Protect his precious little hearing holes!
One year ago, almost to the day, I wrote about being overcome by deafness. A few months of cold winds and my left ear was as useless as a two-hundred dollar shark repellent leg-rope.
(Or Anne Frank’s drum kit, inflatable dart board, a sense of humour at a Greens Party convention etc.)
Have you ever been deaf?
You smile inappropriately in conversation and look blank when asked questions. You narrow your eyes and stare at lips, trying to read whatever they’re saying. All you hear is the thump of your heartbeat and the swishing of water when you surf, as if you were watching raw footage from a GoPro. Your voice becomes a honk and your vowels so blunt to be incomprehensible.
Then, I was talking to Tom Carroll for a political book project (the two-time world champ boycotted South Africa in the eighties because of the White Devil’s apartheid there) and we were talking about how shitty it is to be deaf.
Tom suggested I might wanna look up Surf Ears, a Swedish start-up he’s involved in. Even with Tom’s enthusiastic endorsement I wasn’t entirely convinced they’d work given his championing of the shoulder-zip wetsuit in the nineties and shark repellants recently.
But I called ’em in Malmo, spoke to an impressive man called Magnus Ekermann.
Told Magnus I was writing a story.
In return, they sent a gorgeously presented ear-plug kit (very Scandi). Aesthetically, they were better than any ear plugs I’d seen. I threw ’em in every time I surfed.
Gradually my ear dried out. Soon, I could hear.
And wearing these things wasn’t so bad ’cause there’s a small opening that allows sound to enter. You know how you talk to someone in the water and they pull out their plugs out to talk? It ain’t no way to live. The Surf Ears allow a conversation to flow.
Anyway, I liked ’em so much that when I lost my complimentary pair a month or so later I didn’t hesitate to pay full freight on a new set.
Recently, Surf Ears released a kid version. If you’ve got kids you’ll know they’re a catch-all for disease and all sorts of syndromes. And the little ingrates act as if you personally jabbed ’em with the virus, the pain. All-day, all-night whimpering.
Ears are the worst. Get ’em inflamed or infected and…oowee… tears, wailing, tantrums. There isn’t enough paracetamol in all the world to calm ’em.
My kids surf so I plug their holes up with adult Surf Ears. Which work good enough (my kids got big heads) but, as Magnus told me recently, he’d just loosed a little version for average-sized kids, aged four to twelve.
How about I throw ’em a plug?
And here we are.
If you love your children you’ll pre-order here. (They’re out in January and distributed globally by Creatures of Leisure.)
If you surf okay, hit ’em up for a sponsorship and save your parents the fifty bucks.
Apply at [email protected].