OK. So moving on from various cold blooded reptiles, the next birthday trauma is that my daughter wants to get her “cartilage pierced”. My brain does a quick scan of where cartilage features in the body that’s not rude and it turns out that what she wants is a stud at the top of her ear.
I don’t really mind. I quite like the look actually and given that I wasn’t allowed to have my ears pierced until I was nearly divorced, I’m inclined to take the view that it MIGHT TOTALLY RUIN HER LIFE if I don’t let her just go ahead and do it.
We make some inquiries. The woman in the shop (who has two studs at the top of her ear herself) who may just get the job tells us that not only is it incredibly painful but that the pain doesn’t go away for a whole year. Then she says that it can hurt when you brush your hair and sleep and you can get infections there really really easily and there is a risk of facial paralysis if you hit a nerve and by the time she’d finished not selling us the piercing I was about to pass out. “We need to go away and think about it” I told her, as I rushed out of the shop in a sweat.
So we did. I decided that it wasn’t a good idea and she decided that it was. She and a friend went to our local neighbourhood Claire’s Accessory shop and it turns out that we live in the only Borough that has made a rule that nobody is allowed to have a piercing other than in their earlobe. Phew. What a relief.
