The Bridge/Bron/Broen III

Hollow talking and hollow girl
Force it up from the root of pain
Never said it was good, never said it was near
Shadow rises and you are here
And then you cut
You cut it out
And everything
Goes back to the beginning

I remember visiting a family in Denmark in 1990 who over dinner told me of the plan to build a bridge between Copenhagen and Sweden. This completely blew me away. Build a bridge over the sea? Really? It seemed preposterous. Unbelievable. Remember that this was a time before the Channel Tunnel opened. Plus my geography was more than a little skewed and I had no idea just quite how near the south of Sweden was to the Danish capital. I imagined gigantic suspension arches strung sky high across hundreds of miles of ocean waves, with a road flailing to and fro in the air between them. Which wasn't quite what they had in mind. Obviously.

The double-decker High Level bridge across the River Tyne
is in the background

Nonetheless, the Oresund Bridge, which was finished about ten years later, is an undeniably impressive structure. It's double decker for starters - top deck for cars, bottom for trains. (Though Robert Stephenson did this first in Newcastle in 1847, with the trains on top.) And it does have a couple of very tall suspension towers, even if they aren't quite on the scale I imagined. But it doesn't actually go all the way across the strait - only as far as a manmade island in the middle, then it plunges into the water to become a tunnel, which looks more than a little freakish when viewed from the air. This is presumably to prevent planes landing or taking off from nearby Copenhagen Airport crashing into anything.

I have never seen The Bridge in the (concrete) flesh, only on the television series it has given its name to. And thanks to The Bridge, I am not sure I ever want to see it. Or even go near it. A lot of terrible things happen on that bridge. Boat collisions. Shootings. Corpses severed in two. A mustard coloured Porsche permanently speeding across it.

How did the Copenhagen and Malmo police cooperate before the Bridge was built? Did they row across the water to meet up? Or take a helicopter? Maybe they just phoned each other. Or perhaps they didn't need to cooperate at all, since if there was no Bridge, it probably meant that people didn't keep getting murdered on each other's soil.

But anyway, here we are again, our addiction fuelled and our Saturday nights once more lost to Saga Noren. The background's washed out to match her Porsche. There's another set of grisly, creepy murders to solve, involving mannequins, missing body parts, scarecrows, spotlights and lipstick. No sign of a Michael Gove look-a-like suspect this series yet, although there are gangsters, gamblers, vloggers, art collectors, surrogate babies and a scary stalking undertaker. And no sign of Martin either, since Saga got him sent to prison at the end of series two. I miss him, the great, flawed cuddly Danish bear that he was. His immediate replacement - a grumpy woman called Hanne who reminded me of Hanne Holm in Borgen - was quickly blown up by a caravan. The second - pill-popping insomniac Henrik - is lingering a little longer. He has a shirt that matches Saga's car. He seems to see dead people in his house, like Bruce Willis before him. He has also introduced Saga to the Copenhagen singles club scene. They wear green stickers begging FIND ME, though Saga's attempts at pick-up lines ("Do you want to have sex?") make these seem comparatively subtle.

The Little Mermaid

We are finding out more about Saga's past in this series. The mother with Munchausen By Proxy alluded to in Series 2 turns up to tell Saga her father is dying. She is armed with medical files which supposedly prove her innocent in whatever want on during Saga's childhood. But I don't really want to know. Just like I don't want to know exactly what part of the autistic spectrum Saga is meant to be on, if she is at all. I just want Saga to be Saga and do what she does best - working too hard, adhering to police protocol, making blunt remarks, finding poison in coffee cups, and unmasking killers called Gertrud. May she hold it together despite all that is being thrown at her this series (two dead parents - yes, two now, a lot can happen in the span of a single paragraph! - ill boss, crap new boss, her competence brought into question) so that long may she reign.

