Vet Against The Odds
Hello! My name is Lauren, I’m 22 and I’m at university training to be a vet. Like most vet students I like science and animals, what makes me a bit different is that I am partially deaf in both ears. I wanted to write about what it’s like to go to university and move away from home when you can’t hear properly.
My parents found out I was deaf when I was 5 years old, just after I started school. My sister is also hearing impaired and Mum had inadvertently taught us both to speak properly, which meant that doctors didn’t realize there was anything wrong. When I got older mum told me that she was really worried at the time that being deaf would affect what I was able to do in life, but so far it hasn’t.
A Short Story – The White Dove
Dad walks over to me. He’s carrying several slices of bread.
‘Hi, Grace.’
‘Hi,’ I say, giving him a look which I hope he understands means, I am so not impressed with this new pre-birthday arrangement.
Dad doesn’t seem to have noticed my look. I wonder what he’s doing with the bread.
‘For the ducks,’ he says when he catches me staring at it.
I nod and decide not to mention that I am no longer five years old and that feeding the ducks in the park doesn’t exactly excite me anymore.
‘Right,’ I say, as we head over to the pond.
‘So, Grace, how have you been?’
We sit down on the bench next to the willow tree.
Early English – The Latin Alphabet
In our last post, we discovered the runic alphabet and the Futhorc, and now we are going to look at what came next. The Latin alphabet.
The Futhorc was gradually replaced by the Latin alphabet. However, it seems that the Latin alphabet was not perfectly suited to represent English, which contained sounds that did not exist in Latin, and so people adapted it with the addition of a few runes: thorn to represent ‘th’ and wynn to represent ‘w’, as well as a few adaptations in usage of the already existing Latin letters in order to make them better suited to representing English sounds.
Cat’s Bats
Cat is 10 years old and has recently moved back from living abroad. She is settling into school in UK and learning to read and write in English (until now she was schooled in French, so it is a bit of a change). Her favourite animals are bats, and here she tells us a bit about them.