Sucking it up

Visiting the ear clinic. Martha Stewart on Netflix

Have you ever been on an office away-day and in the first session, the instructor makes everybody form a pair with a person they barely know? Then you and the other person have to tell each other a surprising fact about yourselves? I bet you have. It’s a team-building classic.

The idea is that you collect this fact and when the session reconvenes, you report it to the group with a small air of triumph. This establishes you as a good listener and your partner as more interesting than they look. Plus, it gives you something to talk about later at that awkward first morning tea.

Most people pick a fact that makes them more impressive. But nobody likes a skite, so they wrap their achievement in a cloak of modesty, as if they never meant to be this fabulous but it happened, so here we are. A very good example would be, “Since serving his country in the Falklands war, Andrew here tells me he no longer sweats.”

If you’re Andrew, at this point it’s a good idea to shrug or spread your hands helplessly, as a murmur of appreciation ripples across the group.

I’ve always found these fun facts difficult to come up with. Because I’m risk-averse, poorly travelled and haven’t been on a bender for at least twenty years, none of mine are that interesting. Really, who’s going to remember “Leah likes watching clouds when she’s waiting at the lights” or “Leah once jumped a fence and trespassed over a farm to help a lamb find its mother”?

That is, until now. Finally, I have a fresh and gleaming personal fact to present to my next community education night class. I discovered this fact only yesterday and am basically thrilled about it. Here it is:

I have narrow ear canals. (Spreads hands, shrugs).

I know! Perfect, right? Flattering, because narrow is good; nobody wants ear canals like state highways. But also, self-promoting. It implies some kind of disadvantage, and that I’m overcoming the odds to take part in this particular evening class (Beeswax Candle-Making, probably. Or Hypnotize Yourself).

I suppose having narrow ear canals could be an actual disadvantage and might explain why I needed grommet surgery, aged eight. Apparently, after repeated ear infections, my parents noticed I was ignoring their questions if their lips weren’t where I could see them. Since then, though, I’ve had zero problems with my thinner-than-linguine ear holes. Mentioning them would just be a play for sympathy; in news speak, a beat-up.

Can I tell you how I found out? About a week ago, my left ear stopped working. It was irritating beyond belief, having a blocked lug. My family had to repeat everything twice or three times; I discovered how often I’m bellowed at down the stairs, or from other rooms, because all I could hear was a rumble and the vague sense of someone needing me for something. This was stressful, because I couldn’t gauge how serious their need was. Had they cut themselves and were bleeding (five stars), run out of toilet roll while on the toilet (three stars) or was it only that a bug was trapped indoors (one star)? This left me in a constant state of vigilance, which was exhausting.

Then there’s the effect a blocked ear has on your equilibrium. I didn’t enjoy driving with a quiet side and a loud side; it felt unsafe. Plus, anyone in the passenger’s seat on the school run received nothing back from me. I was only worth talking to if I was the passenger and my bad ear was to the window.

The one positive thing was at bedtime, where I would roll onto my good ear and the house would suddenly go quiet, beautifully muffled, signalling the end of my day’s responsibilities. I couldn’t hear the world; therefore, it didn’t exist. The night was legitimately mine.

This couldn’t go on; I was getting furious. So, I booked an appointment to be micro-suctioned at an ear clinic. I waited several days to be seen and can’t tell you how much I was gagging for this procedure when the morning arrived.

If you’ve never experienced it, clinical ear-cleaning involves a medical suction device operated by someone in a white tunic, usually in an all-white, whisper-quiet surgery dotted with fiddle-leaf fig plants, whose only art appears to be blown-up diagrams of the ear canal. The idea is you walk in gummed up with wax and walk out with clean pipes and a boggled expression, for which you hand over the better part of a hundred bucks.

On my arrival, the nurse told me to lie down while she peered into my bad ear with a large, swingy microscope. “Oh, yes,” she murmured pleasantly. “You’re very blocked.”

She explained I’d feel a sense of pressure and intense noise as the vacuum cleaner was inserted into the canal. It wouldn’t be painful, but my eyes might water, and I could experience a dizzy feeling. Entirely normal, but if I needed her to stop, I should say so.

