The Sunday Post

Alan, sixty-seven, spent thirty-one years delivering post around the same few streets of York before he retired. "You get to know a place properly on foot. You hear everything — dogs, kids, the lot." Which is partly why it needled him so much when, a couple of years into retirement, he started missing things he'd never have missed before.

It wasn't dramatic. Nobody was shouting at him to turn the telly down, not at first. It crept in through small things — asking someone to repeat themselves at the pub, nodding along in group conversations without quite following, turning his head slightly whenever someone spoke from the side rather than straight on.

The moment that actually stuck with him happened at his weekly quiz night. His granddaughter, ten years old, was on his team that week. "She read out a question, I didn't catch it properly, so I just said 'go on then' — buying time, the way you do. She read it again, word for word. And I still hadn't really heard it. I just guessed."

"She wasn't cross or anything. She just looked at me a bit oddly. That look stayed with me longer than I expected."

Alan had quietly assumed, like a lot of people do, that hearing aids meant a long wait for an NHS referral, or a hefty bill from a private clinic — neither of which felt worth it for what he still thought of as "a bit of trouble with background noise."

It was one of his old colleagues from the sorting office, John, who mentioned it a few weeks later over coffee. John had done a free online hearing check a while back — no appointment, no referral, just a short test he could do from his own kitchen table — and it had led him to book a proper consultation once it flagged something worth looking into.

"I hadn't realised you could even start that way. I'd built the whole thing up in my head as this big medical process. It's not that at all — the test itself took about ten minutes."

Alan did the test himself that same evening. It flagged mild-to-moderate difficulty in noisy environments — exactly the pattern he'd been noticing at the pub, at quiz nights, anywhere with a bit of background chatter. From there, he booked an in-person consultation with a registered hearing care professional to talk through proper options.

Alan is careful not to oversell it. "I'm not going to tell you it's like being twenty-five again. It isn't. But I'm not guessing my way through conversations any more, and that's made a bigger difference to my week than I expected."

His advice for anyone who's been quietly putting it off: "Start with the online check. It costs nothing, it takes ten minutes, and at the very least you'll actually know where you stand, instead of guessing — which is exactly what I'd been doing for two years."