Hear Here
This year I did something that I regretted slightly. Was it eating a cherry tomato, putting cranberry juice in scrambled egg or trying to speak Portuguese in the suburbs of Lisbon? None of these things. A friend offered to carry out a hearing test on me and I agreed to it. Like all the mistakes I made in 2018, I can only say that it seemed like a good idea at the time.
I have never had any trouble with my hearing. Back in university in Durham, I remember disliking the meal hall in college because of the way it echoed and swimming pools often annoyed me for the same reason, but i always thought that that must be all about acoustics. I once went to a birthday party in The Prince of Wales pub in Cardiff and had to leave because I could not hear what other people were saying. I simply disliked noisy environments, I reckoned.
I was wrong. The result, as I ended up posting on Facebook, was that I am moderately deaf in my right ear. In some ways, this makes no difference. Apparently it explains why i find environments with a mixture of competing voices hard to cope with so at least I now know that disliking The Prince of Wales is not just because it is a Wetherspoons pub - #neverspoons. However, it caused me quite a shock at the time.
I know what it is like to hear through one ear on a temporary basis. It happened a few years ago when i had a bad case of Swimmer’s Ear. For a few days I could only hear through one ear and sitting at the piano I started to realise how different it sounded if the signals only came through one side of my head. Just as I worry that being slightly colour-blind is the reason that I like colourful clothes and that everyone else is horrified by them, so I started to worry that my whole musical life sounded nothing like I thought that it did. 2018 was supposed to be The Year of Music, but what if I had not been hearing it correctly?
It sounds rather conceited to say that I worried about losing my hearing. It is probably an insight into the privilege of the able-bodied. I remember listening to Peter White interview Larry Flynt on the radio some years ago and them having serious disagreements. Peter White was a journalist who was blind and presented a programme on radio 4 about disability. Larry Flynt was the publisher of Hustler who became disabled after a failed assassination attempt. Flynt was absolutely clear that he was not disabled and not like White. You can just imagine that people who do become disabled put themselves in a separate category like this.
I am also aware of how that works the other way around. Last year I worked with a young woman who was deaf and used lip-reading. I was told that having a beard can be bad for lip-reading, but I was thinking more about not covering my mouth and trying to speak clearly. When I was doing the usual ‘equal opportunities’ form, I asked her if she ‘considered herself to have a disability’. Her answer was ‘no’. Yes, she was deaf, but she did not consider it a disability. We discussed this briefly before she decided that she had to say ‘yes’ because that was what I was expecting for our monitoring figures. She was probably right about that. It is interesting though that if you change the ‘Are you disabled?’ question to one that asks people if they think of themselves as disabled, the answer may not be the same.
I did start to observe one thing in my own interactions, though. I think that we get hearing loss really, seriously wrong. Maybe this is just me but I started to listen to how people spoke. The first reaction to my news on Facebook had been ‘What?’ but that is genuinely how people talk to you. If you do not hear what someone says and ask them to repeat it, they raise their voice. I suppose that it makes sense but in my experience it is pretty much useless. What you need is for them to enunciate clearly and speak with each word and sound clearly defined. That does not mean slowly, just clearly. I probably never thought of that myself until this year.
The other problem with this hearing test was that it went against a narrative that I had been telling myself about who I am. I do everything in the wrong order, as you may have noticed. My clubbing years were between the ages of 27 and 33, for heaven’s sake. I was not a fit and active twentysomething achieving all my life’s goals and having wonderful holidays because I had few responsibilities, I am a fit and active fortysomething who has run half marathons and achieved amazing things that he would never have dared try to do in his twenties. I have no doubt that a race between me aged 23 and me aged 45 would end with the 45 year old winning. As I write, I do things in the wrong order.
This though was a sign of decline. Both 23 year old and 45 year old me have a sense of imminent death. I know, suddenly the blog takes a turn for the darker side, but it is true. I remember sitting in that hall in Durham aged 23 feeling that my time was running out (and that I could not hear what people were saying properly). However, whereas a run would keep the thought of ageing away, I could not escape the evidence of one of my ears not being up to the requirements. At some point, other things will not work and eventually things will come to an end.
For a while, I found this all a touch depressing. I did learn about three signs in sign language, though my inability to differentiate between the sign for ‘ice’ and the sign for ‘animals’ might cause trouble if I decided to become a barman or a zookeeper. I then realised that this was a thing to embrace. It was no good complaining about it, it had happened and if it was a reminder of ageing, then it was a reminder that time was not limitless and that I ought to hurry up with some projects.
Last year during an online discussion, someone patronised with me the old ‘God gave you two ears for hearing and one mouth for speaking, so you should listen twice as much as you speak’. Now I am waiting for someone to try that again. Can you imagine? I would tap my right ear and reply, “Nope, God gave me only one decent ear and one mouth, so clearly I am supposed to speak as much as I hear. You got the two good ears? You need to shut up more.”
Perhaps i am glad that I did that test after all.