away in their little zipped and foam-lined pouch, and then, unless Fred should happen to hear them making the high-pitched feedback noise they emit when thus enclosed and draws my attention to it, the batteries run down uselessly. This quite often happens at night if I take them out in my study or in the bathroom before going to bed and leave them there where Fred can’t hear them whining to themselves like mosquitoes. It happens so often in fact, even after I have made a special effort to do the opposite, that I sometimes think there is some kind of hearing-aid imp who switches them on in the night after I have switched them off. I simply can’t believe it when I open the pouch in the morning and find them switched on when I have such a clear memory of switching them off. There must be a kink in my neural pathways which makes me unconsciously switch them on again after consciously switching them off, a reflex motion of the thumb which slides the battery covers into the ‘On’ position even as I place them in their little nests of synthetic foam to sleep. The Bates Reflex, named after Desmond Bates, who established early in the twenty-first century that users develop an unconscious hostility towards their hearing aids which causes them to ‘punish’ these devices by carelessly allowing the batteries to run down. Actually it’s self-punishment because the batteries are quite expensive, nearly four pounds for six. They come in a little round transparent plastic pack with six compartments, ingeniously mounted on a cardboard base like a carousel, which you rotate to expel a new battery through a hinged flap at the back. Each battery has a brown plastic tab adhering to it which stops the electricity leaking away, or so I understand, and which you must remove before inserting the battery into your hearing instrument. These sticky little wafers are quite difficult to detach from your fingers and dispose of. I tend to transfer them on to whatever surface is to hand, so my desktop, files, ringbinders and other home office utensils are covered with tiny brown spots, as if soiled with the droppings of some incontinent nocturnal rodent. The instructions on the back of the pack tell you to wait at least one minute after removing the plastic tab before inserting the battery into the hearing instrument (don’t ask me why) but it often takes me longer than that to liberate myself from the tab.
When I had replaced the battery I went into the drawing room, but Fred had gone upstairs to read in bed. I knew that was what she was doing even though she hadn’t said so, in the way married couples know each other’s habitual intentions without needing to be informed, which is particularly useful if you happen to be deaf; in fact if she had informed me verbally of her intention I would have been more likely to get it wrong. I didn’t want to join her because I can’t read in bed for more than five minutes without falling asleep, and it was too early for that, I would only wake up in the small hours and lie there tossing and turning, not wanting to get up in the cold dark but unable to drop off again.
I thought about watching the News at Ten but the news is so depressing these days - bombings, murders, atrocities, famines, epidemics, global warming - that one shrinks from it late at night; let it wait, you feel, till the next day’s newspaper and the cooler medium of print. So I came back into the study and checked my email - ‘No New Messages’; and then I decided to write an account of my conversation, or rather non-conversation, with the woman at the ARC private view, which in retrospect seemed rather amusing, though stressful at the time. First I did it in the usual journal style, then I rewrote it in the third person, present tense, the kind of exercise I used to give students in my stylistics seminar. First person into third person, past tense into present tense, or vice versa.What difference does it make to the effect? Is one method more appropriate to the original experience than another, or does any method interpret rather than represent experience? Discuss.
In speech the options are more limited - though my step-grandson Daniel, Marcia’s child, hasn’t learned this yet. He’s two years old, two and a half,