Lutine Bell, Lloyd’s of London: recovered in 1858 from the shipwreck of HMS Lutine (1799), the bell was traditionally rung to alert underwriters to shipping losses, but these days is only rung in the event of major worldwide disasters, such as 9/11.

. . . is a piece of onomatopoeia if ever there was one, a word imitating the sound it represents. It’s actually a relatively recent, deliberately-coined word, dating back only to 1831, by Edgar Allan Poe (The Bells), even if the root word goes back to Latin. Yes, it’s the sound of little bells tinkling – think Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way – but not really appropriate for the rounded complexity of hand bells or the majestic peal of great church bells. After all, when we say a bell is tolling for the dead, we are imagining a different sound from the joyful pealing sound appropriate for weddings and times of national celebration. The vowels of toll and peal evoke different sensations. We can’t escape onomatopoeia when talking about musical sounds.

Poe uses tintinnabulation for just such tinkling bells. At Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve there was much tintinnabulation – little bells rung as part of the ritual, charged with a more festive meaning for Christmas. We don’t usually go down the “smells and bells” route, but on festive occasions you can’t beat pulling all the stops out. Christmas isn’t really Christmas until you have seen a hefty censer rotated 360 degrees on its chains en passant down the aisle (the “smells” part). That slight frisson of worrying whether the censer is going to fly off and conk some poor unsuspecting member of the congregation on the head – certainly adds to our admiration of the spectacle when it all passes off safely.

As a colleague reminded me on our annual Christmas trip out to the village of Avebury, whose ancient church with significant Saxon remains are dwarfed in age by the Neolithic ring of stones surrounding the settlement, bells are the sound of Christmas. I’m in agreement, and bells mark my progress in the cochlear implant world, 20 months on. At first I could barely make out the sound of bells from the surrounding traffic, then I could just hear a mighty dongggg-dongggg above the noise of the city as I approached, then I began to pick out the bells from further away. Now I can recognise and compare the sounds of different sets of Cathedral bells. In the run-up to Christmas we went to Durham Cathedral whose clear bells rang out in the still air above the cold city; the medieval cobblestoned peninsula on which it stands isolates the Cathedral from the roar of modern traffic. The massed singing of thousands of ordinary people, led by the choir, was something to listen to – and join in with – inside this glorious Romanesque building with the earliest vaulted Gothic ceiling in Europe, which gives it excellent acoustics. Now on earth, below, below, are bells in steeple swungen/and i-o, i-o, i-o by priest and people sungen.

The sheer variety of sound that bells make is fascinating. The nursery rhyme Oranges and Lemons teaches us this: as it is traditionally sung, each couplet represents a different set of bells and differs in intonation and rhythm, said to imitate the sound of each church’s bells: from the rapid light sparkle of Oranges and Lemons/Say the bells of St. Clement’s and ending with the sonorous I – DOOOO – NOOOT – KNOOOOW/ SAYS THE GREAAT BELL OF BOOOW.

I love the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem As kingfishers catch fire. It’s meant to be read aloud: it replicates the rapid tinny echo of stone against brick brought up sharp before the stone disappears forever, and the deep measured cadence of the words chosen to represent the bell:

. . . as tumbled over rim in roundy wells/Stones ring; as each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s bow swung flings out broad its name . . . 

One little programme I like very much is the weekly three-minute slot Bells on Sunday on BBC Radio 4, which is a very good listening workout in mixing speech comprehension with music. You have a handle on the subject – the introduction briefly discusses the history of the church and its bells with lots of nice numbers as they tell you the year it was built, etc. – followed by the sound of the bells themselves. Though this was a ‘starter’ programme I discovered when I was first activated, it’s something I still like listening to, just because I like bells. And that is part of the joy of being able to hear – to find out more about the world. Lots left to discover!

