A deafening silence

One morning in 2007, the music critic Nick Coleman woke up to find that he was profoundly deaf in one ear. ‘The silence did not descend silently, however. It made a small sound. You might compare it to the sound of a kitten dropping on to a pillow.’ Within an hour this pffff had developed a pulse, and over the next few days it evolved into an unceasing clamour of clanks, zizzes and whistles. By now Coleman was in hospital and doctors were scratching their heads, as they usually do with tinnitus. I can remember the eyes of my doctor glazing over with boredom when I told him about my own tinnitus. When he heard that I wrote about music, and had been to far too many deafening gigs over the years, his disapproval hardened. A scribble on the pad, and I was on my way. Next!

Coleman’s tinnitus, however, was on another level to mine, several storeys higher in the Tower of Song. As well as losing his hearing in his right ear completely and permanently, his balance was shot and almost all sensory perception had become agonising. ‘It is not the amplitude of the noise that does my head in but the complex irregularity of the signal. Six voices rabbiting over supper is worse than any pneumatic drill; a crunched crisp packet hurts more than a car alarm.’ Music, in particular, was impossible to listen to. ‘Ever since I can remember I have had music playing in my head, at all hours and in most circumstances… Where most people have a mind, I have nice music playing.’

How to go on? Speaking as a coward, I can safely say that I would have been on the plane to Dignitas by this point, but before Coleman could even drop the word ‘suicide’ into normal conversation, his wife told him that she wasn’t having any of it.