“Oh my god... you put Play-doh in your ears”

I’M VISITING my youngest sister.

She, her husband and I creep around the house all evening shushing each other. If we so much as boil the kettle or clink a glass their oldest child shouts “shhh. I can’t get to sleep” down the stairs and wakes the little ones up.

I’d forgotten how similar the routine of putting four small children to bed is to drowning rubber ducks: down they go and up they pop on a two hour loop. Practical solutions are needed and it just so happens I have one.

“Get her some ear plugs,” I say.

“Ear plugs?” my sister says.

“I can’t get to sleep without them. I even keep an emergency ear-plug stash.”

“Did you bring some with you?” she asks.

“I’ve got some spare wax ones,” I reply, “but you need the foam ear plugs, not the wax ones, you’re pretty much deaf with those and they take a bit of getting used to.”

“I’ll have a look in the chemist tomorrow. It could be the answer.”

There’s a small silence.

“If you find the ear plugs work,” I volunteer, “and she gets dependent on them and you lose them, never use Play-doh instead.”

“Play-doh?”

“Yes, you know — the squidgy stuff kids play with, that comes in tubs.”

“I know what Play-doh is. I just don’t know why you’d think anyone would use Play-doh instead of ear plugs...” She trails off.

“Oh my god... you put Play-doh in your ears. How old were you?”

“26.”

Her mouth has fallen open. “You tit,” she says.

“A friend suggested it. I was staying the night at her house. We had all our children with us and I’d left my ear-plugs at home.”

“But why didn’t you use cotton wool… or tissue?”

“In retrospect, yes, that would have been a much better idea. Much less traumatic and humiliating.”

“Why? What happened?”

“My friend rolled some Play-doh up into two balls and said ‘try this,’ so I shoved the Play-doh in last thing at night. When I woke up, I was deaf. I tried to get it out but it had gone all sticky. My friend was talking. I could see her mouth opening and shutting but no sound was coming out. Just like fish.”

“So what did you do?”

I tell her that my friend started hand-clapping and shouting things in my ears while falling around laughing and saying, “are you sure you can’t hear that?” Then she began to look more scared than amused and she phoned A& E and the receptionist said, “bring her in”.

My sister’s mouth has fallen open again.

“I turned up at the A&E reception desk with my friend,” I continue, “but the receptionist looked very confused and said, ‘but where’s the patient?’ She’d been expecting a child to turn up, you see. Then my friend pointed at me and said, ‘this is the patient.’ The receptionist didn’t seem to know where to look.”

“Did she laugh?” my sister asks.

“She tried not to.”

Then I tell my sister how the nurse said, ‘Play-doh. In both ears,’ to the doctor and how the doctor didn’t seem to know where to look either.

“Did the doctor laugh?”

“He tried not to.”

“Then what happened?”

“He looked in my ears and then he said, ‘Pink Play-doh, that’s unfortunate, blue would have been better’.”

“Why did he say that?”

“He couldn’t tell what was ear, or what was Play-doh. It was all the same colour — pink — and he didn’t want to poke around in case he damaged the ear drum.’

“So what did he do?”

“He sent me down to theatre and when I said to the anaesthetist, ‘I expect you’ve seen this kind of thing before,’ the anaesthetist said ‘no, actually, I haven’t’.”

My sister says nothing.

“When I came round from the anaesthetic, I had two cone-shaped packs with blood all over them, sticking out of each ear, like Shrek.”

“Oh my god, you must have felt like such a tit.”

“I can honestly say, hand on heart, that in the 20 years since, I’ve never once felt that much of a tit.”