Stormy Weather

Sue is a great weather forecaster, as air pressure fluctuates she feels her ears change and knows what to expect. Her balance changes in concert with the tone, pitch and volume of her tinnitus and she knows to avoid ‘complicated’ situations. Lip reading is also harder as her head’s filled with distractions.

Over the past few weeks, while I’ve been incommunicado with a sick laptop as well as other things demanding my attention, we lost Lord Ashley (Jack Ashley, MP, as was). In the 70s I worked with an ex-marine who’d lost most of the bits and pieces in one ear to a hand grenade blast. Back then, when racist and sexist jokes were on prime time TV, my co-worker took a lot of stick about something that affected his life badly. Attitudes weren’t always unpleasant, but humour was stretched thin. Getting people to talk to his face and not creep up behind him was a challenge. Ex-marines who’ve been around bad places aren’t the best people to jump out behind – trained reflexes stopped that little game and people did start to be more considerate.

Oddly, while watching the pilot for ‘Due South’ in an idle moment last week, I noticed what I’d missed when it was first screened on BBC (1995?). The Mountie tells the detective how to communicate with his deaf wolf – make sure he can see you and enunciate carefully.

Oh, I’ve got to tell you about Sue’s friend Michelle who picked up finger spelling faster than I did (younger, less brain cells killed off). Michelle spells and lipspeaks what’s going on when there’s a multi conversation. A while ago though, Sue was telling Mich she couldn’t understand her, so Michelle spelt again more clearly. Sue then suggested she might take her mittens off. That’s not a dig at a good friend, far from it, it just shows how something has rapidly become a normal way of communicating – great isn’t it! And Mich taught her mother finger spelling and they now ‘talk’ about people behind their backs.

A word of warning – beware the subject of your gossip can’t finger spell.