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it, I confess to my deafness, make them repeat what they said until I’ve understood and apologize profusely. In general, though, I find it better to confess to my disability before they address me, and point at my now two appliances to convince them. Incidentally, few hearing people notice these unless they are whistling, but we, who wear them, take them in instantly.
    Another side effect is to mis-hear something and misinterpret what was said. If I realize that I have misunderstood, I say, ‘Surely you didn’t tell me’ – and then repeat what is clearly absurd. This frequently gets a laugh as I intend. Mostly I get the vowels right, the consonants wrong.
    But if what’s been said sounds more or less rational, my reaction appears simply dotty. In the early days of John Chilton’s Feetwarmers, they kept a small red notebook called‘George’s deafies’ and when a fair number had accumulated would read them out to me. One example:
    THE MANAGER OF THE ADELPHI HOTEL, LIVERPOOL: Mr Melly, is your suite comfortable?
    ME: What’s he want?
    MANAGER( perplexed ): What does who want?
    ME: The Chief Constable.
    Sometimes these mis-hearings remind me of one of the many games played seriously by the surrealists and guaranteed to produce often apt, yet absurd, results of a certain poetic resonance. An anthology of these seductive distractions is to be found in Surrealist Games , a small boxed book published by the invaluable Redstone Press.
    Here, with their instructions, are two variants:
    One: ‘Questions and Answers’. For two or more players .
    A question is written down, the paper folded to conceal it from the next player, who writes an answer. The paper is unfolded to reveal the result. Remarkable facts result. Here are a couple of startling examples:
    Q: What is reason?
    A: A cloud eaten by the moon.
    Q: Why go on living?
    A: Because at prison gates only the keys sing.
    The second game, ‘The Exquisite Corpse’, is, I believe, the progenitor of all the rest. Here are the editor’s somewhat longer instructions:
    For a minimum of three players .
    The players sit around a table and each writes a definite or indefinite article and an adjective, making sure their neighbours can’t see them. The sheets are folded so as to conceal the words and passed round to the next player. Each player then writes a noun and conceals it, and the process is repeated with a verb, another definite or indefinite article and adjective, and finally another noun. The paper is unfolded and then read out…
    It is in effect a variant of the childhood game of consequences. A few examples. The first, by no means the most surprising, but which nevertheless gave the game its name, is
    The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine.
    And a sample of others:
    The wounded women disturb the guillotine with blond hair .
    The avenged topaz shall devour with kisses the paralytic of Rome .
    My wife Diana is not only decidedly not a surrealist, but equally is irritated by my ‘deafies’, although occasionally she is tricked into a frosty smile. I suspect her reason, probably accurate, is that she imagines I exploit them to amuse others, whereas she has been exposed to them for many years. To live with someone deaf is, I realize, a constant strain. We meet largely at suppertime or when we go out together for some joint reason. Insofar as I know, she is never disloyal about me to others except perhaps (pure speculation) her intimate circle of mostly women friends, nor I to her with the same proviso. None the less, my deafness and its concomitantmisunderstanding of essential instructions are enough to try her patience. This is how she puts it: ‘I have to shout, and it makes me sound bad-tempered and then I become bad-tempered!’
    This, I can confirm, is true enough.
    The malicious fairies of the mind are more insidious than the coarse goblins of the lower intestines and bladder. With great effort they may be kept at bay, but never defeated. Their earliest