Obiter Dicta

Wednesday, December 14^th.

This week, I think I’ll write about my favourite reads of the year. Every other bugger seems to be doing it, including that female writer I’ve unfollowed from Twitter because … well, just let’s say ‘because’, and charitably leave it at that.

No, I won’t. I’ll do that next week.  I want to talk about Dentists. Yes. Dentists. Twice within five days since last I blogged, I have found myself upside down in a dentists’ chair – the same one, actually – for ridiculously long periods of time while a (very genial) dentist dug about in the root canals of two of my teeth. I did not enjoy it. Not the first experience, which lasted an hour and a half. And not the second, which lasted a mere hour and five minutes. To be positioned like that, as if I were a shell aimed at the domain of Dental Caries, for that length of time, is not natural to me. The first dose required three injections – one a block injection right at the join of my jaws. I swear to God, I thought the needle was coming out of my ear. And I was deaf for a day and a half. The second bout only required two jags, both in the front of my lower gum. That’s fun, too! Numb nose and lip. Snot trickling undetected. That’s a good look.

Actually, my even being at the dentist’s for such long, unpleasant treatments represents a major step in bravery for me. I go now to the dentist every six months. And I put up with what he has to do. And it only took me something like 50 years to get to this stage. The problem was that my first experience of dental treatment as a child came when I had toothache and had to have a toothy peg yanked oot. Ay me, pain ever, forever!

And the reason for that, of course, was – sweeties.

From the age of three, I ate sugary, sticky, glutinous gunk that stuck to my teeth as I chewed or sooked or slurped it. It rotted holes in my teeth even as I crunched. You could peel the enamel off some teeth like strips of sellotape. Fizzers? Spangles? Ping! Another hole. Refreshers. Love Hearts. And again, a ping and a hole. These were hard sweets that you either sucked until they softened, and your teeth softened along with them, or you crunched them and splinters of teeth flew everywhere.

Chewy sweeties were a favourite of many children – Black Jacks, Mojos and Chewing Nuts for example. Beech Nut chewing gum, a sliver of cahootchie inside a gleaming white shell like the stuff they used to make sinks, was dispensed from vending machines on street corners for a penny a time. These could extract a filling or a milk tooth with astonishing ease. I think Chewing Nuts were actually the nuts from tractor wheels, covered in chocolate.  Caries in a glossy wrapper. Some days my teeth twanged like banjo strings.

Smarties provided a cornucopia of multi-coloured tooth-rot. I liked Lucky Bags – and the many variations on the theme, like Jamboree Bags and Skiffle Bags – in each of which you got a handful of Dolly Mixtures, Fizzers, chews and Midget Gems, a tooth-cracking lolly and a gewgaw. A trinket. Some trashy little toy that you immediately lost. Or swallowed. But most of all, I subsisted on Lemfizz Cubes and Creamola Foam. Lemfizz Cubes were slabs of fizzy, sugary, crumbly material that you were supposed to make drinks with, but which we all just sooked. Extremely effervescent and probably packed with the 50’s equivalent of E numbers, they were ultra sweet and as addictive as horse. They were like those lurid cubes you see scattered in urinals to neutralise the stink. (I suppose, never having tried them). Creamola Foam was a powder or, more accurately, crystals that you stirred into cold water and made a sparkling, sweet drink that often shot up the back of your throat and crackled in your sinuses. It came in a tin, the lid of which had to be jemmied off with a teaspoon, and was concocted of these ingredients: sugar, fruit acids, sodium bicarbonate, gum acacia, saccharin, saponin, flavouring and colour. Saponin is a soap derivative that made the drink froth. Gum acacia is another name for gum arabic, a stabiliser (now with its own E-number, 414) that is also used in ink, shoe polish and the lickable adhesive on postage stamps. Sodium bicarbonate made it fizz. It can neutralise battery acid and is used in septic tanks to control bacteria. It kills fleas. Sugar AND saccharin, not to mention unspecified flavouring and colouring. Yum yum! No wonder we ran into the furniture and bit folk on the ankles.

