Neurotic to the bone, no doubt about it....

Regular readers may recall that I have something of an obsessive streak (this streak frankly bordered on mania recently when I was fretting about practically invisible scratching on my glasses). I’ve pretty much made my peace with my glasses, but I’m afraid my brain always seems to be searching for the next thing to fret about… that’s the funny thing… I know that I am probably obsessing about nothing, but for some reason that doesn’t make the distress any less real. Anyway…

I thought I’d share my latest worries with you all – partly as therapy, but mostly for your amusement at how ridiculous I am.

I went to see The Hives the other week at Rock City. As Damo remarked when he saw them in Bristol, they were especially loud. Really, almost hurting loud, and when I got home, I was very aware of how I had been standing closer to one speaker stack than the other – the ringing in my ears was distinctly lopsided. As I always do after I have been to a concert, I idly wondered how long it would take the ringing in my ears to wear off, and speculated about one day the ringing never would.

Can you see where my brain is about to take me?

The ringing wore off in a few days and I didn’t think anything more of it. Then about a week ago, I detected a faint whistle in my ears. Very faint – the kind you can only really hear when you are lying in bed with no distracting noises around you to tune it out. I don’t know about you, but I always hear a faint whistle off electrical products like TVs and computers, so over the course of the last week or so, I have been busily trying to work out if I was genuinely hearing a ringing in my ears, or if it was some kind of electrical noise.

Definitely ringing.

This starts the frets (conveniently ignoring the fact that when I was in the red centre of Australia in January, where it's REALLY quiet at night, I had remarked to C. how I could hear the workings of my body... and it hadn't worried me at all then).

Have I got tinnitis? Have I permananently damaged my hearing? Was it when I was in the gym the other day listening to my Ipod at the normal volume (i.e. pretty loud). I start doing things like turning my radio down in the car (in case I make it worse) and generally worrying about the state of my hearing… reaching the point where every time I notice the whistle, my heart skips a beat, and I start imagining my hearing is declining day by day, to the extent that every time I miss what someone is saying, I wonder if it is because I have finally gone deaf. I wonder how Steve Lamacq (who said on the radio the other day that he still goes to 2 or 3 gigs a week looking for the next big thing) manages… surely he must be as deaf as a post? I've got some gigs coming up soon (interpol, snow patrol, the kings of leon, ahem... the darkness)... should I be doing more to protect my ears? (I go to Boots and buy some ear plugs).

All this fretting is pretty stressful.

Then yesterday I decided that not only was the whistling in my ear getting a little bit worse, but that actually one of my ears was now pretty blocked up.

Hang on a minute…. That doesn’t sound like tinnitis.

Ah yes – I’ve just got a cold coming on and it’s affecting my ears. A fact confirmed when C. (who is snuffling quite badly at the moment) tells me that she’s got the same thing.

The sense of relief is positively euphoric.

I am definitely mental. Feel free to have a chuckle (he says, looking shamelessly for sympathy)