Never Ending January
By my estimation, we’re currently on day 1000 of January 2022. I can’t be 100% sure though, mainly because most of my days feel and look the same. I wake up to my daughter’s shouts of “Daaadaaa”, I skip breakfast, check my emails and then drink far too many cups of industrial strength coffee. To break up the morning monotony, I look out the window. This is never a highlight. When we moved house last summer, I could see the Alps from my bathroom window, something I would never have believed possible over a decade ago as I pushed trolleys in the car park of a parochial Scottish town. However, around October the Alps receded into a grey mist that rarely dissipates and which obscures almost anything worth looking at. Now all I can see is my neighbour’s American style pickup truck. I don’t really know this particular neighbour, but going by his penchant for oversized Tonka truck style vehicles, I hate him. Some days this quiet period of hate staring is one of the only highlights. I then spend the rest of the day preparing lectures, lecturing online or answering emails from students and colleagues. In the evening I edit podcasts and offer a shoulder to cry on as my wife unloads the various woes of working as a teacher during a pandemic.
If this all sounds rather bleak, it’s because it is. I’ve been in a rut, but like many men, instead of addressing the actual issues, I took the path of least resistance and simply squashed all those troublesome emotions down somewhere around my small intestine. My wife was the first one to realise I was having problems when she found me crying. Again, like many men, I don’t really want people to know I have emotions. Instead, I sneak off like a wounded animal and do it all in private. However, this time she caught me. What had set me off? A clip of Geordie musician Sam Fender speaking to his hero (and mine) Newcastle United legend Alan Shearer. For some reason, hearing the accent, my accent, the accent of my family and my former home broke something in me.
Like many of us who live in Germany, I haven’t been “home” since Christmas 2019. We had planned to go last Christmas, but that was quickly shelved once it became clear that Omicron was raging in both the UK and Germany. The restrictions on travel, the risk of travelling with an unvaccinated child, and the fear of quarantines denying our return, all were more than enough to cancel our plans. I put a brave face on it, I certainly didn’t want my German family to think I considered them a downgrade. I also didn’t want to admit to myself that I was homesick, after all my home is here in Germany. How could I be homesick for a place I haven’t lived for a decade? It felt ridiculous and frankly rather pathetic. Better to ignore it, enjoy the festive period and see what January would bring.
I don’t know what I was expecting; January is renowned as the shittest of months at the best of times. Perhaps I hoped it would just go away. No matter, my quiet disintegration was clearly a sign I needed to make some changes. Step one was to talk to my wife. Instead of carrying the weight all by myself, I shared how I felt and through these conversations I was able to confront some important truths: I may not get back to Newcastle any time soon and there’s very little I can do to change the current pandemic situation and the associated monotony. Nevertheless one thing I could do is bring Newcastle to me. My daughter had only recently begun to talk, but she’s been picking it up at an astonishing rate. Could I take advantage of this and teach our daughter my local Geordie dialect and accent?
In many ways the north east and Newcastle specifically is a country within a country. Often forgotten about in discussions of the UK, it exists far enough away from the other major cities of England and the Scottish border to make it a kind of no man’s land between the two. The accent of the North East of England has lived in splendid isolation for centuries and it’s developed some glorious idioms and local vocabulary. I want my daughter to know about her Geordie roots, and since I’m the only native English speaker in her life, it’s my responsibility to support her second language development. I’d been neglecting this aspect for far too long. Where to start though?
Introducing the culture of Newcastle wasn’t going to be easy. I could sit her down to watch some Newcastle United games, but obviously no two year old has the mental fortitude to suffer that for 90 minutes, I mean, I can barely do it on a good day. No, we’d have to go with something else. Luckily, my family had sent plenty of material to work with. From a teddy bear made by my mother, in the famous black and white stripes of the team, to a series of children’s books written about Newcastle, I had what I needed. Another option was music. Since her earliest days, my daughter has loved music, so I learned the words to three famous north east songs: Blaydon Races, When the Boat Comes In and The Lambton Worm. The last one has been especially useful given that it’s written in dialect and allows me to ramp up the Geordie to eleven. There’s a special glee I feel when I get say the word “worm” in my accent, especially after a day of hiding it’s rough edges while teaching. Every evening I’ll ask her which songs I should sing and the regular reply is “fishy” meaning my daughter wishes to hear When the Boat Comes In, a rather simple song about the fishermen of the north east that also includes a few eye opening verses about the importance of booze to northern culture. My favourite line is in the second verse that begins:
“Here's thy mother humming,
Like a canny woman;
Yonder comes thy father,
Drunk, he cannot stand.”
If anything, it’ll prepare her for nearly every family event we’ll ever attend when we visit my family.
I’m still homesick and I’m still sad about the fact that I can’t see my family, yet things are different. I don’t feel the burden the way I did at the beginning of the year, mainly because I’m not having to bare that weight on my own. Additionally, teaching my daughter about our other home has reduced the thousand or so kilometres between us and it. There’s also something amazingly uplifting about hearing my daughter say “Howay Man” or “Canny” with unrestrained glee. Sure, she sometimes gets it wrong, and ends up saying “Hello man”, but it’s early days. Watching her wander through the supermarket, dropping Geordie bombs on innocent, and intensely confused German shoppers, is a sight to behold. It made me cry, but this time, in a good way.
Image Credit
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