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| "I believe they're for eternity. Right, just the one please." |
Pre-WW2 encyclopaedias showed African women who had stretched their neck by the addition of a column of rings. Others had extended their bottom lip by introducing a dinner plate. But my fears don't demand such extremes. When VR and I chose her wedding ring (at a jeweller's on Regent Street since you ask) there was no chance we'd be buying one for me. A ring represented restriction (physical not metaphorical). Suppose I wanted to take it off? And couldn't? A bad area to wield a hacksaw.
Now things have gone from bad to worse. Lewis Hamilton, an F1 driver, wears diamond ear studs. To do this someone must have drilled through his ear lobes. In my book that's self-harm even if he submitted to the process.
As to those who decorate their faces with permanently-attached gold balls I am in despair. I cannot rid myself of the conviction that some of these artefacts must screw directly into the skull. Aargh!
Nor is my fetish - perhaps non-fetish - consistent. Uneasily I must confess that women's ear studs can look OK. But danglers, no. Suppose they caught in something...? Double aargh!
Yes, this is uninformed prejudice but I am not comforted by explanations. The stuff I refer to, more at home in the workshop than the ensuite, are incompatible invaders. Which have been welcomed.
Post-Brexit? How about leg amputation so that a prosthetic, in platinum and styled in Paris, may be worn. Metaphorically a self-inflicted mutilation which many clamour for.
A friend of mines dad was a jet jockey in the USAF shortly after WWII. Newly wed, he was climbing down the ladder from the cockpit when his foot slipped and his fall was arrested by his wedding ring catching on some protuberance. I assume that much wriggling
ReplyDelete(and maybe hollering) ensued as the predicament evolved. End result: degloved finger, amputated shortly thereafter.
MikeM: So it isn't just a whimsy, I've been right all these years. Thanks for that.
ReplyDeleteI am in total agreement, RR. I hate to see metal adornments, attached by "surgery" on women let alone the increasingly popular male versions. But it has been going on a long time, maybe back to Albert of Saxe-Coburg if rumours are to be believed. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Albert_(genital_piercing). That particular adornment makes me go cold!
ReplyDeleteEven rings can be hazardous, as Mike M relates. When I was learning to be a blacksmith a colleague crushed his finger. That was bad enough, but he crushed his gold ring into the flesh to the bone - it wasn't something we could amend with the judicious use of a hacksaw and he lost that finger (in Casualty).However, we usually managed, at the forge, to perform "minor surgery" ourselves for small accidents. I once violently hit the top of a finger with a hammer, resulting in a painful blood blister under the nail. My hand was held steady whilst another carefully drilled down through the nail to relieve the pressure, resulting in a blood fountain. (We never attempted trepanning, though.........
Avus: I was prepared to make an exception for women's ear studs but my fifth paragraph wasn't clear enough. This has now been modified.
ReplyDeleteMy resistance to wearing a wedding ring was purely instinctive. I hadn't thought it through. Both you and MikeM have provided solid reasons why I was justified. But again I was inconsistent. I didn't try and persuade VR not to wear one. Of course it was very early days but even now, fifty-eight years later, I would regard such interference as outside my function as a husband.
Back to golden balls. It's the reasons why that give me colly-wobbles. Presumably these self-adorners are dissatisfied with their unadorned faces. This I might understand. I've always regarded my face as lugubrious at best but if, at my age, I had found myself incapable of accommodating this defect I'd have to reflect that time must have weighed heavily during my lifetime.
In any case I tend to agree with George Orwell's "At fifty everyone has the face he deserves." I recognise the problem with the pronoun but, that said, I like the implicit poetic justice there. However, whereas I've been able to bear lugubriousness, might an anonymous face have been a worse burden? Perhaps. But surely it doesn't make sense to opt for a such an alien solution. The only reason for golden balls seems to be that others are doing it. The lemming mind-process has never appealed.