Changing the station

I think Waffle may have developed foreign accent syndrome. It’s strange and unnerving and to be perfectly honest, it’s beginning to freak me out.

An extremely rare condition by all accounts, foreign accent syndrome was first reported in 1941 when a woman in Norway suffered shrapnel injuries to the brain after an explosion and then woke up speaking with a German accent.

Apparently, it’s most common following a head injury and it has something to do with an impairment of motor control, although there have only been a couple of dozen recorded cases worldwide.

As speech is a very complicated process and involves multiple parts of the brain, if one or more part is damaged, then timing, melody and ‘speech tension’ can all be knocked out of kilter. And then there are more extreme forms of the syndrome which result in people speaking in different languages rather than in merely different accents.

I remember reading an interesting article in The Guardian some years ago about an English woman who was hit by a van when she was walking to work. After coming out of her coma, she was initially only able to communicate in French. The thing was, she had only ever studied French to GCSE level at school.

Without being too facetious about things, I am reminded of an old TV I used to have as a kid. To give you an idea of how long ago this was, the telly in question was a black and white set. The size of a microwave, the aul black and white used to live in my bedroom and sometimes when I was watching, the picture used to slip a little, as if a snowstorm was blowing in. In order to rectify this slippage, I used to thump it on the side. Sometimes this corporal punishment corrected the slippage but at other times, the thump resulted in the TV changing channels altogether.

Whilst I can’t say for sure that Waffle has sustained anything like a head injury, he did clatter into the sunroom last week with an almighty bang. I can laugh about it now and in fact, come to think of it, I laughed at him at the time too.

Waffle has the habit of running towards the backdoor at full pelt and them leaping the three steps to gain entry to the house. Last week, his paw/eye coordination must have been askew because rather than leaping the three steps, he clipped the second one and went head over heels into the house, banging his hairy head on the sofa in the sunroom. At the time I was sitting on said sofa trying to enjoy a quiet cup of tea and after the hairy acrobatic malfunction, Waffle clambered to his feet and walked away without a sound. He only deigned to look over his shoulder when I laughed and asked, “Are you drunk, dog?”

Later than evening, I was in bed trying to enjoy a dream about being on Countdown with Rachel Riley, Susie Dent and that other fella whose name I can’t remember, when an almighty howling erupted from the back hall (where Waffle’s bed lives). Shedding the bed clothes (and the dream – “a vowel please, Rachel”), I clambered out and set off post-haste down the hall to make sure Waffle hadn’t morphed into an American Werewolf in London.

The thing is: Waffle never howls. Never. I’d even tried to coax him to join in on a howl on occasion but with no success. It usually went something like this, “Come on wee Waffie. Repeat after me: Aaaaaoooooo!” Except wee Waffie only looked at me as if I’d left my senses back at childhood’s exit.

On the night of the howling, when I arrived in the back hall and wondered for the second time that day, “Are you drunk, dog?” Waffle only looked back at me with pan-faced idiocy.

Satisfied that he hadn’t morphed into a werewolf, I returned to bed and hoped for a seven letter score in the next round.

The following day, I had all but forgotten about Waffle’s new howl, that is, until he started up again in the afternoon. It was a Saturday and I was in the shower after mowing the lawn and as soon as it started up, I knew what it was.

After rinsing and drying (don’t forget to dry your feet, kids!), I headed towards the sound of the howling, which for some unknown reason had continued unabated.

“Are you drunk, dog?” I asked upon meeting the hound. But Waffle merely returned that pan-faced stare. “No more howling. You’re starting to freak me out,” I added, pointedly wagging a finger at the wagging tail.

Could some mild head trauma have addled Waffle’s timing, melody and speech? Could he have developed a canine form of foreign accent syndrome?

As opposed to turning to the internet for answers or better still, ringing a dog whisperer, I decided aloud, “I spend way too much time thinking about dogs.”

Waffle opened his mouth but whether to howl, whine or do one of those mouth-stretchy things he likes, I don’t know.

I snapped, “Any more of that howling and you’ll get thumped like a black and white telly.”