How time flies

Six months after I last announced ‘I must go for a checkup’, I finally made my long overdue visit to my brother’s dental surgery yesterday. I’m rather phobic about dental treatment, so I haven’t been looking forward to it to say the least.

When my name was called, I entered the surgery as if being summoned to my execution. Big brother arranged my notes on the worktop and invited me to take my seat in the dreaded chair. I tried not to look at the instruments lined up on the tray in front of me and waited to see if he would do his “Is it safe?” Laurence Olivier in ‘Marathon Man’ impersonation. He didn’t.

“Ah, so you’ve finally made it,” he said. “It’s been six years since you were last here. Tut, tut.”

“Six years…SIX YEARS? It can’t be!” I squealed.  “It’s only two or, er, three. Four at the very most. Let me see those bloody notes…” To my horror the last entry was dated 2004. My eyes then alighted on another source of horror. “Oh no! There’s that awful photo…” It was a closeup photo of the stump of one of my previously beautiful front teeth after it came into contact with the bonnet of a car whilst I was riding my bike, back in 1998.

“Terrible,” said big brother shaking his head.

“I know”, I replied.  “It’s not the tooth, though, it’s the closeup of my moustache I can’t bear.”

“Och, you,” he said, snapping his rubber gloves on. “Open wide.”

There followed a distressing series of scraping noises inside my head, as the dental probe re-acquainted itself with my gnashers for the first time in six years. The loudness of the noises made me finally understand one aspect of the rationale behind the infamous tooth-mounted hearing aid. Only one aspect, though.

Once it was all over, the verdict came as a total shock. “Well, amazingly, it all looks pretty good in there,” said big bruv. “Gold star. Don’t leave it so long next time, though…”

Never do today what can be put off till tomorrow

This little piggy is wearing the spouse's glasses

I’m panicking. I’ve had about five weeks to prepare for a Pecha Kucha event  which involves talking about 20 images on a topic of your choice, each image strictly timed to be shown for 20 seconds. It’s been organised by my colleague to take place in four days’ time and, as usual, I’ve only started putting it together today. Over the last week I have considered and rejected a variety of potential topics, including the rivetting ‘The Psychology of Walking’ which would have described in intricate detail the primitive behavioural mechanisms engaged when one encounters a stranger who is walking irritatingly alongside at exactly the same speed on the walk into work. Also rejected were ‘Things That Make You Do What You Don’t Want To Do’ which would have featured the paranoid thought processes induced by  daringly deciding to ignore notices such as those saying ‘please use tongs’ at cake counters in shops, and ‘Who The Hell Put That There’ which would have itemised, amongst other things, the many annoying things I’ve tripped over at work recently.

After all that, I’ve settled on ‘How Being Short Sighted Increased My Vocabulary’ which describes how I very creatively evaded getting glasses for nearly ten years after failing a school eye test at age seven. It’s a potential car crash mixture of biography, ancient Mesopotamian Cuneiform writing systems and myopic experimental pigs playing computer games, and it’s either going to be a barnstormer or end up in me being booed off the stage. I may discard the hearing aid on the night just in case it’s the latter…

Mastication procrastination

It’s been at least a month since I’ve had some bizarre encounter with a healthcare professional, so I can feel my creative writing juices drying up. The psychiatrist and clinical psychologists I met at work yesterday don’t count because they weren’t carrying a brown file with my name on it and there were no horribly embarrassing misunderstandings.

My only chance of inspiration in the near future is if I book my extremely long overdue dental checkup. About six years overdue to be precise. I’ve been saying to the spouse for three months now, ” If I don’t do anything else today/ this weekend/ next week/ before I die, I  MUST make a bloody dental appointment.” The spouse patiently replies every time I say it, “Yes, you must. Go and bloody make it.”

I suspect that the amount of work that needs doing will provide plenty of writing inspiration. I’m a complete dental phobic and ever since I bit down hard on the bonnet of a car which pulled out in front of me while I was on my bike, I live in fear of all the resulting work having to be redone which, enhanced by the workings of my vivid imagination at three in the morning, makes me even worse.

Fortunately my dentist is my brother, but he does always like to remind me as he’s doing an injection, of the hell me and my sister put him through with our public singing thirty-odd years ago on the top deck of the No.59 bus…