Mark Palmer: how his hearing loss denial is causing friction in his family

Selective hearing works wonders. Always has; always will for those of a certain age. From my experience, not only does it give a chance to ignore some simple but at times dreary instruction about, say, emptying the dishwasher, but it also affords a few seconds to conjure a gratifying answer. 

“Sorry, say that again…” 

“Any chance you could empty the dishwasher?” 

“Ah, yes, give me ten minutes – there are still two overs to go in the cricket.”

Of course, there’s an awful lot of denial when it comes to one’s hearing. My deafness is not profound but it’s deteriorating and must annoy my younger colleagues at the newspaper where I work. They are far too polite ever to raise it, but my wife Joanna bangs on about it all the time and says it’s beginning to drive her potty.

Things got so bad about 18 months ago that I went for a test. Rather enjoyed it, actually.

It involved sitting in a small, ultra soundproofed pod wearing headphones. I dare say many other Saga Magazine eaders have experienced this procedure, whereby you are instructed to press a button every time you hear a sound, which gets softer and softer, then louder, then a distant grumble and so on. You can cheat, of course, but there’s no point doing that.

“It’s not a competition,” said the person supervising the test, who later concluded, “Your hearing is a little impaired, particularly in the right ear. It’s up to you now what you wish to do about it.”

Nothing is the answer, despite my daughter asking if perhaps the time had come to buy a hearing aid, which of course solicited the response: “Sorry, I did not quite catch that.”

Then, a friend mentioned how having wax removed from one’s ears might do the trick. So, I found a chemist who did this for £80 – but it made no difference whatsoever.

Joanna, meanwhile, keeps leaving advertisements for hearing aids on my desk and we argue about how loud the TV should be.

There are two main impediments to going down the hearing aid route: pride and cost. I raised the pride one with my daughter, but it went down badly.

“You’ll feel so much more involved in the conversation,” she said. “It will be a liberation of a certain kind.”

I’m sure she’s right, but that doesn’t quite deal with the pride issue, just as pride is what encourages me to walk up escalators rather than standing motionless like an older person might do. Pride and an irrational competitive spirit.

Truth is that when I see someone of my age with a hearing aid, that person immediately looks antiquated. Take Bruce Springsteen, for example, whom I have seen in concert at least a dozen times. On stage he’s fit, agile, ageless. But off it, with a hearing aid tucked behind one ear, he suddenly looks what he is: 75 years old. The same can be said about Sir Paul McCartney, who also wears an aid, but, then, he is 82 not 75. 

So, when that day comes (and it has probably come already), I want a hearing aid that no one can see. Which leads me to the second point: cost.

Our late Queen used Signia Silk hearing aids, which are top of the range, but they can cost up to £4,000 for the pair. That’s considerably more than I can afford.

So, it is back to selective hearing for another few months. Which, dare I admit, suits me fine.