Grumpy Oldie Man Matthew Norman
I really couldn’t hear properly – and it was all Apple’s fault
This chronic hypochondriac’s medical history, much like that of any other, is laden with false alarms.
There is no more the space than the audience appetite for a full inventory. But a few examples may hint at the bewilderment with which a sequence of physicians have reacted over 40 years to certain enquiries.
One, informed by my 20-year-old self of the immediate need for a heart transplant, was willing to refer me, she said after a careful examination, albeit to a psychiatrist rather than a cardiologist.
Another, despite my presenting with the clearest of symptoms, brusquely brushed aside my concerns about pre-eclampsia.
My private guy in Knightsbridge is infinitely more indulgent. He once handed me a signed note reading, ‘You do not have cancer,’ reassuringly rejecting a demand to append the suffix ‘yet’.
Because of a dismal turn on the personal-finance front, however, I have become obliged to limit consultations to an annual event.
I collate the potentially lethal complaints until the total hits 17. Having rattled through nine or ten over half an hour, he murmurs something about having a full waiting room.
I respond by asking if he has hired a security officer since my last visit. He says he has done no such thing. In that event, I tell him, I’ll be going nowhere until we’re done with 17.
But even his ungodly patience has waned of late, owing partly to fatigue, and partly also to the Covid-driven pressure to spend as little time as possible with patients.
So it was that, a few days ago, I endured the nihilistically pointless ritual of requesting an appointment at the NHS surgery. In the time of plague, these doctors will see almost nobody. If you pitched up carrying a leg sliced off moments before in a freak urban-thresher accident, the receptionist would tell you to hop home, put it on ice and ring 111.
They will, however, consent to phoning back – and, several hours later, one did. ‘So what is it today?’ he asked in the familiarly jaded tone.
‘Well, doctor,’ I said, ‘I think it’s an acoustic neuroma.’ ‘Why do you think that?’ I referred to the occasional but profound hearing impairment that had been plaguing me for a while. ‘And when do you notice it?’ ‘Oddly enough, it seems to happen only when I’m walking in the park. I’m listening to something cheery on the headphones – Fauré’s Requiem, usually – when suddenly I can barely hear the music. Is it’ – I repeated my reference to a usually benign tumour pressing on the eardrum – ‘an acoustic neuroma?’
After a vexed and lengthy pause, he wearily relocated his larynx. ‘That’s very unlikely. But if it happens again,’ he said, ‘check your phone screen. Is there anything else?’
I made the traditional request for liquid diamorphine. Like many colleagues down the years, he was disinclined to prescribe heroin purely for the merriment.
Mystified by his advice though I certainly was, I took it during a subsequent stroll, when the aural disturbance came during the first track of the album condensed here for brevity to Ziggy Stardust.
‘It was cold and it rained,’ sang David Bowie, in Five Years, his suitably upbeat number about the death of the planet. ‘So I felt like an actor. I thought of Ma, and I…’ Barely a sound.
I pulled the phone from its pocket in keeping with the GP’S counsel, and found a message.
After analysing my headphone usage over the last week, the message related, Apple had decided to restrict the volume for my protection.
Nanny statism has always struck me as a myth, propounded by Ayn Randstyle social Darwinists to justify their preference for minimal taxation of the rich over anyone’s doing anything to help the poor escape systemic poverty.
Corporate nannysim, on the other hand, is evidently real. For the protection of my soul, for example, if not my ears, Virgin Media now requires me to enter a four-digit pin code to access certain recorded shows.
What moral turpitude it imagines might be inflicted by University Challenge is a mystery. Is Virgin Media spooked by the prospect of Paxo whipping off his knick-knacks during the starter for ten, and performing some animist penis puppetry throughout the picture round?
Hearing, like moral sensitivities, used to be ours to do with as we desire. If this happened to involve the deranged self-infliction of tinnitus, by deployment of a cotton bud to push a piece of Roger & Gallet sandalwood soap on to the eardrum in the inevitably doomed bid to remove it, that choice was solely mine.
No longer. From beyond the grave, Steve Jobs is fretting about my auditory canals. Touching as that is, and however gratifying his spectral effort to fill space vacated by face-to-face GP appointments, it’s none of his beeswax. Or indeed his earwax.
If I require someone to nag continually about excessive volume from Bluetooth headphones, that function is more than adequately fulfilled, thank you kindly, by my mother.