Literacy, Empathy, and Syrupy Booze

It's been a few days since I posted here.  My life has been a whirlwind of busybusybusy.  I'm not sure when it's going to ease up.  Perhaps when my children reach their majority.  So I have taken a little time from the schedule to just do a bit of blogging.  I am stinking hot.  Nobody in my house feels hot, so I suspect it's menopause saying, 'Hi, Simone.  Just wanted to drop by and give you a little reminder that I'm still around.  Feel free to swelter and be in a bad mood, and bite the head off all those who cross you.'

Those who know me well know I am an obnoxious grammar Nazi who wastes much of my life wailing and despairing, gnashing my teeth and pounding my chest, at the dearth of passable grammar in society these days.  Misplaced apostrophes make me curl into a foetal position under the desk, clutching wine to my still-perky-for-an-old-girl chest.  You might be aware I have already advertised my services locally as an English tutor, but on the weekend I underwent a training course to brush up my skills, and to register as a volunteer to tutor in adult literacy.  You know what?  It was the best fun I've had in ages (with my clothes still on).  The course facilitator talked of phonemes, and diagraphs, etymology.  I sat there totally blissed out, with an expression on my face akin to those three shepherd children in Fatima when Our Lady appeared in the tree.  Although agnostic, I tend to use some of my old Catholic terminology when referring to the mother of Christ the Carpenter.  I also am cynical about whether the shepherd children: Lucia, Francisco, and Jacinta (hey, I even remember their names!) actually saw the Blessed Virgin, or whether they had picked and eaten questionable mushrooms from the field and were actually seriously tripping out.

But yes, I was in total awe and rapture doing my training on the weekend.  We had to do a spelling quiz of some traditionally difficult words, and I was the only student who got all my answers correct.  Yes, obnoxious bragging on my part, but given my life has been bedlam and total pants of late, just indulge me a little, okay?

I was also almost in tears.  I went to the training centre expecting to brush up on skills, and to decry the lack of passable grammar and spelling that plagues society nowadays.  Instead I learned of the types of people I might be tutoring.  People like a twenty-year-old girl who fled war-torn Sudan as a toddler with her grandmother following the slaughter of her parents, who ended up in Australia just recently, and who can speak English but who has never picked up a pen.  People who are judged for never responding to the school notes they cannot read.  People who just want to read a story with their grandchildren.

I also felt great empathy when I volunteered to read a passage out in class - it was from a Vanuatu publication and in Pidgin English, with the smallest smattering of French.  I struggled.  I was able to stop and correct myself, and from the accompanying picture read for context and prediction, but it was so, so arduous and frustrating.  Now I understand how people struggling feel, and this understanding will help me as their tutor, I'm sure.

On a bright aside, one of my fellow students asked me about my novels, so I nipped home during the lunch break and collected them.  As I was showing the said student, one of the course facilitators tapped her fingernail on 'Abernethy' a few times as she said, 'I've seen this one somewhere.'  GOLD!

I didn't work today.  I went to the local TAFE and had the students colour my hair.  I look like this now:

I drove around feeling glam afterwards, and on the radio came 'Wishing Well' by Terrence Trent D'Arby.  I quite like that song.  I did a little mum-dance in the driver's seat, when stopped in traffic.  The song came out in 1987.  The year I had my own 21st, and attended the 21st of all those around me, so it seemed.  I even remember some of the 21sts quite well, including - gulp! - my own when a few people streaked.  It was a time when people would rock up to the parties with a six-pack of West Coast Cooler, or a cask of Peach Cooler.  The latter was a potentially lethal syrup that could kill a diabetic, and known to cause the excruciating stomach cramps that herald the type of flatulence that could strip paint from the walls.  This is probably one of the reasons I have not seen it on bottle-o shelves for a very, very long time.  If it is still available for purchase, I do not recommend you carry out such purchase for the reasons I have just mentioned.

Ciao for now.  Thanks for reading.  Feel free to click the links on my home page here and check out the first chapters of my novels.