Good morning, good morning

Mondays are great aren’t they? Today, the sun is shining and even my bus journey got me into work brighter and earlier than usual.

There are, as ever, many reasons for my morning optimism but one of the reasons I am smiling even at this ungodly hour, is that I finally got to watch Sex & The City with subtitles…
and, there may have been Minstrels!

What can I say, it was my kind of movie – I laughed so hard I cried, I cried so hard I laughed and, while it wasn’t the best film I have ever seen and there was a heck of a lot of product placement – it was like meeting up with old friends and having an amazing heart to heart.

Was it worth the wait? Absolutely!
Some things just are…

On my soapbox I stand...

Oh dear, there appears to be a bugbear that just won’t leave me alone at the moment. Everywhere I turn I am irked by it and it’s doing my head in. I posted about it yesterday in terms of TV but today it’s DVDs.

HMV has got a massive sale on at the moment and so I dashed in there hoping that there would be something nice that was cheap and would fit in with my gooey, chick-flick taste. There was plenty, but then two DVDs caught my eye: one with Jeremy Clarkson talking about cars (something terribly endearing about him, don’t you think?), and the film Withnail And I. Immediately I wanted them both – and they were super cheap.

I was especially excited about the latter as it is London Aunt’s favourite movie and, when I was 16, I promised never to watch it with anyone but her… and I still haven’t. I’m seeing her today so I thought I’d buy it as a treat.

But…

*squeak of rage

There are no subtitles!

On either of them actually, but now that Top Gear is back on TV I can cope without the DVD of JC.

Not sure if I should admit to this, but I once wrote to a DVD distribution company asking them why their DVD box sets of Dr Quinn Medicine Woman were not subtitled. They informed me it was an extra cost and there was no demand!

No demand?

Did they personally write to every deaf person in the world and ask if them if they were a fan? OK, in all honesty, if they had have done that, there would probably turned out to be no demand – but what about me?

So what if I have such bad taste in TV and films that there is no demand to spend a little more cash adding subtitles – I demand it. Why do I have to go with the masses and watch the mainstream, high demand films when episodes of Rainbow (you try and lipread Zippy) and old series of My Family – neither of which are subtitled – are what keep me entertained.

There’s one problem with today’s rant – it totally ruins my street cred!
Ho-hum…
After all, I am meant to be discussing the merits of art-house flicks over strong espressos in street cafés, not sitting at home, eating Hobnobs and watching season 2 of Dawson’s Creek with French subtitles because it didn’t have English ones.

And that is where, rather bizarrely, the French and the Italians, and even the Spanish save me – with foreign movies. I’ve seen all manner of them, from BonBon El Pero – a shaggy dog story on varying levels, to All About My Mother (my first foreign movie with London Aunt and Uncle at The Gate) and they are always subtitled!
It means that when people start talking about movies on an intelligent level I can join in. Then I kiss them goodbye and tuck myself up in bed with a nice subtitled episode of Sex & The City.

Let's go to the movies

It’s true, finally! Sex & the City has come to London with subtitles and I am very excited! Finally I will get to stuff my face with Minstrels and cry into my popcorn as the plot unfolds. But in the midst of all this mad excitement I can’t help feeling a little bit disappointed that as usual I am having to make do with the delayed hype and, that while everyone else rides on the crest of the ‘hype’ wave, I’m paddling along behind.

This is true in a lot of things in my life especially when someone announces good news. The first I know of it is the squeals of excitement as I have usually missed half of it as I wasn’t tuned in to begin with and the premature screaming from someone else obscured the last bit.

I then spend the next five minutes trying to find someone calm enough to tell me what on earth is going on but by then, I can’t squeal with excitement as everyone else has calmed down. For this reason, I feel a bit like an echo.

Another time I suffer from delayed hype is watching the news, or Big Brother, or any live show on TV – the subtitles are slower than a tanked-up snail and more often than not wholly inaccurate, too. I can only imagine what a nightmare it is watching TV with me.

Take the other day, Fab Friend was in the studio audience of Graham Norton so I tuned in with Friend-Who-Knows-Big-Words to watch. Our evening went something like this – Dame Edna, Graham’s guest, made a joke, Friend-Who-Knows-Big-Words laughed. Two minutes later the subtitles caught up and didn’t make any sense. Friend-Who-Knows-Big-Words had to tell me the joke, I laughed. And so it went on…

*sigh

And then, what do you know – the total opposite happens, usually on game shows. Old-Housemate-Who-Now-Lives-In-Cornwall used to refuse point blank to watch The Weakest Link with me if the subtitles were on as the answers were usually up before the question had even been asked and it was my turn to be ahead of the game for once.

But, this as it turns out, is just as lonely as paddling along behind the crest as no one wants to join you. I wonder how it’s possible to create robots that can iron and space rockets to take you to, um, Space, but not possible to create subtitles that allow me to ride the crest – to join in the hype, not be forced either in front or behind.

There must be someone I can write and complain to – I’m off to find out.

Gigging girly

Today Deafinitely Girly has very bad hearing, although this is not why her post is late…

Last night I went to a gig where there was loud music played by cute boys with bad hair, people jumping and beer spilling in vast quantities. There may also have been rum… ho-hum

I did the responsible (and prematurely middle-aged) thing and dutifully wore earplugs throughout, to protect what little hearing I have left, and bopped about with the best of them. But they didn’t work and today everything sounds a bit flat and a lot quieter. Poor fragile ears…

*sniff

But it really was great, and I have to admit I was sceptical. After all, let’s not forget that the last gig I went to, not including the lovely Jose Gonzalez, was
Steps – in 2001 – when I was old enough to know better.

I remember the very first pop concert I ever went to was Boyzone at Cardiff Arena – I went with Best Friend and Girly with Squeaky Voice and I had no idea what to expect. I wasn’t expecting every single teenage girl in the place to scream the whole way through. Collectively I could hear them and I could also lipread them – they looked like a mass gathering of The Scream painting by Edvard Munch and not a whole lot prettier either as Shockwaves wet-look gel was very much in fashion at that time.

I wore earplugs to that too, but I was desperate to know how loud it really was so I took them out... and fell over – as I often do when I hear loud noises. I was so mortified that I have never removed my earplugs at a concert again just in case there’s a repeat. Had I done it last night, I would have been nicely Carling covered and probably jumped on.

Climbing Friend, who booked the tickets, took precautions anyway and ensured I had guys flanking me at all times to catch me if I fell… oh such a hard life I lead.
There were some quite cute ones there too, including Jason, Joe, Alex and Jack to name but a few.

*blush

Glasses are the new hearing aids

Last night on my way home from work I got something in my eye so took off my glasses to try and get it out. And what a shock I got – I really am quite blind!

You see, I rarely spend a minute of the day without my contact lenses in or glasses on – I often sleep in the latter and very occasionally drunkenly pass out in the former.

I went into hospital once for an endoscopy and begged the consultant to let me keep my glasses on – I explained that without them I feel twice as deaf and he was very understanding. And, it meant that when I came round from the sedative speaking utter rubbish, I could at least see.

Sometimes I wonder what on earth I was doing when God was handing out the senses. It seemed I queued perfectly well for the smell, touch and taste senses and then maybe I got distracted by the ‘Have Impeccable And Expensive Taste In Handbags’ queue and forgot to get the sight and hearing until the last minute – when all the good ones were taken.

Although hearing aids benefit lots of people, they’re not like glasses – they don’t make things perfect. Rather annoyingly they don’t even help me a little bit, they just make me fall over because everything is loud. So in a way I guess my glasses are my hearing aids.

Put them on and I can lipread

Take them off… lips? What lips? I can’t even see faces!

At the moment my glasses are ancient clear-rimmed things that have survived a serious car accident and being packed up in tent… but they are not pink.

I have always wanted pink hearing aids... so I’m off to Specsavers at lunch to get some!

An ostrich went what?

I’ve still got that Friday feeling this morning, possible because I had a lovely relaxing weekend in the country with my Ma, Pa and French Aunt. It was great – there was champagne and great food and lots of relaxing and catching up.

French Aunt is fab but she lives quite far away – hopefully I will make the trip to see her soon…

*Sniff


Anyway, as you know, my Ma is also a bit aurally challenged and she’s also a Very Important Head Teacher. As well as being in charge of lots of little children and bigger people who are staff, she has a class to teach, too.

And, last week it was Grandparents day, where the children invite theirs in to see how brilliant they all are and to evoke lots of aaaaaahs and oooooohs as they showed off their reading skills.

For this occasion my Ma had taught her class a song with actions to sing to them. I’d never heard of it but apparently it’s called ‘Once An Austrian Went Yodelling’ and along the way he meets all sorts of things and people that get in his way.

Ma had taught this to her class with a CD and, as they all have great hearing, she didn’t print off the words. But for the concert she wanted the music teacher to play so they had a quick rehearsal.

So away they sang when suddenly the music teacher stopped and said…

‘What did you say this song was called?’

‘Once An Austrian Went Yodelling,’ my Ma replied.

‘I thought so,’ said the music teacher. ‘It’s just I wondered why your entire class was singing, “Once An Ostrich Went Yodelling”, that’s all.’

With that, my Ma fell about laughing doing the snorting sneezing thing that she does so well.

So a new song was born…

Once an Ostrich went yodelling
On a mountain so high
When he met with an avalanche
Interrupting his cry…

And, I guess to a 6 year old with an active imagination, this would be perfectly feasible.

SATC update

Fab Friend nearly had a heart attack yesterday morning when an email from Your Local Cinema announced that Sex & The City was finally subtitled.
With quivering fingers she clicked open the email and scrolled down, the anticipation causing her to squeak (or so I am told).

And there it was, in big bold letters, the subtitled London showing of Sex & The City is in…

…the Odeon in South Woodford on Tuesday 24th June.

Now, I pride myself on knowing where pretty much anything is (I secretly harbour dreams of passing The Knowledge exam but the book is very expensive), but where the heck is South Woodford?

I’ve checked, on a giant map, the sort needed to show anywhere outside zone 3 and, in short, it is flipping miles away.

*Sniff!

Am I ever going to get to stuff my face with those gigantic bags of Minstrels and watch Carrie on the big screen?

