(no subject)
Had a trip to the dentist today. It's always a source of some trepidation, as I had a series of nightmarish encounters with dentists when I was little(r), and my teeth have always had problems. And just so we're clear, I'm not some kind of cake-guzzling floss-dodger. I just seem to have congenitally soft teeth. ‘Good Lord,’ more than one dentist has remarked, not without some professional fascination, ‘these are the softest teeth I've ever seen.’ I don't know what that says about my bones, but I've often thought I really ought to have some kind of compensatory super-power, like the ability to bend my legs backwards or turn my head through 360 degrees.
English dentists are awful. I say this from personal experience, the experience of everyone I know, and many years' of journalistic research. The lack of good dentists has been a recurring news story in just about every region I've worked in. I had actually found a pretty good one, a South African who I got on well with, and we used to have long rambling chats about how I wanted to emigrate and he wanted to return to Johannesberg. Unfortunately, he has returned to Johannesberg so now I've had to find someone else.
The surgery have replaced him with an Iranian called Ali. The receptionist told me they don't employ English dentists because they don't think the training is good enough here - astonishing. Anyway, Ali seemed like a nice enough guy, spherical and jovial and not too big or imposing. I agree with James Herriot that you want to feel that if it came to a stand-up fight you could overpower the guy and get out of there. They had one of those TVs mounted in the ceiling above the chair, but there were cracks in the plaster all round it, so instead of relaxing to a wildlife documentary, I spent the whole time imagining how much damage I would suffer if the monitor fell on my face.
Like hairdressers, dentists always seem to want to engage me in idle chitchat, apparently oblivious to the fact that I find it difficult to make witty bon-mots with my mouth full of mirrors and cotton-wool. I always find the check-up slightly sinister when they slip into code and start dictating things to the dental nurse, like some cryptic medical version of the shipping forecast: left upper, retracting, central. Third molar, rising, force six, good.
Then I had a couple of X-rays. "It's perfectly safe - harmless levels of radiation," they say, before leaving the room and shutting the lead-lined door. The machine beeps. It always seems a bit anticlimactic, as though I should turn into the Incredible Hulk or something.
"You're actually exposed to more radiation when you fly," I am told. The trouble is, I have to do that too - I'm off tomorrow to Spain for the weekend. Three days away in the sunshine drinking sol y sombres...bliss. Hope everyone else's weekend is equally pleasant.