And one of my New Year’s resolutions is to get up for 8am on 27 July 2012 to hear all the bells ring (or as many of them as possible) to open the London Olympics. Bit of a controversial project this one, and bell-ringers themselves haven’t necessarily taken kindly to it, but it will be, literally, a once-in-a-lifetime experience – I might even sign up myself. That’s the thing – bells are for the community and symbolise my inclusion in a wider community, now that I can hear.

On that note, Happy New Year, to the bongs of Big Ben.

*For viewers in the UK, if you haven’t yet done so, you can still catch up with a couple of programmes about the art and history of bellringing on BBC4 in the next few days, as they should be available on iPlayer afterwards for a week. Fascinating stuff, and warmly recommended.

At work generally, I manage just fine now in small groups without needing any communication support, but prefer to retain “live human” support at large meetings or conferences where the mumble quotient is likely to be high, or the risk of lively debate in the upper reaches of higher philosophical thought higher still (OK, people talking over each other!) Depending on the context, I’m happy to use either lipspeakers or BSL interpreters, who usually work in pairs if the assignment goes beyond a certain length of time, handing over from one to the other as they go on, often at 15-minute intervals. It keeps them fresh in a task which demands concentration from both communication professional and client, and I usually find the switch from one lipspeaker to another refreshing too, for the same reason. It’s also fascinating – watching different professionals doing exactly the same job. I love people-watching, and this is absolutely specialist people-watching . . .

When the speaker’s really boring I wonder if they ever think of the poor deaf woman in the corner who is looking alert with all her might (despite her eyelids drooping in the post-prandial graveyard slot) because someone is being paid for her to take part on an equal basis. I can’t waste these opportunities. (Though on one occasion I had a sympathetic lipspeaker who noted that I could barely prop my eyes open with matchsticks and suggested that we both had a ten-minute break contemplating the insides of our eyelids, since no-one else was listening anyway. Now that’s what I call equality – being able to join the serried ranks of sleepers at a conference.)

Sometimes a trusted colleague will lipspeak for me at an in-house meeting within our department. He’s not trained, but we have known one another for many, many years, virtually the full length of our respective careers within the organisation, and I can always absolutely rely on him to lipspeak what is said. (I can confirm this from what I can hear now.) This is just an organic solution that has grown up over the years in particular contexts, but I want to stress that this solution only works because everyone is prepared to be flexible and make it work. In other work contexts, my employers always provide external communication support.

In some ways it is easier for my colleague to take the reins sometimes because we both speak the same work-related jargon, so he knows what he says will be understood by me in the same spirit as he has given it. I’m usually full of admiration for communication professionals who must convey subject-matter in which they are not trained in such a way that they accurately reflect the speaker’s intention and enable the deaf person to receive it in exactly the same way. To be a conduit is hard.

Today my colleague lipspoke for me at a large in-house training meeting at which he was also a convenor, juggling roles and hats, introducing speakers, then sitting down beside them to lipspeak for me, and doing a large chunk of speaking himself. He’s a natural, no communication professional could have done any better. I really think he went over and above the call of duty in doing this at this particular event and deserved that pint at the pub! Thank you Mr B.

The other day the Bear and I were out on a shopping trip in the beautiful city of Bath – full of independent shops and very nice branches of the chain stores, and not one but TWO independent bookshops (Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights and Topping’s). You name it, you can get it in Bath – anything from a venison sausage to a tiny collectible teddy, from vintage clothing to just the right kind of drawer handle, from artisan cheeses to specialist card shops, and more framing shops than you can shake a stick at. Bath has a genteel and ever so slightly kooky vibe, and that’s just what I like about it.

