Hearing Deficiencies
Hearing Deficiencies
It’s funny. My parents always predicted, from the day that I bought my first album, Deep Purple In Rock, that I would be hard of hearing or even deaf by the time I reached their age, which would have been about thirty-five.
I spent the following thirty years going to insanely loud rock concerts, working on jack-hammers, cement mixers and vibrators on building sites when necessary, and sometimes in very confined spaces without ear-defenders, and it neither bothered me nor affected my hearing.
Now I am sixty-one, and my hearing is as good as it ever was, but these days, loud noises, especially unnecessary noise, really upsets me… and I mean really, really.
Instead of becoming hard of hearing, I seem to have become super-sensitive to racket. Unfortunately, I live in a very busy farming village and when the men get home from work and the kids from school, the noise is enough to make me want to fight.
I have lived here for eleven years, but 2015 is the first year that I have felt like this.
Isn’t that funny?
I both do and I don’t think so. I find it interesting to think about why, but profoundly angry by the din. The motorcycles are the worst. Everyone has one. From nine-year-olds up and they leave them running when they stop for a chat or go into a shop. A secondary problem is the exhaust. I have always hated that, but eighty percent of these motorcycles should have been scrapped before the kids who are riding them were born.
The noise and the smell are horrendous to one as delicate and sensitive as I.
Or the new me, anyway, because like I said, it never used to bother me. Sometimes, I wish that my parents’ prediction had been more accurate, and who but a desperate man would wish that his hearing was not so good?
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All the best,
Podcast: Hearing Deficiencies
