This is the day I have been excited about since my last appointment. I have got my first lip reading class! It's also going to be the first time that I will mix with a group of deaf people. I'm excited, nervous and a little unsure. I have thought of not turning up but I know that I won't gain anything by doing so. I'm hoping that finding the place is going to be the biggest challenge!
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As it turned out, finding somewhere to park and locating the building were the hardest challenges, in fact I almost gave up and went home. Despite leaving an extra half hour to find my way, I was late and I don't do late! I walked into a large room where the lovely gentleman chairing the group said "welcome, you must be Louby". All but one chair was taken so I had to weave my way through. There's nothing like making a big entrance!
There were 25 of us, of whom the majority were in their 70's and 80's, one lady in her 90's and then there was me at 29!
The session was divided in two, the first half was lipreading and the other half was a 'talk', not forgetting my £1's worth of tea and biscuits in the middle. The ladies were very keen on feeding me more and more and more fig rolls and custard cream biscuits...it would have been rude to have refused wouldn't it?!
I had done some research before hand and there were lots of articles stating how difficult it is to master lipreading. For goodness sake, how hard can it be? The lipreading tutor only spoke when she was explaining something or correcting us, the rest of the time she just mouthed the words. There's no start date to the course so some people were already experts and because of this the tutor was using long sentences rather than individual basic words. In silence she mouthed "I'm sorry I haven't been around for the past few weeks but I went away, came back, then I went away again and I don't even have a tan to show for it". My interpretation of that was "I ate a few tweets e.bay I sent you mail went mail again I e.bay go pour"....was I close?! "Did you tea hover at the shop today, the socks were half" was meant to be "did you see the offer at the shop today? The aubergine and sprouts were half price"....slight progression?!
She talked about different supermarkets, vegetables, fruits and a dog having puppies. When it came to parts of the body I couldn't stop giggling (it was meant to be a silent chuckle although with everyone being deaf I needn't have worried) because a man in his early eighties thought that everything she mouthed was to do with sex! "I am good at sex!" he said. We moved on to talk about brushing your teeth and washing using a flannel in the shower to which the man interrupted and said to the tutor "did you say you want to have sex with me?" We were almost crying with laughter. What I later discovered was this man was a fluent lipreader and knew jolly well what he was saying!
We were trying to work out similar words such as 'fine' and 'vine' and we also discussed some virtually impossible letters and words to read eg a phonetic 'g' sound comes from the throat rather than the lips. You try it, stand in front of a mirror, say the phonetic letter 'g', now mouth the letter without saying it. If that were someone else, would you be able to differentiate what they were saying? I suppose the word 'gargle' is a sort of example.
Will I go again? Deaf-initely!
How hilarious! Sounds like it was a lot of information to take on board in one day - you never know, someone might turn up to one of these sessions one day and be similar age to you...! Keep going - you are doing amazingly. And keep up the blog! Put it on P FINE x
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