w.atching the w.orld unw.ind

When I was six, I earned myself a 10-day stay in an E.N.T. hospital, because of poor communication.

Suffering from the usual childhood ear problems, I was sent for a hearing test. Instead of saying:
“Tell us when you hear this noise”
* demonstrates noise *
before clamping huge NHS headphones onto my head, they just said:
“Tell us when you hear the noise”.

So there I am, a terrified six year old in a huge hospital, muffled by massive bakelite, dustbin-sized cans and waiting for whatever sort of noise a six-year old might expect from huge etc.

While the intermittent beeping in my ears went unrecognized and unreported...

This being very pre-MRSA, the only thing I came out of hospital with was a pathological hatred of spinach.

So yesterday, I‘m sat in a virtually empty carriage and a woman plonks herself down immediately opposite me. It’s an empty carriage?

For the next twenty five minutes, in the nanoseconds between making and receiving calls on her mobile, she proceeded to stuff her face with junk. Crisps. Ribena. Apples. Very crunchy apples. It's 9.00 a.m. ffs.

‘If she says once more “No, I’m on the train” I’m going to make her swallow her own Siemens’ I vowed.

Then, when she said “Rachel? I want to go through these fifteen points with you” I walked. 25 minutes of relentless chomping and chatting. It was too much.

And six seats down, with Stephen Hawkings’s voiceover on Pink Floyd’s “Keep Talking” (see “Today’s Lyric”) ringing in my ears, I could still hear her.

* tries on Victor Meldrew cap *