“The average man takes life as a trouble. He is in a chronic state of irritation at the whole performance.…. He fusses about pin-pricks until a mule kicks him. Then he learns the difference”. Herbert N. Casson in Sheet Metal Workers Journal (1928) p. 22.(1)
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“I can’t sleep,” murmured my beloved. “It’s something in my pillow”. It was a brand new pillow, guaranteed to soothe the troubled soul into blissful slumber. For the price of the pillow it should have played a sleepy time tune and served cups of chamomile tea as well. But something inside it was irritating, just like the pea under the mattress of the princess.(2)
Getting up and deconstructing the pillow, she did not find a pea, or even a large crunchy dead spider but a jumbo sized moisture absorbing sachet, full of crunchy silica gel and added by the makers to stop the pillow getting damp. After extracting the irritating packet, sound sleep could be reattempted.
I can appreciate the manufacturer’s concern. A damp pillow would be very unpleasant and irritating. Even worse, a pillow growing mould would be icky and hazardous. I think they also wanted to avoid any pillows growing mushrooms. I think the pillow makers have probably identified pillow based mushroom cultivation as an exciting new business opportunity and they want to keep the idea to themselves.
These moisture absorbing packages are now found everywhere. I find these crusty little packets in bottles of vitamins, bags of flat bread and packets of welding rods.
Now I fully recognise that these itty bitty irritations are nothing compared to the effects of the raging Covid pandemic and the wars that some poor souls are going through. But we still experience these constant pinpricks of annoyance every day and they are as welcome as spending a night in a tent with a blood sucking mosquito. Itty bitty irritations are happening everywhere, all the time. They include toothbrushes that collect odd bits of old food that cannot be removed by any tool known to humankind apart from dental floss, which is kind of creepy. Then there are those tiny red berries which lie on the footpath near us which have a talent for glueing themselves to my shoes. I have found that they will only come off when I go home and walk on the carpet.
Don’t think that these pesky annoyances are just modern phenomena, like flat phone batteries and spam text messages about delivery of non-existent packages. There are many irritations from times gone by.
One ancient annoyance which may well be recorded in cave paintings from as early as 30,000 BC in southern France is the irritation of finding a hair in your mouth. (3). Getting a solo hair in your mouth is like biting on a peppercorn and requires instant action.
The ancient Gauls presumably did not have silica gel sachets in their pillows (although there is no definitive evidence that they did not) but they did have a lot of hair because they had forgotten to invent scissors. They also ate a diet rich in hair including hairy mammoths, hairy goats and long-haired gooseberries, so they spent a lot of time during each meal spitting out hairs. However I’m sure that these hairs, once removed, were useful for making bristle brushes for their cave paintings as well as applying their eye make-up and cleaning their computer keyboards.
Feeling a stone in your shoe is one of those impossible to ignore irritations. Okay, so an itty bitty stone in the sneakers is not something major like being attacked by a sabre tooth tiger but it is almost as annoying. It demands attention just like the old sabre tooth did when it roared at our Neanderthal cousins.
I was subject to an itty bitty stone attack just the other day. I was strolling along a bushland path when I realised I had a stone in my shoe, cutting into my sensitive little footsie. I willed myself to ignore it, but suddenly I could stand it no longer. So I tried to find a place to sit down to deal with the problem. I wanted to take off my shoe and sock, search for that sharp little irritant, throw it away and continue walking, pain-free, stone free and free to wander as lonely as a cloud like Wordsworth. But I couldn’t find even a log to sit on to carry out this operation. Nor could I find a large rock to sit on so I could show all the members of the rock and stone family how much I despised their invasion of my personal foot space.
So with nothing to sit on, I bent over in the middle of the track, while standing on one leg, and tried to take off my shoe and sock. But I wobbled around and then fell over. Try it some time just for fun. I then decided to sit down on the path to continue this search and destroy mission. Without any warning I was run over by a group of senior men on e-bikes who yelled out “passing!”, waved cheerily and sped off. I picked myself up, and resumed the task but I still couldn’t find that tiny stone intruder. Hoping it had mysteriously migrated somewhere else, like Alaska, I put my shoe and sock back on, stood up and then realised that the problem was still there. So I repeated the humiliating operation of sitting on the track and taking off my footwear. Eventually I found the offensive little stone in my sock, rather than my shoe and threw it away with great satisfaction. Then I put everything back together, stood up and was knocked down by a trio of scooter commuters on huge e-scooters which could run over a large possum without pausing. I pulled myself up again, and after one step realised I had a stone in my other shoe. I was about to crawl home on my hands and knees, but one of the e-commuters came back and offered me a lift home on his machine. However the extra load was too much for the battery, which overheated and began smoking slowly like some cool 1950s movie star, so I had to crawl home anyway.
One day I might write a song about all these little nasties. Perhaps I’ll call it, following Bob Dylan, the “Itty Bitty Subterranean Irritation Blues”. Let me see… (X = clap)
“I’ve got grit in my pillow X X
Hair in my foods X X
Berries on my sneakers X X
(and) stones in my shoes X X
I’ve got the
itty,
bitty,
sub-terranean,
irrit-ation blues”
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© Geoff Milton 2022
(1) Wikiquote “Trouble”.
(2) “The Princess and the Pea” by Hans Christian Andersen. The princess had a sleepless night because of a pea placed under the twenty mattresses on her bed.
(3) Wikipedia “Chauvet Cave”.
