syringe 28 March 2009
I am still haunted by the ear syringing conversation on the bus. We have ‘bad’ ears in our family and regularly suffer from earache. Add to this that at various times in my life I have had perforated eardrums (nasty) and you get some of the picture as to why I might be a bit obsessed when the conversation turns to the bits attached to the side of my head. Actually, turns out I am slightly deaf in both ears as a result of the old perforations – another wonky bit, 2 of them in fact. Anyhow, what got me about the 2 ladies, particularly the one wondering if she needed her ears syringed was that they had the conversation 3 or more times, circling around then going through the same details, in practically identical word patterns. They agreed that she should soften the ear wax with olive oil first. That brought me back – when I was growing up in the west of Ireland (a couple of centuries ago) olive oil was for medicinal purposes and you bought it in the chemist. You certainly never would have contemplated cooking with it – that would have been freakish. I had an awful urge to lean over the top of the seat and tell the woman a lie about which type she should use (Sicilian extra virgin?) but didn’t want to actually become part of the merrygoround. The other woman’s brother suffers with his ears too, it seems, and she said he’d had them ‘done’ so often he has tinnitus now. I know too much about it too as a result.
They moved on to a gruesome murder trial that’s being held in Dublin at the moment and discussed infidelity in general and the particulars of it in this case and that was most illuminating too… When we got to the 3rd version (quite Beckettian as I think of it now) I put on my ipod and zoned out. It’s all still in my head though…clearly…
