The Expert

When I was younger, I wanted to be an expert at something and like all young people believed that it would just happen with luck and no effort. I then realised that expertise doesn't fall from on high into your lap but has to be worked at. Soon after, I decided that I was just too lazy and my attention span too short to master anything.

But I think I might have been wrong.

I am a virtuoso in voice loss. My skills as a reluctant mute are second to none. Although my true expertise is the observation of other people's reactions to someone who has lost their voice, which are often bizarre.

If you have no voice people will respond to many of your attempted utterings with, "Bless you." You find yourself thinking, "Bless you? Bless you? Why bless you? I didn't sneeze, I'm just quiet."

When you do speak people will say, "Pardon?" They will say it often. 

"I have no voice," you say.

"Pardon?" they reply.

Even people who can see how much effort you have gone to to get that simple sentance out will say it. Even those that have heard you will say it. 

When I lost my voice for the first time I decided to go to the doctor after two weeks.

"It won't be anything serious," he said. "The trouble is that most people don't know how to breathe. You need to breathe from here." He prodded his soft belly, more in the region of his intestine than his actual diaphragm. "I could refer you to a speach therapist but let's wait another week."

"Actually, I know about breathing because I'm a music teacher and it's very difficult to teach children how to sing without a voice."

"You see, you need to breathe out the sound. You are forcing it. I can tell you are."

"Yes, I was, so that you could hear me."

"Pardon?"

People will ask the oddest questions. 

"What's wrong with your voice?",

"How did you lose your voice?", and my absolute favourite, "Where did you lose your voice?" 

If I knew where I'd lost it, I'd go back and get it. A voice isn't like a cardigan. You can't re-trace your steps until you find the chair you draped it on the back of during your last hot flush. 

People will ask all these questions even after they've read the post-it note you are wearing on your chest. 

In church some parents were interrogating me about where their child was going to sit and which way they would walk in, so that they would be able to shout, "Jonny, Jonny, look at Mummy. I need to snapchat this."

I had managed to explain the general position of the class quite well with a mixture of forcing them to lip read and pointing but I didn't know exactly where Jonny was going to sit and I certainly wasn't clairvoyant enough to know, which of the two aisles the teacher would choose to walk them down. 

"I'm sorry, I don't know," I said.

"Pardon?"

I pointed to my post-it note. 

She jabbed at the note with her finger, "You're not singing today, then?"

I shrugged. Some questions can't be answered. 

When you are quiet people join you. They whisper. This is completely hopeless when you have asked a child to read your instructions to the class. In a class of thirty children I could only find one who was prepared to use their normal speaking voice and he thought I was faking.

"You're just pretending so that you give us a fun lesson, aren't you?"

The fun lesson was to sit in silence and draw what they thought they could hear in Beethoven's Battle of Wellington. 

Not everyone is quieter. The Long Suffering Husband is used to these problems now and so he will often interpret for me. I have some signals that I developed during the first silent period. It started when I wrote the letters Y E S on the fingers of my left hand and N O on the other. 'No' became a very satisfying gesture. 

Last night we were at an adult music school concert, which we force the LSH to come to so that he can keep my friend's husband company when we are playing in the band. Both men are quite reluctant attendees of this concert but luckily you can eat and drink throughout, so after half a bottle of red wine and some cheese for the ears ('Allo 'Allo reference) the LSH is quite jolly.  Eating crisps quietly is a fun game that he's not very good at and there is always a huge crunch during the string group's performance that makes me laugh. With no voice, laughing is OK in these situations. I sound a bit like Muttley (if you didn't get the 'Allo 'Allo reference you are definitely to young for this one) but laughter is contagious and he isn't silent.

"Oh dear, you won't let me come to any more of these concerts if I carry on like this will you?" he whispered, hopefully.

I gave him the sign, which he loudly translated before the meaning became clear to him.

"No.......shit!"

Apparently, being voiceless is funny. I have fun with it, as best as I can but I am still a little shocked when people point and laugh after I've tried to speak.