TJ’s Q-tips.

Mothermouse lost her nose diamond and went down the pub for the quiz. As general knowledge is something I look up when I need it and not before I’m as useful as a pristine notebook at quizzing and chose to nap and ponder the whereabouts of the missing item. As washing one’s face seemed a likely activity for losing it I decided to examine the U bend beneath the bathroom sink. Can I say at this point the bathroom sink has required frequent plungering for the last fifteen years or more, which I’d put down to insufficient fall in the waste pipe. On removing the U bend and carefully shaking it over the bath I did not find jewellery but rather the remains of around forty neatly stacked Q-tips, enough to almost fill the pipe. Mothermouse, Bethmouse and I viewed the rank mess and postulated. Who could it be if not one of us? Britney was mentioned as she does like a Q-tip now and then but hardly forty! Then it all became clear. Long before Tommouse, TJ to his friends, left for university, roamed Brazil and moved to Barcelona, in fact probably before he went to big boys school he was concerned with ear wax or ‘ear whack’ as he used to call it, which is when he developed a fondness for Q-tips. We postulated that being a boy at that particular developmental stage and having a particular concern for personal grooming he would wish to dispose of them quickly and efficiently, but not in the bin as that required the extra effort of bending down. He would note the holes in the plughole were slightly larger than a Q-tip’s diameter wherein they would disappear as if by magic. Having no inkling of the geometry of a U bend or that they even existed the thought of a straight Q-tip not being able to negotiate a U bend was as foreign as the Large Hadron Collider would be to a Neanderthal. So no nose diamond but a free flowing sink, a small victory. One can only hope the habit passed and that sinks all over the world aren’t blocked up with Q-tips.