Dialogue: Enough to make me wax lyrical

It's called Cerumol and I love it. It contains chlorbutal, ortho-dichlorobenzene (which sounds like fancy petrol) and para-dichlorobenzene (which sounds like fancy petrol with military uses) and over the years I've gone through pints of it.

Since the age of 20 I have travelled nowhere without it. I've bought it in several countries but it always seems to have been made in North London. In the time that I've known it, the design of the packet has altered slightly but the colour hasn't. It has always been purple. I can pick it out on a chemist's shelves at 20 paces.

It comes in a small bottle along with a rubber-teated dropper. Dip the dropper into the Cerumol, squeeze the teat to suck up a few drops, cock your head on one side and squeeze the drops into your ear. In the early days I sometimes missed. I would baptise my hair. Now I never do.

Keep the head dizzyingly on one side so the Cerumol doesn't drip out of the ear, soak a piece of tissue paper with warm water, compress it into a wad and plug the ear with it. As you do so you will hear a magnified squelch and a husky whistling noise.

If you do both ears at once the world changes. It becomes a whoozy underwater place. The ears stop giving you the news. Your eyes become correspondingly more awake and attentive. Your fingertips, too.

Some of the Cerumol will ooze onto the earlobe but enough will stay there to eat at the ear wax. Because that is its job. If, like me, your ears block up with wax then Cerumol is a fine friend. When the wads come out it is sometimes magical. The wax has melted and sound assaults you.

At other times the magic comes more slowly. The ear remains largely blocked. In goes another dose of Cerumol until the wax is soft enough for the doctor to attack it with a syringe.

The bad thing about going to the doctor is ignorance. Ignorance breeds imagination. Imagination breeds horror: that cough is cancer, that pain arterial, that rash the wages of sin. But when you go for syringing there is no ignorance. You know the course laid out before you and at the finishing line is the juicy reward of a sense of hearing.

I like it when the doctor sticks a scope in my ear to inspect the dam of wax. I like it when he tells me, as he always does, that my ear canals are tightly and strangely convoluted. I feel it's a secret mark of distinction, like the triumphant birthmark of a prince raised by peasants.

They say that no doctor has completed his apprenticeship with the syringe until he has burst an eardrum. I don't know quite what an eardrum looks like - though I imagine it unimaginatively as a miniature drum with skin taut over a tiny round frame of bone - but whatever it looks like, I never fear for mine.

Instead, I relish the painless shock of the rush of warm water, the sudden localised storm, so strange that every faculty focuses on its invasion.

Beneath my ear I hold an impressively surgical-looking stainless steel dish to catch the outflow. The doc peers into it to see what he's managed to dislodge, but I don't have to. I know by the feel of the ear whether the dam has been blown.

And if it has, I feel a gush of delight. It will be several months before I need to attend once again to my ears, several months in which I do not have to strain to catch the conversation in pubs, or the questions of children or the scrunch of dry gum leaves. The doc has restored my antennae.

But why do I love this process? Why do I bother to write about the clearing of wax? Why deal with trivia when the world is awash with the grand issues of the moment, with the frantic neighing of politics, the strident narcissism of Hollywood, the absurd tribal ferocities of the globe and the fierce bellowing of people for my attention? Well, my defence is straightforward.

When either Cerumol or the syringe clears the ear, when the world can get through once more, it is like starting again with sound, a sort of aural infancy. And with it comes a sense of priority, a sense of what matters.

And I always find that to my rediscovered hearing the boomings of serious people, the sophistries of powerful people, the punditry of earnest people - all of these are overwhelmed by my delight in the good sounds of trivia, the clink of glasses, the laughter of fools and the frantic squeaky whimpering of dreaming dogs.

Cerumol restores more than a sense of hearing.