Big Yellow Taxi/Dr Roberts

Big Yellow Taxi, 24 September 2010


Big Yellow Taxi

Kate McCann in footage from The Oprah Show
EXCLUSIVE to mccannfiles.com

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By Dr Martin Roberts
24 September 2010

BIG YELLOW TAXI

A description of the vehicle believed by some to have ferried a couple and a child from Praia da Luz, perhaps? Not this time. It's that Joni Mitchell song. You know - the one with that rapier of a one-liner: 'Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got 'till it's gone.'

When talking to someone about something you've lost, it makes sense, surely, to reference the object in question, grammatically speaking. For Joni Mitchell it was her 'old man', among other things. It would be a very odd conversation indeed that migrated mid-sentence from topic to topic; from the fire in the living room to the unfinished washing-up in the kitchen, say. (Trust me. Like Kate McCann, 'I know'. Conversation under such circumstances is very difficult).

Anna Andress has recently revisited the verbal detachment of the McCanns from their eldest daughter, focussing on their persistent objective, and distant, references to 'the child', as opposed to, for example, their 'daughter Madeleine'. To support her point Anna makes visual reference to the Oprah programme in 2009, which includes some Portuguese TV footage of Kate given reasonably free rein during an interview filmed on domestic location, and who says something really quite astonishing in consequence:

"I never had a day where I took my children for granted, errm... having been through what I'd been through. But you actually forget how precious life is, errm... until something awful happens, and you realise just how perfect... our life was."

Look at (or listen to) this statement carefully, the second sentence especially. 'You actually forget how precious life is - until something awful happens.'

There is no ambiguity here. The reference topic is quite clearly 'life.' Like so many of nature's wonders, life is a binary phenomenon, the opposite state being, of course, death. Logic dictates that for 'something awful' to call one's attention to the sanctity of life, that something would have to be either life-threatening, or death itself.

Had Kate been more personal in her attribution of 'precious', e.g. 'You actually forget how precious your child is ....' then, paradoxically, the 'something awful' need not be anything like as severe as one is led to infer from her actual statement, since, as parents, we are naturally concerned at any injury to our offspring, even relatively minor ones.

Part two of this verbal faux pas consists of the manner in which the statement is concluded - 'you realise just how perfect... our life was.'

There is a conspicuous pause before the final phrase, 'our life was.' The past tense comparison seems, on the face of it, to be a reasonable one to make. After all, the McCanns' life together can hardly be more perfect now than hitherto, whatever the circumstances attending the change. The pause however is of the utmost significance.

Kate McCann, the Mrs Malaprop of our age, hesitates before finally specifying what she wants the listener to understand as the topic of the sentence ('our life'); a topic which did not feature in her original line of thought or it would not have followed a pause. This is made equally clear by the fact that it does not sit, grammatically or logically, with its antecedent phrase ('You realise just how perfect...') either. 'You' cannot intuit about 'me or mine', only about some concept or experience we have in common.

The McCanns, both of them, are by now well practised at this sort of verbal subterfuge, which in itself testifies to their conscious monitoring of their own output. Spontaneous it is not. Take, for instance, the mother of the year's pious interview with Aled Jones; how God was looking after Madeleine's spirit... 'she's got a lot of spirit.' Instant (well almost) correction of the implication that Madeleine was dead and gone to heaven, with God's role strategically extended to include that of playground supervisor.

'Something awful' happened to make Kate McCann realize 'how precious life is'; not their 'lives' as individuals, nor their 'life' collectively, but life in the abstract. The phrase 'our life', which she tacks on in an attempt to append an altered sense to her statement, is nothing like as appropriate as she imagines. One only need substitute the phrase 'our daughter' for the term 'life' to get an altogether clearer idea of where this train of thought was going before it was deliberately derailed.