Not quite so good, perhaps, is the train company which runs into Bath, and I’m not providing you with a link to them because, a, I have no wish to give them free publicity, and b, they’re giving up the franchise in a few months anyway. I have no beef with their staff, most of whom are actually pretty darn good and go out of their way to help this hardened commuter, but hello, what idiot thinks it’s a good idea to have the PLATFORM announcement “Bath Spa: this is Bath Spa” while the train is still roaring into the station? We on the platform know we’re at Bath Spa, thank you, and if you’re trying to let your passengers, especially your blind or partially sighted passengers, know they’re at Bath Spa, well, how are they going to hear when they’re still on the train on the curve approaching the station?! It’s usually followed by “The train now standing at platform 1 is the train for xxxxxx” and that’s if you’re lucky, quite often it is just “The train now standing xxxxxxxxxzzzzzzhiisssssscreeechhhhhissssbrrrrrbrrrrmmmmmmm”

Aside from being factually incorrect – the train isn’t standing, it’s approaching – who the hell is this announcement designed to help, exactly? (They’ve already given the “the train now approaching” spiel when you can barely see it on the horizon.) Are they expecting their customers to have perfect hearing and understand gobbledegook just as the train screeches to a halt? Does anyone actually think: how on earth is someone with a vision impairment and therefore reliant on announcements expected to get confirmation that they’re boarding the right train? Oh yes, they might have heard the announcement that the train is approaching – but then they might not, they might’ve been running for the train, and what about when trains are running late and the 18.30 storms in at the time and platform usually reserved for the 18.38?

Just such announcements were made at Bath the other day. I remarked on the rubbish timing of “Bath Spa: this is Bath Spa” to the Bear. He hadn’t noticed on the approach of the first train to our platform (not ours) but listened out for it again when the next one came in, and said “You’re right.” So I wasn’t hallucinating, I really was hearing something that was wrong but it took me remarking on it for the Bear to pick up on it. Hearing people take their audio environment so much for granted they don’t really spot things out of place, especially in a busy environment where so much is competing for their attention. I think the same must be true of train companies, because they are so used to the way they work they forget that some of what they do isn’t necessarily helpful to their customers in general and their disabled customers in particular. It drives me bloomin’ nuts!!!

Rant over. *smiles* Let’s hope the new franchisee improves matters!

There’s a magazine for every interest. I love them. You might remember me extolling the virtues of Miniature Railway magazine a while back, but I think this has to be the most esoteric yet . . . Baltic Railways Magazine. There is a market for a magazine dedicated to the railways of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, with every article duplicated in both Lithuanian and English. Of course, I simply HAD to buy a copy. I’m not in the least interested in Baltic rail, of course, though you never know, one day I might find myself tootling out of Tallinn, riding the rails in Riga, or voyaging in Vilnius, but it is just the mind-boggling concept that someone cares enough to publish a magazine on their niche interest and make sure it reaches as wide a readership as possible by translating it with care, pride, and passion. Isn’t that heartening?

And this I purchased in Wales, where everything is bilingual, and read in a Viennese coffee shop in Cardiff with a menu that almost prompted me to order in German. Fab coffee and fab apfelstrudel, and we felt right at home.

I did get the curious stares on an earlier visit this week though. The Bear and I were returning from a weekend away and had just been decanted at the end of the Central Line after some bustitution, in lieu of a train to Liverpool Street. All went swimmingly until midway between Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Circus. A loud, loud, loud alarm reverberated throughout the train and nearly did my head in – there’s no better phrase. On and on and on it screamed to the point where it got physically painful. Naturally the train screeched to a halt, adding to the cacophony.

The Bear looked at me. I looked at the Bear. He looked at my ear. I took the CI off. As one the carriage rubbernecked to see what I was doing but no-one dared quite ask. I wondered if some of them thought I was the cause of the noise. (Hmmph, snorts the Bear: she’s quite capable of kicking up a racket, but was utterly blameless on this occasion.) Others, I think, looked almost envious. It turned out that someone had accidentally pulled on the alarm as the train lurched, and, having established it was a false alarm, we got going again. It took me a couple of minutes to recover, though. Even with the CI off, the din had been so loud it had triggered tinnitus and the exact same sound was repeating itself in my ear, banging on the walls of my brain.

