The Unbearable Softness of the Ante-dental Panic Poo

I am an incredibly lucky bastard.  This does not, however, prevent me from bouts of unfounded anxiety.  My pathological fear of wasps might stem from never having been stung.  I apply this irrational pessimism to my health as well.  I am never ill – much to the envious disdain of friends and family, who are goaded into wishing me ill-health every time I taunt them with the boast, “I do not suffer from human disease, because I’m fucking Superman.” (For the record, “fucking” is used in its adjectival sense there, not as a verb.)  Nevertheless, I often fret over any tiny imperfection in case it might be some form of CERTAIN DEATH.  I am too proud (*scared) to actually bother a doctor with any concerns, except once when I had chest pains and it turned out to be caused by eating my dinner in front of the telly too often.

Which brings me to dentists.  As a child, I had one tooth pulled out and one filling.  Not bad for someone whose mother must have been on commission from Tate and Lyle.  As an adult, I stopped going to the dentist for about ten years, but since our kids needed to be taken, I have attended regularly and only had one additional filling and a reboot of my first filling.  So, yes, I am lucky with my teeth.

But I still loathe and fear every visit to the dentist.

Me and the kids had an appointment this morning.  The panic was evident in the poo I had before leaving the house.  I won’t disgust you with the details.  I feel the identifier “panic” before the word “poo” pretty much says it all.  It isn’t a warm day, but by the time we’d arrived, my shirt looked like it had done a series of Tenko, it had that Japanese-held POW clinginess to it.

Dental surgeries are by their nature, quiet and clean places.  But this merely enhances their chilling nature.  Horror feeds off that silence.  Dental surgeons and assistants creep past the waiting room door in scrubs and face masks like disciples of Joseph Mengele, freaking you out with sinister, devilish smiles.  The waiting room is adorned with photographs of teeth.  Not nice teeth.  Fucking disgusting teeth.  I don’t understand why dentists feel it necessary to show us how shit our mouths WOULD look if we DIDN’T come here.  FOR FUCK’S SAKE, WE ARE HERE – WE WON’T GET SHITTY TEETH LIKE THAT!  I mean, gums are pretty gruesome anyway, but to plaster a wall in blown-up images of Shane MacGowan’s dental history serves no purpose other than to inspire more fear and nausea.

This same strategy was employed in the maternity ward where our son was born.  There was a poster claiming to be reassuring, telling us not to worry if our baby came out looking a little odd or misshapen, because that was normal.  And to substantiate this assertion, it then showed a gallery of about 30 ABNORMAL new-born babies, with elongated heads, Picasso-esque features and skin like a rhino’s diseased ball-bag.  At first glance, you’d believe it was an anthology of Doctor Who's enemies.

Returning to the dentist…

Both of my kids went in before me and came out within minutes.  Neither had any problems.  One half of my brain attempted to fool the other half by thinking, “The kids are fine, so I should be too!” [No logical link]  “The dentist isn’t checking carefully enough, so I should get away with it” [Not a logical aspiration].  And then the other half of my brain fought back and exclaimed, “This is the perfect set-up for an ironical outcome.”

It’s that fear of an ironical outcome that I am often plagued with.  Like when I put the car in the garage for a seemingly small problem, I fear it’ll cost hundreds to resolve.  Going to the dentist, with its fear of the unknown, where the judgement of one person can cost you dearly, is just like putting your car in the garage, but with added physical pain to bolster the financial one.

They have this new thing now where you have to put safety glasses on as soon as you get in the dentist’s chair.  Dark safety glasses.  So you can’t see what they’re doing.  The chair menacingly reclines, and she pulls the retractable lamp down from the ceiling, asking if I’ve had any problems recently.  But her fingers have already stretched my cheeks apart, like a vet delivering a calf, and in my head I want to ask, “DO YOU EXPECT ME TO TALK?” but I know the answer will be, “NO, MR BASTARD, I EXPECT YOU TO DIE.”

Then it gets all fucking Bletchley Park, as she checks each tooth and speaks in code to her assistant.  I hear a series of numbers and letters and I panic, thinking WHAT THE FUCK DO THEY MEAN?  I am certain they mean something bad, particularly if she pauses for too long on one tooth, or says “zero zero.”