Having your ear vacuumed is fascinating and revolting at the same time, which I always find a perfect combination. You can’t see what’s going on (especially if you clamp shut your eyes, like I did, flex your feet into points and twist your dress in both hands), so you have to imagine. And what I imagined was a tiny power tool, sized for a fieldmouse, being whizzed inside my skull.

There was a series of thumps and silences and then a crackling, which I had to accept were probably wax gobbets slurping along the tube. The silences are worse than the crackling, to be honest. There were some sonic booms; the vacuum was briefly withdrawn, and I was still as blocked as ever.

“Hmmm, time for some warm saline,” the nurse said, with mild annoyance. I was already tilted away from her, and she filled my lug with delicious hot water. Its temperature was perfection. I imagined the cup of my ear as a tiny hot bath, sized for a fieldmouse. It felt strange to actually BE the bath, and not IN the bath. She pressed against the flesh of my outer ear and gently squished the saline around, before beginning the suction again. It wasn’t as slurpy as I expected it to be (crackle; thump; boom), but the results were good. I was left with only ten percent of the plug remaining, which couldn’t be reached, as it was glommed onto my eardrum. Too distant, too deep. My body would remain beyond control.

The nurse then told me that earwax is actually “fifty percent modified sweat”, which is a disgusting thing to know and pleased me enormously. Then she said that, owing to my strangely narrow ear canals, I’d need to go back in six months. Ding-ding! Here was news to cut out and keep!

Then she indicated two piles of black gunk resembling tea leaves, collected on a piece of cotton. These had been the contents of my left and right ears. The left pile was the size of a small bumblebee. This was utterly gross, but at the same time, it was extremely satisfying to be purged of such nasty effluvia. I wanted to get up close and a have a better look, however narcissistic that sounds - I even considered asking to take it with me. But she quickly folded the cotton square and chucked it. I don’t think you’re allowed to take body parts home, so I accepted this missed opportunity.

Walking back to the car I felt alert to every noise. Air whistled inside my freshly laundered ears. I thought about the membranes, nerves and cavities, the Eustachian tubes and the perfect whorls of my cochlea, all gently vibrating and pulsing with sound.

Don’t tell me you weren’t interested in this entire thing. We can’t help ourselves. We’re fascinated by human blockages, fatty lumps, discharge and drainage, especially other people’s. I draw the line at watching videos or looking at pictures, but if you’ve a good story about a cyst, I’ll probably pull up a chair. There’ll be a German word for this grim fascination, this inability to leave human waste alone. Of course there will: Germans have an elevated platform in their toilet bowls for their leavings, for goodness’ sake.

Oh, remember when samples of my skin were taken in a fungal scrape? The results came back, and no fungus was detected. This means only one thing: my oddly patchy face isn’t due to infection or pathology.

It’s due to LIFE.

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Speaking of faces, check out Martha’s. Can you believe she’s 83?

It goes without saying that nobody looks this good without paying for it, but you have to marvel at the peachiness of her skin, and perfection of that hair. Martha’s beauty is tempered by her steel, however. What’s the point of remarkable eyes if they freeze your vital organs when you look into them? The woman is a pickaxe styled as a cupcake.

Martha, a Netflix documentary about her rise, downfall and reemergence will make you feel conflicted for the best part of two hours - in awe of a force as unstoppable as Martha Stewart, America’s first self-made female billionaire, while in dread of her disdain. She’s an anti-hero; a feminist icon who seems to have no close female friends; an entrepreneur who elevated cooking, gardening and do-it-yourself decorating from the mundane to the sublime, applying the principles of the Renaissance and the Dutch Masters to the table and the plate, the front door and the hallway; her mind full of ribbons, wreaths and espaliered roses and her pockets full of cash.

Martha has consented to be interviewed but can’t help curling her lip at the director and his inefficient questions. He annoys her. This whole exercise annoys her. Her annoyance crackles off her in blue sparks. She is a locus of absolute power, radiating malevolence. In her black wrap dress and the strangely stiff ring necklace she’s wearing she looks a lot like Sauron, if Sauron had a manicure and frosted blonde tips.