Now that was a learning experience. I’m now well-used to alarms of various kinds – but that one was really out of my comfort zone. The Bear explained: it wasn’t so much the volume of the alarm, though that was bad enough, but the fact that it didn’t have anywhere to go. Trapped in a tunnel, along with the rest of us, it didn’t have anywhere to dissipate.

So I swivelled round to the Bear and asked if the Paris Metro sounded different. “Of course,” he said. “They have wider tunnels to start off with.” And it’s true. Platforms face each other across a tunnel, rather than one platform per tunnel as on the Tube. My dad pointed out that the Paris Metro trains have rubber wheels too. I just hadn’t thought about it specifically in Tube terms, but it seems the Tube follows the general rule that sound is infinitely variable depending on its context. I’d noticed it before, but it took the alarm to get me to think more about how sound behaves.

Why not have a go, as I did, on Youtube – just google whatever city transport system takes your fancy. You could even try the Newcastle Metro. The Bear has just walked in and looked at me: “Only you would think of trying to compare the Tube and the Paris Metro.”

Hmm. I can feel a Christmas shopping trip to Paris coming on. There’d be the Eurostar to listen to. Failing that, Newcastle’s Northumberland Street would be reet canny, an’ aal.

Mum and Dad let me sleep in on Sunday morning – I must admit getting rather grouchy with poor old Dad when he shook me awake at 7.45 on Saturday morning.* He told me a coffee was waiting for me – in other words, wake up and smell the coffee, and you won’t get another one if you leave it to get cold. (The Bear often informs me that penguins are collecting on icebergs ready to jump in my coffee: it’s always the Antarctic, never the Arctic, maybe polar bears encroach on his territory or something.) I finally managed to come round about 8ish and pottered downstairs to find the saucer had been carefully placed over my coffee to keep it hot. That’s love.

Yesterday morning I tottered across the landing to the bathroom at the much more civilised Sunday hour of 9.15 and heard Dad calling me. Thinking I might have pre-empted one of them making their way up to the bathroom after breakfast, I called back, “‘arf a mo, Dad.” But it wasn’t competition for the bathroom. Instead a cheery shout spiralled up the stairs all the way from the kitchen: “Would you like a coffee, love?” “Ooh yes please, Dad.”

Life’s simple pleasures. Coffee, lie-ins, and being with those you love.

*I usually forget to pack my Shakeawake but either of my parents is usually prepared to undertake the exact same function. Groan.

I do a great deal of professional archive research and have made use of an awful lot of academic libraries, archives, record offices and local studies libraries the length and breadth of the land from the National Archives at Kew to tiny offices in Berwick-on-Tweed, from the British Library Newspaper Division at Colindale to the Royal Cornwall Institution. At nearly all of these places I sit down and squint at microfilm . . .

As I say, I have a long and unhappy history with microfilm readers. Once, attempting to pull off a recalcitrant reel of film that was jammed fast on the spool spike, I managed to pull off the entire reader undercarriage onto my lap instead, my colleague helpless with laughter and extremely serious researchers tutting and frowning over their specs as we disrupted their note-taking.

At the same revered institution, which shall remain nameless since I still visit it occasionally (exceptionally tempting though it is to name and shame) many years ago the toilets used to be downstairs, just before the exit doors, which were bristling with security. On my first visit I popped to the loo and came out again to find a big, burly security officer tapping his feet outside. He growled at me: “I was calling you but you ignored me, are you deaf or something?”

“Yes.” His jaw dropped and I could almost see his toes curling in his big black boots as realisation dawned and *my* toes still curl to this day as I remember his grovelling apology. I don’t really do them – engaging brain before opening mouth is far preferable. He explained that there was a rule that you had to show your bag to the security guard before you went down to the loo even though you weren’t exiting the building. I don’t know what they thought you might do – flush some valuable document down the loo, maybe? I mean, have your bag checked when you leave, fair enough. I asked him to show me where the poster displaying the rule was, which was, of course, non-existent, and asked whether they expected me to have acquired the rule by osmosis . . .

