A partner’s view

Tony & Sue Long in woods

Tony Long is married to Sue, who has a profound hearing loss through Meniere’s Disease and relies on lipreading/speechreading to follow what people are saying to her. She wears one hearing aid but it has only a limited benefit.

Tony’s blog is about how Sue’s deafness affects his day to day life as the hearing partner. He offers useful, interesting and thought-provoking insights about how he has learnt to adapt to his wife’s deafness.

Spread The Word. Part 1

I’m sure everyone has discussed Sainsbury’s intention to make life easier for those with hearing difficulties by teaching (a few? Some? Most?) staff sign language. That’s a great idea and I applaud the company not just because it makes life easier in their stores but because it should encourage other businesses to follow the lead. […]

Downtrodden Phone

Remember when choosing a mobile phone came down to size, colour and did you want the “snake game”? The specifications and options choice is long and baffling now and they all seem to do the same things anyway. At least that’s what I thought when we spoke with the sales advisor at the (not very) […]

Testing Testing, Testing.

I have two aunts and, much to Bertie Wooster’s admiration, I admit I hadn’t seen them for many years until my father’s funeral. I’d spoken with them occasionally on the phone but not met face-to-face for decades which would explain why, when I said hello to one of them, she replied “You’re not Tony ………… […]

Strangers In The Night.

Let’s have something more upbeat than the last entry. Sue was on her own at the farm last night for a while, when three females approached her asking for help. No problem, apart from the fact it was dark – impossible for lipreading. Sue could see their outlines and knew they must have been speaking […]

Tea and cakes

September 16th, 4.05 a.m. and I’m awake, again. Yesterday I slept a little later, not much. Sue and I eat at a superb Indian restaurant last night and it could be that I consumed enough to clog a wheelie bin that disturbed my sleep. It’s still unseasonably hot and humid, could that be it? More […]

Tell It Like It Is.

Website is finished and bloggers are sharing thoughts again, what witty and insightful experiences can I share? The danger of summer weight trousers and visiting the bathroom? NO, not like that. We were in Salisbury last week and I’d gone to wash the chocolate éclair residue off my fingers when the water gushed up from […]

In My Defence

Welcome to another new year, hope it’s a good one. At the beginning of December I was in the local feed merchants chatting with the owner and I mentioned the time Sue mistook me saying that we “needed to get rat bait” for we “needed to get a rent boy”. We were in a supermarket […]