Children and Dogs

“Children,” a friend of mine recently remarked while watching her daughter plunge her face over and over again in to a bowl of apple puree “they’re so simple, aren’t they. They don’t overthink things. Carefree! I’d love to be that carefree again!”

I was struck by two things. 

Firstly that I didn’t know what, in this situation, overthinking on the part of her daughter would constitute “shall I dip my happy face into this mixture of apple and sugar again or... is that schtick getting old fast?” and secondly that I didn’t think her statement was true.

I remember as a child being called upon to sing the theme to The Wombles daily in school assemblies. 

I don’t know why. 

Perhaps someone somewhere in the ranks of governance had decided we needed secular music and this was all they could find, perhaps the school had some kind of indoctrination raquette going on with Bernard Cribbins. Either way I became really worryingly fixated with the lyrics and where the pause was meant to go, whether it was...

“The Wombles of Wimbledon Common are we,

Making good use of the things that we find”

... as in, this is who we are (the Wombles of Wimbledon) and here is what we do (recycle shit). 

This in retrospect is definitely the way you are meant to take this lyric, but also on the cards was...

“The Wombles of Wimbledon Common,

Are we making good use of the things that we find?”

... In the sense of ‘we know who we are but are plagued with self-doubt about out recycling abilities’, and...

“The Wombles of Wimbledon,

Common are we.”

...as in ‘have you been to Wimbedon, lately? You can’t move for those fucking wombles.”

Huge periods of my early life were spent cross legged in an assembly hall turning these possibilities over and over in my mind. Which one was it? What were the Wombles really like? And could I ever truly know? I mean really know.

I told this to my friend and she said that because I was an obbsessive care-worn adult, it followed that I was once an obbsessive care worn child. This was peculiar to me and not the default state of universal infancy.

Recently though I came a mob of children who gave me pause. 

I say I came across them, they swarmed me in the street. There were about 8 of them, and they dragged along with them a dog without a lead, three of them holding its collar.

“‘Scuse me!” they yelled at me from across the road (for those of you not used to the Medway accent, try to imagine the cockney children of seasonal Dickens adaptions crossed with the elogated vowel sounds of people who have recently suffered strokes.)

“‘Scuse me! Is this your dog?!”

I looked down at it. 

It looked dreadful. 

Someone had half-heartly covered a wound on the tip of its tail with a mixture of tissue and sellotape, and it’s knees were crusted over with age.

“No.” I said “No, I’m pleased to say that’s not my dog.”

“Oh.” They looked like I might have been the person to sort the whole thing out for them. To take the dog in to my arms and cry “Yes! Skankly! You’ve finally come home!” and give them each money or some confectionary or something.

“Sorry” I said again after they continued to look at me “It’s not my dog.”

“Oh. What should we do with it?” said the lead child “We found it... by the bins.”

Shit. I thought. I am going going to have to be the one that sorts this whole thing out for them.

I told the children to stay with the dog while I walked back to my house, and got a lead for it, and the number for the vet. Who I phoned while walking back to where I’d left them.

“Hi,” I said to a receptionist who seemed to hate, not just the world but particularly the animal life it contained. “I’ve had a roving dog delivered to be by some roving children. Whats the process now? Do I bring it to you?”

“God, no!” she said, as her reception was overrun with stray dogs and she could barely see the phone for them. “I can give you the number for a dog catcher”

“Dog catcher? Really? I thought they only existed in American films”

“Do you want it or not?”

“Hold on I don’t have a pen”

I ran the distance back to my house and she listened to the thump of me running and my breathing down the phone. She knew, she must have know exactly what I was doing.

“Ok,” I gasped once I was through the door, “Ok, I have a pen.”

“The numbers 01634 (that’s the area code so I knew that!)”

“Yes right”

“111 double 1... 1”

“Right.”

I threw the pen down. She was clearly comprised of spite.

When I got back to the children I found them exactly where I’d left them, I’d really expected them and the dog to be long gone by now but there they were, forming a protective circle around him. One of them had bought it a dish of water from his nearby ground floor flat.