Oh, and the little old dears made sour by years of requests for the same thing over and over again, who couldn’t quite grasp the fact that if I put in an order for something there wasn’t a lot of point bellowing out my name to come and collect it. I’d look up from the Calendar of State Papers Domestic to see that I’d somehow created a domestic and everyone would be looking around wondering why this mysterious Miss X wasn’t collecting her next volume and I’d slink to the desk with all these elderly male researchers shaking their heads at the younger generation, and conduct a tetchy exchange in whispers at the desk.

And I have to tell you this. This is priceless. At another institution you have to clear security at the entrance with your reader’s pass before you go upstairs to the main reading room. Now one day I’d pre-ordered material to be delivered at the desk and had no reason to talk to upstairs reception, but I was not to know that after lunch they had decided to do a spot check of passes. I returned to the deepest, darkest recesses of the microfilm reader rooms and started to be aware that a man was following me. Not really wishing to work in an isolated room with a strange man, I turned round and asked what he wanted. He demanded to see my pass, I demanded to know why he was following me. He said he’d called out to ask for my pass at the desk and didn’t like my lack of response. Sprinkling sarcasm lightly over his head, I asked him to review the evidence and see that it pointed to a different conclusion: that I was deaf. Suffice it to say that I objected most strongly in writing to my disability being treated as suspicious.

Then there were the bomb alerts and fire alarms from which I had to be rescued by staff because I was in the loo, and you can see why I always informed staff before I arrived that I was deaf to make special arrangements for document delivery, or to ensure I received a visual alert of some kind before being incinerated with some priceless document. I used to work with old manuscripts in the days before mobile phones, occasionally being locked in a room together with whatever 9th century illuminated manuscript I was poring over, cut off from the outside world, with the staff saying they would pop in at 4pm or whatever to let me out. It really used to worry me that I would get forgotten, especially in the event of an alarm. One reason why I didn’t pursue a career with ancient bits of parchment.

So my visit to a military archive yesterday was pretty special. No need to warn the staff beforehand about me being deaf. No worries about communicating with them. No panic that if something went off I’d be forgotten about. No angst at communicating with a receptionist hidden behind a high desk. No fear that in a high-security environment I’d inadvertently cause some kind of chaos. No tension about discussing material with someone I’d never met before, wondering if they’d have a walrus moustache, thin lips and an impenetrable accent. No stress, no fuss, no bother. I did battle with the microfilm reader as usual and managed to pull off the spool spike without noticing until I tried stuffing the reel back into the box, thereby reducing yet another colleague to giggles. (I managed to put it back.) But best of all was listening at the microfilm reader with my back to him as he reeled off yet another name and date for me to look up. (And the staff there were utterly fabulous.)

If you’re a long-term lipreader, your eyes take over from your ears in understanding speech. Where I’m at at the moment is understanding most people pretty well without relying on lipreading, but without giving it up. It’s actually very hard for me to tell where lipreading ends and listening begins – two complementary tools for comprehension – because I’m doing both, most of the time, but I can feel the pull towards listening becoming ever stronger, and more natural.

It seems really random. The Bear often starts talking to me while I’m reading, as he has the knack of ripping me away from a really interesting bit, and I answer, and he keeps batting the conversational ball back every time my eye goes back on the page. I’m a fast reader, but he’s a fast talker, and I can’t believe that I still revert back to the same paragraph over and over again. (I’m guilty of it too. Hands up.) He has that knack of doing it just at the crucial moment in a TV show and because he’s not listening either, neither of us ever finds out what happens. (Yes, there is iPlayer, but . . . ) It never used to fill me with such fury when I could only lipread – though it was still irritating then, because the clue’s in the word “lip-reading“. When reading – or concentrating really hard on my work, say – if someone spoke to me it would take a moment to make the shift from reading the written word to the spoken word, much like taking in first one text, then another.