Now, when I woke up this morning I leapt out of bed happy that it was Friday, pleased that the sun was shining and the birds were probably singing, and even more glad that I didn’t have a hangover from FF’s birthday celebrations last night…

But this cinema business is threatening my good mood…

To counteract this, I have a bag of minstrels on my desk and am humming the tune to SATC rather badly – oh how my colleagues must love me…

And at lunch time I’m going to practise my 'Carrie run' in skyscraper heels and hope I bump into my own Mr Big and, that when I fall in Dior, someone else pays the bill

Dum-da-da-da-dum-dum-dum

Da-da-da-da…

You drive me cra-a-azy...

It’s the ‘O2 drive me crazy’ time of year again as my phone contract comes up for renewal…

Don’t get me wrong, I love O2 and they have been very good to me over the years, giving me hundreds of free text messages and generally looking past my emotional outbursts to see what they can do to help me.

When I can get their attention that is.

Early last year I managed to break two phones in two months, not their fault admittedly, but what was their fault was that there was no reliable email service that I could use to sort out the replacement. So I was left having the weirdest phone conversations with some poor man with an accent I couldn’t understand. This one time I burst into tears of frustration and put the phone down after having spent most of my lunch hour on hold in the first place.

Then, last June my phone died of old age – for some reason all my phones seem to have the life-expectancy of a daddy long-legs – and so I was faced with the usual predicament of ritual humiliation by phone call or living with a crap mobile.

So I called O2 and got some poor guy I couldn’t understand. I explained I was deaf and he said ‘You go to shop and they help you.’ Really? I thought. Go to an O2 shop, even though I have an online contract. So I did, and they were amazing. They called O2 online on my behalf, spend hours on the phone to them, and then got told they couldn’t order the phone for me as they were not me!

ARRRRGGGGH!

Eventually, as tears of frustration once again threatened to flow quicker than the Thames at high tide, the manager took me out the back of the shop put the phone on speaker phone and mouthed everything that was said. Except, I couldn’t negotiate my contract and so ended up paying double what I used to for half the amount of privileges. This made me mad...

With this madness fuelling my fingers, I wrote a slightly acidic letter to every email address I could find on the O2 corporate website. Eventually this nice lady wrote to me and asked me what was making me so cross. So I politely told her and she politely wrote back and fixed it all!

Hurrah!

Except now, one year on, my lovely pink phone is on its last legs – it limps through the day before needing to be charged again and on the rare occasions I use it for making calls, it makes me sound like a robot with a 40-a-day smoking habit.

So this week, I decided to write to the nice lady who had reassured me that she would always be on email to help me…

No reply…

*Sniff

Must I spend the whole of my lunch hour for the next three weeks on the phone in a fruitless attempt to get a new mobile? I think not…

So this afternoon I am going to flipping well write to every email address on the O2 corporate website again and hope there’s another nice lady, or even better, a cute man, who can give me what I want…

…after all, it’s not like I’m asking for much, just acceptable customer services for deaf people and…

a custom-built pink iPhone!

Pato sandwich please

It’s Fab Friend’s birthday today, she’s perpetually 21 you know. How clever is that.

Something else you should know about Fab Friend is that she is off on an adventure soon to Peru – all by herself – so she’s learning Spanish. Many people with lots of hearing are rubbish at learning languages but, as you already know, Fab Friend is like me, except she actually wears her hearing aids.

Anyway, in the pub the other night she was spouting all these Spanish words, and, as far as my sub-standard ears could tell, her pronunciation was fantastic. I was intrigued to know how she had done all this and she let me know her secret…

…the most bizarre CD-rom tutorial on earth. It uses image association with words, so when learning the words Gatto, which is a cat, it tells you to imagine a cat eating cake. And for Perro, which is dog, it tells you to imagine a pirouetting dog! I jest you not, and what’s more remarkable is it really does work. And I know this because Fab Friend told me a good few days ago and I remember it all!

She also taught me Pato, which is duck and you have to imagine you are patting a duck on the head. Now, I met Friend-Who-Knows-Big-Words for a drink yesterday, and she is fluent in Spanish. I was telling her all this and she warned me, while sniggering into her Jamaican beer can, that Pato is also slang for homosexual!

Must warn Fab Friend! Don’t want her in some dark Peruvian Bar, asking for a duck sandwich and being enveloped into a gay threesome by two guys hissing enthusiastically – this is apparently the South American version of wolf whistling – wearing little more than PVC thongs.

But back to those words, and perhaps the best one is how to remember the word for pretty, which is bonito… you have to visualize a bonny toe!

Hahahahahhaha

Ahem, sorry but it still makes me chuckle and I think I am going to call my toes that from now on.

Shall we dance?

I love music and often dance with the kind of enthusiasm reserved for discovering you’ve won the lottery or that Brad Pitt wants your phone number. At uni, old-housemate-who-now-lives-in-Cornwall used to describe my movement to music as ‘Breakdancing’. Where there was music and me dancing, something always used to get broken.

But as I’ve got older and perhaps a teeny bit more deaf(er) I’ve become more sedate and the only things likely to get broken are at hip level as housemate has taught me the art of Shakira-style hip shaking.

I’ve also become less able to dance to things I don’t know, perhaps because the beat is less clear, or because dancing always feels better if you can at least belt out the chorus, even if the words are wrong, with the best of them.

Take last weekend when I went to a house party. It was a very civilised affair, there was a buffet, card tricks in the front room and in the back room, which was apparently the man of the house’s mid-life crisis room, there was dancing.

Ooh great, I thought to myself. Maybe they’ll play some Shakira and I can get people hip-breaking (I was the youngest person there!). Cue, The Beach Boys, who I guess were floor fillers from ooh God only knows…

This did not please me as I don’t know a single Beach Boys song and, because when dancing, I rely on familiar beats. As a result, this led me to demonstrate the dancing aptitude of a newborn foal born to a drug-dependant mare.

I wonder, when I am old enough to have a mid-life crisis room, or more to the point, rich enough to afford a spare room to have a mid-life crisis in, if I will throw parties with buffets, card tricks and dancing? I hope so – old-housemate-who-now-lives-in-Cornwall would most definitely be invited as she was also a fan of that classic, hit-producing, sensational band…. Um…
Steps.

And, at least we would have plenty of room to breakdance, as I doubt anyone else would turn up!

Starstruck Saturday

I hate total silence, it doesn’t suit me and sometimes I think it’s a frightening prophesy of what my life could be like one day. This goes for all kinds of silence, be it in my flat, my car or even, in a conversation.

The latter often sees me jibber-jabbering away to fill the air space, often being able to talk endless rubbish for hours…
Gosh, do you think I could be Prime Minister?

So, this rather unfortunate crap-talking trait emerged at the weekend and I am still cringing now. In fact, driving back from Gloucestershire last night saw me slapping my forehead whenever I remembered it, which got me some very odd looks off a cute boy in the adjacent car when we were stuck in a traffic jam. Dammit, am I ever going to get a date?

So there I was with Jenny M wandering around the local farmers’ market when I saw that Katie Fforde was signing books.

*Gasp

She’s one of my favourite authors you see, and right this minute I am devouring her latest book at breakneck speed. Trying to be cool, I dragged Jenny M to the area where the signing was taking place and casually loitered, wondering what the heck to do.

And then, as if by some hideous magic trick, I suddenly heard myself saying hello to Katie Fforde. It took me about five seconds to realize that I had bounded up to her like an enthusiastic golden Labrador puppy and she was looking at me trying to work out if she knew me or not.

Quicker than you can say, ‘I’m a scary stalker!’ I began to jabber and, this is no joke, I think I averaged about 60 words a second in which time I managed to tell her at least three times that I loved her book. In all, I think I allowed her about one second to get any sort of word in, and I am still not quite sure what that was.

I was so completely starstruck that even my pupils were star-shaped, which genuinely shocked me as I had always, perhaps rather foolishly, imagined that if I did meet someone I admired I would at least be able to hold a coherent conversation.

Evidently not…

So, in the light of this embarrassing mishap, I am going to learn to savour silences, to nod sagely in conversations instead of cracking all the jokes, and cover my mouth with masking tape whenever I am in Stroud, in case I ever meet poor Katie Fforde again!

The joy of text...

Did you know, there’s more chance of me becoming the next presenter of Top Gear than there is of you seeing me chatting on my phone… *sigh

Don’t get me wrong, I love my phone – it is pink after all, albeit with a rather big scratch on the screen. *sniff

I can often be spotted with my phone in my hand, when I am not rummaging in one of my bottomless handbags looking for it – convinced that I’ve lost it and feeling quite short of breath about this prospect. But it really is just for texting purposes – rarely do I make phone calls. And this suits me fine, as I am quite adept at texting.

The other day I was tap-tap-tapping away on the bus when a tourist with an enormous backpack, said to me in a foreign twang, ‘Are you texting?’ I nodded and he looked shocked, adding, ‘Gee, you are one fast texter.’

And I guess I am quite speedy, although I’m not going in for any world records any time soon. I’ve discovered there’s a Kiwi called Elliot Nicholls who can text a 160-character message blindfolded in 45 seconds. Nimble-fingered Elliot must be a hit with the ladies, for erm… being able to organise a date quickly and efficiently by text message.

So, back to the phone – as I said I use it mainly for texting and when it rings I often, quite bizarrely, feel very afraid. I hate not being able to hear what people are saying at the other end. It makes my face burn and go bright red, and I have the most amazing reflex that causes me to hit the hang-up button often mid-conversation.

Rude? Who cares!

But there is one person I never feel afraid about talking to, and that’s my friend The Writer. The first time I spoke to her, I hung up at the end, not in the middle, realising that I hadn’t said pardon for our whole conversation. She spoke so clearly and each word was enunciated so well that I completely forgot I was deaf.

When I saw her later that week, I told her how wonderful it was! That was when she confessed that as well as speaking the Queen’s English very clearly, she was also shouting very loudly.

So that means, whenever The Writer calls me, not only can I hear her, but the whole of the City of London can, too. You know what, she only works around the corner from me… perhaps we can get by without using the phone at all and just shout from our computers!

Read-along radio

My pa emailed me other day about a fantastic new thing that’s been invented in America…

Subtitled radio!

Hurrah, I can finally ‘listen’ to the Archers!

*Gasp, did I just say that out loud?