“I’m phoning a dog catcher.” I announced, and they nodded sagely, and motioned for me to join them in the circle. I was put interminably on hold, while the dog catcher, presumably, caught more urgent dogs.

One of the children tapped me on the shoulder while I waited. His name, he told me, was Tommy, and he looked like he was carrying some unspeakable burden, he had the heavily ringed eyes of Korean war veteran who has seen dreadful things, and is weary now.

“It’s hard to know what to do isn’t it.” he sighed “It’s hard to know what to do when you find these dogs.” He said it as if he was constantly coming up against the problem. As if he couldn’t leave the house without being set upon by ancient wayward labradors.

Together we gazed forlornly at our charge. The dog was probably about 12 and in addition to the scabby knees I noticed that it was mainly comprised of bald bits and pendulous fatty lumps. It was uncastrated, it’s hips no longer worked, all things being even it probably should  have bitten one or more of the childrens faces off by now but there it was, allowing itself to be lead meekly around by three of them, each tugging its collar in a slightly different directions. Meek and peaceful. It looked up at me with milky eyes “I’m a happy camper!” they seemed to say.

At long last, the dog catcher asnwered the phone.

“Hello, I’ve found a dog and I’d like you to come out and catch it”

He asked me to describe it and I said it was black and very old.

“Warn them about its scabby knees” hissed Tommy conspiratorially. “Tell them it’s got scabs”

“It’s got scabs.” I repeated, “it’s a very scabby dog.”

Undissuaded by this because he was a consumate professional, the dog catcher took my details and said he'd arrive in 20 minutes.

Knowing that 20 minutes is a lifetime when you’re ten so I got the children to go round the circle and tell me their names and ages and if they had any pets. Though what I was really trying to establish in a roundabout way was whether any excessive worries, or deep but pointless trains of thought they liked to return to.

I wasn't disappointed. 

The main thing I took from this exercise was that one of them was called Tiresias. And he had rabbits... but he wasn’t allowed to touch them. 

He didn’t know why. 

I tried to work out what, aside from the obvious, was strange about this situation before realising that Tiresias is the one in Greek myth that is both a man and a woman at different stages in his life. I wanted to know the story behind his parents picking this name, I wanted to know if they knew! 

Tiresias had found a stick the end of which he was worrying away with one hand while looking with concern at the dog. Tommy, with a melancholy befitting him, chose this moment to take a harmonica from the pocket of his shorts. 

“Look,” he said holding it out to me solemnly “at my mahonica. Sometimes I’m scared that if I suck too hard, I might swallow a bit of it”

“Yes” I thought, “that’s exactly the kind of thing I would have worried about too.”

I was pleased in a bitter sweet sort of way by how much my interactions with them were confirming my theories on the care-worn nature of childhood and disproving my friends, and I was just about to ask them ‘so do you think it’s meant to be the Wombles of Wimbledon (line break) common are we, or the Wombles of Wimbledon Common, are we making good use, etc...” when the dog catcher arrived.

It was over very quickly. 

I’d expected a high octane chase and a - well - a catching process. I’d hoped we would all stand around and hum the Benny Hill theme while he ran round in circles after the dog for a few minutes but as it was he just got out and lifted the unresisting dog into the back of the van, and the process was over.

I signed a great deal of paper work, while Tommy sat, nose to nose with the crate, looking troubled.

“Are they going to kill it if no one adopts it?” Tommy asked me.

“No of course not” I said. “(Will you?)” I mouthed at the dog catcher, he shook his head.

The children swarmed the van to say one final goodbye to the dog and the dog catcher rolled his eyes at me as if it were my job to get out a broom and start dispersing them.

Eventually they backed away of their own accord. Once the dog was gone I’d expected them to wander off into the afternoon, but they wanted to have a sort of post-event discussion. A discursive chat, a good long think about exactly what had happened.

“It’s sad now he’s gone isn’t it.” said Tommy, playing a few mournful bars on the mahonica.

This was too much, my experience with them all had more than proved my point, even I wanted them to buck up a bit now.

“What a story though!” I said “you guys found and saved a dog. This will give you something to talk about at show and tell. Do you still do that?”

They didn’t, it’s gone apparently. I explained what it was and they all agreed that if they were going to it do it they would definitely show and tell Tommy’s mahonica. 

