There are two foot stalactites on the ice that lies over my garden pond. These impressive, randomly- shaped ice sculptures have been created by air bubbles. They look like magicians’ hats designed by a Mad Hatter who has had more than tea to drink at his last party. They have come about because of our nine goldfish. No.. the bubbles do not emanate from the fish themselves nor because I’ve been blowing down a long straw inserted under the ice when I’ve had more than tea to drink at our last party, but because we were told that, to keep the hibernating fish alive through the winter, a constantly working aerator is a necessity. So it bubbles quietly away and the nine goldfish lie at the bottom of the pond, ready, we hope, to reappear next Spring. Apart from counting them we will know if they all survived the cold because each fish has its own personality. Each behaves slightly differently than the others. I suppose they say the same thing about my wife and I. We have trained them to appear when food is thrown into the pond. Again I suppose they say the same thing about my wife and I. (Like all living creatures, animals and plants, we are more similar than different in design since we are all versions of the Watson and Crick double helix, employing, in different assortments, the same four amino acids.) Towards the end of November the fish would appear when we did but would not eat the food we threw onto the surface of the water. They knew, because of one or two really cold spells, that winter was coming and their innate bodily instructions discouraged eating. The goldfish were responding to changes in the weather without actually knowing why. Just as we do. Oh... and the ear wax of the title? In the course of any week I syringe impacted wax out of the ears of one or two newly deaf patients. I am often asked if they should use their q tips in a different way to stop this happening. I always say that the problem was brought about by those q tips...which ram wax down a blind tube that ends in the ear drum, eventually stopping its ability to resonate with sound waves. I am also asked what the wax is for, and for the longest time I did not have a good answer for this. But one day, when swimming at the local pool, I saw a man putting ear plugs in his ear. He was talking to a friend and shouting (because the plugs made him deafer) that this was the best way to prevent swimmer’s ear. Bingo! I realized that ear wax is a natural plug that is produced by a mammal species which used to swim a lot more than it does now. Yet another example of one of our bodily gifts to which an immediate function cannot be attributed ...without some thought. Exactly like, in my view, those innate mechanisms which help us respond to changes in the weather, our most changeable, ambient environmental stressors.