“Erm, yes…I think so…is the visual field test the one with the flashing lights and you stick your head in a booth?”

“Aye, that’s the one”, said Sahid. I must warn you, though, it’s really boring…REALLY boring. Isn’t it Tracey?”

“Uh huh. It’s boring”, replied Tracey as she handed me a fetching black eye patch to cover one eye for the test. I had a fleeting impulse to say “Ah haar, shiver me timbers”, in my best pirate voice to liven things up, but I reckoned they’d have heard that one before. I concentrated instead on trying not to catapult the hearing aid at Tracey as I stretched the elastic of the pirate patch over my ears.

Next, Tracey gave the chin rest on the booth such a good going over with a disinfectant wipe, that I began to wonder who had been in previously. I placed my outstretched chin on the damp patch and we were off.

“Here’s your clicker, just press it when you see a light” said Tracey. Clicker? Ah, I was in my element now. I set about clicking with great vigour. After about twenty clicks, I realised I hadn’t had this particular test before and it seemed to be going on for a long time. I kept myself amused by aiming for the fastest response time they’d ever seen in a Visual Field test. After about forty clicks, a slight touch of boredom began to creep in right enough, and I was getting trigger happy with the clicker on the bits with no lights. I hoped this wouldn’t affect the results. I could hear Tracey sipping a cup of tea behind me and reckoned I’d be needing a tea break soon myself. Finally, the first eye was done. How LONG did that take, I thought, my train ticket home was going to be out of date if it kept up like this. I pulled the eye patch round on to the other eye and began again.

Flash. Click. Flash. Click. Flash. Click…………Click. Flash. God this WAS boring. My mind was beginning to wander to my Moussaka For One portion in the fridge at home, and the last Mr Kipling’s French Fancy (a pink one) in the cake tin. Yum. All washed down with a nice chilled glass of wine in front of MasterChef on the telly. I was losing the battle to stay in the here and now with the Visual Field test machine.

“It’s trying to wear me down”, I said to Tracey through clenched teeth, forgetting my chin had no room for manoeuvre on the chinrest. Please let it finish soon, I mouthed silently into the void. Suddenly, three loud beeps announced that my wish had been granted.

“All done”, said Tracey, “Sahid will give you the results in a minute. How did you find that?”

“Boring, really boring”, I said, thankful that it was.

As I scuttled along a dimly lit side street in a desperate rush to catch the train home from work, I felt the familiar loosening of a shoelace, a scenario which only happens when one is in a hurry to catch trains. After weighing up whether I could run the last 200 yards using an exaggerated leg movement on the side contralateral to the flapping lace in order to avoid tripping, I decided to be sensible and stop.

I still had the 18:53 train in my sights, so I decided to cut corners by attempting to tie the lace without first removing my gloves. This, as always, proved to be a mistake, but I persist in doing it anyway in the hope that one day it will work and I won’t have to touch a dirty wet shoelace with my bare hands. Hope abandoned, I removed my now wet gloves, gave up on the 18:53 and tied the offending lace into a pulsatingly tight triple knot, swearing loudly as I did so. It was while I was crouched on my haunches in the pouring rain that I spotted a familiar beige object sitting in a pool of water amongst the fag ends at my feet, and my heart sank.

“NOOOOOOOOOO!” I shrieked, clutching a disbelieving hand to the left ear. This was all I needed now. To my surprise, a blast of feedback and the familiar scrunch of hair on mic confirmed that, bizarrely, I had just stumbled upon someone else’s hearing aid, and mine was still safely tucked behind the ear. Phew.

A closer look at the drowned and beheaded blob on the pavement told me that some poor soul was now walking around the west end of Glasgow, half deaf and wearing only their earmould and tube. There was every chance that they would soon be wondering what had happened to the other half of their hearing aid, and I can reveal that it was last seen in West Greenhill Place, beside the parking ticket machine opposite the Citroen Garage…

As I engaged with the highly risky business of stroking Mitzi, my father in-law’s contrary tortoiseshell cat, I kept a close eye out for signs of feline irritation. She usually likes to attack us as we sleep, but experience has shown that a clawed swipe can happen at any time. As I watched her tail and ear movements carefully, I noticed that the fur on her throat was vibrating, and I suddenly remembered that cats purr. Strangely there was no sound coming out of Mitzi.

“Is she purring?” I asked the spouse, “I can’t see her lips moving from here.”

“Yes, quite loudly”, he replied, whilst carefully using the spike of a folded golf umbrella to retrieve his socks from the fur-lined nest Mitzi had kneaded from his clothes.

“Hmmm”, I said thoughtfully, adding cats’ purrs to the list of noises which have disappeared into the Cookie Bite Bermuda Triangle.

