Being eleven months old must be a bewildering and amazing experience. All the new information to process and understand, and you're just reaching a point where some of it is making sense, when the babbling of adults begins to form into coherent ideas.
A lot of it has got to be annoying and frustrating, but wouldn't be great to be back to a point where you started to understand why things were funny, but nearly every funny thing you saw was completely new to you. "Oh, I see. You are jiggling me up and down whilst singing a song about something or someone called 'Tigger'. Hilarious. Let's do it again. For much too long. For me it is the ridiculous number of repetitions that makes it amusing."
Steph's baby, Paddy has the fortune or misfortune to be about eleven months old. He has begun to recognise various statements and can do "tricks". If you say "Clap Hands" he usually will do so. "Put your hands in the air!" will also elicit the required response. (He knows this pleases me, so sometimes when I am not paying him attention he will put his hands in the air without being asked) Occasionally he gets confused. Sometimes he claps when he should be stretching and vice versa.
But the trick he does that makes me wonder is to point at Martin Amis. OK, I'll explain. At the bottom of Steph's stairs she has a large, framed photo of Martin Amis and every time she carries Paddy past it (and often when we are just sitting in the room at the bottom of the stairs), she will ask him "Where's Martin Amis?". This is obviously a sort of a joke. A ridiculously complicated and irrelevant question to ask an infant. However, Paddy will usually look over at the picture. Recently he has begun to point and say "Der!" which may or may not mean "there". As with the hands thing, he occasionally gets crossed wires and will look at a picture of a duck or Winnie the Pooh, both of which he also usually recognises.
Martin Amis is the most important one. Martin Amis is the one he is most commonly asked to identify. I just wonder what affect this will have on his life. Will he over-estimate the importance of Martin Amis in this world? Will Martin Amis become a Santa-like figure to him, or perhaps a God? Will he be confused as to why none of the other kids at school talk about or even recognise Martin Amis? Perhaps he will be bullied at school for his obsession with Martin Amis. Possibly in later life he will seek out the man who caused him so much suffering and strangle him with his bare hands. Maybe he'll just be more keen to read his books.
To be honest, I have nearly 35 years of experience of life than Paddy, but he knows almost as much about Martin Amis as I do. I think if I was in a room with a picture of Martin Amis in it and someone said "Where's Martin Amis?" I could almost certainly point at the picture and say "There!" But that's mainly because I have been to Steph's house and she's told me who the picture is of. Six months ago, if there had been ten pictures of different middle-aged men on the walls of the room I might have to have taken a guess.
So it's not like the eleven month olds have a monopoly on the "information to process and understand" front.
