No one has invented a fashionable hearing aid.”"I’m afraid,” says Victoria Mather, “that anything to do with an orifice is doomed to be non-sexy.”. I’m sure she thinks it’s something to do with kinky sex.”Now that the designer toilet brush is a Philippe Starck reality, can the pulchritudinous plug be far behind? Derek Rodgers is doubtful “They’ll never be attractive. When the cleaning lady changes them, she picks off the wax and puts it carefully by my husband’s side of the bed. “In the summer, though, they melt and somehow come out in the night on the sheets.
Lucy Gillick, niece of family campaigner Victoria, is one of the latter “Mine are Boots’ beige-coloured ones. To match my ears, I suppose.” Designer Joanna Woodbridge is another foam fan. “I’ve got some very flattering blue ones, which I bought in the States.”"I always sleep with a pillow over my head and wax earplugs”, says the health and beauty director of Harpers & Queen, Newby Hands. I take my own advice whenever I’m trapped in a car with my husband and he’s being annoying.”Orificionados divide roughly into wax lyricists and those who foam at the ear. When they got there, he was the life and soul while she was a nervous wreck I told her to put earplugs in during the journey.
It’s a lot safer than going outside and making a fuss.”Agony aunt Mary Killen also finds them invaluable in transit. “A woman wrote to me saying that her husband complained all the way to parties. They’re very useful if you end up staying in a hotel somewhere like Port-au-Prince that has a car alarm under the window going on all night. “I have an emergency international survival kit that has earplugs from Boots in it. But even there, travel writer John Hatt wouldn’t dream of leaving his little foam friends behind. After all, you never actually heard Abigail having her party.One option, of course, is to up sticks and head for the Hebrides.
“People have higher expectations of peace and quiet than they used to and they have become less tolerant.” Steve Woodward, who works for a local council-funded body whose purpose is to defuse rows between neighbours, thinks the Nineties are responsible: “People are getting more stressed and notice noise more.” Oh, for the foam-stuffed, shag-piled Seventies. “There is no doubt that women tend to be less assertive and aggressive than men and so, when faced with a frustrating stimulus such as noise, they may well try to neutralise the problem by putting in earplugs.” Oliver, it turns out, is no stranger to frustrating aural stimulation himself. “Every so often, a rave gets going down the street and I start to fantasise about going round there and blowing the place up.” Had he considered earplugs? “I hadn’t, but after this conversation I just might.”Noise is up: patience is down, says Hilary King, of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health. Free with all varieties come suggestive instructions in the rites of rolling, squeezing, inserting firmly and allowing to expand within the cavity.Although no earplug customer profile exists at Boots HQ, psychologist Oliver James thinks they’re probably bought more by women than men. In his dark trousers, white shirt, grey striped tie, black shoes and white socks, Colin looks every inch the computer operator he was before his imprisonment.
Small, with a whippet-like frame, grey wispy hair and bushy sideburns, it is hard to imagine him as a stereotypical leather-clad, whip-wielding “master” disciplining his “slave”.But then Colin doesn’t see S&M as particularly deviant. “It’s the same as going pot- holing really,” he continues, chuckling at the unlikely comparison with another of his interests. “Unless you have done it, you can’t understand what the thrill of it is. It’s something you have to experience for yourself.”Now 52, Colin first got involved in the S&M scene in the late 1970s, via contact magazines, when he was working as a handicrafts teacher. Over the next decade he became an active member of a small circle of mainly middle-class, middle-aged, closeted gay men practising what they thought was a perfectly harmless, if rather unusual, form of sexual gratification. A lay preacher and an international lawyer were among the participants.”We were all law-abiding citizens in bloody good jobs who simply never thought that we were breaking the law,” recalls Colin “We would go and stay with each other for the weekend.
