Crystal clear*

 

I had breakfast in the bath this morning, which is something I haven’t done very often since moving to our current home twelve years ago.  This is partly because we now have an adequate shower and partly because we no longer live in a house with bathroom and kitchen on the same level, which made the process of making breakfast while the bath was running a less risky affair.  Anyway, whatever; it triggered memories of that former house and former times and, as I lowered my head under the surface and my ears filled up with water it triggered another reminder.  I have been a hearing-aid user for fifteen years. 

 

 

This is probably not an anniversary I expect to celebrate, but it is worthy of some thought and reflection.  I was fifty when I acquired my first analogue hearing aid having requested a hearing check earlier that year.  Unusually (I think) I was one of those people who became aware of my hearing loss before other people started insisting.  My father gradually lost his hearing as he got older and I had strong memories of the period before he succumbed to testing while he insisted that we had all started mumbling.

A lot of people are familiar with the process of having spectacles prescribed and the process of the optician flipping lenses asking which one is better.  Sight correction is a careful and precise art – hearing correction is less so.  The process has been improved by digital hearing aids which can be adjusted to some extent to accommodate the type of hearing loss, but basically a hearing aid is a small loudspeaker positioned behind the ear with a plastic ear-mould inside the ear.  It can take a very long time to get used to a first hearing aid.  To start with the sensation of having a large foreign object in the ear is very pronounced.  It feels like having a bad head cold and can make you feel as if your nose is blocked as well as your ears.  Then the sounds it amplifies are unfiltered by the brain.  Going out from the hushed hearing aid clinic into a busy street feels like a sensory assault and flushing the loo sounds like a waterfall being unleashed from a dam.  In the first year of having my hearing aid I frequently felt so desperate that I took it out and felt it wasn’t helping.  It took a talking-to from one of the audiologists at the clinic to make me persevere with wearing the aid all the time and really start to get the benefit from it.

I now have two digital hearing aids which are programmed to my particular hearing loss, which also have special settings to cope with noisy environments and for listening via loop systems.  I am well used to wearing them from the time I get up until I settle down to sleep at night, but they are not without their problems and difficulties.  Batteries don’t last very long and frequently give up the ghost at inconvenient moments.  Plastic tubing pops out of place and is difficult to realign.  An enthusiastic hug from a friend can cause shrill feedback if my ear is covered.  I try not to think about the time I sleepily removed my hearing aids at night and carefully dropped them into my water glass – not realising until the morning that they had been immersed in water all night. 

The simple fact is that hearing aids don’t replace normal hearing.  Even with the amplification of my aids I need the television louder than other people.  Clarity is lost and I frequently mishear or fail to understand what people say.  I can’t join in desultory chat amongst a group of people making conversation across a room; I can’t “earwig” on conversations in buses and cafes; I have more or less given up trying to listen to my beloved Radio 4 and hardly ever click on video or music links on the computer because the effort of setting up the earphones and taking out the hearing aids to listen rarely seems worth the effort.  Certain voices are more difficult to catch than others.  Children’s voices, for example, are very light and not always clear, so I sometimes miss out on conversation with my grand-children.

 Other people’s attitudes to deafness are very interesting.  I’m not stone deaf, so on the whole I haven’t encountered rudeness or exasperation from people outside the family.  I’ve never been embarrassed by wearing hearing aids and always make people aware that I have hearing difficulty so that they don’t think I’m being rude or ignoring them if I don’t respond appropriately to something they say.   Family and friends are good at asking me where I would prefer to sit in cafes and restaurants and at relaying instructions to me in public places when I can’t hear the speaker.  In domestic situations with my nearest and dearest it’s not always the same story.  I know that it’s not easy communicating with someone who’s hard of hearing.  I had years of trying to make myself understood by my Dad, who could be pretty haphazard in his use of hearing aids and there were definitely times when I gave up and decided the effort of repeating myself just wasn’t worth it.  On the other hand as the deafened person one soon becomes aware of the tutting and rolled eyes of an impatient family member being asked to repeat themself, of the exaggerated raised voice and slow enunciation as if talking to an idiot. I have been known to become upset and angry.  So have they.