“What about the dog you just saved?” I asked. They all agreed that now the dog was gone, they were pretty much over the dog. Mahonicas though, they the wave of the future. Tireseare waved this stick which had gone from being a sort of staff of worry, to a wonderful sword, as if to say ‘never mind the dog - this stick though... I mean look at this fabulous stick!’.

“You can do it for show and tell!” said Tommy kindly giving me the story out of pity, seeing that I was dissapointed by how quickly they had all moved on.

“I don’t do show and tell I’m an adult” I said before realising that between the blogs and the standup - I was lying. I was probably going to get much more milage out of this story, think a lot more about it, than any of them. 

The cheery manner in which they’d dismissed and tossed my way what I’d thought would be The Event of their summer, made me question my theories. Clearly the drawn, worn face of Tommy was testament to the fact that a child's life is not all apple puree face dipping as my friend thought. But probably not quite as careworn as I’d thought either. They’d all bounced back with wonderful ease.

Still though, there something very reassuring about the notion that I wasn’t a pecularly careworn child. That just as I’d sat in my school hall wondering if I could ever truly know the soul of a womble, there was now a new generation sitting cross legged in the same hall thinking “God, I hope I haven’t swallowed any parts of the harmonica today” or... “Oh! Why?! Why am I not allowed to touch my own rabbits?”

Goats

It was my birthday a month ago. I wouldn’t say I’ve reached that age where I’ve become difficult to buy for so it was odd to receive a book entitled “Licking Hitler: A Play for TV” and then a second titled “Shakesqueer: A Queer Guide to the Works of Shakespeare”. It was odder to find, tucked inside of the latter, a voucher for a goat husbandry course on which my mother had written the words “We all think it’s time you learnt some practical skills”.

In her defense I genuinely don’t have many practical skills, and I have occasionally expressed a fondness for goats. There is, I now realise, a horrible gulf between a fondness for goats (based mainly around their sideways eyes) and being possessed of a great desire to breed and rear them. This gulf was really brought home to me during the 7 hours that I spent standing in the muddied field of my local goat sanctuary with eleven other students, four hundred goats, and the owner who genuinely introduced himself as Goat-y Bob.

Goat-y Bob didn’t look like a goat, which came as a crushing disappointment. In terms of animals that humans can look like goats are a really easy one and I thought he might at least have made the effort. He did however look like a man who had seen some incredibly sobering things. Close contact with goats had, for some reason, given him the worn and haunted demenour of a Vietnam veteran. Every so often he would say or do something that gestured ominously to terrible goat-based events of the past. Such as trailing off part way through a sentence, staring into the middle distance, and whispering ‘Oh! Sorry! The memories!’. 

(In retrospect, this should have been a huge clue as to the horrible realities of goat care.)

When we arrived we formed a semi-circle in the goat pasture and as part of an introductory exercise we all stated how many goats we owned. As if we were traders in some antique society, each assessing the others wealth and bartering power.

“I’m John I have two goats.”

“My goats number three score and twain”

“I have countless goats in the valley, and two daughters of marriageable age”

When I told them I was goatless they all looked at me in confusion and pity and Goat-y Bob was forced to move proceedings on quickly, proclaiming...

"Ok, everyone! What's the first rule of goat husbandry?"

"Don't talk about goat husbandry?" I proffered.

"No!" he said, staring at me as if I'd made light of his life's work "No! The first rule of goat husbandry is if you let the goats get slightly too hot or slightly too cold they will all die! You have to keep your goats at a perfect ambient temperature."

This was the main lesson we were to be taught. Not this one fact but what it stood for more broadly... which is that, in spite of their reputation as hardy survivors, in spite of being reared throughout the world in a variety of less than hospitable climates, for thousands of years, goats are a stones throw away from complete oblivion at all times. 

I don’t know how the committee of people in charge of animal PR have managed to hide this fact from us all for so long, but they have. There wasn’t a job that we did that day that didn’t carry with it the constant and dreadful threat of potentially killing all the goats outright.

