Deafness in an emergency

Oh boy, Deafinitely Girly is tired today.

You see, last night, after unsuccessfully attempting the pub quiz with GBman and The Singing Swede, I returned home and settled down with a cup of tea and the contents of my digibox for half an hour before bed.

There was a weird noise occurring somewhere that I could just about hear, but I couldn’t pinpoint it, so I just carried on watching TV. Then my living room floor began to shake and I heard more strange noises… there was deafinitely a commotion coming from somewhere, but not hearing very well, I couldn’t work out where from. In fact, I really only had the vibrations of the floor to go on, and that wasn’t very helpful.

Then, I heard a serious of massive bangs – no mistaking these for anything else – and so I got up and looked out the window. There were two police cars, lights flashing and coppers jumping from them. The banging continued. My windows started to shake.

I came to the conclusion, given the noise, that they were battering next door’s front door in, so kept looking out the window, wondering what was going on. Another police car screeched down the road, followed by another, then another and another, until nine police cars littered the road – men in uniform propelling themselves from them before they’d even had a chance to come to a standstill, and then dashed to the house next door to mine.

By this point I was more than a little worried. And once the fire engine joined the melee, I decided I should probably go down and find out what the hell was going on. Terraced houses mean that I shared at least one of my walls with the commotion that was going on, and if they were going to have to start battering down anything else, I wanted to know.

Once outside in the dark, I flagged down the most gorgeous policeman and asked him what the heck was going on. He sheepishly admitted that, on account of it being a quiet night, every bored copper in the place had responded to the call, which is why I had the entire Met police force in my road, and that no one was dead, but there had been a commotion.

You don’t say!

Two hours later, the final police car finally manoeuvred its way out of my street and it returned to its leafy quiet suburbia once again.

But it got me thinking about just how much I don’t hear and whether this is a help or a hindrance. I mean, if I had been able to hear the voices from next door, which almost certainly formed part of the commotion, would I have been more or less freaked out?

If I had been able to hear the nine police sirens descending upon my road this would have deafinitely freaked me out. But instead, I got to watch it all unfold in almost silent wonder, feeling only the vibrations of the door being kicked in and the low rev of engines.

It was like I was watching TV with the mute button on, with BBC-quality subtitles – meaning I had no clue what was going on.

And speaking of bad-quality subtitles – the other day, BBC Breakfast described Waterboarding as a form of totter and informed me that nine male passengers travel on the Eurostar every year!

Hmmmm, maybe I should give Daybreak a chance for a change…