June 20, 2008

Dear all,

I collected A from school yesterday. I was standing with a friend who teaches American and British politics at the senior school.  The Major spent his gap year as a high school senior in the US.  The Major, eyes ever twinkling and chuckling in an unsupportive manner, not so secretly revels in the fact that A is slowly acquiring British mannerisms.  You can imagine The Major’s chortle when A ran from his classroom to me clutching a small white paper bag he received at the zoo the previous day.  He reached in and proudly pulled out a pencil.  ‘Look,’ A shouted, ‘This pencil looks like a zeb-bra.’ (There is no ‘z’ as we know it here.  The letter ‘z’ is pronounced ‘zed’ and zebra rhymes with, say, jebra.  They don’t sing our alphabet song.  Zed doesn’t rhyme with the last word of the song, ‘me’.  Also, ‘h’ is pronounced, ‘haich’).  ‘And, look!’ A squealed with excitement, ‘We all got rubbers!’  In England, it is apparently uncontroversial to hand out rubbers to young children…

 

With love from England,

T-Ann