Juliet England: My deafie diary part 10 – life in lockdown

Continuing Juliet’s experiences of daily life with a hearing loss – now in lockdown.

Day God-only-knows-which of lockdown, as life before it feels like an increasingly distant memory.

We’ve had Boris’s latest update – complete with a glaring lack of BSL interpretation which was highly conspicuous by its absence, and I for one was none the wiser afterwards. To be honest, deaf, hearing or in between, I’d defy anyone not to have been left utterly baffled by those five minutes. So it’s unclear how much light interpretation would have shed. And I don’t sign myself. But an interpreter should have been there nonetheless.

Anyway. I did understand (vaguely) that it meant unlimited time outside for exercise, plus guilt-free lounging in the sun. So I met up with my friend M from the theatre I’m involved in, staying the requisite 2m apart at all times, in the local public gardens on Sunday.

In truth, I was quite nervous about this rendezvous, it being my first planned real-life encounter for a couple of months. Would I find my hearing aids? Would I have forgotten to hear or indeed talk? I did, and I hadn’t, respectively, and we had a lovely hour catching up in the sunshine. Mind you, even leaving home to be somewhere at a set time felt weird.

‘Bye, then,’ he said, raising an arm in farewell at the end before pedalling off into the afternoon. None of our usual hugs (well we are both theatre luvvies).

Possibly because it was planned, it was definitely much nicer than running into an acquaintance while out and about. I’ve become a shocking slouch at leaving home without my hearing aids, and the pesky 2m distance thing doesn’t help.

Although I’ve stopped for a quick and not unpleasant chat with a couple of people I know over the weeks of lockdown, it’s usually consisted of me just nodding and smiling hard and crossing my fingers that they’re not telling me of the loss of a close family member. Or I talk too much about myself. Once or twice, I’ll admit I’ve raised a hand to say ‘hello, but please don’t talk to me’ and carried on walking. (Or, much less frequently, running.)

Anyway, the successful chat with M even left me on an energetic high, so much so that I went for a run and made vegetable soup afterwards, both events so unsettlingly unusual I’m not even sure I liked it.

I’ve been doing Mr Motivator’s daily TV workouts too, although reading the subtitles and watching the exercise god at the same time can be a struggle, and the live captions are frequently wildly inaccurate.

‘Beer we go!’ exclaimed the lord of Lycra one morning, according to the text. Er, right. It’s not 11am yet – I’ll stick to my usual poison of intravenously injected caffeine, ta all the same.

‘Eat more!’ he yelped during another session, filling me with delight at the prospect of a keep-fit instruction I can actually commit to following. Oh. Eight more of whatever that day’s exercise was, the subtitles corrected themselves. As you were.

As the weeks of isolation have drawn on, I’ve tried a couple of Skype video calls, in which the live subtitles were again a bit of a jumble, although, as ever, better than nothing. With one friend, male names like Derek would pop up at random, unuttered. With another, a slightly huffy ‘I don’t know, Julian’ was the reply to my perfectly reasonable question about the friend’s views on Trump’s handling of the corona crisis.

I had somehow managed to transition gender without being aware of the fact.

Despite the huffiness, however, in fairness, my friend also played the piano over Skype for me, which I could hear to some extent, so that was very charming. He plays well.

A family Zoom call was nice, but frustratingly they didn’t really get into the instant messaging side of things, meaning there were huge swathes of the conversation I missed. And I had to abandon a virtual play-reading session on the same platform after a few minutes, since it was impossible to hear or otherwise follow. I’d never have had a clue as to when it was my turn to read.

When someone I know organised a virtual quiz and didn’t invite me, it was hard not to feel somewhat miffed. Then again, would I have caught a word of any of the questions?

And so it goes on. No word yet on when or even if All This will finally be over, or what the world will look like afterwards. No knowing of when or even if can have my next cochlear implant appointment, although the process is on hold for the most understandable of reasons. Still, the sun is out. And somehow, I am surviving and doing OK in my little silent bubble, knowing that one day things must surely get back to normal. Of some sort.