IAN McMILLAN A little piece of polish on Louie’s lens of language

MY morning routine never varies, as people who follow me on Twitter will know. I get up at 05.00. I go for my early stroll; I get home and send a tweet about what I’ve seen, trying to describe my ordinary streets in an extraordinary way.

I do some exercises (I don’t tweet pictures of them because they’re not very, erm, photogenic, especially the grimacing) and then I listen to music on Radio 3 and tweet about the music I’ve heard.

Yes, you’re right, I do a lot of tweeting, but it’s not just, to coin a phrase, Tweet for Tweet’s Sake.

I tweet because like all writers and indeed like most human beings, I’m trying to turn the things I see and the things I hear and the things I think into language, which is an imperfect and clumsy descriptive tool but let’s face it, it’s one of the main ones we’ve got.

So I try to tweet about what certain pieces of music feel like to me and I try to describe something very everyday, like a snail inching its way up a wall; well, maybe not quite inching. Half-inching.

As a writer I see it as my job to show the snail and make it real, or more real than it already is, through the medium of the 26 letters of the alphabet.

Not that the snail cares, of course. I could go all anthropomorphic and call it Sammy Snail but it would make no difference to the snail. The language is just there for me to hang things on, I guess, to try help me get close to the essence of what they are.

I’ve been thinking even more than usual about language lately because my little grandson Louie, who is nearly 11 months old, is on the threshold of that amazing language journey that will take him anywhere, anywhere at all in the world and to the edge of the universe if he wants to.

Of course we talk to him all the time and sing to him and tell him stories and he tries to join in.

There was a short and frankly hilarious spell when he opened and closed his mouth but no sounds came out, as though he could see everybody else’s mouths moving like those of bad ventriloquists and he wanted to make a contribution to the conversation. It was like looking at a rubbery cave.

And now, just a few days after what future historians will call the Open and Shut Mouth period, he’s saying ‘Dadadadad’ and he’s on that journey of language that will lead somewhere exciting, as language always does.

He also says ‘Thisss’, with lots of s’s at the end of the word and of course I wonder if he’s actually saying ‘this’ or if he’s saying something just because he likes the sound of it.

I took War and Peace off my shelf recently, with a view to reading it one day, and I was struck by the notion that Leo Tolstoy was once a baby who said things like ‘Dadadadad’ and ‘Thiss’ and then many years later he was the man who wrote War and Peace.

I’m not suggesting that little Louie might one day write something as earthshaking as War and Peace but he might, you know, he just might. Language is one of the lenses we view the world through, and to witness a baby’s mind polishing the lens ready for use is the most amazing thing.

War and Thiss. It’s got a certain ring to it, don’t you think?