But the best, the unsurpassed and pre-eminent superlative, as recommended by the British Dentists Association, was Puff Candy. This was essentially a rich toffee mixture of golden syrup, butter and sugar which had added to it, as it bubbled, a few shovelfuls of bicarbonate of soda, which made it fluff up ferociously. When cooled, it had the texture of cinders from the fire. You could buy it plain or covered in thick cooking chocolate. It crumbled in the mouth but stuck to the teeth like molten tar. You had to pick it off with a four-inch nail.

My first visit to the dentist came about now. After several years of Puff Candy and Lem-Fizz cubes, I had a stump of tooth rotting away in the front of my top gum that stubbornly refused to fall out, unlike my other front teeth.  (Photographs of me at this time show me to be simpering like a namby pamby, for the simple reason that I could not smile without revealing to the world my missing teeth. So I smiled without opening my mouth. I looked like a simpleton.) The dentist pulled it out. It was an extremely fraught experience  - for the dentist as well as for me.

I managed to sit in the chair, after much persuasion and amid plenty of apprehensive sniffling. The smell of the surgery was enough to set me off. There was a range of sterilised metal implements on a tray, looking like hooks, corkscrews, spanners, wrenches, things for cracking lobster claws and things for taking stones out of horses’ hooves. Mr. Steel the dentist managed to separate my lips, which had been stuck together with a suck like an octopus’s tentacles, and insert his finger into my mouth. I snivelled the more. He introduced a new item to my mouth, a little mirror on a stick. I arched my back like a cat and whined like a buzz-saw going through a knotty plank. The only reason I didn’t scream was because my mouth was full of finger and mirror. He tapped the stump with the mirror and I thought the top of my head had come off and was rattling on the floor like a hubcap. Now I screamed, sufficient to curdle the blood of any other patients in the waiting room.

“We’ll just have to go for it,” Mr. Steel told my father.

I went for it, all right. I was up and out of that chair like a ground-to-air coward. He caught me by the slack of the arse and drew me back, providing for a few seconds of cartoon-like running on the spot for the young Yours Truly. Then my father lifted me up and replaced me in the chair. And then Mr. Steel went for it.

With the dentist’s knee on my chest and my father’s arm round my head from behind the chair, Steel got the pliers into my gob and performed the butchery required - with no anaesthetic. Not that I would have countenanced for a second the introduction of a jag into the equation. He ripped the offending remnant of tooth from my gum and dropped it in a wee dish by the side of the chair. Then he stuck a swab in my gob which served two purposes: it staunched the flow of blood; and it shut me up. My self-pitying whinge did not rise above a low-level moan for the rest of the day.

I did not learn my lesson, though, I am obliged to say.

After this agonising first experience, I still only attended the School Dentist when I was climbing the walls with pain, thereby compounding the problem. The School Dentist was a very quiet and charming man called Mr. White. He soon came to dread my visits to his surgery as much as I did. While not quite as bad as I had been, as an adolescent I still tried to drive the back of my head into the headrest of the chair whenever he attempted to examine my wrecked gob. I still gave a sharp intake of breath every time he touched a tooth with a finger. And I still wrapped my hands around the arms of the chair when he started to drill. Curiously, having a jag of anaesthetic has never been a problem for me. Unlike my father, who always said he hated the injection but, after it took, the dentist could saw his bloody head off if he wanted. I did not mind the needle a bit. And even when my face was completely numb, from just below my nose to the knot on my school tie, I jerked and flinched and writhed about the seat like a snake. I paid maybe half a dozen visits to Mr. White over my high-school career and even I noticed how his smile grew a little frostier and his tremor a little more pronounced with each visit.

Teeth, eh! Whae’d have them!

My favourite reads of then year next time.

Rest you merry till then.