She's wasting her time. I want to leap to my feet and cry "Don't bother looking. You'll be sitting beside me. You always are." As she draws parallel with me her face brightens. She's found it. Seat Number 28B, right beside Mr Willems in 28A.

Kiddies, I know, must fly and it's neither their fault nor that of their mothers that the experience almost invariably causes them to shriek and scream for the duration of the flight. I probably would have screamed myself as a child but as our idea of long-distance travel was catching the bus from Holland Park to Red Hill, it never became an issue.

It's the earache caused by the change in atmospheric pressure, I've been told, that turns normally placid children into purple-faced, shrieking terrors and I recall being warned by a doctor once that adults should never fly with a head cold for the same reason.

It was this advice and the plight of screaming airborne children which flashed through my mind as the international flight descended into Sydney and my ears began to ache and then ring. I'd been sniffling for the last few days, my passage marked by a trail of discarded tissues, but being an archetypical, too-tough-to-care Australian male, had thought little of it.

Halfway into our descent, I was ready to start screaming and pounding the seat in front of me with my fists like a six-month-old. I refrained, only because I was reasonably certain that if I did, I'd be arrested on landing for a breach of the Air Navigation Act for unruly behaviour, my pleas that it was ears and not beers that had caused me to become unruly unlikely to receive a sympathetic reception.

The pain eased when we landed and I headed off to catch my flight to Brisbane, noticing on checking in that everyone seemed to be talking very softly.

   "Pardon?" I said to the girl on the check-in desk.
   "Nice day," she said.
   "Lovely day," I said, this causing her to take several steps backwards and give me a peculiar look.
   "I'm amazed," she said.
   "Has it been raining?" I asked.

This innocent inquiry was met with a look of extreme consternation and she handed me the boarding pass as if dealing with a person with a contagious disease.

I sat down in the boarding lounge and tried to ignore the person beside me who I knew was about to engage me in unsolicited conversation. "Oh God," I moaned inwardly. "Babies and professional pests. What is it about me that they find so irresistible?"

   "How's your day?" he said.
   "Lovely," I said. Once more my reply elicited a peculiar look. He then mumbled something unintelligible.
   "Pardon?" I said.
   "For an hour," he said.
   "Not only is he a pest but the man in obviously unhinged," I thought.
   "Speak up," I said. "I didn't quite catch you."
   "It's delayed for an hour," he said, everyone else in the lounge suddenly turning and staring at us.
   "Funny," I thought, "I didn't think he had spoken that loudly."

It suddenly occurred to me that there was a distinct lack of background noise and that the announcements sounding over the public address system were being made by someone speaking with a mouthful of cotton wool.

My hearing. I'd gone deaf! That explained my confusing exchange with the check-in girl. She hadn't been chatting about the weather. She'd been trying to tell me the flight had been delayed.

I went to the supermarket when I got home and when I spoke to the girl on the counter, she jumped back as if she had touched a live wire and ran away, while my fellow shoppers turned and stared. I then wondered if I may just have been speaking a little more loudly than usual.

   "Why are you yelling?" my girlfriend asked when I called her on my mobile.
   "I'm not yelling, for God's sake," I bellowed. "And speak up. I can't hear you."

This lasted for several days, the effect of walking around with my head encased in an empty steel drum punctuated by occasional ringing noises.

On day four, I reached for a tissue, gave my nose a tremendous and an enormously satisfying blow and a loud "crack!" sounded somewhere inside my head. I could hear again. It was a miracle!

I slept soundly that night and was shaving for work the next morning when a beeping noise began to sound in my head. "Oh no," I thought. "It's come back."

I put my ear against the bedroom wall and listened. Was it coming from next door and not inside my head? No. I stood in front of the TV set and the radio and listened. Nothing. And then I stood in front of the fridge and then the washing machine. Still nothing. So I wrapped a towel around my waist and crept out the front door and into the corridor. I could still hear the beeping but it was fainter.

Minutes passed and the beeping continued. My already frail grip on sanity was loosening. The beep was driving me mad!

It was then I remembered that, fearful of burning down my apartment, I had only the day before bought a new steam-and-dry iron which turned itself off if left unattended. The beep was the warning signal that I'd left it on and that it was about to automatically shut down.