I am lying in bed indulging my latest secret vice of watching the entire Cranford box-set on my laptop, when my son bursts in from the next room. “Mum, I can't sleep... It's too loud!” Is it really? With the tinny PowerBook speakers up to max, I am still struggling to discern Miss Deborah's strictures to Miss Matty on the refined way to eat an orange.

And it's happening all the time. These days I find it harder to catch dialogue on television. Voices are muffled, broken, a sonic blur, and I have to turn to my husband and ask “Is it me or the TV?” because, in particular, makers of the edgier American shows and movies - The Sopranos, The Wire, Miami Vice - seem to regard dismal sound quality as a cool aesthetic decision; an auditory Impressionism.

Mostly, though, I know it is me, stepping on to the top rung of a slow descent into silence. Deafness is my genetic inheritance, along with a short temper and long legs. I remember my paternal grandmother, her fierce hugs and whistling hearing appliance. And today when I call my father the conversation takes its customary form, though here I'm editing the numerous repetitions:

“Dad, I'm writing about deafness.”

“What?”

“I'M WRITING ABOUT DEAFNESS.”

‘Gas? What about gas?”

“About what it's like to go deaf. Deaf! D.E.A.F.”

“Oh, deaf... Yes, OK. I'm on the wrong phone, love. [The upstairs one without the amplifier] I'll put your mum on...”

As David Lodge writes in his poignantly funny novel Deaf Sentence, blindness is tragic, deafness is comic. Absurd misunderstandings, uncomprehending old buffers, imperious grand dames intoning “don't mumble, dear” are the deus ex machina of farce. But deafness seems a far from hilarious fate. My dad was born blind in one eye and yet this incapacity did not stop him being a capable bowler, a crack shot with a rifle in the Home Guard or prevent him from driving, even now aged 85. When I close one eye, I marvel at how he could possibly judge distance, but his brain and good eye somehow overcame.

It is the deafness that has done for him, locked away his gregarious character, turned his entire life into a table for one. Measured in Christmases, only a decade ago he was making ribald remarks to my mother-in-law, joining in charades, brushing down his best old gags. Now he has abandoned the strain of keeping up with the chat, eats head down, mostly in silence, maddened by his hearing aids. Even the new expensive ones turn the cheerful hubbub into a monstrous roar. Last year, when the karaoke machine came out, I worried for his sanity at the drunken, amplified Abba renditions. But he just smiled at, for once, being at an advantage: he'd secretly switched his ears off.

And now, off I go, following my dear old dad. “You're shouting again,” my husband hisses, since even my own voice sounds fainter in my head. Sometimes at noisy book launches or dinner parties, I discreetly cup my hand around my ear. David Lodge describes the Lombard reflex, when individuals in a packed space talk louder to overcome the ambient noise, setting off a cacophonic chain reaction. It is then I contemplate an ear trumpet, perhaps an elegant bejewelled one by Theo Fennell.

Pretentious maybe. But better that than the denture-coloured plastic, faffing with batteries, bat-squeaks and feedback, the ugly prosthetics of affliction. No wonder, while a person with a sight problem endures it for three years before seeking help, we wait an average of 15 years to get help with hearing loss.

All that expense and aggravation trying to arrest the beauty industry's “visible signs of ageing” and then we ignore the invisible ones which will truly blight our old age. There are just 30,000 little ear hairs, receptors in our head, and when they're gone, that's it. Unfortunates such as me already have ears like logging camps in the Amazon. But by 90 we'll all have just a copse left amidst a great empty clearing.

It is the grand joke of human design: the ears have a sell-by date. We can live on broccoli, quit fags, conquer cancer and make it to 120, but we'll be sitting ranting at each other from under our soundless private bell jars. Or maybe with our arthritic fingers we'll be texting each other pitifully. That's if we're not all minced beneath the clean green wheels of the latest electric cars we're told will have the power of a Ferrari, but the stealth of a milkfloat.

Doctors talk of a deafness time bomb. The rock'n'roll generation has been exposed to more noise, more auditory abrasion, than any other - except the one we have just bred. It is somehow cheering to know that Penny Lancaster is forever telling Rod Stewart to turn the telly down, that Sting believes hearing loss is improving his voice (one can but hope) or that deafness has saved the world from Phil Collins touring. One wonders about the Rolling Stones band meetings punctuated by “eh?” and “what?” and “Mick, mate, can you bleedin' speak up?”.

But still we wear those damn iPod earphones, the soft bud-like ones that squidge right inside, mainlining 100-plus decibels into our tortured tympanic cavity. I wear them at the gym to drown out the already head-aching yell of the pump-class instructors in the nearby studio, aerobic imams who need to proselytise with Madonna headsets and rave-level amps. And everywhere I see young people perpetually plugged in, the terrible “tsk-tsk-tsk” leaking from their MP3s, the latest single from the Ting Tings causing their ear hairs to tumble faster than those on Prince William's head.

Driving past the Unison strikers outside the town hall I was transported back to an earlier age. Strikes are so retro. The very idea of collective action seems quaint, 24 years since the miners' banners were trodden into the dust. Now that contracts - and aspirations - are mostly individual, I wonder whether anyone under 30 knows what a trade union is for.

Certainly strike etiquette seems long forgotten. A teacher friend, crossing the dinner ladies picket line, without even a whisper of “scab”, bemoaned the lack of braziers - “perhaps they could use a patio heater” - donkey jackets, slogans or wrath. Just polite ladies with tartan flasks collecting money for their strikers' biscuit fund, which they mandated their leader to spend at M&S.

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