(Mental note to self… must stop acting so prematurely middle aged)

Apparently National Public Radio in America is piloting the use of subtitles on digital radios and it was reported on Radio 4’s You and Yours programme. With enthusiasm I went on to their website to find out more, except you can only listen to the programme online, there is no transcript! GAH!

Seriously though, subtitled radio could potentially be amazing, although I think it would have its drawbacks, too.

Just imagine, there I am, zooming up the M1 in my beautiful Peugeot, Boo, when a traffic report comes on. As the M1 is often a perpetual car park I read along with interest, forgetting somehow that I am in charge of a fast-moving vehicle. Then…

SMASH!

Ooops, there’s the traffic jam I just read about!

Okay, so maybe driving and subtitled radio are not the best combination, and I also wonder how much I would actually use it. I mean, the whole point of radio is that you switch it on and potter about, getting on with making coffee, or breakfast, or weeding the garden. How many people, not counting those in the pre-WW2 era, actually sit around the radio to listen to it?

Would it just be like TV but without the pictures?
I am going to remain optimistic and open-minded about the idea, and hope that when it does come out, they create a pink subtitled radio to go with my pink bionic ears… perhaps I should get pink glasses, too.

Can you hear a secret?

I have exciting news – except it’s a secret! But I am sure you will find out in a later blog… if you keep reading.

I’m not very good at hearing secrets, or keeping them sometimes either

*blush

If there’s gossip going around it always misses me. Those furtive, hushed whispers aren’t suited to my aurally-challenged self and so, I am often found floating around on a cloud of ignorance… or – as I prefer to call it – innocence!

I would LOVE to be one of those people who sit on the bus, not-so-subtly listening in to other people’s conversations. And it's not just on the bus, it’s happening everywhere you look. Take the other day, there we all were, sat in the park, discussing boys and topping up our tans and in the process, we were entertaining three nearby couples who were all blatantly listening in!

I think this lack of real-life gossip is why I enjoy reading chick lit so much. I once wrote to one of my favourite authors, Katie Fforde, to tell her I loved her writing. It’s because when I read her books, I feel totally included in the everyday goings on. I ‘hear’ all the conversations between the characters, even the whispers, and I always have the full picture, which is something of a rarity in real life.

She, rather wonderfully, wrote back and said that a deaf friend of hers once told her that people will always make the effort to tell a deaf person when a building is burning down, but will rarely ensure they have heard their secrets.

In reality, I have to be content in the knowledge that people do tell me the important things and, that I have the wonderful skill of lipreading. So while I couldn’t overhear the couple bickering at the bus stop next to me this morning, I could pretend to stare into the distance and lipread the people at the bus stop on the other side of the road.

I would tell you what they were saying – but I’m trying to be better at keeping secrets.

One tube mind...

I went on the tube yesterday – an every day occurrence for most – a rarity for me! I hate it you see. It’s hot, smelly and I never have a clue what’s going on especially when it stops for ages, in a tunnel, empty, except for some Greek tourists who don’t speak English. But that’s a whole other story.

Also on the tube, I can’t really hear much – so can't listen in on other people's conversations – and as a result I have developed a love of reading all the adverts that line the walls. Over the years I’ve read about impotency clinics and pregnancy vitamins, holidays for singles and ways to find romance – I thought I’d seen everything, until last night.

There I was reading away through instructions of what not to do on the tube: Don’t put feet on seats; Be considerate with your music; Don’t leave it until the last minute before trying to get out; Avoid pulling passengers between stations…

Huh!?…

At that point I burst out laughing, much to the disconcertion of the other passengers, and wild images of brief romantic trysts popped into my head (clothes were on – I’m not that filthy-minded!). Unable to believe my eyes I reread the sign again and was rather disappointed when I saw what it actually said:

Avoid pulling the passenger alarm between stations

I think I prefer the first interpretation myself.

Climb every... um indoor wall

Fab Friend and I went climbing at the weekend. She’s getting really rather good you know – she flits up the wall efficiently and sometimes rather effortlessly. I am best at coiling the rope… thanks to great tuition from ex-housemate’s boyfriend.

So anyway, I finally decided to lead a route, quite a long one but not a difficult grade, and set off grabbing green holds and hoping for the best. I was trying to project the same outward coolness that FF has, using an outside flank here, a drop knee there but it just wasn’t working… and two thirds of the route in, my feet and my hands started fighting each other. The hands would go up and the feet would drag me back down again and I was starting to wonder if I’d ever reach the top. *sniff

And this is where we realised how cool it is that we are both deaf. You see, hanging on a rope 20 metres up is normally quite an isolating experience but we could have a completely silent conversation and lipread each other with ease…even the swear words! (sorry Ma).
And so FF egged me on, told me not to give up and we were in fits of laughter at the randomness of it all, which really helped me complete the climb.

FF then tried a harder route and set off. It was all going swimmingly until she used a new sign to signal that I should pull the rope tight as she was going for a difficult move and couldn’t turn around to mouth it, except from where I was it looked she was asking me to give her move rope… so I let out loads…. whoopsee!

Bonuses of being deaf and climbing = long distance conversations

Downfalls = literally that… and um, getting dead!

Holiday...

ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-da
I have an unprecedented day off today because a wall is being knocked down in my office, and it's left me in a very good mood. In fact, if I knew the words I would be dancing around this internet cafe right now, hair bleached and backcombed, pixie boots on, doing that funny arm movement thing and singing Madonna's Holiday in my notably dulcet tones.

In fact, if everyone in this cafe knew what fate would befall them if I was hearing, I think they'd all be thanking their lucky stars that I am not. And today, I am too. And here's why...

I got to have a weekday lie-in without the rush hour traffic waking me up.

The children in the pool at my gym failed to annoy me with their whingey tones, caterwauling and general child-related noise even though it was blatantly obvious everyone else would have quite liked to drown them all.

I get to listen to my music as loud as I want when I get home because everyone in my block is at work. Ha-ha-haaa...

... and what's more, I get to sing MY words, too - without people thinking I have totally lost the plot.

The only thing I am sad about...

There is still no showing of SATC with subtitles... that I can find - if I am being dumb and there actually is one, that isn't in Ramsgate on a Tuesday afternoon at 4, please email me and let me know. You see, today is a perfect cinema day... the sun's not shining, it'd be nice and empty and I'd probably have my pick of the seats. *sniff...

Think I am going to go home and work my way through the box set instead, while eating the still-delicious flapjack from the other night.

Do you know the way to...

Last night I gave Nikki, who incidentally is Fab Friend’s sister, her second baking lesson. Having mastered the delights of lemon drizzle sponge cake and cupcakes with vanilla buttercream icing, we went down the oaty route and created flapjacks – my speciality – and oatcakes.

The flapjacks were an incredible success and are quite possibly responsible for the sugar high that I was still on at 4 o’clock this morning. The oatcakes were less of a success. The first batch, it has to be said, was absolutely revolting. We were so excited and took a massive bite and met each other with mirrored looks of disgust. Naturally, we had to get rid of the taste with a mouthful of flapjack.

Nikki, the eternal baking optimist embarked on the second batch. Not wanting the odd baked porridge taste of the last batch, we cooked them until they were dryer than the Sahara desert and harder than Grant from EastEnders, which rather bizarrely made them more palatable.

The third batch tasted delicious with Comte and chutney and, even though I had very little room, I soon polished off my share. Must go to gym today… although it’s been so long, I might have to ask directions.

And, while we’re on the subject of directions, I get asked them all the time. Which has pros and cons when you don’t hear very well. I was outside Liberty once when this group of painfully shy Japanese school boys came up to me and asked the way to… well that’s the problem – to this day I still have absolutely no idea where they wanted to go, not even an inkling! I tried so hard, but on the third go, they admitted defeat and despite my attempts to convey my deafness, they will probably return to Japan thinking English girls are rude.

Then, on my way back from lunch the other day this lady blocked my path with a rather pained look on her face. She was Russian, I discovered from the ancient dictionary she had in her hand. She pointed to the word Department Store and looked at me expectantly. I named all the famous ones, but not a flicker of recognition crossed her face. This went on, with her blurting out random English words that I couldn’t hear or understand and me trying to guess. After 10 minutes and a lot of thinking, I decided that she might need the toilet… and Bullseye that was it. But unable to say it in Russian, I decided it would just be easier to take her to the nearest one, which was 10 minutes away, and pray she wasn’t as desperate as she looked.

But, in a way, I rather like that people stop and ask me things and, even though I have trouble understanding, some of them are really interesting. The other day I met this elderly couple from Canada who were trying to get to Victoria Station and about to board a bus to Putney – I told them the correct way and we got chatting as I watched three of four of my buses sailed past but I really didn’t mind. And guess what, if I’m ever in the Lake Eerie area, I’ve now got a place to stay!

SATC obsession

Okay, okay, I know I’m starting to sound a bit like a broken record here but I REALLY want to see Sex & The City at the cinema and there are still no subtitled showings listed.

Despite the mixed reviews about it, ranging from utter crap with more product placements than Selfridges to ‘So amazing, *Sob*, I cried the whole way through!’ I feel the need to make up my own mind – and I want to do this with a life-sized Carrie staring back at me.

I love the cinema – squishing down in to those massive seats with the cup holders that no cups seem to fit in. I even love the smell of stale popcorn that lingers on from the last movie and the millions of adverts that you have to sit through before the movie starts.

The boy I was in love with, who took me for a crap in Hampstead (see Words aren’t all I have), understood my frustrated and unrequited affection for the cinema and tried his hardest to take me as often as possible. This one time we watched La Vie en Rose and, after four hours of seeing Edith Piaf lose the plot then finally die a hideous death, I was so traumatised I nearly passed out in China Town. He hadn’t quite got the grasp the Chick Flick genre being my favourite.

That said, he once took me on a surprise date to Streatham – the romantic capital of the capital – to watch a 1920s’ silent movie, which was brilliant. I think I fell in love with him on that date in spite of the fact we were the only people there who weren’t born in the 1920s and who had our own teeth.

When I can’t go to the cinema, it makes me very mad. About two years ago I went to the cinema for the first time in four years. My friend had triple-checked that the subtitled showing was happening and he bought me popcorn, nachos, a massive diet Coke and some pick & mix to make sure I had a real cinema experience. As we sat down and the movie started I was jigging with excitement. And then, nothing, no subtitles, just a bloody movie for hearing people. My gallant mate dashed off to complain and discovered that the man who knew how to work the machine was on holiday so there would be no subtitles.

