Juliet England: My deafie diary – where to start?

There are typically many far more interesting things to write about than me. But, having nothing better to do this month, I’ve decided to revert to my own favourite subject – myself. 

After all, it’s not as if recent weeks have been without incident. Indeed, where to start? 

To kick off with, I’ve been back on stage as my local theatre’s resident deafie. Catch 22 if you’re interested – playing Major Major and a number of other minor characters. And what a ride it was. I joined as a late recruit, after someone else was obliged to drop out. It meant cues, lines, entrances and more had to be learned double quick – always quite the challenge with a hearing loss at the best of times. And I’m still not entirely convinced I know my downstage left from my upstage right. 

It didn’t help that Major Major, an utterly deranged, gloriously incompetent individual and an absolute gem of a part, took a false beard on and off and fell over at one point. (Seriously – do you have any idea how hard it is to fall over on stage convincingly? Go on. Try it.) Both beard removal and fall were liable to cause my cochlear implant to come loose from its moorings on my skull, soar through the air and land on the stage. 

This posed a double problem. Did I just put the implant back on, taking up awkward seconds of silence, which inevitably seem to take millennia on stage, or did I say something like “This darn thing! I shoulda stuck with the ear trumpet.” 

For Major Major is, of course, American. I’m not sure I got the accent quite right – another challenge for someone with cloth ears. (I wasn’t even sure which of the many and varied US accents I was doing.) 

In the end, I opted for just returning the thing to its rightful place on my head and soldiering on. In 1942, it’s doubtful Major Major would have had an implant anyway. Luckily, by the end I knew the words well enough that lip-reading my fellow performers was relatively straightforward. 

I also had to enlist the constant help of my fellow cast members in telling me where we were in the script each performance, since the sound conveyed from stage to dressing room via speakers wasn’t entirely audible, at least to me. 

Finally, putting on the skull-tight airman’s cap I had to wear for another character was a two-person job if it was to be fitted without dislodging aforementioned implant. 

But it was a blast, Catch 22. Indeed, luvvie that I am, I enjoyed it so much I’m now down to play Mrs Joe in Great Expectations this summer, our theatre’s open-air effort this year. Oddly enough, again it’s a bit of a recasting after someone else was forced to pull out. I’ve been upgraded from the role of Molly the servant (‘to the Welsh Premier League’ as one wag quipped), although I’m still playing her, too. Catching lines and making cues outdoors can be a challenge, but bring it on. 

But it’s not all been swanning around on stage. The usual frustrations continue. 

Some of them are relatively minor. I was looking forward to watching the much-hyped Derry Girls finale on catch-up the other night, only to find, to my dismay, that there were no subtitles. Actually, ‘relatively minor’ – who am I trying to kid? This was nothing short of an all-out Friday night catastrophe. I caught most of it, in fairness, but it’s nothing like the same. Seriously, Channel 4, why? 

And, of course, some face masks linger. Is it wrong to feel frustrated these days when someone won’t remove them when I explain I won’t be able to catch what they are saying otherwise? And if not everyone is wearing them isn’t it a bit of a pointless endeavour anyway? 

Oh, and Tesco has been up to its old tricks, phoning me instead of sending a text message to let me know a delivery driver is at the door. I’ve been on at them for years to communicate in a way that’s meaningful for me, but it makes no difference. I am stuck in an endless loop of phone calls and they seem certain to keep doing this, however many times I tell them not to. I know it seems a petty concern – and yet, and yet … 

More seriously, my poor old mum is still struggling with her hearing aids, weeks after acquiring them, complaining of (variously) roaring, creaking and other noises when she wears them, and insisting that she is better off without the things. It’s impossible to know what else to say, other than that she has no option but to persist. I remind her of how hard I found my implant at first, that I was in tears to the audiologist on Zoom, begging to be allowed to stop using it, that now I am an implant evangelist. 

I tell her I won’t speak to her again when she threatens to bin them. We make another appointment for her to go back to her audiologist next month. 

It’s particularly hard when she visits or phones my dad, now in a nursing home with an incurable brain tumour. Indeed, I’ve more or less given up on even trying to speak to him on the phone myself, since it’s too heartbreakingly hard. And so the three of us sit, throughout interminable afternoons, in his room, with me interpreting for my mum where I can, but all of us struggling to communicate.