diplacusis

Sunday 26th June, 12:47pm.
The Flat.

We’ve made it. Blimey, but I thought that year would never end. School years come and go in cycles, and I consider myself an extremely patient man, but this one has been particularly trying. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve come close to questioning my career on more than one occasion, and every time I’ve been pulled back up to the light by the trinity: the kids, the music and the torchlight of my ancestors. I’ve never been overly fond of the yawning hole in the year that is the summer holidays – I have a desperate need to be busy that two months puts a serious strain upon – but I did breathe an almighty sigh of relief when the clock struck twelve on Friday night. It’s just been one of those years.

When I look back, I can’t help but label my third year as a teacher as the year when everything went wrong. The year when all my endeavours came to ruin. Consequently, it’s also the year when hope has been even more important than ever – and hope, shapeless and mysterious, has ever been my polestar.

This year my Gospel Choir was disbanded, cancelled on the grounds that I, as a white man, was not the appropriate choice to run such a group. I conceded without a fight. It hurt, it hurt right down to the core of my soul to be told so openly that my efforts – and even my taste in music – were so wholly inappropriate. It wasn’t an attack on me by any standards, but my word, did I take the issue home! My head was spinning for weeks and I took some time out in Spain with my cousins to heal. What had happened flew in the face of everything I’d been taught by my various Gospel mentors over the years, and everybody I spoke to seemed baffled. For my career’s sake I briefly considered abandoning my attempts to dabble in music absolutely, and would have gone ahead were it not for the discovery that my great-grandparents were both musicians. I cannot let them down. It wouldn’t be right. I also owe it to the kids under my aegis to find a way, so that the last three years of hard work will not be in vain.

Rising from the ashes, my new a cappella group has been fun, and I hope the kids have enjoyed it, even if we’ve never been concert ready when the time came. The simple truth is that Gospel music, as well as being eye-opening and soul-enriching, is easy to learn. It’s meant to be, because it was never written with trained musicians in mind. By contrast, a cappella arrangements are impressive when done right, but hard to pull off, even when you have a group of semi-professionals. It pains me that my efforts to instil a genuine love of performing have yet to bear fruit with my current cohort, but the kids rock up each week with big smiles and they enjoy the music, and I guess that’s good enough for now.

December hit me with a one-two punch that nearly knocked me out cold. I wandered out of a five-year relationship and within twenty-four hours I had a head-cold that left me half-deaf – and later, more excruciatingly, under the maddening influence of diplacusis dysharmonica. The timing could hardly have been worse: first the Gospel fiasco left me questioning almost all my choices in music, and then the mother of all earaches made it physically impossible to listen to any kind of music whatsoever for all of two months. It felt like the world was conspiring to bring me down.

I wasn’t especially keen to admit it, but I’ve been in orbit ever since. I tried a couple of times to kindle the sparks of a relationship with somebody new, but my attempts sputtered and died like the fireworks in the rain, and I confess I’ve probably been too proud to bend the knee in full to the world of online dating purely on principle. So I’ve been a family man to my kids more than ever this year, giving them as much of my time as I can muster of an evening and finding opportunities to praise and guide wherever I can. They give me hope and I try to do the same for them. I’m convinced teaching is the best job in the world.

I’ve tried to be more supportive of my brother this year. He hasn’t chosen the easiest path, and there are few people in the world I look up to more. I’ve also kept up with my youngest cousin through our English classes every week, or at least the weeks where he doesn’t have an exam to revise for. Family means a lot to me, squaring well with my dreams of being the best dad ever someday, which is partly why being out of a relationship has been so disorienting. At least if there’s been one success this year, it’s been a closer connection to my kin. Maybe rediscovering the Chronicles of Ancient Darkness earlier in the year helped.

Finally, I know I can be a better teacher. I’ve done well by my kids this year, but I can improve. I know I can. I think all the knocks I took this year left me on one knee, still standing though not as strong as before. I reckon it’s about time I got up on two feet again.

So it’s time to plan ahead and set things in order. Two months of summer stretch ahead, and I’ve got plenty of things to do, starting today.

I’m going to get fit.
Fitness has never really interested me, but a healthier body can only prop up a healthier state of mind.

I’m going to cook for myself again.
I’ve taken advantage of being fed at school for too long. I used to love cooking when I lived for myself. It’s time to rediscover that joy.

I’m going to learn to drive. Finally.
It’s a milestone that I can’t ignore anymore, and I’m finally at the stage in my life where absolute freedom of mobility is starting to interest me. Even if I don’t pass my test this year, I need to make a start. Starting is always the hardest part.

