefully achieve in most aspects of life as we mature.

I'm off to put my slippers on, make some cocoa and read Barchester Towers with a little Beethoven in the background, because thats what I like!

I hope to be back soon!

I'm about to attempt the most challenging technical feat of my life - changing to wireless. I've had problems with broadband for a few months; BT haven't been able to solve them so I'm going to have a go myself. If I'm not back within a month I hope someone will come and rescue me!

More on our young people

In the aftermath of yesterday's tragic events at Virginia Tech University, journalists and politicians will do the inevitable public hand-wringing and searching for scapegoats. Parents, teachers, liberals, pop musicians et al will come in for their usual dose of blame and I daresay that some of it will be deserved. But what will be proved or, more to the point, what will be solved?

A few weeks ago, I promised Adelephant a post on my views on some of the problems in our schools and homes. I've heard that Adelephant's laptop has been stolen, so I hope the insurance stumps up for a replacement soon so that we can get a lively debate going.

Many years as an adviser to schools and families gave me opportunities to observe social changes at close hand. I am not opposed to change or progress but not all change is progress, just as not all progress is to the benefit of everyone. There has been rapid and dramatic change in many areas of life during the years since the Second World War and I think it is the rapidity that underlies our problems. We have not had the luxury of time to accommodate change, to evaluate and sort out the difficulties before the next set of changes; this has left two generations with unsure foundations.

Here are a few of my observations, obviously somewhat generalised and over-simplified but I have to start somewhere. I'll tackle different aspects in separate posts:

Part one: Family life

The 1960s in Britain were the 'we've never had it so good' years. Post-war austerity was over, there was high employment, better health and education. Thanks to government grants, thousands of working-class youngsters were able to go to college and enter professions previously the preserve of the middle classes. As a result, there was a breaking up of the traditional family, where generations lived in the same area and supported each other from cradle to grave. Instead of following his father down the mines, on the farm or in the factory, Jimmy went to a college many miles away, looked for a job there, married and started a family, isolated from his roots. At the same time, girls were being encouraged to think of careers before marriage and they started to move away from the traditional support of mothers, grandmothers and aunts with all their acquired wisdom of home-making and child-rearing.

So, we have many more advantages in education, travel, employment, health and freedom of choice balanced against the loss of the extended family for physical and moral support and the handing on of basic parenting skills.

The apparent outcomes for society include old people becoming a 'burden on the state' instead of being cared for within the family; increased pressure on marriages/partnerships when parents have no-one to look to for advice or support, leading to increased rates of divorce or separation; a decline in any sense of community or belonging.

The current generation of young mothers has a new set of pressures from the government and the media. On the one hand they have the government telling them to put babies into daycare and to go back to work and on the other, conflicting 'experts' telling them that staying at home to bring up baby is the best or the worst thing to do.

How to address the problems? We have charitable schemes like Home-Start, which sends volunteers to give the advice grandma used to give; the government sponsored Sure Start scheme offers similar support in the poorest inner city areas and some local authorities provide parenting classes for the most troubled or troublesome families. These schemes are all effective but a mere drop in the ocean of need.

These are some of the most significant issues I had to address in my work with families:

• lack of organisation and time management - no set bedtimes, homework not supervised, children choosing what and when to eat
• poor or inconsistent discipline - children not having recognised boundaries and no consistent rewards and punishments, resulting in children not understanding what is right and wrong because it differs from day to day
• no family mealtimes - the majority of homes I went to in the last fifteen years had no dining table, meals were taken on trays in front of the television or family members grazed on a succession of snacks and takeaway food
• lack of family time - many of the families I was involved with either did no activities together or else the children were involved in so many clubs, teams and societies that they had no time just to play or to do things as a family
• lack of quiet - in many homes the television forms a frequently unnoticed background of sound throughout the day; children don't learn to listen and to pay attention when they are constantly bombarded with meaningless sound
• lack of incentive to do well - many children never hear themselves or their work praised: success breeds success and indifference or too much criticism leads to 'am I bovvered?'