What I suspect I need to do is work out how to carry on reading – my book, the article in the newspapers, the subtitles on the telly – and listening to the person who’s talking to me? It just seems instinctive to look at whoever is talking to you – it’s rude not to! – but it will be good listening training trying to take in Bear without looking while having half an eye on the TV subtitles. It’s hearing in noise training, even. My eyes and ear have to swap over.

I managed it the other night without even trying. Dad and I were watching TV one evening while Mum was in hospital recently. The phone rang and I hit the mute button, continuing to watch the programme with subtitles, but also listening to both sides of the conversation as I could hear my aunt’s voice leaking through the phone, and understanding every word. It was probably easier, because, of course, my aunt wasn’t there to see what she was saying, and you don’t eavesdrop on the phone (though that’s just what I was doing really) but I wouldn’t normally watch my father talking on the phone. Interesting thought – cultural norms have an impact on learning to interpret what we hear. Behavioural linguistics it is then!

My feet dangling over the sea wall drying off. The Bear can be seen under his hat taking the photograph. © Bear, obviously.

At school I was quite open about my ambition to be a writer. I’ve never forgotten the stupidity of a classmate who said straightaway: “How can you do that when you’re deaf?” as if the ability to paint a picture in words was dependent on being able to hear. I challenged her and all she could come up with was I wasn’t able to put over the tone of voice . . . erm, but you can see irony and sarcasm and love and anger all dripping from the lips, and I’m sure I would’ve had the common sense to put in creaking floorboards and other plot devices. Anyway, there’s such a thing as imagination. This girl clearly lacked it because she couldn’t see past the ‘can’t’.  The negativity of all those people who say ‘You can’t . . .’ was probably the loudest sound I ‘heard’ for years.

I think I would always have imagined lots of different sounds as I did for so many years – my brain made it happen even as it went soundlessly past my ears – but there’s more for my imagination to play on now that I can hear. So here’s my take on Southwold’s most famous moment as the townsfolk witnessed the Battle of Solebay on 28th May, 1672, inspired by a facsimile of a sketch of the ‘Battell’ in our hotel at Southwold, made by a contemporary artist and eyewitness.

How much the 17th century residents of Southwold could have heard I do not know: sea battles were mobile and ranged over many miles, and the wind and waves may have snatched away some of the noise. For the onlookers it might not have been much more than dim booming drifting ashore through a deadening pall of smoke and sea haar. For those on board the fighting ships, it would have been deafening, particularly for the gunners: boom – roar – whizz – crack – thwack – and a scattering of splinters (which were more lethal than the cannonballs themselves) multiplied over and over until the men must have been half mad. Orders barked and oaths uttered in dialect English and guttural Dutch, yells of terror as a ball thudded into the mainmast, sending it ‘by the board’ and bringing down with it yards and ropes and rigging in a swishing, hissing, thudding shock of noise. The roar of flames as a fireship, stuffed with combustible materials and with its empty gunports left open to allow the whooosh of oxygen to do its work, was left to drift among the enemy. More oaths as the skeleton fireship crew jumped into the boat, the plash-plash-plash of their oars barely audible above the general din, the roar and crackle of flames intensifying as the burning fireship touched the hull of its intended victim, the English Royal James. Water, water, everywhere – and nothing to quench the flames leaping higher, hissing and rippling along the ropes and tearing up the sails, and creeping ever more dangerously towards the magazine. BOOOOMMMMM. The hissing, boiling, cracking, splattering sound as what was left of the Royal Navy’s newest ship sank beneath the waves, with a sucking sigh that would have taken down with it anyone unfortunate enough to be in close proximity and still alive.

And in all this noise, the tiny little sound of a graphite pencil as the artist, Willem van de Velde the elder, made the original sketch from the edges of the battle in his little pinnace.

I doubt whether I could have included that last little detail pre-implant.

Figure Court, Royal Hospital, Chelsea, designed by Sir Christopher Wren, opened to its first Pensioners in 1692.

