At 6.30am I get
woken up by Spiderman – the bad black one who’s made out of yucky slugs. The
good Spiderman is made of small blue and red spiders that aren’t yucky. That’s
what I learnt from the 4-year-old I’m staying with this week.
To share a small
space with a child and his mum is challenging as we constantly bump into each
other and the furniture, but I think that’s the price you pay for living in the
middle of a big city, even in Sweden.
What I really
like about this week though is reading bedtime stories – or anytime stories to
the little boy. It’s nice to be able to recognise characters such as Paddington
and Tintin from my childhood in Sweden. Although in the Swedish version
Tintin’s dog is called Milo, not Snowy as in the English translation. I’ve also
read about Katie Morag, dinosaurs and the Octonauts. What surprises me is that
Sweden’s most popular children’s author Astrid Lindgren isn’t very well known
in England even though a lot of people have heard of Pippi Longstocking.
One thing that
can make me feel really alienated about English culture is that I didn’t grow
up with the same books, films and TV programmes. The nursery rhymes and songs
are also different. Last week the woman I stayed with taught me Hickory Dickory
Dock which she used as a an exercise to warm up her voice before doing a
recording.
PÅ SVENSKA
No comments:
Post a Comment