Tomorrow: language development and our schools

Code of conduct

It has been proposed that bloggers should establish and regulate their own code of conduct. This is something I hadn't thought about since my blog is very low-key and (as far as I am aware) has only been visited by people I know and trust. Recent events, however, have disturbed my naive complacency and I have felt obliged to remove previous posts containing photographs and personal information that might be used by mischievous or malicious people to harm those I love.

Think of England suggests that the blog is like a pub with the blogger acting as landlord. I think I've been acting more as the hostess in my dining room, with trivial after-dinner chatter about family, friends and daily events, forgetting that uninvited guests could intrude.

So why yesterday's post complete with photograph? Some years ago, when we lived in Hampshire, we returned from holday to find the house had been burgled. My husband and I reacted very differently, I was sickened by the intrusion into our personal lives, while he was outraged by the breach of security. The burglars had emptied wardrobes and drawers and left our clothes strewn around, they had even pulled the linings out of all my shoes and bags, looking for hidden money. I couldn't rest until I had thrown away everything they had touched. My husband spent the remaining days of his leave installing alarm systems and fitting new locks to doors and windows.

The interesting result was that I recovered from the burglary as soon as the evidence was removed. I even managed to be amused when the perpetrators were caught trying to cash cheques which clearly bore my female name, while they were burly men! On the other hand, my husband became obsessed with security: he worried when he was away at sea and phoned home to check that I had set the alarm every night and that we were safe every morning. Eventually, I felt like a prisoner in my own home and had to go back to sleeping with the windows open or go mad.

Yesterday's post was an act of defiance!

April, April, laugh thy girlish laughter

April 16 1973 was a day filled with laughter.

Today we celebrated our 34th wedding anniversary with a drive in the country and lunch in a village inn.

It snowed on our wedding day whereas today was really sunny and warm (26 degrees celsius).

We're both a few pounds heavier and the master mariner's hair has almost disappeared but we are still laughing!

Easter holiday

The Easter weekend has arrived with unaccustomed glorious weather. The main road through the village, which runs to the beaches at Saunton and Croyde, is already gridlocked with battered old camper vans full of Aussie surfers and the MGBs of the London weekend surfers. The beachside car parks will show the diversity of income and lifestyle of our visitors but, once they are in the water, only the sunbleached hair will distinguish the year round surfers from the City bonus spenders.

I went into the garden early this morning to watch the birds enjoying the sunshine. Unfortunately the sunny weather has brought out all the weeds as well but I won't have time to get at them. My son and daughter and their respective spouses will be arriving soon and meals and Easter church services will be high on the agenda. I've just had a bright idea, though: Andrew and Tanith's school motto was 'Read and Reap', I could adapt that for the weekend to 'Weed and Eat' - an hour of work in the garden in return for mum's home cooking!

Happy Easter to everyone.

April Fools

Looking for the April Fool article in today's paper, I found so many candidates that I'm left wondering if the whole issue is a send-up. The intentional piece of tomfoolery is the 'leaked' news that London is planning to share the 2012 Olympics with Paris, but there are unbelievable elements in a number of other articles too.

The online version of The Sunday Telegraph has a technical hitch at present, so I can't make a link to the Olympics feature. The gags include holding the opening ceremony in Paris because 'the French are very good at fireworks' and also because it would help to regenerate a 'run-down' area. The operation to get the athletes back to London after the opening ceremony is being dubbed 'a sporting Dunkirk' with Eurostar providing specially adapted carriages for the athletes to continue exercising and stretching during the journey. Apparently negotiations are ongoing between Tessa Jowell and her French counterpart, the excitable Avril Bouffonnerie.

Among the news items that I would like to think might be April Fool jokes is the one about the £91,000 three year research project to find out how to bake biscuits. Ask your granny, it won't cost more than a phone call! Then there is the story about a group of tax inspectors flying off to Hong Kong to ask Mickey Mouse for advice on how to raise more money from us to fund their next holidays.

The next contender is the story about dogs being issued with asbos to keep them from fouling public parks. This is only slightly less silly than the introduction of the Animal Welfare Act, which requires pet owners to ensure their pets can "express normal behaviour patterns".

Perhaps the funniest headline of all is Clean power is coming soon, scientists believe.
Any sentence containing the words 'scientists believe' is sure to get me laughing whether it is April Fools' Day or not!