Apart from these irritations I think these days that I’m pretty well adjusted to using my aids.  I certainly couldn’t manage without them.   Somehow, though hearing loss isn’t “normalised” in my life.  It’s still a problem and an irritation, something I would prefer not to have to think about and deal with.

*Apparently a fifteenth anniversary is a crystal anniversary

peacock feathers

Sometime in the late eighties I bought a 120cm square of Liberty fine wool in William Morris’s peacock feather design. I fringed the edges and gave it to my mother for Christmas as a shawl. When my mother died in February 1992 it came back to me along with her snow-grey wool coat. I wore them together and they warmed and comforted me through the rest of that sad, cold winter.

The years passed and the coat went to a charity shop and the shawl into a drawer.

A couple of years ago I visited the Welsh Quilt Centre in Lampeter, where there was an exhibition showcasing Victorian quilts made from Indian Paisley shawls. I came home inspired and rooted around to find whether I still had that shawl. After a few disappointing experiments of adding other fabrics to the Liberty square I eventually decided just to use the one piece of fabric, but to make it into a scarf that I could wear again.

I cut it in half and rejoined it to make a longer shape, then folded and seamed that long piece. I could have stopped there with a long scarf, but I still had the quilting idea in mind so decided simply to stitch the entire surface kantha-style. I used a variety of different hand embroidery threads in shades of blue and grey. It took a long time, but I am finally done – and wearing it.

I'm not sure what my mother would have thought of the process - she was an elegant woman and quite particular about the way clothes should be worn.  I'm happy, though, to have another turn at wearing something to remind me of her as she was before illness robbed her of speech and personality.

an outbreak of nostalgia: the good-old/bad-old days

Yesterday I met my sister in Birmingham for “Christmas Shopping”. Neither of us is particularly addicted to retail delights and very little actual purchasing took place, but we did spend the day nattering and eating lunch and drinking cups of tea. It was also the opportunity for a little nostalgia.

Back in the day when we were growing up in Lichfield, Birmingham was our closest big city for shopping and there were only two department stores, Lewis’s and Rackhams. Despite being only about 15 miles away we only visited Birmingham once or twice a year and one of those visits was the annual trip to visit Father Christmas and Mr Holly in the grotto at Lewis’s . We also remembered Rackhams, which was the posher store, having a particularly magical toy department, which would have a model railway with full landscape and running trains as a centre-piece and other mechanical toys performing their tricks. There were wonderful soft toys and walkie-talkie dolls and rank upon rank of matchbox cars and lifelike farm animals. I can report that House of Fraser, which has taken over Rackhams, no longer has a toy department of that calibre.

Obviously those childhood memories are overlaid by memories of visiting Birmingham as I got older. I was probably about fifteen before I was allowed to go on the train for a shopping trip with friends. Visits to the pantomime at “The Alex” and later other theatre at Birmingham Rep were highlights. I remember Spaghetti Junction being constructed to great media excitement. Like many major cities, the central shopping area of Birmingham has altered almost beyond recognition since those days and it got me thinking about the speed of change.

Coincidentally the book I started reading on the train yesterday is a memoir by P D James; Time to Be in Earnest. Writing in 1997 about her early life in the 1920s she remarks that “a Victorian child of the same class – the Pooters’ daughter perhaps - received into our family would have felt immediately at home; a modern child, transported to a house without electricity, central heating, television, telephone or the use of a car, would feel himself banished to a dark age.” In many ways I feel that my own childhood in the 1950s was still more similar to hers than to a childhood at the beginning of the 21st Century. Obviously we did have electricity in my first family home, but no central heating, telephone or car. It was still a world of coal fires, liberty bodices and chilblains. Change began to accelerate in the sixties and has continued to run faster and faster ever since.

I’m not quite sure what point I’m trying to make here apart from offering it as an observation. I’m certainly not decrying progress – after all how would I be communicating these thoughts on my fancy interwebular device if we were still living in the fifties?

Photo: Steve's and my teddies from the fifties. I don't think Antiques Roadshow would be interested.