Now, in this comic I read, a boy simply held the thermometer close to a light bulb in order to artificially raise his temperature, and he got the day off school. Fortunately, this was a dark winter morning so my bedside light was on. I took the thermometer out of my mouth, held it close to the bulb and when I head my Mom’s footsteps coming back, I popped it quickly back into my mouth.
Unfortunately for me, I didn’t have much idea about normal human body temperatures, and certainly didn’t know when not to overdo things. My mother read the temperature, looked at me more suspiciously still and put her hand to my forehead, then down the shirt of my pyjamas.
“Well, young man,” she said ominously, “we have a problem here. You have a temperature of 103 and yet you’re not in the least bit hot or clammy. Have you been messing about with that thermometer?” Compounding my sin, I now denied that too.
“I’d better go get the baby thermometer,” she said. I whined that I was too big a boy to have a thermometer put up my bottom but Mom didn’t listen and went to fetch it, along with a jar of Vaseline and a box of tissues.