ear trumpets

Yesterday found me visiting her maamship and the prof. Readers of Joker's blog will recall that her maamship used to be called mrs prof, until she was called to the judiciary, whereupon it was felt that she needed a title befitting of her new station. Talk turned to our increasing oldness and general decrepitude. The prof has the lead on oldness but her maamship and i are probably ahead on decrepitude. 

Her maamship related an amusing tale about her ear. It seems the ear has not been well and her maamship resorted to pouring olive oil into it in an effort to return it to useful service. While this may have resulted in interesting salad dressing, it did nothing for auditory volume. In addition the ear was rather sore. It then began to give off a rather unpleasant smell. To give some idea of the magnitude of this, her maamship was able to smell her own ear, in spite of not being furnished with a trunk. At this point in the conversation her maamship digressed, describing how she had had to resort to wearing perfume on the side with the dodgy ear when she went to the optician. I commented that the optician was more commonly associated with having one's eyes fixed, but her maamship explained that she had understood that but was concerned at the optician having to be near her smelly ear while trying to test the judicial eyes. 

This saga reminded me of the period before the Ageing Rockstar went into hospital to have his lung reduced. He too had one ear which gave off a foul miasma. As he was rather reluctant to have his ear inspected i resorted to surreptitious sniffing while passing the ear. Occasionally i would score a direct hit with my nose when he was distracted by a guitar. Using this technique i was able to monitor the condition of the ear, but sadly was unable to persuade the Ageing Rockstar to do anything about having his ear rot seen to. It seems that Ageing Rockstars are on the whole rather phlegmatic about declining health. 

On being admitted to hospital for his op, the Ageing Rockstar was given various tests to ascertain whether he presented a risk to other patients. As far as i could see no ear-sniffing was included. But all was well. As a result of complications after the operation the Ageing Rockstar was dosed with every type of anti-biotic and anti-fungicide known to the human race and a side effect of this seems to be that the ear rot was nuked into submission. 

I still find myself giving the ear the odd sniff when passing, when i am able to approach from behind without being seen, and i offered to avail her maamship of my ear sniffing skills in an effort to see whether her anti-biotics were working. She said she thought ear-sniffing was weird, and the prof concurred.

Call me old-fashioned, but in my book wandering about with ear rot is decidedly weirder. It makes sharing an ear trumpet decidedly hazardous...