Lower Molar the 2nd

Last week, when Lower Right 2nd Molar began to strop petulantly around the scarlet mess of my gum, I did - through the fog of my glum agony - fleetingly equate myself to a televised war-victim stumbling about with a piece of shrapnel woven into my lower jaw. The extent of a man's self-pity, of course, knows no depths.

Unfortunately, having never bothered to find myself a private dentist since leaving home, it was a stagger up to the Trainee Dental Clinic for me - forlorn eyes bared in vague hope of communicating the depths of my pain to the production line of indifferent passersby, none of whom so much as stopped to pat me sympathetically on the back as I headed to have my mouth altered for free by an amateur. Even the people stood smoking in gowns attached to tubes and trolleys outside the hospital - usually the target of my nose-raised derision - were treated to a feeble glance as I shuffled past them.

As I sat in the trying to imagine what sort of fumbling child-dentist was behind the door ready to bleed me to death, a radiant and perfectly calm young student called Emma suddenly emerged into the resigned gloom of the waiting room to call out my name instead. She let me away, looked at my x-ray, tapped away at Lower Right 2nd Molar with something sharp and concluded calmly from my subsequent bleat that it was time to numb up and yank out...

Unfortunately, it turned out that in world of gum-numbing drugs, I'm something of a Lemmy from Motorhead. If I had a handle-bar moustache, climbed on a stage with a bass guitar and started bellowing out 'The Ace of Spades', a teenager standing near the back with a Jack Daniels and Coke would almost certainly lean in to his mate and say 'they reckon he injected porphyria into his face for three days straight once and didn't lose a single tooth...' as the other nods in quiet awe.

She kept sticking it in and sticking it in (the needle that is), each time causing an involuntary spasm in my left foot, each time waiting a few minutes before clasping Lower Right 2nd with a pair of pliers (for that, despite a fair old time passing since the Vikings first discovered the downside to meed, is precisely what they still use), each time causing me to experience pain that surely only a face and a variation of a vice can together produce.

It got to the point where her self-assurance began to wane, and I, in a twisted parody of a oddly-familiar bedroom scene, felt obligated to embark on a round of 'this kind of thing has never happened to me before' platitudes... to which she went stiff, turned around and informed me: 'I'm only legally allowed to give you one more injection - then I have to send you home.'

At this point a senior dentist popped inside my room. He listened to Emma and nodded sympathetically, then frowned at me. 'It's time to try something stronger', he said, in the voice of a man relishing words he felt he'd never get to use. Evidently there is a reserve of 'heavy stuff' in a dentist's tool kit that requires an even more monstrous needle - the kind you could hitch a flag to, wave above yourself and head unselfconsciously into a protest march. 'You shouldn't feel a thing' he said - the standing joke of the last two hours - as I very much did.

Thankfully, the end of my tolerance was reached and Emma, with palatable relief emanating from behind her plastic goggles, wrestled Lower Right 2nd Molar out of his bed-sore dwelling before plonking the ugly thing next my face as I 'rinsed' (the polite term we use in these situations for 'dribble').

As I made my way back to work two hours late, with Lower Right in a little paper envelope in my pocket and my mouth set in a cruel mimic of Marlon Brando's Godfather, there seemed no discernable cosmic signal to read in my toothy ordeal.

No symbolism to see in it, no truth to extract - except perhaps a reminder that life - if you're lucky - is part-stroll/part-fumble over cobbled path, that the quotidian is a pantomime in which we all must sometimes play the fool, and that you should always, without excuse, brush your fucking teeth.

Lessons Learnt #5 - The Parents Are Alright

At some sullen point in our adolescence I’m sure we’ve all shared a similar fantasy: what if I’m really adopted?

My biological parents (not those excruciating clowns downstairs) might be sat in a studio somewhere in Montmartre, or in the Congo bottle feeding parrots, or Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf…

Alas for me the fantasy was always quashed under foot: my own foot, that is, as the toes on each are divided equally between a broad knobble identical to my Mothers and a arching hook identical to my Fathers. I wear proof of my DNA on the ends of my size 12’s that pitter-patter ‘yu-mum yu-dad, yu-mum yu-dad’ as I walk down the street.

Still, being at university seems to have been as much about reconciling me with my past as with my future, as much about giving me the space to come to terms with the ‘rents as giving me the gumption to start planning a life without them.

The first thing you realise after getting to uni how wonderful it is to not see them all of the time, not to have them around put limitations on what you can do and when.

The second thing you realise is that your Mum must have been doing a hell of lot of tidying up back there, cos this place looks like a nuclear fallout in there and it’s only the third day in (not to employ crude and outdated gender stereotypes here: it may well have been your Dad who washed the curtains and moved the dirty plates, but by the end I only lived with my dear Mum and I’m pretty sure my Dad’s gaff resembled the average Fresher flat anyway).

They say an atheist is only truly tested in his or her belief when the axe is about to swing: the theory that, in the end, we all pray to some thing. I think the extent to which we have become independent from our parents is similarly tested: it’s when you’re getting court threats from the credit card companies, or you’ve gotten someone pregnant, or you’ve accidentally mowed down your tutor on your way to your dissertation meeting that you suddenly find yourself phoning ‘home’ for help. When the shit really hits the fan, you want the people who dealt with your shit in the first place.

For their part, my Mother’s doting optimism and my Father’s world-weary pragmatism have both served me well as I’ve spent three years trying to fashion a life for myself: from the shaky bit in first year when I thought I might have to drop out to change my course, to the nerves that went with putting the first pieces of a magazine together, to the present day anxiety of not knowing what’s going to happen after graduation. Their lives were very different to mine at twenty-two – harder, more responsible - but they advise me, as best they can.

Their reward is to watch me gradually turn into a version of them: procreation, the ultimate vanity project. I am approaching an average sneezing fit of eleven ‘atishoos’, just like my old man, and I have obsessive-compulsions that stop a yard shy of making me a weirdo, just like my old ma.

I value politeness, am vigilant in wearing seatbelts and insisting others wear theirs, will try anything once and still can’t grow a beard. I imitate my Father’s easy charm, and my Mother’s resilient romanticism.

I am, I have discovered, the compound of their strengths and weaknesses, the composite of their quirks: the chemical reaction in the crucible of their love and the marriage between them that worked.

Now, if those adoption papers were to turn up, I’d probably just want to throw them away. Who could be bothered to come around to a whole new set of parents, after how long it took the first time? Unless, of course, my real parents are millionaires. Or movie stars. Or player scouts for Real Madrid…