Aural danger

The Guardian had an interesting — and, frankly, terrifying — piece the other day by Nick Coleman, the Independent’s long-serving and shamelessly cerebral rock critic. I used to know Nick slightly: we talked drivel on the same radio show for a while a dozen years ago, and he wrote a piece about my first cricket book, in which he described me as ‘faintly posh and indefatigably sunny’, a combination of words that makes my girlfriend fall about to this day. Actually, I liked him a lot: he has an incredibly dry sense of humour and loves music to his core.

And a terrible thing has happened to him. Without warning, or apparent reason, he has lost his hearing in one ear. Worse, the ability to hear in that ear has been replaced by a monstrous variety of noises, as his brain tries to compensate. ‘It is the auditory equivalent of the illusion experienced by amputees,’ he explains. It’s not conventional tinnitus, ‘but entirely reactive to input in the good ear…When two or more voices are joined in amiable conversation, I hear trains entering underground stations.’ And music, his ‘great passion in life’, has become a nightmare. ‘What I can hear is monophonic, on the far side of whatever uproar happens to be filling my head.’

He manages to write about all this with great eloquence and without a trace of self-pity, or the rage he must surely feel. Because the chances are that this will get no better. His ability to cope with it might, but the hearing in that ear seems to be gone for good.

As it happens, Nick is the same age as me: 47. We are at that slightly worrying age when bits of us start dropping off and people we know keel over for no apparent reason.