Dodgy summerhouse in Swedish woods,
where mosquitoes commit crimes against humanity

Antiques Roadshow

I don't actually watch the Antiques Roadshow. I could never take it seriously after that Victoria Wood Christmas sketch when someone took in a lidless blender. ("Now you've settled an argument!") But I happened to catch the final few minutes last night before tuning in to new "psychological crime thriller" From Darkness. (More on that later.) They were in Durham. A lad was showing his grandfather's World War II medals. He claimed he would never sell them, but after hearing they might fetch £3,000 there was - dare I say - just the teensiest bit of wavering to be detected in his eyes. Then Fiona Bruce showed us a mystery object brought along by Glenda (which rhymes with blender). This turned out to be a knitting stick, or goosewing - basically a carved strip of wood you wedge in your armpit to hold one of your knitting needles. This frees your arm up to do something else, like hold a glass of wine, or - as they suggested - herd sheep along to market. Multi-tasking the old-fashioned way. Anyway, I thought my friend at the Twisted Yarn might be interested. Because frankly even a third arm wouldn't help my knitting.

But it gave me a little moment of nostalgia. I am sure that the Antiques Roadshow has visited Durham many times over the years, but this sent me back to September 1997, when I saw it being filmed there. I wasn't taking along any family heirlooms to be valued, you understand, of which we have none anyway. Back then I was about to embark on my Master's degree at the University of Newcastle. I had gone up a week before the start of term and my Jesmond flatmates hadn't moved in yet, so I had spent a couple of days going completely stir-crazy by myself, not knowing anybody or having anything to do other than unpacking. I felt a long way from home. (I was a long way from home.) I had just split up with my boyfriend, and while this was no bad thing ultimately, I have to confess I felt terribly lonely. So on a sunny day on Tyneside, I decided to get out and explore. And I took myself off to Durham on the train for the day. It's only a ten-minute journey from Newcastle Central. And what a lovely city it is. As Bill Bryson says, if you haven't seen Durham Cathedral, then what have you been doing all your life? You must. You can even (apparently) borrow his car. I'd lend you mine, but it only just scraped through its MOT and there's not enough tread left on the tyres. Look, it's simply stunning:

(Durham Cathedral, that is. Not our car.)

Anyway, down by the weir on the river, er, Wear, looking up at the cathedral, the then Antiques Roadshow presenter Hugh Scully (on a break from filming) strolled past me on a bridge. And he gave me a lovely smile and said hello. Just because he was friendly and nice. In my miserable frame of mind that day, it meant a lot. 

The rest of my year in Newcastle was brilliant. But it definitely had a shaky start. And Hugh Scully of the Antiques Roadshow - of all people - made me feel a little bit better about it. 

The Woman Who Woke Up Chinese

Waking up Chinese?

A woman did not wake up "Chinese", needless to say. It's just one of those headline grabbing documentary titles. A few years ago, Sarah Colwill suffered a severe migraine which left her with Foreign Accent Syndrome, a rare motor speech disorder which affects ability to control speech prosody in such a way that listeners perceive the speaker as foreign. Normally, when patients sustain neurological damage after a stroke or head trauma, their speech sounds obviously disordered. But the neurological effects of Foreign Accent Syndrome are more subtle, possibly because a smaller part of the brain has been affected.

In Sarah's case, no damage to the brain has been detected at all, even by state of the art scanners. This is why she was diagnosed with severe migraine rather than stroke. In fact, the boundary between the two is rather blurry, it would seem. Her migraines are hemiplegic and absolutely crippling. The poor woman has several a week, but only two have landed her in hospital. The first of these gave her the Foreign Accent Syndrome, and the second affected her mobility on her left side. It seems nothing can be done to prevent or help her with the migraines, and she is unable to work at the age of 38. Her husband is at his wits' end with worry.

Sarah's acquired pattern of speech makes her once Plymouth accent now come across as Chinese. She has a monotone, staccato rhythm and utterance final lengthening and inappropriate pitch rises. She simplifies consonant clusters ("hopital") or uses schwa epenthesis to help her articulate them, so "spider" becomes "s-e-pider". She drops plural [s] and has some mild agrammatisms and word-retrieval difficulties.

