Joint tinnitus

So the weirdest thing happened last night when it became clear that Nathan and I were experiencing the same tinnitus which manifested itself as an identical high-pitched whistle oscillating between an Eb and a D/Db. I genuinely don't know how this can be happening. Does anyone understand tinnitus? It's the same noise that I've been experiencing on and off for some time, but Nathan has never heard it before. What's going on? Is Nathan actually hearing the inside of my head?! Are we so aligned that we're sharing conditions of the inner ear? Or do we not have tinnitus at all? Is there an electronic device in the bedroom which is making the noise? Nathan says that he could still hear it when he blocked his ears. When I block my ears I just hear the sea. And my heart beat!

We took our car to the garage in Highgate this morning. The garage is a lovely place, situated through an archway in a little courtyard on the hillside behind the High Street. It's located in a beautiful, somewhat functional 1950s building which has apparently always been a garage and looks like something from the mid West of America. They always do a brilliant deal on the work they do, which, for a garage in an area filled with people with more money than sense, is astounding. The mechanic, with his enormous grey eyes, is ridiculously easy on the eye and is obviously a really nice bloke. Instead of a calendar of naked women on the wall, he has framed photos of his children.

Our car was officially written off by the insurance company following our little prang with the lorry, despite the fact that we've been driving around in it ever since. The damage is actually nothing more than a broken back light and a little dent in the boot, which it turns out is only going to cost £150 to remedy, or £400 if we want to have it all done properly and re-painted. The insurance company are plainly just lazy. They're more than happy for us to spend the write-off money "as we wish," even if that means fixing the car. The only stipulation is that it passes its next MOT.

I worked the rest of the morning in Costa. A child was screaming so loudly that I recorded the noise and sent it to Llio as an MP3. Llio periodically sends me little recordings of the sounds of the madness she hears around her. The little girl in Costa had been toddling about quite happily, and, ten minutes before the screaming started, had walked into a table and muttered something incomprehensible, which only the Mummy understood. "You did bang-bang didn't you?" She said, unacceptably. When the child started yelling, everything became clear in my head. The child was plainly screaming out of pure frustration because Mummy isn't teaching her proper grammar. She's screaming because she knows the language she's been taught will have to be unlearned when she gets older. She's screaming because she doesn't have a friggin' clue what bang-bang is!

It snowed heavily for about ten minutes this afternoon. The snow fell at a 45 degree angle with great force. It didn't settle. A few minutes later the sun was shining again.

Just before the snow started, a pair of plastic gloves floated past my window. That was a little random. We're on the third floor. How do gloves get that high by wind alone? Plainly they were motorised...

The rest of the day was spent planning our trip to the trenches in France. We have to raise £1500. I hope the BBC will help us, and I have a few other ideas, but if not, I may have to open up a little crowd-funding initiative.