Disappointments mount up

Fleetwood Mac played the Isle of Wight and even though Stevie Nicks must have passed within a few miles of me at most, she didn’t stop to whisk me off. Crushed, that’s what I am, I’ve adored her singing since 1976 and I’d have lavished Tea and ice cream on her – real dairy ice cream, not that fluffed up muck!

I could have watched the concert on TV, but I don’t because (I know, I’ve said this before) Sue can’t enjoy music anymore which takes my enjoyment away. It’s about all I would have wanted to watch, television seems to be an endless round of trailers for more set-up, pre-planned to show what the editor and producer want, ‘reality’ programmes.

I prefer to read. Bernard Cornwell is one of my favourite writers, his Sharpe novels are books I can re-read without losing interest, but his Viking and Saxon era novels featuring Uhtred have become a treat for me. Not only am I from Norse stock, I know many of the places he writes about and his research is impeccable. Names can be difficult to ‘visualise’, so I might stop and go over a name a few times until it sounds right in my head.

I saved up ‘The Pagan Lord’ for a special treat and half way through I found a passage I had to re-read, not for sounding right, but because it was about not sounding at all. The story teller said “that was not her real name, but who knew what that was? She could not tell and, because she was deaf, she might not even know.”

I’d never thought about that, how does a deaf child find out what name he, or she, has been given? I’m not even going to Google that for  while, I need to think about that and the hurdles faced in teaching a language to a person who doesn’t even know what sound is. I saw ‘The Miracle Worker’ when I was very young and strongly recall Helen Keller using water from a pump to connect a feeling to a sign, but a name must need understanding of spelling, surely?

I’m being serious when I say this – I keep finding out how much I don’t know about hearing loss.