Juliet England: My deafie diary part 14 – life in lockdown

The staff member at Pret finally rebels by pulling down her face mask to complain.

“I can’t hear anything, either!” she wails. I just about catch her words, in the roar and hiss of a town-centre branch on a Saturday afternoon.

I nod in sympathy, and point again to my own hearing aids, guiltily glad that it’s not just me struggling every time I go out.

This was a more pleasant weekend encounter than I experienced during a visit to a garden centre, when I couldn’t catch a syllable. The assistant did the same thing, lowering her mask, but only to snarl something barely intelligible about masks being necessary for people’s safety. (Well, none of the brown stuff, Mr Holmes.)

This pandemic constantly offers reminders, as if they were needed, of how much I depend on being able to see the shape of someone’s lips.

It’s not the only problem. When I stay at a friend’s house overnight, my loud voice becomes, obviously and increasingly, an issue.

“Stop bellowing,” he hisses. “The neighbours!”

I could have sworn I was whispering. Or at least I am convinced I am not shouting, and in any event, I refuse to spend and evening cringing in fear. As if our conversation would be of any interest to the people next door, anyway. It’s true that my ears are probably full of wax and the hearing aid tubes need changing, which doesn’t help. But I’m still not sure which NHS non-life-and-death services are open.

Anyway, this is the same friend who recently hurled a book through an open window to attract my attention when I was plugged into the computer and oblivious to the outside world. His claim that he had been ringing the doorbell ‘for an hour’ with no response is frankly ludicrous. And why not text half an hour before you rock up, instead of pitching up out of the blue?

Meanwhile, the play I’m currently doing, F****ing Feminists, if you’re interested, is proving a fascinating experience from a cloth-ears point of view.

We’ve given up even trying to get subtitles on the likes of Zoom, although it seems to help to share a screen. But the few captions supplied never seem to be that consistent with the words spoken for very long.

Skype seems to work better. Someone has been coaching me on line learning, and doing that via Skype video call seems to work out well, with subtitles which are enough to get by on.

We’ve also tried setting up Windows 365, and that captures the director’s notes on a rehearsal as though taking dictation. But I can’t see her face and the text comes up very densely on the Word document, not making for easy reading. So there’s no ideal solution.

Even with headphones, and the volume turned up full blast, I can barely hear a thing when my fellow cast members (splendid females that they are, every last woman Jill of them) speak. So I am 100% dependent on knowing the text well, and on lipreading. And it seems had to believe that I won’t stuff up in some way or another on one of the online performance nights, but the best I can hope for is that I won’t do so too spectacularly.

I have to say that the theatre has bent over backwards to help include me in this production, as well as in other activities. At our AGM, one valiant soul transcribed the entire meeting (held over Zoom) into Facebook Messenger for me while it was going on. No small effort, and I owe her the largest glass of wine the theatre bar sells once All This is over. Rehearsals and other meetings would, of course, be so much easier in normal times, but these are anything but.

Once the current production is out of the way, later in the autumn, I’m due to go on holiday to Holy Island, among other places in the north-east, local coronavirus restrictions permitting.

The well-known national organisation that runs the cottage on the island where we’re staying initially left me a voicemail message (my internet provider also sent a message telling me to call their ‘help’ desk, cheers for that) when I emailed to ask about the local rules and to say I’d paid.

But, brilliantly, I later got an email of apology plus a designated contact name and a number to text any future questions – a text number! – and a pledge to do all they could to help. Did I, for example, want a vibrating smoke alarm to go under my pillow in the cottage? Probably not, as it happens, but the exchange did serve to remind me that I had never been offered anything like that before when booking accommodation. Ever.

So, there you have it. Another month in cloth-eared semi-lockdown has zipped by, with little end in sight. It’s not all bad, though. It looks as though the ‘rule of six’ will probably still apply come Christmas. In truth, I can’t remember my last super-rowdy festive season anyway, and of course it’s horrible to think about large families being forced to stay apart or decide who gets one of the half-dozen places at the table. But, still. Quieter, smaller gatherings and no big noisy parties. For those of us who struggle to hear, what’s not to love?