Hearing aid day

As I was getting ready for work this morning, I noticed my hearing aids sat on my bedside table… with flat batteries and looking distinctly neglected.

Feeling in the mood for a challenge I decided to give them brush down, a new set of batteries and pop them in my ears. And I have now been wearing them for three whole hours.

So far a dustbin lorry has nearly given me a heart attack, a man coughing almost caused me to fall of my bus seat, and a police car came close to becoming my nemesis as it left me staggering about like a drunk on roller-skates.

But I am going to persevere… I want to see if it will help me pick up office gossip. So far it hasn’t, but it does make the radio a bit louder and I can also hear the alarming whirring noise that my MAC seems to be making.

I guess my hearing aids are a bit like that dress you keep at the back of your cupboard with no clear reason of why you bought it. You love it, it looks quite nice on but something is not quite right about it and yet you can’t bring yourself to throw it away. So instead it sits there and every so often you get it out, try it on, think for a moment, take it off and put it back in the wardrobe.

I know that at the end of the day, this is what I will do with my hearing aids – if not before actually. I wonder if I will lose it with them at lunchtime as I peruse the shops, or during a meeting later on this afternoon? Whenever it happens, you can be sure that before nightfall they will have been removed until such time as I feel the need to try them out again.

And, you can also be sure that this will happen because I never learn. I will always remain slightly optimistic that my hearing aids will someday miraculously help me do something more constructive than fall over when I hear a loud noise. I will always have a place in my heart for them because they are, after all, only trying to help me.

I’m not sure I will ever be able to shake off this strange affection for my hearing aids. When I was 10, I named my first pair Percy and Perdita and they lived in my pencil case at school and frequently got covered in ink or Tippex. Not a lot has changed except the new ones, which shall remain nameless as I am practically a grown-up, now live in my make-up bag, at the mercy of loose eye shadow and perfume. And this is a good thing as it means that they always have a sparkly sheen to them and smell lovely!