One of the characters in the Wodehouse pantheon who never fails to irk me is Gussie Fink-Nottle. My main objection to him is that he is a wet blanket who cannot cope with life. Reading between the lines, I feel that Bertie Wooster feels the same about him, but continues to be his chum out of a sense of loyalty that he refers to as the Code of the Woosters. I suppose we all have people like this in our lives whose mere presence causes us to sigh and wish that things were different, but still we tolerate them because there but for the grace of God go I, blah blah blah. Gussie’s main preoccupation in life is his love of newts. He has quite the collection and can speak about the amphibians ad nauseam. His obsession with them has always amused me, as they seem to be such unlikely things to capture a person’s fascination. My amusement dried up abruptly when I realized that I, too, am obsessed by an unlikely thing.
It all began innocently enough. My house is over a hundred years old and has a forced hot-air heating system. While the heat is incomparable, it does dry out the air quite a lot, which causes a lot of tickly throats in the morning and aggravates my cat’s asthma. The obvious remedy is to run a humidifier. I bought a wonderful one a couple of years ago. It was a Sunbeam ultrasonic model. Not only could you set the desired humidity percentage, but it also shut off automatically when those levels were attained and there were no filters involved. It was silent, and served me well for a year and a half, until, alas, I hit the clumsy stage of my pregnancy. Since I was living alone at that point, I was responsible for filling the reservoir. One night, I dropped it in the bathtub and cracked it. I spent far too much time searching for a replacement reservoir on the internet after being informed by the good people at Sunbeam that, not only was a replacement reservoir not available, but they no longer made that particular model. The pregnancy hormones rendered me inconsolable, bemoaning that of all the losses that I had experienced recently, from my failed relationship right on down to my missing memory stick, this was the sharpest sting. Fortunately for my mental health, I had some chocolate, dusted myself off and concocted a plan.
It being February, when all reasonable people had bought their humidifiers and the stores were stocking bikinis in their place, I was out of luck. Against my better judgment, I bought a couple of Crane models from Amazon. I really ought to have paid attention to the reviews, a good half of which almost screamed “Do not buy this!” at me. Reason was clouded by the blind panic that was brought on by the twin worries of my son’s imminent birth and my cat’s asthmatic condition. Besides, one of them was shaped like a duck, the perfect thing in a nursery. The appliances arrived and worked well throughout my maternity leave, misting the air and providing respiratory comfort to all and sundry.
Then the summer hit, and my son developed his first case of the sniffles. The poor mite had to endure regular applications of saline to his nose and tussles with a Swedish Snot Sucker. I was told that the air conditioners were drying out the air and to run humidifiers. Up to the attic went I to retrieve the first Crane humidifier, certain that it would provide the same reliable service that it had during the early spring. So it did, for one week and then it refused to send as much as a wisp of moisture into the air. The second unit responded similarly, although this one operated for only a couple of days. By that time, the weather had broken and the sniffles had dissipated. Of course, being a baby, he got sick again a month later, again necessitating a humidifier.
That was in September and since then, I have bought three humidifiers and returned one. One is in my bedroom and another in my son’s room. A third is needed for my living room because, as much as I try to lure my asthmatic cat into spending the day snoozing in my room, he is very fond of a spot on the couch directly across from a heating vent. I have tried carrying a humidifier from room to room, but given my track record, I know it is almost a matter of time before disaster happens. For reasons unknown to me, probably yearning for a lost love and wanting to recapture the magic, I called Sunbeam and, when I heard that they had a really good ultrasonic model out, I bought two so as to have a back-up or a spare reservoir when/if I break one. Awkwardly enough, I placed that order after speaking with the Crane people, who informed me that I could have replacement models sent as my units were still under warranty. I had plumed for a refund, but there was nothing doing. It seemed madness to have two broken humidifiers in my house when I would have two working ones, albeit working ones that I will never trust, hence the reason why I did not cancel the Sunbeam order. When all of this is done, I will have six humidifiers in my house.
My madness only became clear to me when I was asking my father if he wanted a humidifier (a Crane obviously, as I suspect I will start hoarding ultrasonic Sunbeam humidifiers now) and he asked me why I had one on offer. This put Gussie’s newt-loving tendencies into perspective. Certainly, I once made the acquaintance of a particularly compelling bearded lizard named Eugene, and thus understand the allure of something that others might put into the creepy and slimy category. No one, to my knowledge, in literature or real life, has ever had a soft spot for a Sunbeam humidifier manufactured in 2008 with adjustable humidity levels and automatic shut-off. Were I ever to meet Gussie in the street, I would have to slink off, knowing him to be the better human being. Thank goodness for my self-respect that he is only a fictional character.
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