We were taught how much space to give them and then how to extract from that space all the myriad things that can and will poison them. Tree bark, wild flowers, certain breeds of grass. For an animal famous for eating everything, they can eat almost nothing.

On the flip side of this coin - if goats don’t eat for three days, due to poisoning, or possibly just a sudden whim, the bacteria responsible for their digestion denatures - and they die.

We were taught how to trim their hooves. Which they hate, they squirm and butt at you desperately trying to escape, but if you don’t do every day, their hooves become soft, sodden and eventually just rot away. Once goats feet have rotted off - they die.

To delouse goats you spread a blue unguent along the length of their spines and if you think they don’t sometimes die when you’re doing this you’re wrong, if you put slightly too much on, it’s absorbed into their bloodstream, then on into their brain. And - well... (very few things can survive poison in the brain.)

In light of this knowledge Goat-y Bob’s shell-shocked demenour suddenly made horrible logical sense. Here he was with over four hundred goats to care for and any one of them could potentially sicken and fade at a moments notice, like delicate Victorian heroines... but with horns.

Or, as another student termed them, goat-antlers.

By the time we were allotted a goat each to care for I was afraid to touch it. Though I did name it Wiggles, and let it trail about after me. At length I went to give it’s goat antlers a pat and Goaty Bob yelled across the yard “Don’t touch the base of the horns, they can snap off and leave an open hole in their heads.” I withdrew my hand quickly.

“How have you survived as a species?” I hissed at Wiggles, 

He looked up at me with brilliant little sideways eyes, blissfully ignorant of the abyss upon which he was perpetually balanced. 

He chewed happily at my hair and I extracted it from his mouth, fearing it would poison him.

I looked from his happy little goat face, to the haggered form of Goat-y Bob, whose eyes were darting from goat to goat, constantly checking that they were all extant. This was what you got, happy, carefree goats unaware of how death stalked them at every turn, and terribly terribly care-worn people, who were far too aware of it. If I had ever been seriously entertaining the notion of keeping these time-bombs, I wasn’t any longer.

In terms of practical skills though I am now if anything over-endowed. I can kill a goat, tell you what might be killing your goat, and I can predict the ways in which your healthy goat will shortly die. And if that’s not a highly applicable practical skill set, then, for what it is worth, I can also discourse at length on the homoerotic themes at the heart of Shakesqueerian cannon.

Teeth

I remember reading once that it’s standard practice in ‘some parts of the world' (possibly fictional parts) for women, when they reach marrying age to have all of their teeth removed and replaced. This works on the presumption that while having all of your teeth drawn and sensation-less plastic replicas inserted into your jaw-bone seems unnecessary now, you will thank the attendant surgeon later, as the amount of pain and trauma you endure in that one sitting is as nothing when compared to the carnage your natural teeth would wreak over the course of a life time if you left them to their own devices. 

I think this is true. 

If you think this sounds unlikely, or ridiculous, then all it means is that you haven’t reached that stage in your life where your teeth have turned against you...yet. All we know is that it occurs at some point after marrying age in women. And that I have reached it, and eventually you will to (I’m presuming you’re a woman, if you’re a man then there’s probably some other part of your body that will cause you untold grief, and that you should have removed and replaced with plastic ones at the first available opportunity. Maybe your eyes... or your balls.) The point is, if the tooth extraction tradition isn’t already a thing, it definitely should be and I'm going to pioneer it. 

I'll tell you why, strap yourself in, it's a long one...

My front teeth had been turning slowly outwards for the past few years. Assuming this was a natural part of the ageing process (‘That’s normal, isn’t it? Doesn’t everyone grow gradually more grotesque in their twenties?”) I ignored them, until one day, while out walking my dog, I found I couldn't ignore them any more. I was probing about in my own mouth with my tongue (it’s one of my many attractive habits) when I found a small, hard, lump on my pallet just behind my front teeth.

‘Well, that’s it.’ I thought. ‘I’m dead.’

I finished walking my dog, and quietly took myself home to die.

I had a dental appointment the next day, for a filling, and I figured that - if I made it through the night - I’d mention the death lump. I could see my dentist in my minds eye, staring at it for a few minutes, giving it a quick jab, and then sadly donning her black dental mask and wailing ‘Deeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeath!’ in the way that all dental professional are duty bound to do when they discover suspicious mouth lumps (trust me on this, my mother is a dentist, although you wouldn't guess it from everything that is about to follow). 

