The Sign Language Explosion

What is it, for you, that proves you're home?
There are plenty of things for me. My own front door, with its demented turny-key combination. My own staircase with the Pile of Stuff No-One Quite Has Space For Anywhere Else. My own bathroom, with my own bathrrom books. But for me, I'm not properly home until I've heard d's laugh.

Last night was a case in point. Got home late afternoon, did some work in my office, took a long, luxurious bath until d came home from a late shift. We shared the bones of our days spent away, then she turned to go downstairs to put some pizzas on to cook.
"Oh yeah," I said as she was leaving. "You'll appreciate this."
"What?" she said, smiling, but with a single raised eyebrow.
"I've been away two and a half days, right? And during that time I've done more than my fair share of travelling. Every train and every tube I've been on, I've noticed a weird phenomenon. People on the right of me, gesticulating wildly."
"Oh," she said, not yet understanding.
"And on every single occasion, I've thought 'Oh cool...some deaf people using sign language on the Tube...'"
"Aha," she said, still not getting it.
"Yeah, it was like a veritable sign language explosion," I said.

"Course," I added, "didn't occur to me till I noticed it on the train coming home from Cardiff this afternoon as well. Funny how this explosion of sign language always happened on the right of me."
"Oh my God!" cried d, getting it at last.
"Yyyyeah. Notsomuch a sign language explosion as one deaf dickhead on the right hand side," I explained.
"You...daft..." She rushed forward to kiss my ginger-scented bath-foamed head. Then she cracked, and the laugh grew like one of those seeds you see in time-lapse nature shows, reaching up a stem and bursting out to flower in the sunlight.
And as she went in search of pizza, I grinned and dipped my Moby Dick body under the foam. I was home.

On a slightly more serious note of course, this is getting silly now. I no longer have vertigo, and I no longer have seasickness...so I no longer have the two main symptoms of Labyrinthitis...
But I'm still, clearly, profoundly bloody deaf in the right lughole.
Sigh...
Going back to the doctors on Friday...