Just a quickie before bed.  I’ve not long got home from picking Oliver up from Newbridge Comprehensive and taking him home to his parents’ house (Dad-in-law has the car as he’s on night shift).  The weather is gawd-awful.  It is not just raining, it’s bucketing it down.

I had to drive through about three MASSIVE puddles/almost floods, and there seems to be a burst water pipe on Penmaen Road, flooding the road in the process.  Combined with the buckets of rain and the darkness, it was really quite a surreal experience.

The weather these days is completely bizarre.  We’ve had the warmest November on record, with fairly dry weather (actually, I thought it’s been quite cold, so it’s actually meant to be colder than this?! /shivers).  Now the weather is pissing down.  The nights are drawing in earlier and earlier, and everything’s just so miserable and dark!

Don’t you just love British winters?  Spring, here we come!

If the mountain won’t come to Mohammed, then Mohammed will have to go up the mountain!

Here’s another annoying article: “Bionic ears ‘threaten deaf culture’”, which I first read in The Metro on the train to Beckenham Junction this morning.

A few points I’d like to raise in response to this article:

‘normal’ language skills

/coughs. So sign language is not normal?

Eleven children who received implants before the age of one developed language normally, a team at the University of Melbourne found.

I totally abhor the thought of all these poor little mites who have received cochlear implants without any say in the matter.

‘The children don’t have normal hearing, but they have normal language,’ a team member said.

There they go again with that phrase: “normal language”. Grrr.

Harlan Lane, a psycholinguist at Northeastern University in Boston said: ‘The idea of operating on a healthy baby makes us all recoil.

‘Deaf people argue they use a different language and with it comes a different culture, but there is certainly nothing wrong with them that needs fixing with a surgeon’s scalpel.’

Hear, hear (!). Nicely put, Mr Lane.