She sits in exactly the kind of room she featured for years in her magazines. A little rustic, a little luxe, with a generous vase of homegrown flowers behind her, glowing honey-coloured woodwork, and quality furniture. Her taste is Old Connecticut. She invented this aesthetic - the hanging copper pans in the kitchen, the Shaker chairs, the waxed floors; outside, all her animals match, her garden is clipped into shapes where it matters and left leaf-strewn and blowsy where it does not. But these wild edges are simply pretence; they are as meticulously planned as her serving platters, her wedding cakes. Martha stalks through her gardens, recording voice-notes to staff. “There seem to be some dead peonies, which make me very unhappy.”

Martha wasn’t always powerful and used to be a suburban fifties schoolgirl. She describes a domineering father, a drinker and a bigot, who beat his children when they didn’t complete gardening jobs, and an emotionally distant mother. But she was always beautiful. Photographs of her on her European honeymoon and early in her marriage show someone as casually chic as Jackie Kennedy, who can make anything work. A twinset and pearls, loafers and culottes, jeans covered in plaster dust as she renovates a farmhouse, a striped apron as she pulls fresh pasta through a press. She has dimples, good teeth, a defiant chin.

The documentary presents Martha as wronged by men - her ex-husband, who apparently slept with her floral assistant, in a devastating betrayal; her billionaire boyfriend, who didn’t visit her in prison but sent his jet on her release; by law enforcement and the courts for indicting her on trumped-up charges and sending her to jail. It ruined her reputation, upon which her media empire depended; she lost millions in minutes. She was forced to sell her company and lose control of everything she’d built.

“It was so horrifying to me that I had to go through that to be a trophy for these idiots in the U.S. attorney's office,” she now says contemptuously, with a tiny head toss. “Those prosecutors should've been put in a Cuisinart and turned on high.” You agree with her.

The case for Martha is also made by Joan Didion, whose 2000 piece in the New Yorker reframed her foremost as a woman who made it in a man’s world by taking women’s interests seriously. In a typically luminous sentence, narrated in the film, Didion says: “The dreams and the fears into which Martha Stewart taps are not of “feminine” domesticity but of female power, of the woman who sits down at the table with the men and, still in her apron, walks away with the chips.”

Interesting that coolly observant Didion, whose personal style was, like Martha’s, key to her aspirational appeal, would write about Martha with something like warmth, in something like defence. To me, Didion seemed to be someone who loved her own friends, but not the public, and here she was writing about someone who enjoyed the public, but not her own friends. After all, Martha was testified against by her best friend, and another - a stockbroker - had been the one to bring her down.

Martha’s paradox is that if this had been a documentary about a flawed, flinty, cultured, attractive male entrepreneur, not that nice to his people but always in pursuit of his goal, we’d be left with an overall impression of triumph. He showed them, you might think. They said impossible and he said, never.

But because she is a singular woman - a difficult multimillionaire, a witch to her staff, still angry as a wasp at her ex-husband (‘a piece of shit’), bitter and vengeful - you’re left with the suggestion of loneliness amid her comeback, her properties, her rebirth as an Instagram star.

I looked Andrew Stewart up, and he’s not pleased at having their marriage relitigated by Netflix. His current wife Shyla wrote a passively aggressive Facebook post in his defence when it aired, implying that marriage to Martha was “painful and abusive” and besides, it was over 40 years ago.

She goes on to describe her own marriage to Andy as the greatest love of all, ending with this spicy little kick: “We both wish everyone, including Martha herself, the experience of loving and being loved deeply and fully, and the peace that comes from such a love.” Shyla sounds as annoying as hell.

It seems everyone on film still needs Martha to pay. At what cost? bleats one of her associates, of her success. At what price, perfection? It’s not a question Martha’s asking herself. Her refusal to give in to emotion works for her; it’s always been part of the brand. Nobody with a truly warm heart makes a perfect Christmas wreath. The bitch is in the house. She always has been.

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Can I recommend a delicious post from

Zoe Barry

about creating a garden for butterflies? Zoe’s Very Good Gardening blog is full of anecdote, splashes of colour and compassionate advice. You imagine every garden she works in is happier for it. She very kindly wrote this one at my request about planting for butterflies, and made it free.