of ‘useless’), because it’s incurable. Hopwood told me that. ‘There’s no cure,’ he said cheerfully. ‘The condition will get worse - but very gradually.You’ll also experience some loss of volume at all frequencies as you get older.’ ‘Eventually, then,’ I said, ‘I’ll be stone deaf ?’ ‘Not stone deaf,’ he said, frowning slightly as if this were a newly minted and excessively emotive metaphor. ‘In theory you could suffer up to ninety per cent hearing loss, but you’ll be lucky if you live that long. I wouldn’t worry about it. Get yourself a hearing aid. You’ll find it makes a great difference.’
I got my first hearing aid from the National Health Service, a rather clumsy device in two pieces, one about the size of a tangerine segment that fitted behind the ear, containing the microphone, amplifier, battery and controls, with a little transparent plastic tube attached which conveyed the sound to the other bit, a custom-made transparent plastic mould seated in the ear. Putting it all in place was tedious, and it was fairly visible unless you grew your hair very long over the ears, which would have been easy in the Sixties, but looked a bit eccentric by the mid-Eighties. Also if you wear glasses, as I do, the space behind your ear gets rather congested. The arm of the spectacles can squeeze the plastic tube so that the sound is cut off, or removing your glasses can inadvertently remove your hearing aid. Once I whipped off my spectacles in the street to put on a pair of prescription sunglasses and sent my hearing aid flying into the road, where it was run over by a Parcelforce van. The National Health Service would have replaced it, but I decided to go private and get one of the in-the-ear type, then something of a novelty, which are miracles of electronic micro-engineering, all the components being contained in a moulded earpiece not much bigger than an earplug. But you can still have misadventures with these, because they’re so small. A year or two ago when Fred was driving the car I took out an earpiece to change the battery and dropped it down between the seat and the door. We were on a motorway so Fred couldn’t stop. I groped for the earpiece under my seat and felt my fingers touch it but somehow I managed to push it through a small hole in the metal tracks on which the seat slides backwards and forwards and it disappeared into a cavity under the floor. I took the car into the service centre the next day and they had to remove the whole seat and part of the floor to recover it from the chassis. The man behind the counter in Reception was grinning from ear to ear as he gave me the bill and, sealed in a transparent sachet, the little plastic earpiece with a mechanic’s oily fingerprint on it. ‘This job was a first for us,’ he said. It cost me eighty-five pounds, but I had no option since each hearing instrument costs over a thousand. I use two, now, one in each ear. In the past I only needed one. My relationship with hearing aids has been a steady escalation of cost and technical refinement.
The first in-the-ear one I bought had a fiddly volume control like a tiny studded wheel which you twisted with the tip of your forefinger, as if trying to insert a screw into your head, but they got more and more sophisticated over the years, and my latest one is digital, has three programs (for quiet conditions, noisy conditions and loop), adjusts itself automatically on the first two, or can be manually adjusted with a remote control concealed in my watch (very James Bond). Unfortunately the technology seems to have hit a ceiling and it’s unlikely that there’s going to be a great improvement in the near future. I read a report in a newspaper a year or two ago which gave me a spasm of hope, about people having their hearing restored by new techniques of surgical implants, but when I asked my GP about this treatment he told me that it only worked with a different type of deafness from mine, otosclerosis, where one of the bones in the middle ear that transmit vibrations to the inner ear becomes fixed, and can be artificially replaced. He asked around and discovered that experimental work is being done with implants in the inner ear, but