Surrounded by my mountain of snacks I wanted to sit there and cry but my sniffing was disturbing the hearing people. So instead I wrote a letter complaining – I’m quite good at these, I once complained to Kettle Chips about their mango crisps not tasting of mango and they sent me a huge box of their mango crisps, which still didn’t taste of mango. The cinema people were equally crap and sent me enough free cinema tickets to last a hearing person a lifetime. Except, not being hearing and with a subtitled showing of a movie I want to see happening once every 4 years, I will probably be dead before I’ve even used half of them…

What a cheerful thought for the day…

Fire, fire!

This morning I started work early as I had stuff to do so I bought my breakfast from a local health food store near my office. A creature of habit, when I shop there, I always have an Innocent Smoothie and a delicious wholemeal roll – and this morning I was starving and really looking forward to it.

So, there I was queuing and about to pay when all of a sudden the shop got a bit smoky and people started putting their fingers in their ears. I tuned in to see if I could hear anything and could feel the vibrations of something very loud.

Being of moderate intelligence I put two and two together and decided that the fire alarm must be going off! Smart huh!?
Now, I’d always imagined that in smoky atmospheres with an alarm blaring, people would leg it pretty quickly. But no, people continued to stack shelves, with one finger in one ear, queue for food and attempt to buy coffee. So, seeing as there were no flames licking at my ankles and the alarm wasn’t causing me any aural discomfort, I decided to stay and pay for my breakfast.

By the time I had paid, there was moderate panic and the manager was herding people out the door, the pavement had been cordoned off and I half expected my old pals in their fire engine to turn up, too. Needless to say, I looked both ways before crossing the street.

I was going to go there for lunch but can’t be sure that it’s still standing. Think I will brave the M&S crush instead.

It's electrifying

Well, I had an eventful weekend involving a hedge trimmer! I went round to my aunt’s house and we decided to tackle her garden. While she was sorting weeds, I got started on her front hedge with much enthusiasm, as I have never used a hedge trimmer before!

Call me a boy but I love tools – not that I am very good at using them. I inherited my uncle’s drill and on the few outings it’s had, it ended up making the wall look like Swiss cheese as it bounced around with gusto with me, yelping, and attached to the other end. Needless to say I am also very handy with filler!

So there I was trimming away, hitting my aunt’s newly-replaced but antique railings and trying to pretend I wasn’t, when she said something so I looked up to hear her and sliced straight into the trimmer cable.

My first thought was ‘Argh – how much does one of these things cost?’ as I saw the gaping hole in the wire. My aunt’s first thought, bless her, was, ‘Arrrgh, you could have died!’

*Gulp

It still didn’t really sink in as I dashed to get the electrical tape and hoped and prayed it would work again…

Nothing…

Luckily however, my mother has given me some practical genes and so I raided the toolbox, found a fuse and replaced the one in the plug. And thankfully, the trimmer came back to life. Although I was relegated to cutting the rest of the hedge with a small pair of secateurs. After I had finished I did have a quick contemplative think over a beer and thanked my lucky stars. Also made a mental note not to lip read while holding potential killing machines.

It’s not the first time my hearing has got me into risky situations, as you have read before. Perhaps the worst one was when I was about 5 and my mum said ‘no’ and I thought she said ‘go’ when we were trying to cross a busy road.

I wish I could say the car came off worse but it, unlike me, didn’t land on its head…

…which maybe explains a lot about me now!

Put your hand on your heart…

Before I knew I was deaf and around about the age of 7, I discovered Kylie and one Christmas my mum and dad gave me her album and my grandparents bought me a shiny red walkman to play it on.

I was so excited and wore the first set of batteries down before Christmas Day was out – I wanted to be Kylie and my favourite song was Hand On Your Heart.

I vividly remember listening along and thinking that there were no real sentences and that pop stars just mumbled or inserted random words here and there that I could hear. To this day, song words have no meaning to me and I only like songs for the melody. Does this cleanse me of my Westlife-liking sins?

So, back to Kylie – I think it was because of her that I got my first inkling that all might not be well in my world of hearing. There I was, aged 7, stood on the rounders pitch at third post. With hindsight I realise now that because I couldn’t hear, I clearly had no clue what was going on and was very bored. So I started to sing Kylie, only with my words and it went something like this

Put your hands on your heart and shell me
You’re a clover
I won’t be in it til you
Put your hands on your heart and shell me
That you’re blue, oooh, waaa-aaa-aah-aah-aaah

At which point the nasty girls in my class fell about laughing.

*sniff

This trend carried on and to this day I still have no clue about the words to Summer Nights from Grease, although to be fair the words ‘Summer dreams drift out to sea’ are not a bad shot at the line ‘Summer dreams ripped at the seams’.

My ex-boyfriend/brilliant writer once wrote about lyrics he misheard and it was nice to know that someone else has a quirky take on things…
Perhaps the best one was Madonna’s Like a Virgin, which he thought went something like this, ‘Like a bird king, plucked for the very first time’.

If, for whatever random reason, I become a pop star, I will only concentrate on the melody, the words will be a rambling mix of whatever rhymes and goes with the rhythm and when the nasty girls from my class want to see me play at Wembley, I will turn them away!

I wish I may, I wish I might...

The sun was shining when I woke up this morning and as I floated to work on my little cloud of positivity, I started to wonder what I would wish to be different in my life right now.

As usual when I start thinking about things like this, I wonder if a genie came out of my bedside lamp, would I ask him for my hearing back… and actually I’m not sure I would.

You see, being deaf might be a right Royal pain in the posterior, but it’s kind of who I am, along with my blondeness and chatterbox tendencies.

If I wasn’t deaf, would I have worked so hard at school? Would I have done so well in my degree without all the fabulous angst I channelled into my writing? Would I appreciate the smaller things in life? In short, I believe the answer would be no.

Sure, deafness has its downfalls in that it gives you a sixth sense – body language becomes more like a neon sign, flashing above people so you instantly know when they’re lying, don’t like you or are in danger of falling in love with you – all things I don’t really like the look of…

But perhaps the biggest downfall of all is that I can’t go to the cinema with the same regularity of hearing people. Take last night for example… housemate went to see the new Sex & The City movie and I REALLY WANT TO SEE THAT FILM!

I have searched the Subtitled Cinema, the Odeon and Vue website and can’t find details of any showings at all – and it’s driving me crazy. I know that there will eventually be a showing somewhere, at 2pm on a Tuesday afternoon in Ramsgate but what’s the use of that, unless you’re a deaf old pensioner with a penchant for racy movies?

So tonight, I am going to go home and dust my bedside lamp in the hope that a genie will pop out and give me one wish…

And if he does, I will wish for hearing for 24 hours – so I can go and see Sex & the City with ease, listen to Sibelius’s violin concerto and hear the cadenza at the beginning, and go to Bird World and hear some birds sing. I may also try and have a phone conversation with an Irish person to see if it’s difficult for hearing people, too!

Yup, that’s my wish list for today.

Like a moth to a lightbulb

I never learn…

Have you ever sat and watched a moth bang its head repeatedly on bright lightbulb? Well, just sometimes that’s what I think I do with my hearing. I know I can’t hear in certain situations and yet I keep putting myself in them.
Why, oh why?

Pompey-Revision-And-Onion-Soup mate visited me the other week and I thought it would be wonderful to go and see Vivaldi by Candlelight at St Martin’s in the Fields. And it was… kind of. It was a special congratulations-on-your-new-job from me to her and luckily she loved it. And I loved that she loved it but after 20 minutes of near silence while two violins battled it out, I was contemplating poking my finger in my eye and swirling it around in my brain.

The seats were hard, with an overhang on the back so you couldn’t lean back – I guess because it’s a church and they don’t want you to get to comfy and fall asleep. Somehow I still managed to for a bit of the first half.

In the second half I realised that falling asleep was a tiny bit rude and my neck was starting to ache so I tried other ways to pass the time. Luckily, there was a double bass player playing quite a lot and as a bonus he was quite cute, so I focused on him… quite literally. I stared at him the whole time, watching his fingers fly up and down the fingerboard, pretending it was a double bass solo I was listening to, and it really helped. Although I think the poor chap thought I was some kind of lunatic for staring at him for a full 40 minutes and made quite a speedy exit at the end as if half expecting me to follow…

I guess I just love classical music so much that I forget I can’t hear it. One of my favourite ever pieces is a violin concerto by Sibelius… it’s quite exquisite in places but the first couple of minutes are almost completely silent for me as there’s a huge cadenza where all I can hear is the bow scraping on the strings.

I have a flute lesson once a fortnight now, to keep my fingers nimble and really do love it, most of the time – but last week I started banging my head against a hot lightbulb again and had to play pieces I couldn’t hear for the whole lesson. And, for the first time in ages it really upset me and, rather embarrassingly, I started to cry, big, fat silent tears, and being British I tried to keep on going. But trying to blow out while crying results in one big snotty mess and some rather interesting musical phrasing.

My flute teacher, bless him, finally noticed, shut the piano lid with a bang, handed me a tissue and left me to it before returning with a large glass of red wine and a promise of lower-pitched pieces.

It helped considerably and now, whenever I see a moth banging its head against a lightbulb I feel confident that I’ve learn my lesson for the time being and I’m not going to do it again for a while.

Mel's thought for the day

Well, I am back from my explorations of the fromage and forest, baguette and boulder variety and as well as waxing lyrical about the torrential downpours and the excellent standard of climbing, I can report one more very exciting thing! I got hit on the head by a tree… well a bit of a tree anyway.

You see, during one such lovely downpour, I was sheltering from the worst of it when mischievous ex-housemate’s boyfriend (the JAWS one) decided it would be hilarious to shake the tree so I got covered in water, which would have been OK, except when he did this the tree came with the water.

The rest is a bit of a blur, I vaguely heard exclamations but nothing of any clarity and then I saw a wide-eyed Mel backing away and saying something, which to me, through torrential rain-clouded eyes and a hood pulled down lower than Kenny from SouthPark lipread as 'whathkjdhkjghth!!!!'.

Then, THWACK, it hit me… and I lost a few more blonde cells, which is what probably caused me to think no more about it.

