Hairy people have rights, Teesdale Mercury

Hairy people have rights

Mar 18, 2008

HELLO all.  I have been struck down recently with the virus counciltaxiococcusviduscurrentaccounticus or, as it is more commonly known, Brown's disease.  

This condition has no known cure but has several very unusual symptoms and side-effects. Firstly, it ensures that the sufferer is only tended by nurses who are overweight,  have children called Cameron and Chloe and talk too much. Secondly, it enhances certain capacities in the conscious mind, to one of which I developed a particular susceptibility. When you've had the virus for a week or two and spent most of that time in the company of other people who are ill, you become acutely aware that men over the age of forty have hairy earholes. I have yet to understand why the hairy ear phenomenon exists, or why I am now so very aware of it. Many women are known for their capacity to scan their rivals from head to toe in one nanosecond, memorise forever what the other is wearing and think of sixteen reasons why this clothing makes that person look ridiculous. Some men can look at a car or tractor and decide its price, cubic capacity, performance and desirability before they have even drawn a breath. 

  Well, my recent illness has now made me an expert on hair growth in ears, not to mention noses and eyebrows. I can see those little stubbies a mile off.  If you are getting on a bit and you meet me, don't be surprised if I I seem always to want to look at you from ninety degrees to the right or left. I have become aware of the almost limitless variety of these growths and the reciprocal understanding they have with hair growth on the scalp.  As the hair declines up top, so it speeds into action sideways. However, you will note that it has a different texture. When well-established, it can have the rigidity of barbed wire. It is virtually indestructible and grows back at the most alarming rate. It is the physiological equivalent of Japanese knotweed in the garden. Just as the gardener can only eliminate the weed by importing a JCB and changing the garden soil in its entirety, so old blokes can only rid themselves of aural infestation by chopping their heads off.  Proof of this lies in the fact that not one of Henry VIII's wives is reported as suffering from this affliction after being beheaded.

Some men just give up and let the stuff take over.  I know one Teesdale man whose lugs have weapons of war growing out of them. So great are they that small birds can often be found impaled thereon.  These birds disappear after a day or so, leading me to believe that his body has found a way of ingesting them as protein.  This level of hirsuiteness can lead to premature deafness and a rapid decline in the ability to pull human, as opposed to avian  birds. 

There are very few women, it seems, who get really hot for men with shrubs growing out of their ears.  Strange things, women. Other men let it all go mad for a few months before getting the wife to hack it all off with the bacon scissors. This is when you have that ‘I can't quite place it, but there's something different about him' moment.  It is also when he loses weight very rapidly. By far the more effective disposal strategy is for the wife to sit on the offending man's chest and pull the little sods out with tweezers.  A more painful strategy, admittedly, but longer-lasting in outcome.

So there I was in hospital. I ventured to suggest to the nurse with the big bottom that the bloke beside me (whose ears would have won a silver gilt medal at the Chelsea Flower Show) might have got the plot of Hamlet a bit wrong.  I do believe she had never heard of Hamlet. Her GCSE English coursework concentrated on the literature of Loaded magazine and her mum wrote her essays. Well, there's vocational training for you.  I suggested that Claudius might just have poured fertiliser instead of poison in the old lad's ear in an attempt to cart off his wife Gertie. She gave me a look suggesting I would get an enema very soon.

 So it's obvious.  We have an awareness-raising need in society.  The rights of the hairy-eared are in danger. The public has a right to be consulted and informed.  I rang the Kremlin Shadow Authority at Aykley Heads to ask for advice and found an old friend.  Kevin Pyramid, 22 and three eighths is now Shadow Minority Groups Coordinator.  He told me he was well aware of the problem and that County Durham was 'ahead of the game' at the interface between ears and the outside world. This was largely because all the councillors, men and women, have hairy ears, so he has been put in charge of meeting Government guidelines on deforestation strategies.  To that end he was setting up a consultation group with central funding.  He kindly offered to suggest my name as a cooptee to Councillor Wilf Flange, 107, the first chairman of the Durham Aural Follicle Trust (DAFT).

P.S.  It's nice to be back. My thanks to all the kind people who wished me well.

First published in the Mercury, March 12, 2008