Communication, or rather the lack of it, is frequently given as the cause for almost every mistake, mishap or form of misconduct. I neither understand, nor subscribe to, this universal blame.
I can communicate perfectly with Chocolate, my pet toy poodle, whose level of understanding enables him to carry out every command I utter.
So I can't imagine why my fellow humans have difficulty communicating among themselves.
I reflect on how I communicated with my own three children at different stages of their growth and development. From the start, for instance, they all called Helena, my wife, 'Mimi'. This was started by Phoebe, the eldest. Living in Happy Valley, I had the misfortune of giving her, when she was one, her very first speech lesson, while holding her in my arms watching horses marching downhill into the race course.
So the first word I taught her was 'ma', Cantonese for 'horse'. The upshot was that, at the second lesson, she wouldn't say 'Mammy'. She absolutely refused to call her mother a horse! We reached a compromise, and she would only repeat the second syllable of 'Mammy'. She has addressed Helena as Mimi ever since, and so have her brothers. The lesson I learned was that language teaching is fraught with pitfalls.
I sent my children to a wide range of hobby classes when they were small, enabling them to express themselves in different formats and media. They're all good musicians. Phoebe loved drawing pictures, too, and after art class training and reading comic books, she started producing her own full- length comic strips.
That was in the early 1990s, when she was boarding in a dungeon-like castle-turned-dormitory, and writing us long letters on one-sheet aerogrammes. My heart warmed to see her writing the little line,'Thank you, Mr Postman!' beside the home address. Alas, this form of communication, which allows fuller expression of sentiments, soon became obsolete.