Last week I found myself at a railway station (what a surprise!) homeward-bound from home to home – that is, from my home town back to where I live with the Bear. I could hear the announcements apologising for the delay to my train, which kept coming: the train kept getting postponed, it seemed. Then, all of a sudden: BLAAAARRREEE BLAAREEEE BLAARREE BLAM BLAM BLOO BLAAAH BLAAAH BLAAH and everyone stood stock still and tried to listen. If you’re hearing, you’ll recognise that ‘trying to listen’ stance. If you’re deaf, you’ll know that feeling of missing something yet again by noticing other people’s body language. This time, we were all in the same boat, as it blared out again and again, everyone on the platform looking at one another in consternation and confusion: no one could make out a bl**dy thing.

Normally tannoy announcements are fairly clear and easy to understand (give or take the odd crackle or three), especially when they’re recorded ones. The live ones usually occur when there’s an untoward event and are performed by panicked staff, who have no idea about volume control. Hello folks, the medium is the message. Can’t you hear yourself reverberating round the station confusing everyone? Why not do a quick test and check the volume, compose yourself and speak without gabbling in high-speed, high-volume panic? After all, when you want the public to act on your instructions, surely you need to make sure they can hear what you’re saying? Hmmm? After all, hypothetical station manager, you have got the gift of working ears, why not use them, plus a smidgeon of common sense?

The platform was woefully understaffed, by which read that there was no-one to ask, so as one we all descended down the stairs to seek information and assistance. The old gentleman on the seat next to me was a Chelsea Pensioner, who couldn’t understand the still-booming tannoy either and asked me. I had to queue up at the ticket desk to ask (where were the other staff?) and for the umpteenth time probably the girl at the desk explained that the overhead cable had been vandalised and our train was stuck, unable to come in. I mean, I would have listened in to her reply to the person in front of me who was probably asking the same question, except I had to rely on my lipreading skills to overcome what seemed to be a loop of noise, and I couldn’t very well barge in, now, could I? (how terribly British!) I asked if they were laying on road transport to London, and she replied it wouldn’t be coming in for a couple of hours. She suggested that we had only to get ourselves somehow to the next station down the line, where different lines join to snake their way to London, and pick up a train unaffected by the chaos. All I could do was snort at their incompetence – ridiculous, two hours to lay on road transport from a firm which made its name originally running coaches before diversifying into trains. Integrated transport, anyone?

Anyway, I passed on all this evidence of incompetence to the pensioner, and said I had a plan. Rather than rushing off to the bus station to fight our way onto the next (and probably mythical, this being a Sunday) service bus to the next stop, I rang my dad. The tannoy was so LOUD that I had to go out of the station to get rid of it, though it was still very much audible outside, but managed to talk to my dad and ask for a lift.

Dad to the rescue! Even now as a fortysomething and with a Bear to lean on, Dad still comes to the rescue! He exclaimed that he had taken all sorts of people in his car before, but never a Chelsea Pensioner! Actually, they hit it off and had a wee chat en route when the road noise wasn’t too bad: at one point I had to facilitate the conversation a little, as I think it was fair to say everyone in the car was somewhat hard of hearing! In fact, we all had a bit of a chuckle at the fact that Dad was older than the old soldier, though they were much the same vintage, representative of a shrinking generation, as the links with WWII fade away.

His uniform alone should have told other people that he needed and deserved a bit of assistance, but I guess that most people would have overlooked his hearing needs and thought instead of whether he might have been fatigued. He wasn’t to know I was deaf too, when he asked me what was going on, but I’d already clocked his hearing aids . . . It takes one to know one, as they say, and, having been too often on the other side, dependent on the goodwill of strangers to keep me in the loop, I’m delighted to be able to help someone else on that score. In fact, I feel proud that I could help this old soldier resplendent in his uniform and his immaculately polished medals. After all, he gave the best years of his life so that, ultimately, really, I could benefit from cochlear implants.

How did I get there, I hear you ask? Well, just think about what might have happened had the tide turned against the Allies all those years ago: medical science might have taken a far more sinister turn.