And the Moral of this Tale is?

My old granddad was a strange old bloke. Very stiff and Victorian. He was in the Great War and fought at the Somme. He never spoke to me as a child except on one occasion. I was about twelve and he had come back from the pub and was very pissed. He winked at me and said in his broad black country dialect: ‘Would you like to see something?’ Fuck off, it was a long time ago and essentially I’m middle class these days. I’ve had to suppress my accent because, no bugger can understand what I’m saying and folk associate my indigenous accent with being dim. Perhaps sometime my accent becomes thick to be a tune with my audience. Being of a naturally inquisitive nature I nodded yes. He took me to the back room and opened a drawer to an old mahogany desk. He rummaged briefly in the drawer and withdrew a string containing a series of oddly shrivelled objects. He smiled. ‘Can you guess what this is?’  I looked on in wonder and said ‘no’. ‘They be ears’, he slurred. ‘What sort of ears granddad’, I gasped. ‘Well ones over here are taken from the Hun and these are Frenchy.’ It seems my wicked old grandpa had been taking a few souvenirs from the battlefield. Interestingly there was a total of 23 ears: 2 taken from the devilish Hun, the rest from Frenchy. At the time it didn’t strike me as odd that there were more French ears than German. My grasp of history, at the time, was poor. Years passed and old gramps drops dead. The old sod left absolutely bugger all, except to me. He bequeathed to me an old wooden box. When I returned from the funeral I took the box into my bedroom. I have to admit I had an idea what might lie within. With trembling hands I opened the box. Inside, in all their gristly glory was grampa’s ear collection. It did cross my mind to chuck them in the bin, but I didn’t, I suppose I was oddly fascinated with the grisly relics and flattered that my grampa had decided to leave them to me. So I put them in the drawer. Years passed and like most folk I married and had kids. I came home one night from the local pub after drinking more than my two livers could handle and possessed with a morbid fascination decided to examine the ear collection (gramps would have been proud). I suppose they had changed little over the years. They had taken on a dark, amber hue and had coiled in on themselves and could no longer be recognised as ears. I fell asleep in bed with the ears loosely clenched in my drunken mitt. I awoke bleary eyed, sore headed and peeked gently over the covers to see my infant son sitting on the bed. Slowly as my eyes focussed I noticed that he had the ear collection in his tiny pudgy hands. One of the ears was firmly placed in his mouth and he was biting down with obvious relish. Of course he was teething, bless him, and I think he was deriving comfort from a French ear. After depositing my son on the bed my wife had left the room and didn’t see what had happened- which was just as well as she would not have been amused. Moral of the story: The French make third rate soldiers but first class teething rings.