Monday 22 June 2009

Monday.

Cottages on a green near Orford.

In workshop this morning. Went well. This afternoon to last lipreading class. I have enjoyed it. I've done five years of lipreading, but the local council is cutting back on expenses and has decided that the maximum amount of time per person of lipreading is three years, which meant that, for two of us, today was our last class. Lip reading isn't the complete answer to deafness (only about 30% of the language is lip readable) but it does help considerably. The class gave us a small party as a send off. It was good fun. The lip reading classes as a whole have been great fun. I shall miss them. I took Jill (our teacher) a bottle of sloe gin (to which she is partial ) as a small thank you present. She gave me in return a kiss and a hug and said how much she would miss me. I call that a good swap. This evening Ann has gone to the dress rehearsal for the new Dean's induction service tomorrow. I've been doing a bit more work in the workshop (and, of course, blogging). Goodnight all.
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5 comments:

Anonymous said...

The lip reading sounds fascinating! I imagine it's quite difficult but then I'm basing that on how many words sound similar in English.

Unknown said...

Yes, it's been fascinating (and necessary) learning to lip read.You'd be surprised how many word sound rather alike but don't look at all the same - bite - light- fright - white are good examples. But because the letters M, B, and P all look exactly alike, the words bomb, mob and mop are quite indistinguishable on the lips (if you try the above in a mirror you'll see what I mean). I can still distinguish vowel sounds- and lipreading often allows me to see the consonents. Every little helps. Cheers, Mike.

The Preacherman said...

Learnt a bit of signing from a deaf driver who delivers to our shed at Heathrow.

A few of the lads saw me signing to him and were curious.

Next thing you know about 8 of the cargo handlers have enrolled on a course just so they can chat to him!!!

Sometimes human nature ain't so bad eh?

Unknown said...

Hi Preacherman. That story restores the faith in human nature.
Cheers, Mike.

Unknown said...

We've been having a few ad-hoc BSL lessons at work - fascinating stuff, what with the history of history of British and American signing being rooted in the Protestant and Catholic churches respectively - a signer from the USA would find it easier to understand a Spaniard than a Brit despite the common written language of the first and the latter.
There's a very good BSL teacher in the internet called Paula Cox (Google her, she's on a website called VideoJug) who teaches very useful phrases like "You're cr*p at football" "Lousy weather, isn't it?" and "Would you like some chips/cake/beer?" - all well worth a drop of sloe gin!
Cheers!
Amy x