On Ear Woes and the Minds of Women.

Last Thursday I went for an appointment at the doctor’s where a nurse checked my ears for wax. I felt quite sure that wax was the cause of my current hearing difficulty. She told me there was wax in both ears but the left one was worse, which made sense because that’s the one giving most trouble. An appointment was made to have it removed after a requisite period of dropping olive oil into the offending organs, and today I reported for the procedure.

I saw a different nurse who assured me that there was no wax at all in the right ear, and so little in the left one that it wasn’t worth bothering with. Consequently, there was nothing to be done. I suggested that maybe I should see a doctor. She disagreed. ‘Optician,’ she replied. Optician? For ears? At that point it became complicated… Suffice it to say that I eventually settled on a plan of inaction: Do nothing and hope it goes away of its own accord, which I feel is quite likely. Bear in mind that opticians don’t operate under the purview of the NHS so they require payment for whatever they do. And bear in mind also that they are genetically programmed to find something wrong so they can sell you something to correct whatever it is. In other words, they’re good capitalists. (Although I’m fast coming to the opinion that the phrase ‘good capitalist’ is an oxymoron. And it’s an interesting coincidence that I’m also coming to the view that only morons think otherwise.)

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I’m going to lighten up now and list three things I particularly like and three things I particularly dislike:

Dislikes First:

1. Bureaucrats who believe they’re entitled to make decisions based on their own, often irrational or at least jaundiced, moral compass, rather than applying the rules without judgement.

2. Senior politicians who continue to play fatuous little games even as Rome burns almost to a wasteland.

3. Members of the corporate world who try to fool the gullible into believing they have a heart by putting Any way we can help, we will at the bottom of every page of their website. This is so outrageously disingenuous as to be unforgivable (even to a capitalist.)

Likes:

1. Dogs with long floppy ears who rush to smother you in fuss whenever they encounter you on the lane.

2. Little girls with hats on (and preferably carrying baskets for some unknown reason.)

3. Month-old lambs which regard you inquisitively before rushing off to their mothers for protection.

And a ‘Don’t Know’ for Good Measure:

Women who smile at you but say nothing when you try to engage them in conversation. Running away I understand. Giving a curt, dismissive reply I understand. Even a slap in the mouth I understand. But smiling silently? This is a lamentable gap in what I thought was a reasonably comprehensive understanding of the female psyche.