The next day in a different bit of forest, as we all sat munching on baguette and smelly Camembert, it became clear that Mel had not forgotten about it when she piped up ‘Okay listen to this, if a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, did it really happen?’ Familiar with this riddle, we all got ready to state our thoughts on this but then she added…

‘So, if a tree falls on Deafinitely Girly in a forest and she doesn’t hear it, did it really happen?’ And at that point I laughed so hard that baguette tried to come out of my nose – something I didn’t realise was biologically possible until then!

Luckily this time, I had lots of witnesses so it definitely happened… but next time I’m walking alone, in a forest and there are lots of tall trees around, I’m going to take a hard hat.

I’m taking a break…

…until Tuesday, and I probably will have a Kitkat – stuffed inside a bit of baguette – it’s absolutely delicious and could well be why I will always have a double-figures figure.

My online silence will be because I am going on holiday, and I am rather excited. But alas those with me will have anything but silence…

First there’s the car journey – I can’t really hear in cars so my fellow travelling companions are often subjected to my deaf tourette outbursts of things like, ‘I’m bored, are we nearly there yet?’ and ‘Look at that car/sheep/cute boy over there.’ Any intelligent conversation is out of the question so I have also baked a large batch of flapjack to keep my jaw busy.

We’re camping, and climbing boulders and I’m hoping I don’t fall off the latter…
Lipreading while hugging a gigantic rock and hoping you don’t fall bottom first into the person spotting you is quite difficult, but as I love climbing rocks, it’s a small price to pay. I will just listen before and after I climb and hope that I don’t need to hear anything crucial inbetween.

Camping is always an odd one for me as when it gets dark, I can’t hear. But this year, Tigger, my bouncy friend is going to be there and he’s come up with lots of ideas to help me – I love Tigger, he’s quite a clever thing. He’s bringing a lantern so I can hear in the dark! Hurrah! And, he’s going to make sure I know what’s going on – although I’m not sure how he’s going to tell the difference between my deaf gormlessness and my blonde gormlessness…

So, back to being excited… I really am– it’ll be fun – and an excellent way to get new material for Deafinitely Girly.

Love in the time of deafness

Today I am going to a wine tasting

*hic

So I thought I’d better update this before, not after, so I didn’t accidentally write a love confession to…
Actually, come to think of it, I think I am fairly safe on that front just now – there are no potential suitors in my midst.

But just thinking about it has got me reminiscing about my first crush… and do you know – I can thank my deafness for meeting him. Although at the time no one knew and I think he liked me as I came across as something of a rebel.

You see I was always in trouble when I was at school, in the days Before Hearing Loss Was Discovered (BHLWD)… and in the days after come to think of it.

At my first school I had this draconian teacher who wouldn’t explain what she had just said when I told her I didn’t understand. She scared me witless, so much so that I actually rubbed a hole in my maths book as I got a sum wrong so many times. And, at 6 years old, I thought rubbing a hole in my maths book was a cardinal sin. I nearly cried on parents’ evening as I thought my mum might shout at me. She did shout, but at the teacher for being so evil. However, it still got me lunch detention for a week…

After two years of seeing very little of the outside of my school and lots of time practising lines on the blackboard, I moved up to the big school – it was louder and therefore had lots more potential for me to get into trouble.

Bollockings became a regular occurence. Usually a teacher had said, ‘Quiet’ and I hadn’t heard them so carried on nattering – something I am very good at. I would then be hauled across the room and banned from break, or put on changing room duty. The former punishment saw me standing outside the staff room for most of the term’s break times – but it was OK as the headmaster’s wife took pity on me and gave me the pick of the best conkers. The latter, involved tidying up the girls’ changing rooms – a mass of jolly hockey sticks and mud.

One time I got told off in the lunch hall in front of the whole school and I was mortified. The whole school gawped at me, the brand new junior with blonde pigtails jutting out at mad angles (my dad had done my hair that day… I looked like a hybrid Pippy Longstocking) being shouted at public-school style by a very tall teacher. Placed in the corner facing the wall as the rest of the green-clad clones filed out I began to cry… the kind of snivelling you do when you don’t want anyone to know you’re crying but they can tell as your shoulders are shaking and there lots of snot.

I felt a gentle tap on my shoulder and there was the cutest boy in the year above and he handed me his hankerchief and told me he’d sort some of his friends to do my changing room duty. And I fell in love! I guess being naughty was an attractive trait to 11-year-old boys and he took a shine to me – and until I left that school I had a protector. Wonder what he’s like now…

I am not alone!

My mum, it seems, is joining me in the land of ‘What, what? Huh, huh?’
She was at a meeting last night when her boss announced the new furniture colours in the school library.

‘Leek and carrot?’ she exclaimed… probably losing her volume control like me and announcing it town-crier style.
And with that, 10 pairs of senior management eyes were upon her… as she visualised lurid green and orange leather sofas.

‘Ink and claret,’ her boss responded.

Apparently there was a wonderfully awkward silence and then my mum started to laugh, which often becomes a choke and soon turns into a sneeze if you’re my mum! Most strange!

Anyway, a good three hours later when I spoke to her, she was still laughing, choking and sneezing, so much so that I misheard her and didn’t even get the gist of what on earth she was talking about for a good five minutes!
But it was lovely to see her laughing about it. Especially as not being able to hear so well is something new to her.

I sometimes feel very grateful that I won’t have to encounter the stress of losing my hearing as I get older (Ma I am not saying you are old). At least by the time I reach old age I will have had a whole lifetime to get used to it and who knows, medicine may have advanced so much that I could have bionic ears by then. What a thought…

I wonder if they would make pink ones…

Back in the days…

Speaking to Jen, an old friend, last night, she reminded me of the days when I just started going very deaf. One of the most noticeable things was not being able to hear in the car anymore, that and not being able to decipher my beloved Secret Seven story tapes. (I really was very geeky in those days)

Anyway, one summer she came on holiday with my family to Dartmoor and, after the excruciatingly long journey of me not understanding anything, my father renamed me ‘What, what? Huh Huh!?’. Thankfully it hasn’t stuck, although a whole host of other nicknames have… guesses on a postcard please!

Jen was, and still is brilliant about being my ears – not only did she help me lots that holiday but she also used to teach me the words to pop songs with her own form of sign language – and, 14 years on, I still smile secretly to myself when I Swear by All-4-One comes on the radio as I remember Jen gesticulating wildly to illustrate moon, stars and sun!

She also came with me to a Hearing Fair not long after my hearing loss was discovered aged 10 and officially outed me! There was lots of equipment on display for me to look at and wonder if I needed and I think I resisted everything that day in a fit of tantrum and independence! Oh what a fun child I must have been.

The truth was I really didn’t care about my deafness – it was just how the world was, and always had been. I didn’t know what I was missing and saw my new disabled status as more of a mislabelled status.

Anyway, Jen and I looked like twins in those days and everyone assumed that we were both deaf – and, by the end of the day she was starting to get a bit sick of PEOOPLE SPEEEE-AAAKKIIING TOOO HEEEE-ER SLLLOOOO-WWWERLY and eventually she lost it and snapped, ‘I’m not the deaf one, she is!’ It opened my mouth to point out that I wasn’t deaf, but then remembered that I was… dammit!

And that was it, my coming out party, at a hearing fair in Birmingham!

Friday rant!

Straight to the point today…
I am very mad with my insurance company!

For the fourth year running I had the following phone conversation with them…

‘Hello’
‘Oh hello, I’m calling from your insurance company as your policy is up soon. Would you like to renew?’
Except I hear ‘Psg dkfjh kdsnk nkgnskdfdn gkjdkj kkjbkjdb kjbf renew?’
‘I’m deaf,’ I say. ‘and I’ve been telling you this every year you’ve called me for the last four years!’ My voice is normally quite shrill by this point as I ask them to email me and hang up. It was, with hindsight, dumb to let them have my mobile number – but the enquiry form wouldn’t send without it. Next time, I’m going to make one up.

Anyway…

Two days later – ‘Hello there… this is…’

and I hang up.

The next week, Boss answered my work phone with its strobe flasher when I was in the kitchen making tea. ‘Your insurance company rang,’ she said.
‘Arrrgh,’ I replied.

She’s used to this now – having been privy to two years of it so far.

Finally, after six ignored calls, two hang-ups and a very rude word… I reached the end of my tether and asked my mum to ring them. Except they didn’t want to talk to her because she’s not me. After some polite, gentle persuasion (I love my mum), she got them to renew my policy and they had almost redeemed and removed themselves from the top of my idiot pile.

Thoughtful mum ended the call by asking for an email address so that I could get in touch with them if I needed to. The guy gave her three phone numbers. Politely, but firmly, she reminded him that I couldn’t use the phone, which was why he was speaking to her and so he gave her another phone number.

By this point I had gone a puce colour and the steam from my ears was causing the paint to peel from the walls…

Hoping that the third time would be lucky, my mum tried again and he disappeared from the line for 10 minutes presumably to find his brain, which clearly wasn’t in his head and came back with an email address…

He’s called Kevin and I hope that I won’t have any need to email him as I feel the sort of affection for him that one reserves for giant sea slugs – but I’m sure his delightful, unintelligible voice will grace my voicemail next year…

I’ll keep you updated.

Deafness made me drunk!

A few years ago, I went to visit my friend in Birmingham for a night out with another uni mate. It was a very civilised affair – we had dinner in her lovely Jewellery-Quarter flat and a few glasses of wine. And then we hit the town…

Less than an hour later I was sat on the floor in a bar, vandalising a plant by pulling it’s leaves off, and generally being a deliquent, which for those of you who know me will know is quite out of character (honestly!!). Of that night, I remember little else…

The next morning I woke up, head crashing and convinced I’d done something terrible. With shaking hands, I checked my phone. No drunken texts to Boy-Who-Did-My-Head-In-But-Who-I-Still-Liked (I’m over him now), which was a relief. But, sat on a sofa, with my relatively unhungover friends, feeling like death, it lead me to question just why I had got drunk so much more quickly than them.

After much deliberation, it was Clever Katie who came up with the reason, apart from lack of self control, as to why I had gotten inebriated that night and guess what!?
I can blame it on my deafness!

You see, in the quietness of a living room I never get steaming drunk ahead of everyone else and, unless there is red wine around – which sets me off on the successful path to talking rubbish – I am the model of good behaviour.

