Thursday 26th Jan

In the night something changed. I was starting to hear something in my left ear besides the invented sounds of my stimulus starved left hemisphere. You couldn't exactly call it hearing BUT it was something. I excitedly put a earphone in my left ear and played some music. I heard nothing until the volume was around 3/4 full and then it was horribly distorted and unbelievably, totally out of tune. I tried not to think of what that might mean and clung to the fact that it was an improvement of sorts. I spent the morning rearranging my home studio so that the both speakers were to my right as I sat at the keyboards.I hoped this would enable me to work with only one ear as the left was proving to be more of a hindrance than a help. When I was in secondary school, my art teacher John Germain was an important musical inspiration to me. He would sometimes lend me LPs to take home and listen to. Because of a botched operation following an accident playing rugby, he was paralysed on one side of his face and totally deaf in one ear. He explained that he didn't ever listen to music using headphones because even with one ear, if the speakers were positioned right, he could hear the stereo image. I failed to emulate this trick. I don't know if it's something that can be learned but to me, wherever the sound came from in the room, it sounded like it was dead centre in front of my right ear. I could see I was going to have to take extra care crossing the road from now on. Music in mono is flat and one dimensional, difficult to understand, a challenge to listen to. I was really starting to worry about Monday. Marillion we planning to meet at Peter Gabriel's Real World studios then to continue working on the next album. I read a lot about SSHL and became something of an amateur expert on the possible causes and cures. It made for depressing reading. In the evening I went down the local pub but only stayed for half an hour because the noise was horrible in my left ear and I couldn't understand most of what was said to me.