Can you hear a secret?

I have exciting news – except it’s a secret! But I am sure you will find out in a later blog… if you keep reading.

I’m not very good at hearing secrets, or keeping them sometimes either

*blush

If there’s gossip going around it always misses me. Those furtive, hushed whispers aren’t suited to my aurally-challenged self and so, I am often found floating around on a cloud of ignorance… or – as I prefer to call it – innocence!

I would LOVE to be one of those people who sit on the bus, not-so-subtly listening in to other people’s conversations. And it's not just on the bus, it’s happening everywhere you look. Take the other day, there we all were, sat in the park, discussing boys and topping up our tans and in the process, we were entertaining three nearby couples who were all blatantly listening in!

I think this lack of real-life gossip is why I enjoy reading chick lit so much. I once wrote to one of my favourite authors, Katie Fforde, to tell her I loved her writing. It’s because when I read her books, I feel totally included in the everyday goings on. I ‘hear’ all the conversations between the characters, even the whispers, and I always have the full picture, which is something of a rarity in real life.

She, rather wonderfully, wrote back and said that a deaf friend of hers once told her that people will always make the effort to tell a deaf person when a building is burning down, but will rarely ensure they have heard their secrets.

In reality, I have to be content in the knowledge that people do tell me the important things and, that I have the wonderful skill of lipreading. So while I couldn’t overhear the couple bickering at the bus stop next to me this morning, I could pretend to stare into the distance and lipread the people at the bus stop on the other side of the road.

I would tell you what they were saying – but I’m trying to be better at keeping secrets.