Several years later, the ice and I met again. Driving back home from Edinburgh one wintry night, I skidded on the frozen road, somersaulted and slammed into the verge, ending upside-down with my head separated from the tarmac only by a thin strip of bent metal. I was carted off to the local A & E, had concussion for a few days, and returned home apparently undamaged.

But in the months following the second head injury, I noticed that I didn’t seem to be able to hear as well as I had previously. I wouldn’t hear the phone or the doorbell going. I kept blanking the neighbours’ cheery greeting. Once or twice, I failed to hear a car’s approach when crossing the road, and nearly got run over. Friends started making jokes about ear-trumpets. Conversation became a game of consequences; I’d grab for the one or two words in a sentence that I had heard, and guess the rest.

At first, I did what most mature, evolved individuals do when confronted with an unpalatable medical fact; I pretended it would all go away. It did not go away. Finally, after a year of prevarication, I made an appointment at the local audiology unit. They gave me an MRI scan and strapped me into an Orwellian headset through which was played a series of low and high frequency tones. When the test results were returned, they confirmed what I already suspected; because of those two head injuries, I was losing my hearing. You’re not deaf!’ yelled a friend when I told him, ‘You just don’t listen!’ It’s always tempting to see illness or injury as metaphor; people get cancer because they live a cancerous life, people go deaf because they refuse to hear. Maybe he’s right, I thought; maybe this is payback.
The way in which I lost my hearing might be unusual, but the fact of losing it is not. According to the Royal National Institute for the Deaf (RNID), around nine million people in Britain are either deaf or hard of hearing, of whom around 700,000 are severely or profoundly deaf. In the vast majority of cases, hearing loss is linked to age and natural wear-and-tear. Most people are born with about 17,000 individual cells rising vertically from the surface of the cochlea like the tufts of a rug. With time and age, the rug begins to wear out and the cells’ sensitivity to diminish. But the rug does not wear out evenly. Hearing is measured across a range from high to low, and most people lose high-frequency sensitivity first. I had lost about half the sensitivity across all ranges in the left ear, but kept some high-frequency sensitivity in the right.

In practical terms, losing my hearing can only be as bad or as good as the remedies for that loss. The best analogy is with eyesight. If you become short or long-sighted, you go to the opticians and they fix you up with a pair of glasses or contact lenses; clever, low-tech devices which - if they’re fitted well - replicate normal eyesight with such fidelity that most of the time the wearer doesn’t notice them. If you start losing your hearing, you have two alternatives. You can either live with it, or - as of April this year - you can queue for a couple of years or so and get a pair of battery-powered digital aids free on the NHS. The digital option is usually the most effective. The human ear is an instrument of immense elegance and precision which separates the sounds you do want to hear (the person speaking to you) from those you don’t (the traffic nearby). The old NHS analogue hearing aids were not much more than miniature microphones which amplified all sounds. Digital aids discriminate between different types of soundwave, prioritising variable waves (the human voice) and shunting other noises into the background. They are adjusted to suit the individual, boosting the hearing in frequencies with heavy cell-damage, and leaving it unaided in places where the cells remain intact. They aren’t perfect, but they’re a damn sight better than getting run over.

So do I mind going deaf? Of course I mind; I mind like hell. Wouldn’t you? If you’re born with all your immaculate senses present and correct, and if one of those senses dwindles away to a whisper, you do tend to mind. Initially, I minded because of the connotations of hearing loss. If you are short-sighted and wear glasses, you are traditionally perceived as either very stupid or very clever. If you go deaf, you are traditionally seen as thick, or old, or both. You’re dumb, you’re slow on the uptake, you’re a few crucial beats behind the rest of the world. I spent most of my childhood being mistaken for somebody stupid, and I didn’t like the reminders.

I was also sharing an ailment with half the OAPs in the country. Only about 2% of young adults are deaf of hard-of-hearing, but in the over-60 age group, that proportion rises to 55%. Apart from stair-lifts and tartan carpet slippers, hearing aids must be the only products advertised using octogenarian models. No offence to the old folk, but when you’re 28, that hurts.

