WRITING LIFE
PROSE
An ear for musicBy Kate Diamond
‘You mustn’t just sit her in front of the television all day’, says the speech therapist. In my hand I grip a meticulous schedule of playgroups, hours spent in frigid church halls and swelting soft play centres each week, providing open-ended play, interaction and new vocabulary modelling for my little girl who just doesn’t want to talk. He ignores my timetable, scowls at my daughter’s inability to produce farm animal noises on command and records his judgements on a clipboard. Rather unethically, he ends the appointment regaling me with the linguistic feats of his own daughter – of a similar age – who is ‘coming up with six and seven-word sentences by now!’ I bundle my silent daughter and her lion toy into the pushchair and cry the entire walk home.