Goodness me, does it sound like I know what I am talking about? Well, I should, because I spent all of 1998 in Newcastle studying a lady with Foreign Accent Syndrome. She had a couple of minor strokes (TIAs) which replaced her mild Derbyshire accent with one that sounded distinctly French. She had been an accomplished singer, but now had difficulty controlling her breath and holding a note well. She was such a lovely person, and it was so sad how little we could do to help her. I say "all of 1998 studying a lady" - in fact, I only spent a couple of hours with her. The rest of the year was spent listening to recordings and staring at spectograms and pitch contours on phonetics laboratory software. No use to the patient at all.

The university bookbinder's line endings made me become a subtitler

Exaggerated pitch contours in Foreign Accent Syndrome

Anyway, lo and behold, off goes Sarah to see my former thesis supervisor, Professor Nick Miller, in the Department of Speech at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. So nice to see him again after all these years. It looks like he has a bigger and better office now. When I was working for him, he was in very cramped conditions in the King George VI building and used to have all his children's clothes drying on the radiators. Scary to think that those young toddlers are probably at university themselves now.

Glorious Newcastle-upon-Tyne

Foreign Accent Syndrome also has a profound social effect on the people who acquire it. Suddenly someone loses their whole identity and effectively becomes foreign in their own country. Sarah says others treat her like a tourist, or even an alien. They make at best unfunny jokes or at worst racist comments about her Chinese accent. No one believes she is who she says she is. Sarah barely feels she knows who she is. On request, her car insurers send her some recordings of her voice in calls to them made before her migraine. Sarah is crushed to hear her true accent again.

Sarah undergoes some intensive speech therapy with Martin Duckworth, which she finds exhausting and frustrating. She has to repeat words over and over, trying to retrain all the tiny muscles involved in speech articulation. She does eventually considerably improve her pronunciation of "chips" and "chopsticks", though these may not have been the best choice of words for someone people (unhilariously) think should be ordering a Chinese takeaway. And there are so many more words in our rich and complex language left to work on. (Ironically, if Sarah had actually woken up Chinese, she may have found that easier, since there are far fewer possible consonant-vowel combinations in Mandarin syllables.)

Chopsticks

There may be help for her terrible migraines in the near future. But there is no magic pill or miracle cure for Sarah's Foreign Accent Syndrome, despite all the research done into the condition over the past 20 years, in which I played a very insignificant part. However, over time and the course of her speech therapy, Sarah finds a growing acceptance of her changed voice, and she starts to regain her confidence and be happier about who she is. Happier is all we can hope for. For now.

Summer of Sport

It's hard to be a television blogger when you are in the middle of a football World Cup because there ain't a right lot on telly apart from what some term the beautiful game. Which this summer I just can't bring myself to care about, for some reason. The England team plane landed with an offer from the pilot to just keep the engines running (see Private Eye) so there's no point getting too hopeful about any great sporting achievement from our end of things. (Two matches lost as I write.)

It's possibly partly because in York, we are entirely focused on preparing for the Tour de France which will be cycling through our city (and right past the end of our street) on Sunday July 6th. There are yellow bikes, bunting, poor French puns and knitted jerseys all over town. I have even less knowledge of cycling than I do of football, and as far as I am concerned Lance Armstrong has left a pretty big scar slashed right across the sport, but it's hard not to get swept along by such a big event happening right on our doorstep.

Anyway, the fact remains that the television schedules are entirely clogged up with footie and football punditry (I'm sorry, Newcastle, but Alan Shearer in full drone is fairly close to what I imagine torture by THE WORLD'S MOST BORING MAN would be like) during the hours that I am free to view them. Alternatives on offer involve documentaries about missing planes, fostering and mobility scooters, none of which have really led me to much writing inspiration. The missing Malaysian Airways flight MH370 has of course a poignant right to a place on a blog about travel, but I cannot even begin to comprehend what torment and tragedy those passengers and their families have faced and I feel it would be inappropriate to make any comment here.

So in the evenings I've picked up my book and started going out for long walks instead. Hardly a bad thing.

And everything I ever had to say about football has already been said, when I went to see Brazil play New Zealand at the Olympics in 2012.