What my dentist actually did the next morning was much worse. She stared at it for a few minutes, gave it a quick jab with a series of ‘diagnosing hooks’, then sat me up in the chair. She had the carefully neutral and panic-inducing expression that medical professionals adopt when they don’t want you to panic.

‘That doesn’t look good’ she said, solemnly.

‘Christ,” I thought “I really am dead!’

We marched together, a funereal procession of two, to ‘the x-ray room’. This, it turned out, was literally a chair in a cupboard at the back of the surgery. I could feel the radiation coming off the walls and upholstry, the biros on the shelf above me looked a little melty.

“What about that filling?” I asked innocently while she aimed a massive radiation gun at my head, and she looked at me as if - having just been diagnosed with ebola and co-morbid rabies, I’d asked “but isn’t there any thing you can do for my house-maids knee?”.

Ten minutes later she handed me a ghostly image of my teeth. There was a black nimbus of doom around the front ones.

“So thats cancer?” I said.

‘No, no the good news is, that’s probably fluid’ 

Although comparatively favourable news - good seemed like a stretch.

‘The fluid form of cancer?’

‘No the fluid form of fluid. Come back into the surgery. We can root treat it today.’

‘Like - a root canal? Isn’t that famously painful?’

She made a sound like she was deflating and then ventured 

‘...sometimes.’

It turned out, three weeks and four failed root treatments later, that what she meant by ‘we can root treat it’ was, ‘we can’t root treat it’ and what she meant by ‘...sometimes’ was, ‘You will audibly whimper - on each of the four occasions that we have to do this.’

‘It’s beyond my ken, I'm afraid’ she said after the fourth go, washing her hands in a grimly symbolic fashion. ‘There is a possibility that rather than fluid it may be a cyst, or a fluid filled cyst, or cyst with fluid infection around it” 

It was like she was just trying out the words ‘fluid’ and ‘cyst’  in different orders in search of the most disgusting combination. 

“I’ll refer you to a specialist. Guys if you want to go national health’

‘I do’ I said, like a good socialist.

‘But the waiting list is sixth months, and, I’m going to be honest, this is a large infection, it might spread into your jaw, or sinus, and then on into your brain - if you leave it for more than about two.’

‘D-do you die if your brain becomes infected?”

She deflated again 

“...sometimes”

I booked into the private specialist. 

Later that day when I called my mother to explain what was happening, and ask to borrow a lot of money, she offered the following reassuring words...

“Oh, a tracking infection on the upper 2. That’s what killed Tutankamun.’

‘Oh! Good!” I said “Do you say that kind of crap to your patients?’

‘Of course. Everyone likes facts!’

"Not about things that might kill them!"

We’d discussed the possibility of her, as a dentist, doing the whole thing for free over the dining room table, but she refused on the flimsy grounds of 'ethics' which is almost always her excuse. 

And so two weeks later I found myself in an up market surgery where a beautiful Central American woman called Sofia peered at my teeth and then asked...

“So, when were you hit in the mouth?”

I paused, wondering if I should be offended “I’ve never been hit in mouth”  

“Oh, usually when there is something like that - it’s because people have been hit.” 

“Oh.”

“In the mouth.” she added helpfully.

“Well, I’ve never been hit in the mouth.”

“I noticed you have a scar there below your lip. How did that happen?”

She said it as if expecting me to reply

“Oh that! That’s from when I was hit in the mouth!”

“I got it as a child.”

“Oh, it won’t be that then.” she shook her head “Well, I’m baffled, still I’ll do a root treatment”

It was a phrase I was growing increasingly weary of. While she got the instruments ready we chatted about my life.

“You sound creative.” she said.

I shrugged, mostly I felt infected.

“It must be wonderful to be creative, I’d give anything to be creative, but I’m not” she sighed sadly and pulled on some telescopic goggles “I’m precise!”

Good, I thought. No one wants a creative dentist. No one wants a dentist who at the end of surgery sits you up and explains...

