I had my 6 monthly appointment with my genius consultant on Thursday, as friendly, cheerful and easy-going as usual, this man’s accent should be preserved in aspic so it doesn’t become to anglicized, like mine unfortunately has. I have however realized that it is easier for a Welsh woman to impersonate an Italian man, (I can imitate him quite well, although not yet in person) although I haven’t yet encountered an Italian man impersonating a Welsh woman, although it would be amusing to watch, when most people try to impersonate me they begin to sound like an Asian shopkeeper from a 70’s sitcom. I did put the thought to him that perhaps using one’s echolalia may help a person with TS learn a new language. I also queried the claim that’s in his book that Kurt Cobain had TS amazon.co.uk/Tourette-Syndr... , so far I haven’t actually come across anything that states this, although I will get my mitts on a couple of biographies and read up on this, it is known that he had ADHD as a child and Bi-polar as an adult, but there is some confusion as there is a track on “In Utero” entitled “Tourette’s” unfortunately the lyrics aren’t printed on the inlay card. I will get back to you on this matter.
I think another reason I find it easy to impersonate my consultant is that in 1990 there were approximately 300 Italian families living in Llanelli, so being brought up a Catholic it was hard to avoid them, so he isn’t the first Italian I’ve met. The first meeting was late 1973 when my heavily pregnant mum waddled to Mass one Sunday and met my friend Dai’s mum, who was pleased to meet another pregnant woman, they compared bumps, one being me, the other Dai, through her mixture of English and Italian and she was proud to exclaim that this was her 12th child and her last. I emerged on Christmas Eve, Dai emerged on St David’s Day, hence the name, we went to nursery school together, primary school and then secondary school along with a couple of his older siblings. My mother actually sometimes describes herself as a bit of a linguist, she is good at picking up new languages, her degree is in German, she’s also learnt Latin, Welsh, Russian, Dutch, French and Italian. I wasn’t very good at languages at school, French was a disaster, I was thrown out, I was awful, I just couldn’t get my head around it, I ticced my way through the lessons and was often shouted at for being in a “daze”, I was better at Welsh however, Welsh is more important, it is also easier due to it’s accessibility, my Dad’s a Welsh-speaker, although Welsh-speakers don’t read much Welsh they like to conduct most conversations in Welsh and watch Welsh TV, so practicing spoken Welsh is easy. We did also learn Italian for a short period, due to the older Italians who regularly went to Mass the church decided to hire their own Italian teacher to teach the Italian kids to prevent conversations like this happening.
My friend Yvonne – “Nona, what’s for tea?”
Yvonne’s Nona – answers in Italian, and also asks some questions about her day I think.
Yvonne – "No, we’ve got double PE this afternoon; we had maths and art this morning. Mi chiamo Yvonne, e questo è il mio amico Catherine."
Nona - "bene, bene, lo so Catherine, lo so la madre."
I did have a few lessons myself with Signor Cubiccini, that’s Mr Little Cubes, who was shipped over from Scilly in his cream flared suit and slicked back hair straight “Saturday Night Fever”, Italian was a bit easier than French.
Anyway back to my appointment, I’m doing pretty well at the moment tic-wise, to be honest I didn’t really notice it until my consultant asked me about the Flupentixol that my Psychiatrist prescribed me, as an anti-psychotic it would make sense that Flupentixol could help with tics and yes, it has, intially I thought it was either to do with the cold that I had or just one of those things, you know the way tics can be sometimes bad and sometimes not-so-bad, he isn’t the only person to notice, I met a friend for a couple of drinks in a pub yesterday and he noticed that I seemed “calmer” even talking to Pete earlier he’s noticed that my vocal tics are less, but I still have loads of motor tics constantly going on. So, yes, both Nigel and TS specialist have been able to spend a short period of time with me without having too many expetives hurled at them, so lets just wait and see what happens.
I didn’t want anyone to take the picture the wrong way but I think the puppet looks like my consulatant rather than the other way round. Like the chiken and the egg quandry the consulatnt definately came before the puppet. So for now, here’s some Nivarna, I’m afraid I have an image of my be-suited consultant in the middle of a mosh-pit at Reading festival in my head. Buona navigazione, arrivederci.
