It was with shock and a bizarre feeling of betrayal that I discovered recently that neither my wife nor my old friend K had ever licked a nine-volt battery.
I know what you're thinking. Unbelievable! Preposterous! Pah, you spit, why do I read this fool's idiotic prattling? Never licked a battery? The wife we might forgive for the frailty of her sex, but this K too? Absurd!
Well, those were my thoughts exactly. But it remains, nonetheless, the tragic truth. There I stood, bewilderment on my face, a cheap smoke alarm in one hand and its battery in the other. "I don't get it," I was saying. "This bloody thing keeps beeping to indicate the battery is low, but" – and here I slithered my tongue quickly over both terminals, as you do, receiving a reassuring tingle in response – "the battery seems fine."
"Wait a minute, hold on, what are… hey," interrupted K. "Why do you keep putting that battery in your mouth?"
I stared at him in incredulity; my jaw dropped open. Since this left my tongue hanging out anyway, I absent-mindedly licked the battery again. Yes, definitely a charge there. My mind grappled with K’s apparent stupidity. Was he perhaps joking? Or had he really never licked a battery?
“Stop it!” said my wife. “Stop licking that battery and answer the question!”
I turned to regard her. Over our 150 years of marriage, surely this was not the first time she’d seen me lick a battery? I would have sworn that she herself, a woman of vast practicality, had often employed this simple biological test of voltage.
So dumbfounded was I, so positively speechless, that I was unable to murmur any kind of explanation or defence. This paralysis prompted concern for my health in my companions, K suddenly smacking me on the back while my wife emptied a glass of wine over my head.
This was the final indignity. “I can’t believe you’ve never licked a battery!” I shouted in sodden misery. “For shame!” An unusual, itchy sensation was now spreading over my tongue and lips, for which I blamed the face full of Merlot. “I insist you lick this battery now!” I shouted.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” they both answered. “It’s covered in your saliva, anyway,” added K. Furious, I went immediately to the kitchen to get a fresh battery, still in its packet. Unwrapping it before his startled, foolish eyes, I flung this angrily into K’s lap. “Lick the damn battery!” I demanded. “Or get out!”
And so Easter ended. Reader, I ask you now: haven’t you ever licked a nine-volt battery?