“I know you came in for implants, but half way through I got a serious thing going, and I just sort of went with the flow - so - I’ve given you tusks”

... I wanted to tell her that precision in a dentist was exactly what I was looking for. But just as I was about to a large sheet of plastic was stretched over my mouth, and I was invalided out of the conversation. 

“I’ll work through the plastic,” she said “It’s there to stop you swallowing my bleach”

“Ahhh-kghay” I said

What followed was two hours of re drilling past holes. The two teeth in question were dead now following the first four treatments, so it wasn’t that painful. What was unexpectedly painful though was having to listen to the conversation above me while not being able to join in. It was, almost agonisingly interesting, Sofia and her nurse covered everything from the exact nature of creativity, to the culture of meso-America, through literature to cinema, and the nurse, frankly, was not pulling her weight.

By the time they got to classic films I couldn’t bare it any more.

“Now what is that one? With Tom Hanks?” said Sofia “He’s on an island. Tch, I know the title in Spanish, just not in English.” The nurse shrugged... 

“Lost?”

“No, no”

“Caddyshack?”

There was clearly something wrong with her. They both paused, Sofia actually lowered the drill and stared into the middle distance for a while, as they both silently grasped after the title. 

“Aaaasst-aaaawaaagh!” I cried in frustration.

“What? Are you in pain?” they set about removing my plastic mouth obscurer hurriedly.

“Castaway!” I gasped, “That film with Tom Hanks, it’s called Castaway!”

“That’s right,” she said smiling, “Castaway... so anyway, that’s a good film!” 

They reassembled my plastic sheet-gag, signalling a perminant end to my role in the conversation.

Despite Sofia’s levels of precision, and masterful taste in films, the fifth root treatment didn’t work either. It looked like it had for a while. But then the lump grew and swelled, and developed an angry blister, I ended up back at the practice in under a month haemoraging fear and money. They booked me an emergency appointment with their next available dentist, and the moment he walked out of the surgery, all thoughts of my painful and imminent death evaporated.

He was, without a doubt, the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. The sort of tall, proud, hispanic eagle man, that I’d thought only existed on the covers of large print Mills and Boon.

“Jesus!” I whispered, which, it turned out, was his name. 

It was as if private practice employed only stunningly beautiful South American people. Come to think of it since my treatments both privately and nationally had failed it was possible that that was the only real difference. The private sector employed stunners and charged you to gaze upon their loveliness, while the NHS employed my mother, and didn't.

I resolved that something beautiful would come of my teeth trying to kill me. Over the course of the coming operation, I would seduce this man-god. If everything went according to plan we'd be married within the year. 

Jesus sat me down and leafed through my notes, ‘Wow, you’ve been through a lot." I nodded in a tragic but self-effacing way - that I thought was probably quite winning. He went through the arcane tooth counting ritual that all dentists do to praise the teeth gods, and started prodding at my gums. As he went about it I pictured myself tight in his embrace on the cover of our erotic novel, my hair falling over my bare shoulders, a rose in my teeth. And his face staring down at me with angry Venezuelan lust. The title above us ‘Love in the Time of Cancer Scares’ or possibly ‘Root Canal to My Heart!’

‘Bite for me’ he said. That would probably be a line in it, I thought to myself, it’s a little kinky but that’s what sells in this post-50 Shades market.

‘No bite normally, are you biting normally?’

‘Yes, this is just the way my weird teeth fit together’

‘Oh!’ he said, in the least aroused way ever. ‘Oh, that is weird.’

I felt like we weren’t off to an auspicious start, but then again, if I had the kind of teeth that could wow a man I wouldn’t be there in the first place.

“So when were you hit in the face?” he said.

When we'd been through that debarcle again, he treated me to a short explanatory speech on exactly what was happening in my head (well in my face, it was best for all involved that he didn’t know what was happening in my head). There was some kind of tumour above my front tooth, the infection around it had eaten away at the bone and he planned to cut an opening at the front, remove the tissue and surrounding infection, trim the root of my tooth and then sew every thing back up again.

At least, that was the gist. It was hard to focus on the details - his voice was so soft and gently accented, it was like a lullaby - a beautiful lullaby about surgery and tumours.

