In other words, we need to talk (From The Northern Echo)

In other words, we need to talk

2:57pm Friday 20th January 2012 in Sharon's View By Sharon Griffiths

If babies are to learn, we must spend more time chatting – and singing – to them.

HELLO baby. Aren’t you beautiful? Yes, you are.

Shall we put your dress on? The pink dress with one, two, three flowers on it. What can we see out of the window?

Can you see the trees? And the little birds? There’s Granny in the garden. Wave to Granny.

And so it goes on...

Most of us when we are with small children carry on a non-stop burble.

A commentary on life, laundry and mashed banana. Most of us do it because our mothers did it to us and because we know that’s how babies learn about the world, about language – as well as love, laundry and mashed banana. Everything really.

Yet now a communications champion has said that parents are so bad at talking to their tiny children that they should get text alerts to remind them. Ironic really.

But Jean Gross, a government communications advisor, is keen to try all sorts of ways, using Facebook or You Tube in order to get parents to turn to their toddlers and talk.

And it’s getting desperate. Increasing numbers of children arrive at school unable to talk or listen properly. If they don’t know how to communicate or understand, they’re behind from the very beginning.

It’s easy to see why. People who spend most of their time plugged into phones or iPods aren’t going to change when they have babies. And often don’t even realise that they should. Working parents often don’t have the time or energy to start engaging in conversation with twoyear- olds.

Language has to be learnt. Words are our most basic tools. And everyday we see children and teenagers who are totally unequipped to use them. Tragic.

I talked all the time to my sons, an endless stream of love and drivel.

Given half a chance, I still do. They think I’m completely bonkers, but they certainly learnt how to use words, to reason, think and speak with sometimes infuriating fluency.

Babies need words. Lots of them.

So talk to a baby today. Sing to it, talk to it, tell it stories, show it the world and explain it to them.

How else are they going to learn?

First-class breakfast

BREAKFAST at last! After all my moaning, I finally had my free first-class East Coast breakfast. Porridge and banana, warm croissant and jam, orange juice and coffee as the train went through Doncaster on a sunny morning.

Brilliant.

Best of all, I hadn’t even paid for my ticket – it was free, courtesy of all the points I’d accumulated on all those earlier, hungrier, breakfastless trips.

Never has porridge tasted so good.

Gossip

GOSSIP is good for you, says new research. It can control bad behaviour, encourages a sense of belonging and can lower stress.

Pass it on...

Room fit for a princess

WELL done Princess Anne.

On a private visit to Scotland she saved herself £40 on a hotel room by declining the superior sea view and opting for something smaller with a view over the car park. As she would be arriving and leaving in the dark, she would not see either outlook.

She’s a lady who gets her priorities right, so I hope she spent the £40 on a couple of bottles of wine – much more fun than the view.

But the real scandal is not the money-conscious princess – already famous for recycling her favourite outfits – or even the gleeful gossips who broke the news in the first place, but how ridiculously expensive hotels in this country are. And how hotel owners can charge an extra £40 for looking out over something which isn’t even theirs.

The cheapest low season, backroom B&B rate in that particular hotel was £115, rising to £215 for a bigger room in peak season. It would have to be a pretty splendid breakfast to justify that plus a guarantee of no rain or Scotch mist to obstruct the expensive view.

Quite ordinary hotels think nothing of charging £150 or more, which is nearly twice as much as you’d pay abroad, apart from Paris which is a cramped, extortionate and noisy law unto itself.

Otherwise, for a price of a week in a British hotel in the rain, you can often get two weeks, plus flight to somewhere warm and sunny. No wonder we flee the country in droves.

We’re not just sun-seeking, we don’t want to be ripped off.

Once upon a time the rich went abroad and the poor stayed at home.

When even a princess won’t pay top British prices, you know that times have changed.

She’d be mad to take the gloves off

MADONNA loves her gloves.

These days she’s rarely seen without them, have you noticed?

Even at the Golden Globes, she shimmied up with her gloves on.

It is, says her critics, because her hands are showing her age and are sinewy, bulging-veined and ugly. Well maybe. But she’s 53 and still, if in a slightly scary way, looks terrific. If it’s only her hands that she has to worry about, she’s doing a lot better than the rest of us.

Thank you Cambridge

SO there we were, younger son and I, roaming among the Cambridge colleges and musing on broken dreams.

On a crisp sunny afternoon, we wandered along the Backs, watched punt-loads of Japanese visitors and gazed at the honeyed stone of the old buildings with only the slightest tinge of bitterness.

Thirty five years apart, both the boy and I were rejected by Cambridge colleges. We hadn’t felt rejected for long. We’d gone elsewhere and had a great time.

But looking at all those marvellous buildings, the lawns, quadrangles, rich with a sense of privilege and history, we both felt that, well, maybe we should have worked a little harder all those years ago. Who knows how different our lives might have been, what paths we might have followed?

Chances are I wouldn’t have met my husband. In which case, the boy and his brother would never have been born.

He looked suitably horrified.

Maybe things had worked out for the best after all.

Vastly cheered, we went for a drink and thanked Cambridge for not wanting us.

The real rescue heroes

A FTER the disaster of the sinking of the cruise ship the Costa Concordia, and its show-off cowardly captain, the two main heroes are the off-duty captain who took charge and the brilliant coastguard, increasingly infuriated with the captain, who screamed at him to get back on board. He’s now a star on a thousand T-shirts.

But even among the chaos, panic and with the initial lack of leadership, the crew still managed to get more 4,000 people safely off a dramatically listing ship.

They’re heroes too.

Backchat

Dear Sharon,
SELF-scanners are a great idea if you just want to pay for one or two items and there’s a scanner free.

Problems happen when there are not enough staffed checkouts available, so people with trolleys full of shopping then use the self-scanners, which causes even more queues. The queues for the scanners can often be as long as those for the staffed checkouts and customers aren’t getting any benefit from doing the work.

Supermarkets are cutting back on staff. When they cut prices they have to save that money elsewhere, so every penny off a tin of beans means a longer wait in the checkout for the poor old customer.

Shopping for essentials has become a very frustrating time.

I’m sure I’m not the only one hoping that the wheel will go full circle. Supermarkets should start concentrating more on service and be less concerned about cutting prices.

Angela Pitman (by email)