TODAY I WENT TO SEE MY MOTHER and her husband (never really a step-dad to me ..) down the West End. We were going to eat Thai food, until we realized the "Indian and Thai restaurant" my Mum thought she'd found was actually offering Thalis ~ not a Thai menu at all! Both of my parents have the same problem: they read what they think is there. And I picked up this habit from them. But I don't think I'm as bad. It's a genetic thing. I think if it was very much worse it'd be called "dyslexia" or something ...
In fact we ended up talking about my humungous spelling problems I had (I was put in retarded readilng group) in primary school. My Mum used to teach me with flashcards and the teachers said this was confusing me as the "progressive" 1970s school was teaching reading by "phonics". In short let me tell you phonics do not work. They're based on the ridiculous premise that the English language can be taught "phonetically". And thanks to this I was constantly banging my head upon the brick walls of head not pronounced "heed" knees that were somehow K-less and so on. I still remember puzzling at a young age "why are there Cs and Ks. And Ss and Cs?" None of it made sense. My early writing books were a tangle of red corrections. And yet I grew up with the ambition to write novels!We had a lovely lebanese dinner. My Mum had chicken skewers. I had lamb skewers (too much chicken's gone to my head. I've grown a gizzard. If we didn't have a "socialist NHS" the doctors would want $5000 to chop it off ... Branzy, unfortunately for him ordered something that sounded charming on the menu, but looked like bulls' testicles floating in a yogurty ejaculation. He kept quiet and kept nabbing bits of our salad ...
Afterwards I remembered I'm supposed to be learning Central European Dialect (ie German) so I raided the local cosmopolitan newsstand for Paris Match, Stern and Die Spiegel magazines, and sat there pretentiously leafing through on the tube home. The woman next to me was reading a novel in Swedish ...And that was that. Today was meant to be hammybuying day but I spent so much time stressing about this evening's food experience I never did anything except the rudiments of getting ready and still I was late ...
Hope yous all had a cheery day too ... Cheerio for now!