He massaged a numbing gel into my gums with an gloved index finger. I just had time to lock eyes with him, flirtatiously, before a series of five fantastically painful injections across the front of my mouth made me screw my eyes tightly shut.

In his defence he was genuinely contrite about having to do this, it made me want to hug him. ‘I’m so sorry’ he said putting the needle away. He gave me a rueful grimace and then got out something that I genuinely assumed was a prop from a 70s comedy sketch about dentistry. As syringes go it was grotesquely oversized. It looked like something you might inseminate a horse with.

“This one - will hurt’ he said, ‘But once it is over, you won’t feel anything else’ 

Sounds like it is going to kill me, I thought.

It went straight in to middle of my pallet and was the most excruitiating thing I’ve ever experienced. “I’m so sorry, Anna, really I’m so, so sorry” Jesus cooed softly. 

I could feel his breath against my cheek like a summer breeze. 

I realised with mounting horror that as well as being in incredible pain, I was also, simultaneously, quite aroused. He was just so handsome, speaking to me so softly and kindly - at the same time though really ramming home that massive needle into my pallet! The cognative dissonance was difficult, I found myself hoping that I wasn’t forever going to connect the two things and that, perhaps, I had paid a staggering amount of money to have a portion of my tooth removed and that the upshot of it was that it had also turned me into a sadist. From here on in I might only be able to get my jollies if someone was piercing the roof of my mouth with metal. 

Fortunately though Jesus was right, after he removed the cartoonishly large syringe from my mouth all pain subsided and I was left only with the vision of his beauty and an entirely numb face.

“How are you feeling?” he asked, 

“Like I dont have a nose,” I said playfully batting myself in the face a couple of times, in a way that I hoped he thought was endearing (though looking back he was probably thinking “for God's sake, stop hitting yourself in the face, thats how you got into this mess!”)

He gave me a cup of antispectic to swish around my mouth, and I dribbled it down myself and the chair, “Sorry,” I said “I can’t feel my lips,” (‘or my right eye, or any part of my forehead. Do you want to marry me yet?’).

The process took four hours. Four hours - just him and me (and that nurse who thought Tom Hanks was in Caddyshack but she kept quiet) I felt like we really grew close in those four hours. How can you not grow close with someone when they are cutting away a small section of your mouth over the course of an afternoon. It's a tremendously intimate process.

When we finished he gave me a mirror so I could appreciate just how swollen and smeared in my own gore I was. I looked from my monstrousness to his saintly bronzed face. I wanted to make one final plea ‘Look, look, I know I don't seem much now, not now, but... you should see me after a good facial, and when I'm able to talk! and, well, you are splattered with my blood, so, you probably don't realise it but... once two people have been through something like this... and there is only about 5 years between us tops... look, I’m just a woman, standing in front of an endodontist,' etc. but all that came out was...

“I jsth phuuu”

He smiled in polite incomprehension, and as I was leaving said

“I’ll call you”

“Whas?”

“With the results of the biopsy, from the tissue I removed. Don’t worry...” he added “It’s very unlikely to be malignant.”

What? What? Was that back on the cards again now? Even marginally? Very unlikey. Very unlikely. I tried to hold on to that phrase, while in my head Jesus donned his ceremonial black dental mask, stood up and wailed "Deeeeeeeeaaaaaattttttth" at me until I left the room.

It wasn’t cancer. Obviously. If it were I think I would have devoted less of this blog to how attractive Jesus was and more of it to coming to terms with my mortality. It was, and I will quote my mother directly here "just one of those tumour-y-cysts you sometimes get". It's given me pause though - the trauma of five root canals, and one surgical procedure. That's 14 hours in total. 14 hours. How long would it take to have them all out and plastic ones put in? Probably 13 hours tops and they could have removed the infected tissue while they were about it.

So thats the plan now. That's how I will recoop my monetary losses from this whole horrible venture. I'm pretty sure I can rope my mother into doing it, for a nominal service charge, over the dining room table and I urge all woman of marrying age who are reading to visit and have it done. I know it sounds unspeakably grim now, but, trust me, you will thank me later.