Juliet England: My deafie diary part 13 – life in lockdown

Continuing Juliet’s experiences of daily life with a hearing loss – as virus restrictions continue

I was going to start this article by saying that life continues in our weird state of limbo, half in and half out of lockdown. But the recent announcement about the Rule of Six (or ‘role of sex’ as the subtitles had it on the Channel 4 evening news) means that All This won’t be over anytime soon. Indeed, if anything, we’ve gone back a step or four.

So, no social gatherings for a while. On the one hand, crowds are no good for my cloth ears. And at least for once this is a rule that’s easy to understand. On the other, I miss my social life, and indeed have seriously started wondering if it will ever come back.

Face masks clearly aren’t going anywhere, in my own view for good reason;  I’m no facial covering refusenik. But, still, it feels as though I may as well give up completely on public communication until they’re no longer mandatory.

The scenario typically goes like this. I warn the person behind the mask that I can’t hear well. They continue to speak anyway, and I can just about tell that some words are coming out of their mouth, but who know which ones or in what order. The resulting frustration is so intense it regularly turns me into a grumpy fiend when I’m out and about.

I’m sure some people wear those clear masks and it’s not as if I’ve been out very widely in recent months, but I for one have yet to see anyone wearing a covering that makes lipreading easier. (Anyone else?) If anything, actually, All This has been an instructive lesson in just how much I depend on seeing people’s lips.

‘Can you hear me behind my mask?’ I asked a supermarket checkout lady the other day, marvelling at what a luxury that must be when she nodded her head and I saw the affirmative smile in her eyes.

There have been some unexpected, delights, however. Travelling home from a friend’s the other Sunday morning, I had to attach myself to a young man to act as my ‘ears’ on the station platform after our train was badly delayed. Somehow we managed to have quite a nice chat – he turned out to be a trainee pilot, and willingly passed on the travel updates from the tannoy announcements and masked station staff.

At Kew Gardens, the delightful woman in the ticket office painstakingly plotted my journey back for me, writing down all the times for what seemed like the next few weeks, and carefully explaining that I could in fact return home via one bus and train. On the way there, I’d been diverted via Aberdeen and Plymouth on every conceivable mode of transport, including, but not limited to, bobsleigh, camel and magic carpet. This had, inevitably, put me on a constant state of nervous high alert in case I missed some vital instruction or scrap of information.

I’ve been struggling a bit, too, with working out how live captions work on Zoom, having had an epic fail when I tried to set them up for a meeting of the residents’ panel of the housing association from which I rent part of my flat. I’m now a panel member, and so it was frustrating I couldn’t join my first meeting. But fair play to the association, who spent a long time trying to resolve the problem.

Then there’s the local theatre in which I’m involved and which has, for obvious reasons, moved online for the duration of All This.

I’ve done two web-based auditions, one of which, I’m thrilled to report, was successful. In the one I didn’t pass, to be fair, the director bent over backwards to make the thing accessible, allowing me to perform a special, solo audition in which the one-to-one instructions were easier to follow. I still missed some of her words when standing up to read and having to flick to a new window to see the script.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to the rehearsal process and then the web-based performances of F***cking Feminists, the play in which I have been cast, and intrigued to see how that works out online rather than in person. The audition was slightly disrupted when I kept having to asking for typing out or repeats, but again the director showed commendable patience.

So. While there’s no end in sight for All This, and there’s no denying that those of us with a hearing loss have been extremely disproportionately affected, I remain grimly determined to get through it, one way or another, and aware of my good fortune in getting this far relatively unscathed.