Self Examination
dentist was French and went by the moniker Mrs Uren. You can imagine what hilarity this induced; how we chortled — until the drill started to whine. Gentle readers under 40, who do not know a time before fluoridated water and effective anaesthesia, kindly look away from the page at this point.
Oh, man! It really hurt. And such was my sugary lust — I remained a stranger most nights, let alone mornings, to the brush — that I must have had the majority of my milk teeth filled before they fell out. (Or were removed via a string-and-door method that had been in use since the Ptolemaic dynasty ruled Egypt.) When we complained about Mrs Uren’s heavy-drilledness, mother would say, “Many dentists are thwarted sculptors.” A statement that — along with the plate-pushing noted above — pretty much sums up her bizarre character. But to be fair to Mrs Uren, she realised early on that there wasn’t much room in my mouth for adult teeth, so she took out four of my back molars as soon as they poked their crowns above the gums. Aged 12, I looked like Plug in “The Bash Street Kids”, and while I may still have something of an overbite, no one mistakes me for Janet Street-Porter. (Or at least, not in daylight.)
I wish I could say that wisdom did indeed coincide with the teeth that grew into those spaces but the sad fact is that I didn’t begin to look after my teeth properly until I was in my late twenties. It seems surpassing weird (and even faintly tragic), that quite a number of rather attractive young women were prepared to place their mouths against mine during this period, and even insert their tongues between my grimy lips. Nowadays, the possessor of a full range of TePe flossing brushes, an electric rotary toothbrush, and any number of decay-preventing, whitening and breath-freshening mouthwashes, I bemoan their fate as I carry on sweetly breathing, for it seems I have the teeth of Dorian Gray: while my face withers around them, they remain sinisterly white and youthful. Actually, white they may be, courtesy of Mr Kyaw, my dentist and his hygienist assistant, but youthful is a bit of a stretch.
I’ve had tens of thousands of pounds of treatment over the years: fillings, extractions, root canals, crowns… and more crowns when those crowns have fallen out. The only thing I haven’t done is join that sad caravan of western European, middle-aged folk and make for Budapest where the best and cheapest dental implants known to man are cunningly inserted against a backdrop of former Austro-Hungarian imperial grandeur.
Why so much dental work? Well, as I say, wisdom didn’t come with the teeth, and although I started looking after my poor fangs eventually, no amount of dental care, whether amateur or professional, can vitiate the effects of a veritable mother lode of refined sugar. There’s my hopeless addiction to chocolate (I once considered buying shares in Green & Black’s, safe in the knowledge that my purchases alone would ensure corporate growth), and there’s also my equally relentless bruxism.
People who’ve shared my bed in recent years tell me the sound is as loud and abrasive as a cement mixer, or possibly one of the old-school drills Mrs Uren once used on me. Yes, for years now, I’ve been drilling into my own teeth with my own teeth, a kind of auto-dental-cannibalism. Some believe tooth-grinding happens because, lacking the necessary vitamins, the grinder unconsciously decides to obtain them from his own dentine. I had a dentist years ago who encouraged me to take zinc supplements, but this had no effect whatsoever: on and on I ground. I now wear a mouthguard like a sportsman, which only emphasises quite what an effort my sleeping life is.
Anyway, there’s a rough poetic justice in all of this: to slumber is always to die a little. The only question is, will I manage to make it to the grave with any of my teeth left? Or, will my skull be disinterred by some archaeologists of the distant future, only for them to class me — on the basis of my flat and eroded gnashers — among all the other extinct ruminants.