Right then, better crack on with this here four-parter before the young blighter gets carried away with book-learning and ends up with a vocabulary wider than the lot of us put together. Now then , where were we? Oh yes...
N is for.... No
The textbooks tell you that babies learn to say 'no' a good six months before they get around to even thinking about 'yes'. This on its own does not do justice to the average toddler's absolute mastery of stress and intonation, which equips them with at least forty different ways of pronouncing this simple two-letter word, depending on the exact message they intend to convey. Depending on the context, Frankie's 'no' veers between a laid-back estuary drawl reminiscent of the late Peter Cook, and a short, high-pitched staccato more readily associated with the femme fatale in an early Almodovar movie:
Jonathan: Hey Frankie, is that a number 192 bus up your jumper?
Frankie (faintly amused but airily dismissive): Naaah!
Charlotte: Now then Frankie. How about a little piece of this lovely broccoli to go with that fish-finger? After all it is your seventh, darling!
Frankie (polite but absolutely categorical): No, no.
Jonathan: Let's wash your face, then- then we'll get you ready for bed.
Frankie (distraught at the very suggestion): No. No no NO!! No no NO!! NO!!!
O is for.... Oh Dear
Something else the textbooks don't tell you is how difficult it is, at the age of thirty-eight, to re-learn how to get through daily life without swearing. We're constantly minding your 'P's and 'Q's, like nervous hosts during an extended Royal Visit. At moments of stress the household reverberates to the sound of poorly-executed 1950s-style cusswords....
Jonathan (watching football results come in): Oh, for fer-fer-fiddlesticks sake! I had a fer-fer-flamin' fiver on b-b- bloomin' well City... and the ba-ba-ba basketcases have drawn twos each!
Charlotte: (gamely fighting back efforts of various unladilike expletives to escape from lips) A fer-fer-flaming fiver? Oh dear!
Frankie (enthusiastically joining in): Oh dear! Oh dear! Oh dear!
I don't know how Charlotte manages it at home all day, I really don't. Fortunately I still have the hours between nine and five to cast off this badly-fitting suit of primness and give free rein to my inner navvy:
Jonathan (on telephone): Yes, of course. We'll do everything we can to get you the full shipload of flanges by Thursday, Mr Johnson... of course, yes....I quite understand the urgency.... Good bye now, and thank you!
Jonathan's colleague: who was that, then?
Jonathan: Oh, some arsehole wanting his fucking goods bastarding-well yesterday.
P is for .... pooter
The place where all the characters from ceebeebies live (when they're not on the telly, of course). Of course, this is Anna's name for her computer as well- so Frankie is in pretty good company there. Perhaps the young lad will grow up to be an 'A' list blogger....
Q is for... queen
Now this is the part where I admit to some cheating. Aware that we were coming up to some tricky parts of the alphabet, I sat the lad down the other afternoon:
Jonathan (getting crisp five pound note from pocket): What's this then, Frankie?
Frankie: Money!
J: and who's this a picture of?
F: ??
J: It's the Queen! The queen! Can you say 'queen' Frankie?
F (aghast): No! No! No!
A Republican at heart, you see. Well good on the lad, I say. Although just the once wouldn't have hurt, would it? Just for the A-Z, you understand.
R is for.... roubaback
The field round the back of our house- and by extension, any large area of countryside- as we found out when recently taking a train to Buxton.
Frankie (looking out of window at rolling Derbyshire countryside): Roubaback! Roubaback!
S is for... Soup-Poo
This was one of the boy's first words, and it confused us for a while- until Charlotte walked in one day when he was watching the telly:
Frankie: (pointing at screen): Soup-poo! Soup-poo!
Well he was watching The Clangers wasn't he... and the Soup Dragon was in the process of ladling out some of his delicious... well you all remember what he kept in that crater of his, don't you?
...
Next time out... our fourth and final delve into a two-year-old's head. featuring the journey from T for Thunder to... well, we do have something for 'Z' as a matter of fact... but I think we will keep you in suspense for a few more days. Now if you will excuse me I'm off to read up about the Clangers. I used to fucking love them, man.
It's always tricky reining in that impulse to swear, isn't it? I have to do it with the folks: "Oh no, it was f-f-f-f ... complete ... er ... rubbish" etc etc
Posted by: Ben | August 08, 2006 at 12:10 PM
Ah, I am glad the boy has turned against the royal family at such a young age. He might take after his very own great grandad who, when taking an Alzheimer's-related test recently and asked by the doctor if he could name the Queen's husband, said after a long pause in the finest Bedlington brogue, "I'm neeee Royalist!" I seem to remember that he passed the test.
Posted by: abby | August 09, 2006 at 03:15 AM
I'm glad you brought that up as I was going to use that story to show how Frankie was following in a proud family tradition of anti-Royalism... but then I thought it was really high time we moved on to another letter. I think another time we will have to have a series dedicated to our grandad and his slightly implausible stories. We could start off with the one about how he met Winston Churchill, and then move on to his famous wartime road-trip to Blackpool. After all if there's one thing missing from this blog, it's stories about the Second World War. Those Germans bombed our Grandma's house, you know!
Oh and I should make it quite clear that the ideological leanings young Frankie is showing signs of are of course not Republican (Heaven forbid!), but republican. With a little 'r' not a big one. I just did a search on the BBC website to assure myself of the correct usage...
Posted by: Jonathan | August 09, 2006 at 01:19 PM
Hang on a minute, where is this mythical field you speak of? Surely your house has either a railway line or another row of houses behind it??
Posted by: Clare | August 10, 2006 at 11:53 AM
I think you need to have another look at that map of Levenshulme in your head Clare.. the A6 and the train line run parallel to each other where we are, so our street,which runs between them, is at right angles to both. Behind our row of houses there is a field (which you can see from the A6, or looking down from the train just as you pull into the station). The field belongs to the Arcadia Sports Centre therefore to the City- when we moved in there was talk of building over it but thankfully that never materialised.
Apparently there did used to be a street of cottages where the field is though (it was called Levenshulme Terrace, you can still see the street sign on the side of the Church Inn)- but they knocked it down in the 60s intending to build some kind of futuristic cross-city motorway.. and then they noticed the small matter of the main Manchester-London train line forty yards in front of their bulldozers so had to revise their plans (and this is why we now have the M60 instead). Well that's what a woman told me who I found wandering around there one afternoon-she was paying a nostalgic visit back to where she reckoned her gran used to live..
So there you are- more informative than just drawing you a map I hope you'll agree!
Posted by: jonathan | August 10, 2006 at 12:36 PM
I have a lovely image of you in Open All Hours now. "Fu... fu... fu... funny how someone left this cupboard door open for me to walk in to."
Posted by: Paul | August 15, 2006 at 01:50 PM