But, once outside in the loud world of nightclubs and bars, I can’t hear anything so therefore I am often left stood there, nodding and smiling away pretending that I am following things, when in fact I am not. Bored and in need of something to do that makes me look less like the nodding Churchill Dog, I drink my drink. And, hey presto, I am on my fast-track journey to Pissedville.

And, so armed with this knowledge, I have spent the last two years trying to find other things to do in clubs, other than suck through a straw, when I can’t hear… it’s been a rocky journey of accidental kisses, dancing on tables and falling downstairs (actually it was Nikki that did that) – but the good news is, not all of this is done in the first half hour anymore and I remember nights out. Who would have thought that it was deafness getting me so steaming drunk in the olden days… naughty deafness – does that atone my behaviour at my Grandmother’s 80th birthday I wonder?

You know what the best news of all is though? I haven’t demolished any pot plants since either. Soil under the fingers nails is not a good look!

I’m not facetious… really!

I was eating dinner last night with Friend-Who-Knows-Big-Words when she reminded me of the time my hearing had her rolling around the floor with laughter… and me blacklisted from Tesco canteen forever more!

The Tesco canteen was the perfect venue for our A-level revision – skanky, sticky and rammed with junk food! We used to sit in there for hours discussing Charles II or the ‘merits’ of Mansfield Park – usually with me mumbling under my breath that Jane Austen should have been strangled at birth. (I’ve grown up a lot since then)

One day we arrived there, in my car (possibly the same day I nearly fractured Helena’s skull), all badly in need of coffee before our exams started for the day. The canteen was loud – machines buzzed, broad accents cut through the air and the sea of perms was making my head spin. I needed caffeine and I needed it now!

Suddenly, from behind the counter appeared a fierce looking woman, hair set solid, features to match and said, ‘Are you waiting for coffee?’ Except, I didn’t hear her over the rabble and gabble of OAPs so I just guessed and said, ‘No! I’m waiting for coffee.’ And, it was at this moment that I lost my volume control and accidentally bellowed it.

Thirty perms turned and stared at me, even the coffee machine seemed to slow to a hush and then I heard manic spluttering from in front of me as Hannah appeared to be fitting, frantically stuffing the sleeve of her jumper into her mouth.

The woman looked at me as if I was something nasty that had crawled out from under a stone and promptly served the person behind me. With no idea what I’d said wrong, I was ushered through the queue like a leper, my friends trying to keep the hysterical bouts of laughter from escaping, making them sound like manic kittens.

‘What did I do wrong?’ I asked as we sat down with our mineral waters – I’d unwittingly ruined our chance for caffeine…
‘Shite,’ was my response when I found out.

Another accidental smart-Alec moment came when I was temping in an office that was relocating. The boss was packing up and extremely stressed. ‘Could you get me a bowl,’ I thought he asked. So off I tottered in search of a bowl, which was quite difficult in a half-empty office block. After much searching I returned with a battered plastic flower pot in my hand, quite proud of my find and presented it to him.
‘Very clever,’ he said putting it down on the side and stalked off.
I stood there a while wondering what the hell I’d done wrong when the office angel sidled up to me and hissed, ‘What the hell was that? He asked you for a bulb, for a light – not a flower pot.’
He’d obviously been quicker than me…

Light – bulb – flower pot…

Gettit?

The art of walking... revised

Hahahahaha!

Ahem, sorry – I am still chuckling to myself after my antics with Fab Friend at the climbing wall last night. I encountered one of the most common pitfalls connected to being deaf – trying to lipread AND walk, and stumbled straight into a bent-over man’s bottom.

Fab Friend and I dissolved into fits of giggles much to the man’s bemusement and it seemed too difficult to explain quite why I hadn’t seen his hulk of a torso in my path… but I honestly didn’t because I was looking backwards hearing something FF was saying about a cute boy around the corner.

Walking into things when you’re deaf is something of an occupational hazard. I have honestly walked into more lampposts/walls/people/cars than I’ve walked around.

I do try and look where I’m going, but if I put more effort into that, then I can’t chat and I really do like chatting.
One time, on a school trip to the ballet I walked into a lamppost with such ferocity that I honestly thought I’d managed to reverse the direction of my nose.

But, when things like this happen to me, and I can feel the burning eyes and guess that bystanders are sniggering, I console myself that hearing people walk into things, too.

Perhaps the best one I’ve ever witnessed was at Notting Hill Carnival – cool people, cool music and lots of TV cameras. There was one filming on Westbourne Park Road and the two people ahead of me spotted it and started to try and walk cooler, look cooler, dance cooler but actually looked like total dicks.

This was amusing enough until one of them, putting all his effort into coolness, failed to notice a massive lamppost – wider than average and festooned with streamers and balloons, I have no idea how he managed it. But he hit it, front on and bounced of it with the ease of a bouncy ball and the finesse of a newborn foal.

The camera captured it all, including my beaming face – not happy about his misfortune, but happy that for once it wasn’t me!

Me and my hearing aids

I own hearing aids but I am not a hearing aid wearer – if the NHS ordered me some pink hearing aids, I might possibly become a hearing aid wearer… they’d match my phone then…

Is that shallow? Who cares!

My hearing aids currently sit in a box by my bed and rarely come out of it – sure sometimes I wear them for the novelty factor, for when I want people to look at me, see them and look away really quickly… or for when I’m having an EDD (Extra-Deaf Day) after a particularly loud night out with housemate.

Although my most recent pair are more tolerable, one of the reasons I hate wearing my hearing aids so much is they make everything so loud – so loud in
fact that I fall over! But then, even without my hearing aids, certain things still make me fall over!

I first discovered my knack of falling over to loud noises when I was in a nightclub during Freshers’ week – it was of those fabulous 90s places with fabric flames that billowed unrealistically and lashings of Woody’s and WKD…

It also had podiums, which were situated on top of giant speakers – and it was these speakers that were my downfall literally! There I was slinking along in my giant flares and platform trainers (so, so cool) when suddenly, as I walked past the speaker, music thumping, I found myself flat on the floor… looking like a complete idiot… and I learnt something

Loud music + me = no balance

That learnt, I moved on and was quite happy knowing that should a fighter jet fly over, a police van (I can hear those klaxon-sounding sirens) or a big motorbike come flying past, I should brace myself like that scene in Mary Poppins, where everyone holds on to bits of the house – only in my case, I hold a lamppost, person, my brains and occasionally if I am not quick enough, the floor! Oh the shame!

And then, I got new hearing aids – with promise of being able to watch TV without subtitles and birds singing – the latter I was really excited about as I have never heard a bird sing…
However, my hearing aids were so loud that, on coming out of the clinic, a bus went past and I fell over…

Trying to give them a chance I went to the park to hear birds… and a police car went by and I fell over. So I went home and tried to listen to the TV but I had to have it on so quietly, because my hearing aids made it so loud, that even housemate would have struggled to understand what Paul Robinson was saying.

So I put them in the box and accepted that life has pros and cons – the pros of being hearing-aidless by far outweight the cons…

I fall over less, I fall over less, and um… I fall over less.

Please leave a message after the foghorn

If you are ever unlucky enough to hear an answer phone message left by me, it will go something like this…
‘Er… dammit, can’t hear the beep – has the beep happened? Er… Hello, this is Mo-‘

And that’s as far as I get before the time limit cuts me off…

Why are beeps so high on answer phones?

Come to think of it where the heck did the idea of beeps come from in the first place?
Why not a big, low booming foghorn? When I lived in Pompey, I could always hear the ships honking away as I lay in bed at night and if everything that beeped honked instead my life would be so much easier.

The beeps that I can’t hear fall in to two categories – those which are helpful to people, and those that stop people getting dead…

The ones in the helpful category, I find mildly inconvenient – like the time I got distracted watching the Neighbours Omnibus and let my flapjack bake for two hours because I couldn’t hear the oven timer (mental note to self to get Miele to design a vibrating oven).

Then, there are the beeps that signal that tube doors are closing. I don’t like tubes at the best of times but I have this amazingly dumb habit of sticking my head into or out of the doors just as they close and… BANG… that’s another few brain cells gone! What’s worse is the looks of pity that people give me, as if I’m some idiot who ignored the beeps. ‘I DIDN’T HEAR THEM!’ I want to shout, nursing my sore bonse and going bright red with embarrassment.
But I don’t, I just sit there and ignore everyone, like everyone does on the tube.

Now, onto the dead ones. These include Level Crossing alarms on train tracks – I really cannot hear these and living in the sticks growing up, there were quite a few. One time, when I was skiving off RE and going to the pub I almost got hit by a train – I looked both ways and stepped out to hear a ROOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR
PAAAARRRRRRRRRP!!!! (at least the horns are those wonderful low booming noises).

Head-girl-and-best-friend saved my life – she grabbed my rucksack and pulled me backwards.

I bought her some chips and mayonnaise in the pub to say thanks…

…generous as I am!

I'm going a Deaf/Blind date

Right now, I’m sat at work waiting to go on a date… a blind date!
Why why why and HOW do I get myself into these situations? that is really what I would like to know.
The positive side of me is speaking up in soft tones akin to an earth mother wafting incense around a mud hut and saying that it’s good to broaden my horizons, meet new people and blah blah blah – actually right now I can’t be bothered to listen to her so I’m pretending I can’t hear her – a handy deaf trick.

Now, I could start my millions of reasons why I hate first and blind dates so much with a deaf-related reason – but actually there’s a far simpler reason that is top of my list, lit in neon and filling me with dread.
I hate waiting in the bar for the guy to turn up and then trying to say hello…

It’s a near impossible task for me. For starters, when I am nervous I go blind to faces, I doubt I could recognise my own mother, so I am usually frantically scanning the bar wondering if that’s him… or maybe it’s him (and sometimes even) Oh no, that’s actually a girl!

Another thing I do when I am nervous is forget to breathe – so by the time they have showed up, I’m normally seeing stars, have pins and needles in my hands and am about to keel over – this does not go hand in hand with eloquent conversation so I normally greet them with, ‘Helllurgh…’ start shaking and take a huge gulp of air.

Ironically, the thing I mind least is telling them that I can’t hear – they normally go a bit crazed at first and the one who I fell asleep in a bar listening too actually guffawed like a country gent and exclaimed, ‘Golly! Don’t you do marvellously!’ Bit of an odd reaction but it’s a wonderful way of showing how someone works up there… and it gives you a great insight into whether you could actually like them.

