Awaiting the dreaded telephone call!
At some point during the coming week it would appear that my friend will be ringing to inform me that her mother has passed away. This will be very sad but . . . it will be made even more sad by two facts. The first being I'm becoming more deaf with every passing day and secondly is the fact that my friend comes from New Zealand.
My friend is in her sixties and her mother, who lives in New Zealand is in her late eighties and has been in poor health for a number of years. She did manage to visit her mother about three years ago but it's an expensive trip so she can't afford to drop everything to fly out to see her. Consequently, she's promised to ring me and tell me all about it. Of course, I shall be most sympathetic but here's my problem. :(
As I've mentioned my friend is a New Zealander and although she has lived in this country for quite a while (nearly twenty years) and she's married to a Cornishman (who has a really strong accent) for well over twenty years she still sounds like she has just got off the plane! To my deaf ears her speech can resemble gobbledygook! Try as I might I cannot understand everything she says so I'm living in dread of coming out with an inappropriate remark. The telephone call makes the situation even worse because when I'm with her face to face I can at least hazard a guess at what she is telling me! Although I don't always get it right! I invited her for afternoon tea and cakes once and she arrived late, very flustered and full of apologies. She explained that she needed picks to hang her washing out and that was why she was so late. Yours truly fondly imagined that she had spent her time digging a hole in which to put the whirligig on which to hang her washing. It took me a while to work out that 'picks' was her way of saying 'pegs'! Is there a telephone app that translates New Zealand speech to Cornish I wonder and if there is does it come up on the screen in text! Told you I was deaf!
My friend is in her sixties and her mother, who lives in New Zealand is in her late eighties and has been in poor health for a number of years. She did manage to visit her mother about three years ago but it's an expensive trip so she can't afford to drop everything to fly out to see her. Consequently, she's promised to ring me and tell me all about it. Of course, I shall be most sympathetic but here's my problem. :(
As I've mentioned my friend is a New Zealander and although she has lived in this country for quite a while (nearly twenty years) and she's married to a Cornishman (who has a really strong accent) for well over twenty years she still sounds like she has just got off the plane! To my deaf ears her speech can resemble gobbledygook! Try as I might I cannot understand everything she says so I'm living in dread of coming out with an inappropriate remark. The telephone call makes the situation even worse because when I'm with her face to face I can at least hazard a guess at what she is telling me! Although I don't always get it right! I invited her for afternoon tea and cakes once and she arrived late, very flustered and full of apologies. She explained that she needed picks to hang her washing out and that was why she was so late. Yours truly fondly imagined that she had spent her time digging a hole in which to put the whirligig on which to hang her washing. It took me a while to work out that 'picks' was her way of saying 'pegs'! Is there a telephone app that translates New Zealand speech to Cornish I wonder and if there is does it come up on the screen in text! Told you I was deaf!