sitting in the middle of a huge auditorium all on my own, and have not repeated the experiment. An empty cinema has a depressing effect on the viewer: better to wait and see the movie on TV.
Television is the saviour of the deaf. How did they ever manage without it? Most networked programmes, including old films, have subtitles which you can access through Teletext; even live transmissions, like news bulletins, have subtitles, though if you have any hearing at all it’s distracting because the text runs a few seconds behind the speech and often contains grotesque mistakes (like the weather forecast for ‘the aisle of man’ last night). Alternatively you can use headphones, either wired or infrared, which are far more effective than the headsets they lend you at the theatre, and have an independent volume control which means you can turn up the sound without deafening other people watching with you, or watch on your own with the loudspeakers mute. Not that this arrangement is without its social disadvantages. If your partner should wish to share a comment on the programme with you, or to convey some other message, she must wave her hand to attract your attention, and then you must take off the headset and insert your hearing aid to receive the message, and then remove the hearing aid before donning the headphones again.When this procedure is required very frequently both parties are likely to become irritable.
For programmes I’m really interested in I prefer to use both headphones and subtitles, on the belt and braces principle, because I still miss occasional words and phrases through the ’phones, and the subtitles don’t always reproduce the speech with total accuracy. Sometimes the subtitles abbreviate the dialogue so as not to lag behind or take up too much space on the screen. I have noticed a curious and interesting phenomenon in this connection: when I watch using both headphones and subtitles together I hear spoken words and phrases which are missing from the subtitles, which I’m sure I would not have heard using the headphones alone. Presumably my brain is continuously checking the two channels of communication against each other and, when they don’t match, the word or phrase missing from the subtitle is foregrounded and somehow becomes more audible in consequence. It might be worth writing up for a psycholinguistics journal if I could be bothered. But I can’t.
4
4th November. This seems to be turning into some kind of journal, or notes for an autobiography, or perhaps just occupational therapy.
I went to London to see Dad yesterday, a duty visit which I make every four weeks or so. If I describe this one in some detail it will serve as a record of most of the others, since the routine seldom varies. It was a long exhausting day. While Mum was alive I often stayed the night with them when academic business took me to London, and I kept up this practice for a few years after she died, but now when I make these trips to see Dad I prefer to return the same day. I leave home early in the morning - with my Senior Citizens railcard I can get a Saver ticket even at peak hours - so as to get to Brickley in time to take Dad out to lunch, then I spend the afternoon with him and leave after tea to catch an evening train back home. He always says, ‘Why don’t you stay the night, son?’ and I always say, ‘No, I can’t, Dad, I’m too busy.’ And he says, ‘I thought you were retired,’ and I say, ‘I’m still doing research,’ and he nods, acquiescent if a little disappointed. Though he argues the toss with me on every other subject, my professional life is a mystery to him which he treats with respectful deference. He never comments on or asks about the inscribed publications I have sent him over the years, but they have an honoured place in the glass-fronted bookcase in the front room, and I have overheard him boasting to total strangers encountered in shops or on buses about his son the professor. So the invocation of my ‘research’ is always a winning card to play when the question of staying overnight comes up. The fact is that I shrink from sleeping in the sagging, lumpy and always slightly damp bed in the back bedroom which was my room as a boy, and sharing the cheerless bathroom and smelly toilet