One guy was so unbelievably sweet about it I could have married him on the spot and one time a guy acted like I had told him something about the weather – it just went in one ear and out the other, speeding through the door – with me close behind.

But back to tonight’s date – I wonder when I will tell him or if I will even tell him at all – I didn’t tell one guy once and he just thought I was blonde and pissed!
Tonight I plan to tell him, and be blonde and pissed, too.

Air on a D-eaf String

When I was 6 years old, I announced I wanted to be a concert violinist, hoicked my mum’s guitar under my chin and tried to play it with a pencil!
After much begging, I got the real thing and it really did sound like a cat being strangled under water – but it was okay because I was going to be a world-famous violinist so I had to improve… right?

But then, bugger it, I found out I was going deaf and the violin gradually faded from my grasp. I so wanted to be a female version of Nigel Kennedy (but with better hair), and it used to make me very mad – one time so mad I actually headbutted my violin and ended up in casualty. I had quite a temper in those days!

So then I thought I would beat my hearing at its own game and took up the viola, which is one clef lower, but I was soon outwitted and after a time could once again only hear the bow scraping on the strings.

Then, one day in a fit of defiance I spotted a double bass languishing in the corner of our music room at school. ‘I’ll play that,’ I thought to myself and soon enough I was having a weekly lesson with Big Bird from Sesame Street – she really did look and sound like her, so much so that I have totally forgotten her real name.

I loved the double bass, it spat and heaved out great big throaty notes and was by far the loudest instrument in our feeble flute- and ego-heavy orchestra.
Just my cup of tea. Until one day I came in for my weekly lesson to find my double bass was gone… poof! Just like that… it had vanished into thin air. Well, not quite thin air, someone had nicked it. Not the double bass case, or the bow, just the bass!!!!

On reporting it to the police in the sleepy little town I lived in, the plod behind the counter said, ‘Oooh yars, I do believe we had a drunken sod in last night saying he’d seen a man running across a field with a giant cello. Thought he was just pissed to be honest, dear.’ And that was the end of that!

Anyone got a tuba I could borrow?

Apres ski

Sat on the bus last night, in my own quiet world minus the guy who kept moaning in a very disturbing way (did I mention I can hear low noises), I got reminiscing about my car.
Jennifer was my only lesbian crush – and I think as she was a green Mini – it doesn’t really count. She was everything I could wish for in a car and came into my life when I was 16 and couldn’t even drive.
My friend Jenny and I used to sit in her where she was parked outside my house and listen to Roxette on the very shonky cassette recorder.
Now, Minis are perfectly suited to not being able to hear very well, because they are so loud that your passengers can’t hear very well either, so we were all in the same boat. My Mini was also very good at making extremely loud noises when something was about to go wrong. I think everyone within a five-mile radius knew when her exhaust had fallen off.
I had her for 10 years and during that time she saw more than her fair share of dramas, break-ups and general girly gossip. She learnt to fly over cattle grids at break neck speeds, park on pavements and even coped when some ridiculously stupid chav from Pompey reversed into her. When she died, from a head injury, I was broken hearted.
Now I have a quiet purring Peugeot called Boo, which I love and that I can hear surprisingly well in – but I still look back at my years in Jennifer the Mini fondly.
There was the time I nearly fractured Helena’s skull going over a speed bump in Tesco car park – she was sat in the middle of the back seat so I could lip read her in the rear view mirror and I approached the speed bump with such gusto that she took off vertically into the motor for my electric sunroof.
Then there was the time I was driving to school with my friend Kate, discussing our forthcoming skiing trip. ‘Of course you don’t need one,’ I said in answer to her question. ‘But my parents would really like me to have one,’ she replied.
Incredulously I looked at her and said, ‘Why on earth do your parents want you to take a cocktail dress skiing?’
There was a roll of eyes as I pulled into the car park at school, and a pause as I yanked the handbrake up. Then, Kate looked at me and said, ‘Cocktail dress? What are you on about? I said contact address!’
For embarrassment’s sake, I took my fist cocktail dress skiing that year!

Life gets cheaper every day

As you know, I saw Fab-Friend-Who-Actually-Wears-Her-Hearing-Aids last night and, after reading yesterday’s rant, she reminded me positively of all the great things about being deaf…

We can sleep through practically anything – except 5-year-old boys playing Spiderman at 7am on a Saturday morning and bin men, who from the noise they make outside my flat, also appear to be playing Spiderman…
We can ignore people without them thinking we’re rude – so when you spot the ex-boyfriend across the street, it’s fine to walk on by oblivious to his calls of ‘I still love you, you know!’ Fab friend and I always find that boys shout this after us.

But here’s the best bit…

Life Costs Less

I’m not kidding, it really does. We get free local travel, discounted national rail travel and as I discovered last night, even climbing is cheaper!
As we were paying I noticed that Fab Friend’s bill came to quite a lot less than mine and as this had happened before I asked the till man why.
He looked up Fab Friend’s details and said, rather confused, ‘Eet says sheee ees dis-abled.’ Being deaf is not the most obvious disability so people don’t really believe us a lot of the time.

‘But I am too,’ I exclaimed with glee. ‘Can I have a discount as well?’
I could feel him eyeing me somewhat warily so I jumped to action and pulled out all the proof I could find – much to Fab Friend’s amusement.

There was my free travel card, my disabled rail card and here’s the best one, which I’d totally forgotten about, my Sympathetic Hearing Card!
I think this was the clincher as one look at that and he was tapping away faster than you can say disability discrimination and BOOM, as if by magic, climbing now costs less.

I love my Sympathetic Hearing Card – it’s more kitsch than a 70s lampshade and Afghan coat with it’s off-white appearance and retro imagery – goodness knows which ignorant beige-wearing person thought up the design but it’s function is actually quite vital. Say I had got run over by that fire engine – the cute boys in uniform could have checked my wallet and realised I was deaf and not stupid. But err…

probably dead.

Deaf rage

Something very odd happens to me when I discover non-accessible services for deaf people – my face gets very hot and turns bright red – the colour of Santa’s trousers, my ears start to burn and I feel a surging wall of rage coming from the ends of my toes.
It then travels my body and comes out of my mouth usually in a fairly eloquent but not polite rant…
Ooooh it makes me so cross!

Take the time I emailed my local council about getting a permit renewed – I sent them a polite note about how I couldn’t hear and as there was only an information phone line could they please help me. So they did, by sending me the telephone number I needed to call.

Now, bearing in mind this was a disability permit that I was applying for I was fairly astonished at this response and so, as a result sent a curt email back…
Two weeks later, I chased it up again only to be told it had been referred to the correct person…
two weeks later, NOTHING!
So I chased the right person and still nothing!

And so today I reached boiling point, I stamped up and down the office, doing my work while silently fuming at the dumbness of some people – and then I emailed housemate – who for future reference and accolades has a fabulous pair of ears that work and so helps me often – and she called them.

And, in two seconds flat the problem was sorted, the form was in the post and all was calm – except me! I am still fuming, trying to find a vent for all this pent-up anger and frustration that doesn’t involve chocolate and weight gain.

Yoga? Tried that and not surprisingly from the position of the downward dog, I was quite unable to lip read anything except housemate’s obvious suffocation expressions due to the farting woman in front of her.

Deep breathing? Does this make anyone else feel dizzy?

So, instead I’ve booked a climbing session with fab friend who actually wears her hearing aids and I’m going to hum and climb. It really is quite relaxing – last week I hummed Amy Winehouse as I went.
This week, while working out just how to complain to my local council, I’m going to be humming The Bitch Is Back.

It's official... I'm a shoplifter

Well, not really but I did set all the alarms off in ASDA the other day as I walked out with a DVD player in my arms – all paid for but not detagged.
Housemate was very good about it – and had it not been for her, I think I would have been swiftly rugby tackled by the burly-looking security guard who was, as I was striding out towards my car, chasing me with much enthusiasm.

But it got me thinking about the fact that I can’t hear shop alarms, about how many other warning signs I don’t hear and what trouble it has, and could, get me into.

Take last Friday afternoon, there I was striding down Oxford Street when I spied the green man flashing (he doesn’t beep for me) and began to cross the road.
Sure, I did wonder why other people were just stood there, not crossing, but I just assumed they were of the tourist breed that stops randomly in the middle of the pavement for no apparent reason.

Alas, this was not the case and I was all of a sudden faced head-on by a big, red fire engine, lights flashing and, now I was within centimetres of it, siren definitely on.

Not wanting a vehicle full of rather good-looking and uniformed men think I was a total idiot I tried to sign sorry at them so they would realise I was deaf – except in my panic I signed thank you instead – and they all stared at me as if I had totally lost the plot.

Then, there was my old alarm clock – it was one of those massive tick-tock tick-tock clocks with the two bells and the hammer. I remember a time when I could hear it well enough to wake up but then, one day all of a sudden, it was waking up everyone in my uni halls of residence except me.

So now, everything I have that beeps, vibrates – from my mobile and alarm clock, to my phone at work and the fire alarm there – problem is there’s so much vibration going on that sometimes I’m not sure which one is going off!

I wonder if there’s an inventor out there who could make a nice vibrating fire…


engine.

Me and my volume

When I tell people that I’m deaf, one of the first things they usually ask me, after can I hear their voice, is can I hear my own.

And, the answer is Yes, I can. But one thing I do struggle with is my volume control – housemate was the first person to tell me I have a wonderful skill of shouting in quiet places and whispering in loud ones! I have no idea why I do this, but she is absolutely right you know…

Take the time I was on a train from London back to my house at uni in a packed train. It was hot and stuffy and my boyfriend at the time was doing his best to keep me amused – he was a quick learner, so had brought a Take A Break Arrow Word book with him.

So there we were, chug chugging along when I suddenly announced to him, ‘I am so fucking (sorry mum) bored!’ Except I didn’t just announce it to him – I announced it to the whole carriage and probably to the whole of the South East.

His face was a complete picture and it made me laugh so much that tea came out of my nose and smudged my down clue on the Arrow Word I was doing…
He diagnosed me with deaf tourettes that day and it’s been that way ever since.

