Ears may be self-cleaning, but I love delving in
Those nice people at Nice, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, have issued a dire warning about sticking cotton buds in our ears. It can damage our drums, quoth the quacks, and proves self-defeating, ramming the gunk only further into said orifice. Instead, the ear is apparently “self-cleaning”, excess wax dropping out of its own accord; a prospect that makes me feel distinctly nauseous.
I confess, I have form in this area: for I am that cotton-bud self-harmer.
Twice I have appeared in casualty with a Q-tip wedged in my ear, twice, mortifyingly, as an adult. On the last occasion – a Christmas Day, no less – my father and I used this opportunity to evade Betts
Yule, spending the afternoon sitting happily in A&E: he reading a novel, me comparing notes with six-year-olds with a present wedged up their nose.
And still I didn’t learn.
Cue incident three, whereby I managed to rupture my ear drum
ahead of 11 hours of contemporary opera. “It’ll sort itself out,” I assured my companion. By morning, I was writhing in agony, I was ferried to the hospital, where I was informed that I had managed to give myself a First World War-scale injury, from which, pre-penicillin, I would have perished. Turns out that these things are rather tricky to fix. My trench ear went on for, oh, a mere 18 months, rendering me partially deaf and prone to emitting blood and pus in moments of high passion. I wasn’t the hottest date. However, it did work brilliantly as a form of office passive aggression. And yet, still I find it irresistible: a box of virgin buds, the allure of a recently shampooed ear. For what is humanity without the right to aural delving? There is no satisfaction that comes close.