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.