My lo-oooooooooooooooooong weekend

Today, I am not at work.

Tomorrow, I will not be at work.

Monday I will not be at work either.

I've gone oop norf to see The Rents for a long weekend and a spot of respite in the country. It's Father's Day on Sunday (psst - Big Bro, don't forget to call Pa) so I thought I'd come home and see Pa and thank him for being, well... fabulous.

I'm also going to recharge my hearing assertiveness batteries. They've been failing a bit of late.

Take yesterday for example when, at lunchtime I popped out to my favourite salad bar to grab a salad. The man behind the counter asked me a question.

I thought it was, 'Would you like a bag?' so I said, 'Yes please.'

He looked at me weirdly, and muttered something under his breath to his colleague who started to laugh.

*sniff

Now, normally I would speak up and say, 'I'm hard of hearing' but yesterday I just stood there like a lemon and let them laugh at me.

Not my finest moment...

When he did eventually ask me if I wanted a bag, I said yes and grabbed it and ran out the shop, a good few shades of red darker than when I went in.

Then, last night, Snowboarding Boy and I went for sushi in this fab little Japanese restaurant. Walking in, I recognised a girl from work and said hello and started chatting. Halfway through the conversation however, I realised she was a different girl from work, who worked on a totally different floor, in a totally different office. I'd been guessing what she was asking me as it was quite noisy and as she wasn't who I thought she was, it meant none of my answers would have made any sense.

*cringe

When I eventually realised this, instead of explaining my blondness/deafness, I stood there, rooted to the spot, yakking at her, making a total idiot of myself. Honestly, I seriously considered death by chopstick to make it all go away.

Snowboarding Boy however, reassured me that I didn't look like the lemon I felt and so we settled down to munch on raw fish.

But all this has got me thinking. Why am I all of a sudden so reluctant to backtrack and explain that I haven't heard something right or have got confused. This head-in-the-sand approach to my deafness is something I used to do when I first went VERY deaf as I wasn't used to cocking up all the time.

And then I realised, while glancing through past columns, that I recently mentioned that I was feeling less and less deaf at the moment. Which means I appear to have forgotten all my one liners and face-saving sentences I dish out when I'm heading for a catostrophic situation.

So this weekend, while enjoying some R&R, I am going to think about ways to stop me forgetting my deafness. Just for a little while. Just til I get my groove back.