The Dentist's Chair Calleth

If you’re anything like me, and I don’t mean merely lite, shallow, venal, horrid and lazy, but stingy and cowardly too, then you’ll hate the dentist’s.
But having cracked a bit of tooth, I had to go. I mean, I Had To Go. I am not so totally stupid as to be able to brush that little one under the carpet.
Indeed, in the intervening 36 hours twixt crack on Saturday night and finding myself prone on a diddy up and downy chair yesterday, I had sufficiently enhanced and advanced my cracked tooth via the various stages of necrotising infection merrily through onto, er, death, for my vanity to take a kick up the bits and force me to book an appointment.
I popped a firm fist round my purse and dialled the number.

I remember my dentist fondly. Not so fondly that I ever really went but fond in the abstract: he was a jolly chap stepping in for a friend of his who had been “totalled” on his motorbike. I didn’t ask if he had qualifications because I didn’t want to hear the answers. He was nice and that was fine and he was steady on the equipment, with no wild gleam in the eye on snatching up the drill or revving the syringe.
I had been forced to move by some sort of warped principle, on the occasion of the callow swine at the place I had frequented since childhood forsaking their national health obligations. Hello, we trained the *astards: I was there handing out leaflets on buckle occludals and obfuscation by alphabetical dental naming – to be read as if reciting the football scores, with even rise and fall – even if you weren’t. So I wasn’t going to drive to Bristol, fail to park, and pay top prices when I could do all that here.
And lo, I found one at which I could park, a modern peril sorted, and, more, I was convinced by its shabbiness. Anywhere that can’t afford to change its door mat is my sort of place, I thought: money stays in the patient’s mouth (if not, sob, their wallet) and isn’t gleaming in the form of a shiny Jag slung outside, number plate: 1BITE.

But in the intervening years, things have changed. Just as irons have morphed, so has even the dowdiest dentist’s palace.
E has long sashayed through the doors of an upmarket establishment, mainly funded, thanks to his dental implants, by us. There, 3 dragons studiously ignore the poor ill-toothed, staying slave instead to their space-age headphones. They raise an importunate stilling finger at the luckless wretch hovering at the desk in favour of attending to the needs of the more important person on the other end of the phone. Needless to say when we are on the other end of that phone, we are put on hold. They battle with, supposedly, sub-standard computer programmes, charge a bomb, bugger off early and breathe fire. The children go there too, because there’s a train set and fish tank. We fiddle with the swishy coffee machine and read magazines smothered in suede covers. So I am used to Modern Dentists.

Things have not got so bad, or so typical, at my dentist’s. No fish. But they remain strangers to the idea of fear, they do not laugh in the face of clutched mouths.
We sat on leather armchairs and waited beneath an enormous decorated round mirror.
I considered moving the children here forthwith. Which was when the receptionist muttered something unpleasant about “most dental practices charging between £18 and £33 per child PER BLOODY MONTH.” The potentially dentally-expensive children did not so much as glance up, planning their scuba-diving trips to the Red Sea, “4 star hotel, I think’s best,” said T11; or, F9, busy besting a baby building toy.

Once in the dentist’s lair and semi-upside down, being pumped to the ceiling, like a butterfly sprawled against a pin, but free at least of the children and their strange ideas of amusement, I was forced to take in a most odd sight, being a television clamped to that same ceiling towards which I was jerking north fast. Bless. Entertainment. Pavarotti in silence, but a distracting focus from the suggestion that I get my teeth realigned, “£3,000 I think,” the dentist cooed. “Is good.”
I had dressed up in case I died on the chair, and I think that the hot chick Swedish dentist appreciated my efforts. She pretended that we were the same age, but this was clearly offensive. To her. She packed in some temporary gubbins and held my shoulder kindly.

In all, I was so entranced by the myriad toys, the, yes, artwork, the wooden floors, the travertine tiles in the loo and the French soap and hand cream pumps, all designed to lull you into thinking you’d fallen into some chi-chi little wine bar and might actually be enjoying yourself, that when the bill came, given the surroundings, it almost felt cheap at half the price. A mere couple of bottles of wine, I thought, handing over that poor battered thing, my credit card. T11 barely looked up from his Egypt holiday brochure and F9 sent the baby toy hurtling to the floor AGAIN, and I all but skipped out and bought myself a cheap Phlox as a recovery present.

I’m not saying I’m looking forward to next week’s visit replete with its smorgasbord of x-rays, deep cleaning and real filling, not to say more mention of how I could spend a spare £3,000 I might have hanging around, but let’s say a lot can happen in 168 hours. I could be bombed, or mugged or run over and if none of that lot happens, I’ll just study the artwork and stare at Pavarotti.