I mind now because I am dependent. I mind because the first objects I would save in a fire would not be rings or photographs or sentimental things, they would be a pair of glasses and two small pink plastic hearing aids. Without them I would be - as the audiologist at St Mary’s memorably put it - a ‘psychological jellyfish,’ hermetic, isolated, incapable of interaction with the rest of the world. I don’t like being dependent. I don’t like special pleading. And nor do I like being unwittingly rude. The aids work well, but they can’t cover all situations. I still occasionally walk out of the room just as someone introduces themselves. I still fail to respond to a question. I still miss vital conversational links. It’s one thing to knowingly make enemies, but quite another to involuntarily offend half the people you meet.

I’ve also developed a couple of old-age complaints. Oddly enough, digital hearing-aids make the wearer more acoustically aware, not less. There’s a reason for this. No-one actually hears with their ears, and no-one actually sees with their eyes. The ears and eyes are only mechanisms for gathering messages conveyed through light and sound. It is the brain which then decodes and translates those messages. It takes about four months for an individual to adjust to a pair of digital aids - not because their ears can’t cope, but because their brain has to re-educate itself into a whole new way of hearing. When it has done so, it will have completely re-learned the different sound frequencies. In the past six years, the degree of cell-damage in my ears has remained more or less stable, but my brain’s ability to compensate for it has improved.

Which has some practical drawbacks. The ‘90s passion for furnishing bars and restaurants in wood, slate and steel makes eating out an aural nightmare. Digital aids can’t cope with sound over a certain decibel level. They stop filtering sound and develop instead a frantic high-pitched whine. Leaving them in is like listening to a succession of RAF Tornados landing at the next table. Taking them out makes it impossible to hear the person I’m with. My ears now dictate my eating habits; if it isn’t possible to hear, I’d rather get a carry-out. Same with music. Background music - whether at home or outside - makes for an ugly sonic mess; no-one is listening to it, but nor are they properly listening to each other. Far better either to give the music your full attention, or not have it on at all.

But there are compensations. Huge ones. You could say that partial deafness is the ideal 21st century urban disability. In my new, two-volume existence, I can have the world outside, with its mobiles, car alarms, sirens, road-works, helicopters, lorries and drills. And then I can have another world; a world of total focus. I don’t hear the trains in the station nearby. I can sleep soundly through gales, storms, pneumatic drills, the neighbours’ parties and most of the Today programme. I never complain if someone snores. I can have silence in the middle of the city. I reckon it’s a privilege.

And despite what my friend said, I do listen. I listen with all my strength. I listen not just with what remains of my hearing, but with my eyes and my instincts. I see sounds, I hear with the whole of me. The diminution of one sense traditionally means the amplification of another. Wandering round the recent exhibition of David Dawson’s photographs of Lucien Freud, I thought, Freud looks as if he’s deaf. As far as I know, Freud’s hearing works perfectly, but Dawson had taken a series of images of someone whose whole being has become so concentrated in the act of seeing that his other senses have become almost redundant. Musicians do sometimes say they see beats, and artists claim they can hear light. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that I’ve become increasingly interested in photography since going deaf. Or that I’ve become more alert to silent forms of communication, and to the kinds of conversations which don’t need words.

Try, if you like, a couple of experiments. If you wear glasses or contact lenses, remove them. If you don’t, then squint hard. Ask someone else in the room to cover their mouth or turn away from you, and then to say something. You might be able to hear them, but you won’t be able to hear them as well. Then try something else. Next time you’re in a bus or a car with all the windows closed, watch the passers-by out on the street. What they’re saying to each other may be inaudible, but you can usually tell at least some of the content; he’s arguing, she’s tense, he’s jealous, she’s angry, he’s tired, she’s lying. Everyone lip-reads, and everyone is fluent in the language of the body and the face. You just don’t realise it until you try.

In most cases, hearing loss is for life. Once you’re deaf, you’re deaf, and that’s how you’ll stay. Perhaps in the future they might be able to do something fancy with gene therapy or cochlear implants, but if someone offered me back my full hearing now, I don’t know if I’d take it. True, I’m not much use without the hearing-aids, and true, there are disadvantages. But I like my new two-tone life, and the silence doesn’t scare me. I am immensely lucky not only because I survived those two head injuries, but because I was born in an age where the remedies for hearing loss have become almost as sophisticated as the human ear itself. I don’t like the idea of becoming profoundly deaf, but at the moment I can work with what I’ve got. Besides, I reckon I want radical surgery about as much as I want a hole in the head.