Sorry? Pardon? What??? Say that again?

These have been my most commonly used words over the past… while. Not saying how long, just a ‘while’. But… NO MORE!!!

I have just acquired a pair of… hearing aids!!! Yeah, I know, shoot me now, Dignitas time, its all gone to shit. I am OLD. But hearing aids??? Holy shit. I mean, my hearing is fine! If I put on Smells Like Teen Spirit at volume 11 through a headset, my hearing’s perfect. It’s only at times there’s a problem. Like people speaking. The phone. Talking to someone who’s using a hands-free kit. It’s only a problem when sounds are involved. In particular, sounds you need to hear. Otherwise, I have no problem at all. My knees are fine.

So I went for a ‘test’. And they looked and said, ‘ahhh, there’s wax there, need to get that out first’. Ok, hack away. No, you need to go away and put olive oil (note, only the best for me, extra virgin stuff, imported from Tuscany. Morrison’s vegetable oil would only help the wax in a lorry driver’s ear, not mine) and then come back and we’ll remove it. So for 2 weeks I anointed my ears twice daily with the oil that Ottolenghi would use on his most delicate of salads. And I reached the point, having dislodged all this stuff, by Wednesday, of blocking both my ears. Totally. Absolute deafness. Most horrendous thing ever. Taking a credit card payment on the phone from a woman (higher pitches are my specific problem) took 3 hours and 27 minutes. After my first 4 phone calls I stopped saying ‘is anybody there!!!’ really loudly. I’d forgotten completely that ‘f’ and ‘s’ are actually two different letters! Like, who’d’a known?? ‘D’, ‘T’ and ‘B’ similarly. All the fucking same ta me.

Yesterday the dude ‘syringed’ my ears. They actually use a tiny little sucker thing. And, in my case, supplemented this with an industrial shovel. I will spare the details. That action changed my life. I could hear again! It was fantastic. But, not quite well enough, as the following test showed up. High range? What high range? I don’t have one any longer. So try these matey; and he programmed up a pair of little hearing aids. Digitally!!! So, rather than just having, like, a miniature Marshall amp in each ear, these are programmed for the specific ranges that an individual is missing. And I tested them.

I took a piss. And heard it in the most glorious of full, Dolby stereo, panorama-techno-colour-for-ears, quadraphonic sound ever. If Bang & Olufsen took a piss, it would sound like that. And I can even hear a sibilant ‘s’ once more. Yesssssss…

Happy loud Friday

A xxxx