An Embarrassing Malady
Confession time!
Since I have decided to come clean by the end of this year and put out all the most embarrassing and uncomfortable things about me, here goes.
I am ticklish. Very ticklish.
As in, not your common or garden ticklish, but full-scale red alert kind of ticklish. I would never dare to post this on Facebook: of the 3000 odd friends I have on my main page and three other pages, most people know me personally.
…and ‘therein lies the rub.’
In college, one of my colleagues came to know this malady I have, and she sneakily told everyone else: with the result that they would all be lying in wait for me. The minute I began to declaim some very important subject, like what to have for lunch, or something, someone would sneak behind me and tickle me, or threaten to: all it required was a raised finger, and I would disintegrate into unseemly giggles. That would, of course, occasion the most ribald and risqué jokes you can think of: and when language teachers crack risqué jokes, you can be sure they are the kind even Shakespeare’s Nurse in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ would blush at.
Back at home, when I was getting all hot under the collar about something, and my mother-in-law wanted to diffuse the tension, she would come and stand behind me and raise a finger, like a pointed pistol: and laugh to see me jump.
It is so bad, that, I can’t go for a pedicure. The first time I went for one, I giggled so much, at one time, almost falling into the large bowl of soapy water, that my friend, the pedicurist, got up and walked off in high dudgeon. Or was it disgust? I don’t know. I had to train myself to scrub my feet, without grinning, giggling, or grimacing. I have learned to manage it. Kind of.
And today, the man I live with resorted to this very underhand means to snatch the morning newspaper from my hand and run away with it. He is not ticklish: if I try to tickle him, after a point, I have to tell him, austerely, “I am tickling you,” and then he thinks for some time, and then says, politely, “Hahahaha.”
He is very polite, the man I live with.
Sometimes.
