Pronunciation, Blindness and Dreams

English Pronunciation

Serge, a Belgian friend who spends a couple of months a year in Mollans and who plays boules, asked if he could come round to see me and practice his English pronunciation as he was doing a course in English. “No problem”, I said. So he came round with his course books and set to work. However, I ended up as confused as he was in attempting to infer some rules. As far as I can see, there simply aren't any. I could find no reason why “where” and “wear” should be pronounced the same or why in “what” the “h” is silent but in “who” it is the “w” that is silent. The only answer, it would appear, is to spend a lot of time in an “English only” zone and learn by repeated experience but that is simply not practical in many cases. I just felt pity for any foreigner trying to unravel English pronunciation.

Blindness

I seem to remember commenting a year or more ago about progress on curing blindness in the USA in connection with a paper I published in 1971 when I was editor of the Infotech State of the Art reports. It concerned stimulation of the optic nerve to produce patterns of light perceived by the brain. I was therefore interested to see a news item this week on a woman in Australia supposedly having her blindness cured. In fact, the headline greatly overstated the result but the research, being carried out by the Royal Victorian Eye and Ear hospital and a bionics consortium in Australia, was along the same lines as the 1971 paper. The main difference was that instead of electrodes being inserted through the skull to the optic nerve they were inserted through an implant into the retina. In both cases the idea is to stimulate the optic nerve to produce a pattern of light which would correspond roughly to a blank TV screen, onto which images could be imposed via a camera. Key in both the US and Australian research is to understand the pattern of stimulation that would produce the TV screen. In fact the Australian research had got no further than producing flashes of light, a fair way from curing blindness.

The news item caused me to wonder whether the US and Australian researchers were aware of one another and swapping progress reports. I assume, with today's hugely improved international communications, they must do. In the 1970s, though, I was frequently introducing Americans whom I had invited to the UK to one another, who did not know each other or each other's work even though they were researching the same field of activity. It gave me a great kick to do this but I would think that now it might be possible only where an idea in one field of research has as yet undiscovered application in another.

Desserts

In the baker's this morning my eye caught the usual wonderful array of desserts, tarts and flans, on offer and their equally wonderful prices. Small individual tarts retail for 3-5 euros and flans approximately 20cm in diameter and 5cm in depth for 20-30 euros. Would you pay £25 for a dessert for 6-8 people? Sunday lunch in France is traditionally a major meal as in the UK and Sunday morning is when these delights are bought. But why the high prices? I took time today to study the descriptions in detail and the reason becomes obvious. These are culinary works of art. Not only are they individually hand-made but each includes several different ingredients combined in different multiple layers. Thus one, for instance, had a raspberry coulis with flakes of chocolate layered on a hazelnut praline layered on a special type of cream layered in turn on almond biscuit. I rarely make desserts, preferring cheese and fruit to end a meal, and cannot conceive of trying to make anything like these; they are certainly in a different class to most shop-bought desserts in the UK.

A Sad Reflection

I'm not sure why the following occurred to me recently but it did. I had three friends, unconnected, who committed suicide. One was an alcoholic, one dealing with a difficult domestic situation and the other failing at business. But they all had one thing in common. They were all in some respect dreamers, fantasisers. No doubt we all have dreams but we also deal with reality. In their cases, I believe, the dreams, fantasies, had replaced reality and when reality imposed itself they could not deal with it.