100 YEARS OLD AND STILL AS TALKATIVE AS A COW...
MOO, or possibly meuh or muu or perhaps mmuuh. As a result of a recent trip to the dentist, I now have a mouthful of stitches, a stomach full of antibiotics and no longer have a fistful of dollars. I have handed over the latter to the dentist but to look on the bright side, I am now officially half man, half cow. Hence, the mooing (or meuhing or muuing or mmuuhing) with which I started this piece.
A few months ago, you see, I was appalled when an implanted tooth decided to uproot itself. I took the tooth to my extremely expensive dentist who confided to me that his predecessor was not a good dentist and my implant, which admittedly had lasted six or seven years, had been put in wonkily.
The extremely expensive dentist then made an appointment for me to see an even more expensive implantologist who prodded around in my mouth and told be that the miscreant implant had damaged my upper jaw and I would need a bone graft if the replacement implant was to stay in place.
“What,” I asked him by way of conversation when he paused to let me speak as he was hacking away, “is the bone graft made of?”
“Cow,” he said, before amplifying his answer to “Swiss cow”. The cow bone, he explained, was intensely treated to rid it of its cowishness, but I was a little disappointed to learn that it would not taste even the slightest either of beef, befitting its bovine origin, or chocolate, to match its Swissness. I cheered up a little, however, when the dentist told me that in America they used to use bone donated by convicts. All the same, I’d have thought, considering how much the whole thing was going to cost, that I ought to be able to choose the flavour of the bone graft.
When he had finished, the dentist showed all the skills of an experienced seamstress in sewing up my gums and gave me a prescription for antibiotics. Then, after handing over my fistful of dollars, I took my leave and began to adjust to my newfound cowishness.
“Moo,” I said rather tentatively, but then I remembered that the cow which had supplied my bone was Swiss and might not speak English, so I tried meuh, muu and mmuuh, which I am assured are the sounds emitted by French, Italian and German cows, and those are the principal languages of Switzerland, but none of them sounded totally convincing.
Unable to find any translation of ‘moo’ into Swiss-German, I have settled on a sort of pseudo-Germanic ‘müü’ moo-ed in a mock Swiss accent. Müesli, after all, was originally developed by a Swiss nutritionist and served with cow’s milk. I am told, however, that the word Müesli is a diminutive of Mues, which means a mash-up or puree and has nothing to do with a cow.
Next time, in view of the current state of dollarlessness of my fists, I think I shall just plug the gap with Polyfilla when an implant falls out and flavour it with Swiss chocolate. Unless, of course, the cow graft lets me eat grass and expel milk from my nostrils.