With the exception of Smokey, the cat with the world’s loudest purr at 67.7 dB…

It’s 2012, and if the recent apocalyptic weather conditions in Scotland are anything to go by, I’m starting to wonder if the Mayans might have had it right with their predictions after all.

New Year Resolution No. 1: Go for early morning run round park, has already been thwarted by the sudden appearance of a river where the concrete path used to be.

Phew, thank goodness for that.

Merry Christmas everyone!

It’s Christmas Eve, and BatteryBot has been putting the finishing touches to his Christmas tree. I’d been wondering why I’ve been getting through hearing aid domes so fast lately, but I have to admire my little robot friend’s ingenuity in fashioning them into an attractive set of lights. He’s been very excited about Christmas this year, and I even found a tiny letter to Santa in the fireplace this morning.

“Dear Santa”, it said, “please can you get me some proper legs, my wheels keep getting trapped in the gaps in the floorboards. Can I get an I, Robot DVD too, if that’s not too greedy, and please can you persuade my mum not to kill off the Cookie Bite Chronicles so that I can have one last Christmas next year. I love Christmas. I’ll be really, really good, Santa, I promise.”

I felt guilty, and wished I hadn’t opened the letter. “I can give you the first two wishes”, I gulped, “but I’m not sure about the third…”

And all that for a pair of plastic lips and a paper crown that splits when you try to put it on your head…

Despite the severe weather warnings on Thursday, my intrepid colleague and I set off for the new Museum of Transport designed by Zaha Hadid, to head off any students who hadn’t seen the notice telling them that the visit was cancelled because of adverse weather. After huddling in the driving rain, we were the first to enter when the museum opened at 10:00, and were made very welcome by the lady handing out floorplans at the door. We greeted the first few bedraggled students, then I set off enthusiastically for the new and improved Victorian Street Reconstruction to see how it compared with the old one. It was very good, and when I spotted a sign for the Subway, I was over there like a shot. I was so excited that I didn’t notice the man in the Glasgow Museums uniform shouting “Excuse me!” until he came striding assertively into my line of vision.

“Oh”, I said, “sorry, I didn’t hear you I’m a bit er…”

The man wasn’t in the mood for beating about the bush.

“Excuse me, who ARE you?” he said, in the manner of someone who was about to make a citizen’s arrest after recognising a suspect from Crimewatch UK.

My mind went into overdrive. The last person to ask me “Excuse me, who are you?” was my mother, but she put the emphasis on the normal ‘you‘ whereas this geezer was putting the emphasis on ‘are‘. This implied I wasn’t who he thought I was purporting to be, but since I didn’t know who he thought I was, and he hadn’t said “Wait a minute…you’re not that woman off the telly are you?”, I wondered how I should best answer his question.

I weighed up whether I should just say my name, state my occupation, or adopt the more Rumpelstiltskinesque strategy of saying “I’ll give you three guesses”, before grabbing a fossilised baguette from the French Café exhibit to use as a weapon, and running for the exit.

The man was getting impatient.

“Just WHAT do you think you’re doing here?” he said, in an even more puzzling development. I eyed up the fossilised baguette. The Crimewatch UK hypothesis was looking more likely by the minute. Fiona Bruce’s grave tones cut in to my silence: “The woman has thin curly hair, is slightly scruffy in appearance and may be wearing a hearing aid. Members of the public are advised to exercise caution when approaching her from behind.”

Suddenly, the museum attendant looked down at his watch. When he looked up again, he had undergone an instant personality change.

“Och, I didn’t realise it’s after ten o’clock”, he said. “We’re open now, I thought you were an intruder. We get some right strange people in here sometimes.”

I’m clearly one of them.

PhotoFit yourself here

“Oh my god! OH MY GOD! Come quick!” shouted the spouse. I had been having a nice relaxing afternoon at home after the gale force winds currently affecting Scotland had shut the Institute of Artistic Endeavour earlier in the day.

“Oh my god!” I said in agreement, after running to the window.

“Didn’t you hear the noise?” said the spouse, “It was horrifically loud…I thought there had been a car crash!”

I had to admit that I hadn’t heard a thing, but since the hearing aid had been having the day off in the bad weather too, there was no great surprise there. As I scanned the scene, relieved to note that the occupant of the car squashed by the tree was no longer in there, a sudden thought occurred to me. It occurred to the spouse at exactly the same time.

“Wait a minute…where’s the car?”

Fortunately, it’s the red one, but I don’t think our neighbours are going to be too pleased when they get home from work…

The sobering effect of a metal tray hitting the back of the head made me appreciate that my sound localisation faculties are not quite what they once were, and I cleared the shelves of other heavy objects as a precaution. This turned out to be very wise, and when the Attendance folder tumbled noisily from its perch after a particularly loud series of door slams a couple of days later, I was ready for it.