On Sunday we came back from a long weekend in North Wales, attending an HMS Conway school reunion at what is now the Conway Centre in the grounds of Plas Newydd, the home of the Marquess of Anglesey. We spent one night on a friend’s drive, he and his lady wife being away in Italy, and another in the municipal car park in Beaumaris. Some Welsh councils now allow camper vans to stay overnight for a single night, which is very enlightened.
We then spent two nights in the grounds at The Conway Centre in our motorhome, which, set against memories of the rather Spartan accommodation of the past, felt positively luxurious. The event itself was arranged around the dedication of a Conway window at the nearby Llanedwen church, which the cadets used to attend on Sundays, it being the church of the Marquess of Anglesey. A civilised setting, good company, and exactly the sort of occasion where one might hope to follow a conversation without too much drama.
I have had my hearing aids for about two months now, which feels like long enough to have moved beyond novelty and into a more settled assessment of their merits.
Hearing aids are one of those triumphs of modern technology that leave you wondering whether the victory might have been declared a little early.
On paper, they are miraculous. Miniaturised computers, constantly analysing the acoustic environment, selectively amplifying what matters, suppressing what does not, all while discreetly tucked behind the ear like a well behaved civil servant. In practice, they are rather more like an overexcited junior who has been given too much responsibility and no supervision.
The morning ritual sets the tone. There is the delicate insertion of tiny components clearly designed by someone with smaller fingers and better eyesight. There is the ceremonial inspection for wax, which appears with the reliability of HMRC correspondence and must be cleared with tools that would not look out of place in a watchmaker’s bench. Then the battery, which will of course fail at precisely the moment one is furthest from a spare and most in need of hearing something important.
Once installed, the real entertainment begins. The devices present you with a choice. You may have the world slightly muffled, as though heard through a polite layer of felt. Or you may have it rendered in forensic detail, in which every rustle of paper, every scrape of a chair, every faint shift of a shoe on carpet is elevated to the acoustic prominence of a starting pistol. Conversation, meanwhile, occupies an ambiguous middle ground, occasionally audible but never quite confident of its place in the hierarchy.
Complicating matters further, speech itself is not a single, tidy target. The settings that make a deeper male voice reasonably intelligible are not the same as those that bring out a higher female voice. So one finds oneself in the faintly ridiculous position of being well tuned for one half of the population and slightly adrift with the other. A dinner table with mixed company becomes less a social occasion and more an acoustic experiment, with the hearing aids gamely applying a single solution to what is, in reality, two different problems.
The theory is that all of this is adjustable. In reality, the settings resemble a menu designed by committee. One is invited to choose the least objectionable compromise and proceed with a stiff upper lip.
To add a modern flourish, there is, of course, an app. One can fiddle with sliders, toggle modes, and generally behave as though one is piloting a small aircraft rather than attempting to follow a conversation about pudding. In principle, this offers control. In practice, it adds a layer of responsibility. If you cannot hear properly, it is no longer merely the fault of the device, but of your own failure to select the right setting while someone was asking you a question.
There is one clear benefit of the NHS Bluetooth-enabled variety. One can listen to videos on one’s phone with complete discretion, a small triumph of modernity that allows one to appear attentive while being quietly elsewhere.
And then there is the formal occasion, that most revealing of stress tests. In this case, a Gala Dinner on the evening of the window dedication. Several people, competing conversations, background noise, cutlery, glassware, the low hum of a room not designed with acoustics in mind. Here the hearing aids rise to the occasion by amplifying everything with admirable impartiality. The clink of a fork becomes a matter of urgency. The rustle of a napkin acquires narrative significance. Meanwhile, the person sitting directly opposite, saying something undoubtedly interesting, is rendered faintly indistinct, as though speaking from the far end of a tunnel. If he has a baritone, you may catch the gist. If she has a lighter voice, you may catch the vowels and hope for the best. My own strategy in such circumstances is simple. Nod in agreement to whatever was said and, if a frown follows, shake one’s head sagely as though condemning any implication. It usually works, although I remain none the wiser as to the gist of the conversation.
At a certain point, one removes the devices altogether. Not in defeat, but in a spirit of practical realism. It is, after all, perfectly possible to ask someone to repeat themselves. Indeed, most people are happy to oblige, especially if the request is delivered with a hint of apology and a suggestion that they might raise their voice slightly. This analogue solution, while lacking in technological glamour, has the advantage of working.
Which brings us to the unfashionable but stubbornly effective idea of direction and size. Before digital signal processing, there were ear trumpets. Large, unapologetic devices that gathered sound from where you pointed them and delivered it, without commentary, to the ear. No batteries, no menus, no firmware updates. Just physics, doing its job with a minimum of fuss.
This has led me to toy with a refinement. Not a return to the full Victorian flourish, but something along the lines of a deely bopper arrangement. A lightweight band over the head, supporting a pair of forward facing acoustic horns, discreet enough to pass as eccentric rather than alarming, but large enough to do something useful. Directional, passive, and entirely honest about what it is trying to achieve.
Modern hearing aids, by contrast, are designed to be almost undetectable. Invisible, discreet, socially polite. Which is admirable, up to a point. The difficulty is that their very subtlety conceals the problem they are meant to solve. People speak as they normally would, unaware that you are only catching half of it.
A pair of deely bopper ear trumpets, on the other hand, would make a rather more explicit statement. They would announce, with admirable clarity, that the wearer is not hearing perfectly and that a modest increase in volume would be appreciated. The social signalling may be faintly ridiculous, but it would be effective. One may look eccentric, but one would at least hear the person in front of one.
There is something slightly perverse in a modern device that hides the condition while struggling to manage it, set against an older principle that advertises it but, in doing so, quietly improves the outcome.
In the end, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that in the elegant surroundings of Plas Newydd, with all the benefits of modern technology, the simplest solutions still have a habit of working best.
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