Pull up a sandbag, swing yer lantern and I'll tell you about the first time my ear got clogged up.
I was in the Army at the time (don't believe everything you read in the Bayeux Tapestry, Hastings was a lot rougher than they make out!), not quite hit the two year mark so I'm only seventeen, and for whatever reason I didn't know ears getting blocked with wax was a thing. Looking back it seems odd, because when you go in, especially as a Boy, they teach or reteach you literally everything from how to wash your working parts and brush your teeth, tie your laces, eat with a knife and fork, how to use toilet paper.. I had extra lessons with a nice lady to learn to read and write (and have been unable to stop ever since!), I didn't know it was a thing.
So we're learning to use this particular bit of kit, there's a written/multiple guess exam and an ability test you have to pass to get qualified to use it. We've been spending a lot of time on the range practicing drills and skills for the test, and over the course of a week the hearing in my right ear goes from "slightly different" to "say again all after good morning" and I know that my right ear's blown - we did get issued amplivox/earmuffs, but you'd get knocked about for wearing them on the range so no one wore them.
I'm too scared to tell the staff or go to the med centre because I think they'll kick me out for being deaf, but people start to notice and one one of my mates explains about the wax thing, maybe it's that. So out of desperation and stupidity I take the left over arming pin from a previously thrown WP Grenade (you're not meant to take them, but all the cool kids have them on the zip of their smock like a fashion accessory) which is like a thick piece of wire on a big keyring, shove it in my ear, twist turn pull...
OH
MY
FCUKING
GOD
The first thing that happens is I hear this kind of ripping noise, you know like when you've got one of those giant rolls of packing tape and it goes ttsshiip, ttsshup, ttsschoop each time you pull it a bit further? Like that, but at the same volume as if you took a nightclub speaker and used it for a headphone.
Then the cold hits. And I mean COLD. Now, there's been a few times in my career when I might have gotten a bit chilly, as you can probably imagine. I know what real cold feels like. Three separate times on two different continents I've been caught in avalanches, buried twice, once for more than six hours (send me a postcard from your skiing holiday, I'll send you one from Kenya) but the INSIDE of my ear has never experienced such a bitter, biting cold as those first few seconds.
Then you can hear. The grass is growing. Inside the grass there are water molecules, inside of which are hydrogen atoms, inside of which is a single electron. For the first few minutes you can hear that electron going around and around, even though the grass is in Glasgow and you're in Aldershot.
Even I don't have the words to describe the relief.