Categories: musings
Date: 22 October 2007 22:12:15
In order to support fair trade and to ease congestion in my overflowing jewellery box, I ordered from Tear Fund an earring stand. It arrived the other day, and I duly assembled it by screwing the bits together. Basically it's a kind of miniature cake stand, in what looks like olive wood, with a circular base and an upright column (nicely turned and finished with a sort of upside down plumb-shaped thing at the top - what's the name for one of those?), which supports two further circular trays. Each of these is pierced around the edge with multiple tiny holes into which one inserts one's earring hooks so that eventually, earrings hang down all round with a Christmas tree effect. It all looks rather attractive and it just accommodates all the open hook earrings I possess (the bottom tray is dished to take studs, but I'm leaving those in the jewellery box with the 'closed-hook' earrings - the sort where the hook is secured by a little latch bit).
Now here's the really funny bit: on the top tray, there is an odd number of holes! In what circumstances, I ask myself, might one want to store half a pair of earrings? Hope springs eternal, of course, when one has lost a favourite earring - it's always the favourite ones - and elects to keep the other in the vain imagination that its twin might eventually turn up. And indeed this very scenario happened in the summer, when I found my missing amber earring just when I'd bought a replacement pair, which I didn't like, in Lithuania. But then, if one has been storing a widowed earring in that extra hole, what does one do when its pair does reappear?
It could of course be a provision for those with only one pierced ear, or indeed those unfortunates in possession of only one ear. But then there would be no point in the even number of holes on the lower tray, nor the catalogue's boast that the item allows storage of 36 pairs of earrings (it doesn't, it only stores 20 and a half pairs). I can only conclude that Tear Fund's quality control is a little lacking in this case. But it made me laugh, anyway.