I’m going to read more. And I mean read, not just say it and buy more books.
I’ve set myself a target of a chapter a day, whatever the book, in addition to at least one article.

I’m going to plan ahead.
I want my teaching to get better and better, so I’m going to dedicate some serious time to planning some fantastic teaching methods this summer.

I’m going to write again. Not just on here, but the book.
My journals have been with me to almost every lesson and on every school outing, but I’ve made little progress on the novel since the real teaching life began. And that’s criminal.

Last but not least, I’m going to get out and see the world.
Not traveling – I can’t justify having more than one holiday per year anymore, and I had my holiday at Easter. But I need to widen my circle of trust. I need to allow myself to meet others, and if I’m guarded about making that connection online, the only way to do it is to get out and about.

I’m no fan of coming up with action plans at work, but my future is counting on me to make this choice now. Melodrama aside, I could do with some change in my life. And that change starts today! BB x

How did your 2022 start? Mine began with a miracle. Not a major one – at least, nothing that brought about anything new in my life. Just the restoration of my hearing.

Since the first day of the Christmas holidays, I’ve been plagued by the after effects of a bad head cold that went to my left ear and decided to wreak havoc there. My first week off was spent largely deaf on one side with a tinnitus so fierce it kept me up at night. It’s not often that an illness gets me down – I’m lucky enough to have a rather robust constitution that withstands most things, bar the seasonal pollen allergies that come around every summer. Personally, I thought I’d done pretty well to make it to the end of term without testing positive for COVID once, despite working in a school where children come and go every week. Perhaps this was the man upstairs showing his fickle hand, where fickleness is another word for fairness.

The tinnitus wasn’t so bad, after I got used to it. But it was what happened once the antibiotics had done their job that was the killer. For the best part of two weeks, everything sounded wrong. It took me a couple of days to realise what it was: the ear infection I had been through had left me with a case of diplacusis dysharmonica, a condition that warps the sounds that you perceive. In my case, while my right ear operated normally, my left ear perceived all sounds a semitone higher. For the musicians out there, I’ll let the ramifications of that sink for in a moment.

In most cases, this is a minor inconvenience and can be ignored a great deal more easily than any tinnitus. That is, unless you have perfect pitch.

It’s hard to talk about the uncanny ability to pluck exact notes and tunes out of the air without prompt without coming across as boasting at worst, or false modesty at best, so I won’t labour the point. What I will say is that, for somebody who notices the instant a piece of music is played in a key in which it was not originally played – even if the pitch has been shifted by a hair – hearing the world in two tones at once for a fortnight was nothing short of maddening. A quick browse of the internet will tell you that diplacusis dysharmonica seems to be especially painful for musicians.

What does it sound like? Try to imagine one of those cassettes you might have had when you were younger, after you rewound them once too often, or somebody (possibly a child) had played around with the spools. The sound eventually warped, keys were bent out of place and voices got the Alvin and the Chipmunks treatment. Now imagine that weird, unnatural effect playing alongside a perfectly functional version of the same audio. A long-winded analogy, but the first one that came to mind – chiefly because of the sheer number of cassettes I must have destroyed as a child before the era of Spotify and the repeat button.

Earphones and headphones were out, as they just exacerbated the problem; higher frequencies seemed to be the biggest triggers. I got into a habit of humming to myself in the morning, just to check, and each time I heard two notes come back to me instead of one. I’d give myself a pat on the back for being one of the few humans capable of singing a chord if I knew it wasn’t a) all in my head and b) an exceedingly ill-chosen chord consisting of two notes barely a semitone apart.

Like many of us, I imagine, I woke up this morning apprehensive about the new year ahead. 2021 was a rough year with just a few golden moments that made it one to remember: spending the summer with a dear friend in Edinburgh and a week in October with my beloved family in La Mancha rank right at the top. But with the sun in the morning comes hope, and hope is what I come back to when the world is dark.

By midday today, the distortion in my left ear had dimmed so much that it was hardly noticeable. By tomorrow, God willing, it may be gone altogether. I can’t begin to describe the feeling of putting a pair of headphones on and hearing music as it should be again, after two weeks of dissonance without resolution. I’ve had album after album of sevillanas by Raya Real on repeat ever since. There’s nothing quite like a sevillana to express reckless joy, and that’s exactly what I’m feeling right now. To quote Sweeney Todd: my arm is complete again.

It’s a shame it had to last from the first day of the holidays right up until the last, but I’m not complaining. I can hear the world again, as it should be. That’s more than enough for me.

BB x

NB. It’s been a while since I flexed my writing muscles. This year, I’m going to blow the dust off the blog and get back into a reasonably regular writing habit again. It’s been too long. Until then!