The king with the pearl earring
King Charles I had a rather beautiful dangly pearl one and Shakespeare a golden hoop.... ah, earrings! I just bought a pair of delicate gold studs with tiny green stones, far removed from some I've worn in the distant past. How about you? Do you wear studs or rings or other objects in your ear/s or just adorned yourself in them in long ago?
I still have - just about! - five holes in my earlobes. The folly of youth; long ago in a different age it seemed a lot but must be really quite minimal now.
Even in my teenage girl demographic it wasn't that common to have any. Then I suppose it became a bit of a thing and one classmate even offered a 'service' in the lunch hour with a drawing
compass, some TCP and a look-out to signal the presence of lurking teachers. I didn't use her special skills, but I did want a hole in my ear. It'd be cool to hang weird things, I thought - plus I had access to a free supply of very dangleable objects if I foraged amid the elastic bands, batteries and spare coins in the kitchen odds-and-sods drawer.
Indeed, finding mysterious items to craft into unique punky earrings wouldn't be hard. Transistors, resistors, washers - all potential contenders. The tough part was that I didn't want to broach the dreaded piercing topic with my mum, even though she was quite a non-conformist herself and loved her arty rings and clothes. She once wore a Kaftan to my dad’s workplace Dinner & Dance, the posh kind (posh Dinner & Dance, I mean, not posh Kaftan, I'm not sure there is such a thing). So she wasn't averse to defying convention, but she'd never liked pierced ears.
What to do? Resort to covert measures: buy some cheap clip-ons from Boots, remove the decorative bits and attach my own curious objects in the secrecy of my bedroom. Springs and things on little chains could be easily looped around. My favourite was Eric, a sweet plastic skull given to me by a friend who’d won him in a Christmas cracker. Eric dangled beautifully and we shared many happy nights together, once I'd sneaked him out of the house unseen...
Of course it soon all came out into the open and, ironically, without the expected objection from Mum, I eventually got both ears pierced properly. I was so pleased with my new holes that I got three more. Those washers, wires, unidentified plastic objects and, later, even dried chicken bones and locks of plaited hair (goth era), all found their way into my home-made earring collection at last.
It was only as many more years went by that I discovered, after increasing discomfort, that I have a metal allergy. It got more intense with age and now I can only wear the purest, most expensive minerals against my skin without getting an itchy reaction or worse, an ooze. Hence the delicate gold studs I've just bought - as long as I can still get them in the holes! I do rather miss Eric, though, he was a most trusty companion and, thankfully, he never brought me out in a rash.
Gandalf: Golden Earrings (1968) (what a lush and brooding cover of the Bobby Darin original)
