Some people are too severely deaf to benefit from conventional hearing aids; a cochlear implant may be a suitable alternative but only for a proportion of them.

An early sign of damaged hearing is temporary deafness after listening to loud music. This is known as the threshold shift and means you have damaged the cochlea in your ear so that your hearing takes time to revert to normal.

Temporary hearing loss or a ringing in the ears is a sign these cells are trying to recover. But over time, recovery becomes impossible and hearing is permanently impaired.

Everything was fair game. Hearing senior executives say things like, 'I want the people responsible for those features in my office early next week; I want to get to the bottom of this' was at least one measure of success from my point of view for the event.

We enjoy hearing the stories and how proud people are of their loved ones.

A platitude is simply a truth repeated till people get tired of hearing it.