The other day I was watching Jaws in the early hours of the morning, for possibly the first time – it was old housemate’s favourite movie, she loved the book, too. So much so that she used to hide it in the shed so that she couldn’t read it anymore.

Anyway, so there I was watching Jaws for the first time, a bit spooked to be honest – I don’t do scary movies very well. Remember that scene where they’re hunting the poor fishy and he pops out the water and says hello, well I screamed, a very me scream – a town-crier proud scream – so loud in fact that other-old housemate’s boyfriend (who I was visiting at the time) shouted ‘Bloody ‘ell and Flamin’ Nora’ at the top of his voice too, and we woke up an entire row of terraces.

Now, for old housemate’s boyfriend to have been disturbed, it must have been quite a scream, even though I didn’t hear it – screaming is out of my frequency…
Once he challenged me by a loch in Scotland to shout as loudly as I could – I competed against the boys and won. And, I was the only one who didn’t suffer ear damage as a result.

I could probably fill this blog for days with details of all the noise I’ve made, but what really disturbs me is that I can shout in sign language, too. It’s quite alarming but my face gurns wildly, my hands flail about and I literally let rip…

So this got me thinking, if I ‘shout’ in both languages, perhaps if I wasn’t deaf I would still be noisy.
Perhaps I would still whisper in pubs and shout swear words in front of little old ladies on trains…
And for once, it’s quite nice to find something I can’t outright blame on my deafness!

I'm green... honest

Apart from saving the environment and blah blah blah, there’s another good thing that’s going to come out of the increasingly common trend of not giving carrier bags to shoppers. I won’t look like a total idiot!

Here’s what usually happens…
I go into a shop, queue up, buy my stuff and just as I look down to fish my change out of my wallet, the shop assistant whispers so only people who can hear, hear, ‘Would you like a bag?’
Well, that’s what I think happens, and I can usually tell if it has because when I look up I am faced by them staring at me intently waiting for my apparently imminent response.
So usually flail about hopelessly acting as though they have asked me to find the square root of 67,987 and mumble yes, hope for the best. Now, back in the old days before chip ’n’ pin and would you like a storecard/cashback/extra gift for just £1 this used to work.
But today there’s a whole new host of questions coming my way and it can be a struggle to juggle them and guess their order.
Which brings me to my recent visit to Top Shop. There I was trying to look cool as sometimes I think I am bit old for this place, paying for my T-shirt when I predicted that the tweenie, traintracked, size -0 shop assistant asked me if I wanted a store card. So I said no. She repeated the question, which I didn’t hear and again I said no.
Very slowly, she raised her head to look at me, bug-eyed with malnourished over-straightened hair and repeated herself as if talking to a confused elderly lady.
‘E-n-t-e-r y-o-u-r p-i-n. ’

So now I don’t say anything… I pay by cash, I carry a lifetime’s supply of canvas bags (which makes me feel quite ecologically smug) and I never ever, ever answer questions.

Words aren't all I have

Anyone who knows me will know that I love words – I work with them all day, preening them, honing them, bashing sentences into shape and removing unnecessary punctuation and tutting at misplaced commas.

As a teenager when I was going deafer, it occurred to me that some of my peers, (mentioning no names, Hannah) were using quite humungously-massive words in their 32-page politics essays that I had never heard of. And it got me thinking about why I didn’t know any of these words – and then I realised I hadn’t heard them.

It’s always fairly obvious if there’s a word that I don’t hear very well as I rarely use it – and when I do it’s more of a mumble, often with the beginning and end letters in place but not much else.

This has been the case since I was very little. I couldn’t lipread ‘S’ – it’s an invi’ible letter to the eye. So I used to ask for ’au’age’ and math for tea and my favourite teddy was called ’inging bear. My marvellous mum sat with my religiously going over the letter ‘s’ (she didn’t know I was deaf at the time – I wasn’t keeping a secret or anything – I didn’t know either) and eventually I got it – although until the age of 10 it had a big fat ‘th’ in the middle of it. So I was saying Thinging Bear and Thathaguh.

As I got older it was words like schizophrenic – goodness knows why I wanted to know how to say that word, but anyway I did. But I couldn’t!
It’s such a hard one to lipread so instead it used to come out as skitzopreenic! Or sometimes scitzophrmhmrph.
So once again I sat with my mum going over it syllable by syllable as though it was the hardest word in the English language – but I cracked it and I can say it – and now I am just waiting for my chance to use it!

With my last boyfriend, who was fluent in French, I used to be afraid of saying crepe and Comte – the former sounding very much like crap, the latter sounding like Crumphe. One time we went for a picnic on Hampstead Heath and he took me for a crap and fed me Crumphe. Needless to say, we broke up.

When I watch TV I am completely unable to distinguish one word from the next – but for some reason I seem to forget this and just act like I can hear what the heck is going on. No more so than on a recent flight from Istanbul to London. There I was watching You, Me and Dupree laughing along with everyone else at the crappy antics of the blonde scarecrow-y looking man when all of a sudden housemate said to me, ‘Why are you watching it with your headphones switched to Channel 10?’ I looked at her and replied, ‘because that’s what channel it’s on…’
‘Yes, in French!’ was her response!

Zut alors!

Deaf kisses

When I was 17 years old, I was quite bad tempered. I used to scream, shout and slam doors and generally behave in a common end-of-teenage-years manner. I also used to forget to wear my hearing aids.

So, on one visit to my lovely audiologist for a two-hour long painfully difficult, boring and tear-inducing hearing test I kind of lost it and the world of bad teenage behaviour and deafness merged.

This resulted in a weekly session with a hearing therapist, which pleased me as it also meant time off school.

My hearing therapist was stark raving mad… bonkers and in fact bonking – behind her husband’s back. And, as I didn’t really have any issues with being deaf, it was this that we spoke about. Her bonkers bonking! Isn’t bonking a fabulously 90’s word?

I used to sit there and listen as she poured her heart out to me and wonder what on earth I’d done in my past life to deserve such a liaison when suddenly she came out with something relevant to me…
Well kind of…

While talking about her dalliances out of marriage she suddenly pointed out to me that as a deaf person, hearing sweet nothings in bed would be out of the question and apparently (I was a young 17) lip reading at times like those would also be quite difficult.

I stored this information under ‘inappropriate things grown-ups tell you’, quit hearing therapy and soon grew out of my stroppy phase.

Then, five years later, I found myself on a campsite, in a tent, in the dark with a boy I quite fancied. It was freezing so we were cuddling to keep warm (It was all quite chaste, I promise) when suddenly he whispered something to me.
‘Pardon?’ I said
and he repeated himself.
‘It’s too dark, I can’t hear you,’ I responded.
And so this went on as I frantically scrabbled about for my head torch.

He tried once more with his question when suddenly someone piped up from the tent next door, ‘Oh for god’s sake, just kiss him!’

And the romance was dead.

...and while we're on the subject

That club and I seem to be building quite a history – something of a love/hate relationship – not one-sided at all
So there I was a few weeks earlier full to the brim with rum.
Now, rum i have just recently discovered makes me very very happy.
I have never encountered this with an alcoholic drink before...
Gin makes me morose and feel middle aged but I love it.
Red wine makes me talk utter crap at dinner parties and burn the pudding.
White wine makes me feel car sick even if I am not in a car.
Rosé reminds me of France.
Port makes me eat thousands of calories of cheese.
Whiskey makes me feel like I have stolen from my father's drinks cabinet
But RUM...
Rum sends me to a happy shiny place, where people look delicious... even rough ugly blokes, and no club queue
is too long, no cab fare too high and no hearing can be done.
Sometimes I think that when I drink rum my eyeballs actually spin around like that indecisive emoticon on the MSN messenger...
Focussing is not a possibility, which means lip reading is out of the question.

So there I was hip shaking with my usual vigour and randomly dropping my glass every few seconds when a guy approached me with a glass of champagne (Crshtal, according to a worse for wear friend). He was cute and kept shouting in my ear (not cute).
I'm deaf, I yelled at him over Kelly Rowland's latest tune, and dropped my glass of Cryshtal...
He replied something in my ear...
Hands free from the recently-dropped Cryshtal, I grabbed his face and put it opposite mine so I could lip read him... and he kissed me!
It wasn't a come-on you randy git, I wanted to scream, but I was otherwise occupied!

So obviously not in any fit state to learn from my mistakes I moved on and found myself cornered by a rather gorgeous guy, who too had a penchant for chatting up my ear...
I'm hard of hearing, I tried this time... to which he replied something to my ear.
So I grabbed his face...
and well, you know the rest...

The rest of the evening passed in a hazy blur... I kissed them both and have no intention of ever seeing them again.
I'm thinking of getting a T-shirt printed for night's out entitled
TALK TO THE FACE, THE EARS AIN'T LISTENING

deafintely no entry

Last week, I reached new heights in the world of uncool – I got thrown out of a very posh, rather exclusive London nightclub less than 20 seconds after entering. I wish I could blame it on too much champagne – alas we were limited to Cava. I can’t even blame it on my enthusiasm to get into the place – as it’s really rather rubbish. No, once again, it was my pesky ears – things that are no longer something to drip with diamonds, but instead something to get me into a whole lot of trouble and strife.
I’m aurally challenged you see, deaf as a door post and blonde with it – a lethal combination at the best of times and when my brain’s involved, there’s always five star entertainment on offer.

So anyway, to set the scene, there we were, aware of the two-way mirror checking us out to see if we were good looking enough to get in – luckily we are of course all totally fabulous, so no worries there.
The problem is, when I try and look cool, it normally involves staring meanly into space – so allows no room for lipreading.
So when housemate marched passed the bouncers, I naturally followed, flicking my hair in a yes-I-am-a-super-cool-person-who-doesn't-need-to-queue sort of way.
And that's when it happened, I got collared (I finally understand why they call it this). The bouncer grabbed me by the collar of my M&S limited collection coat and hauled me back out again.
BOOM went my coolness
Snigger snigger, went the queue.

So anyway, it turned out that housemate had spun some wonderful yarn about our friends being in there and had been permitted entry to check... alone!
So this is kind of an apology to the rest of the girls, who never even got to see the lobby – it wasn't that special honest!

Still, I suppose it saved us the £1,000 minimum spend and instead we went home, watch Sex & The City and I fell asleep on the sofa, with my contact lenses and hearing aids in!