ARGH! ZERO ZERO?  THAT MUST MEAN THEY’RE GOING TO PUT ME TO SLEEP AND EXPERIMENT ON ME AND I’LL WAKE UP WITH MY TEETH SOWN INTO MY ANUS AND THEY’LL TAKE A PHOTO OF MY BLEEDING TOOTHLESS MOUTH AND PUT IT IN THE WAITING ROOM NEXT TO A PHOTOGRAPH OF MY FREAKISH TOOTH-FILLED BOTTOM!

But in reality, what happened today was that my teeth were fine, it cost a mere £18 for all of us and I texted my wife to update her on the outcome with the boast WE ARE THE FUCKING TOOTH KINGS.

Going for Gold

At the very moment that I learned about Margaret Thatcher’s death, I was watching a 1988 episode of “Going for Gold” on telly. 

This show was the pull factor that prevented me attending early afternoon lectures for most of my 2^nd year at university.  Digesting a lunch of Supernoodles or pig’s liver required a sedentary half-hour, post-Neighbours, in the company of Henry Kelly and a range of socially retarded misfits competing for the prize of “European Quiz Champion.”  The pure fact that contestants hailed from all over Europe (well, this side of the crumbling Iron Curtain anyway) appeared enough of a significant fact to warrant such a lofty assertion.  The stark reality confronting us viewers when these hapless morons opened their mouths was altogether contradictory.  Surely they weren’t quiz champions of their own countries, were they?  I mean, they sort of knew absolutely fuck all about fuck all.

One particular moment of neurotransmitter non-functioning was when Henry Kelly asked “What common liquid is technically known as H20” and 3 contestants guessed wrongly.  You could have guessed this level of highbrow intellectual challenge was coming during the show’s opening titles as the contestants were encouraged to give a quirky wave to camera as it focussed on them one by one.  If I’m being kind, I could say that the mix of nationalities resulted in a diverse array of idiosyncratic gestures which reflected what might have been the norm or perhaps even quite cool in each of their respective cultures.  However, I wasn’t kind, so I’d sit there with my housemate Phil and together we’d piss ourselves stupid pouring ridicule on every grinning contestant as he or she did a Fonzie thumbs-up, a window-cleaner wipe, a dead fish flapping in a net, a near-as-dammit Nazi salute or a jolly-sailor-bugger-you-later fisting of the air.

Henry Kelly was perfect for the role of quizmaster.  He was truly excited by it all, and was forever bobbing up and down on his toes as if someone was regularly tickling his balls, giving literal meaning to that anachronistic nugget of our homophobic past, “light on his loafers”.  With gentlemanly grace he’d ask the contestants about themselves and appear genuinely interested to hear that each one had a hobby that was so mind-numbingly dull that within half a sentence of hearing about it, anyone less generous would have driven burning kebab skewers into their ears so as not to have to endure the rest of the response.

There was an elimination round before the “first round proper” and we could never fathom why that wasn’t just called the first round.  The style of many questions required Henry Kelly to describe something or somebody in the first person, like so:

“Who am I?  I am a German born composer, famous for writing symphonies including the most famous one, Beethoven’s fifth…”

BUZZZZZZ!!!!!

“Hans from Denmark?”

“Is it Mozart?”

“No, Hans from Denmark, it isn’t Mozart.  I’ll continue.  Including the most famous one, Beethoven’s fifth.  My first name is Ludwig and my surname begins with B and rhymes with Hatehoven, but I am not Tchaikovsky…”

BUZZZZZ!!!!

“Lucia from Italy?”

“Tchaikovsky?”

You were kind of waiting for someone to buzz in early, after “Who am I?” and answer “Henry Kelly.”  And if he asked, “What am I?” then me and Phil would barrack the telly with a string of insulting terms, many of which would be considered hate-crimes now that it is no longer 1989.

For the “Grand final of finals” of the European Quizmongs, Henry Kelly would don his dinner jacket and bow-tie, itself worth twice the cost of the studio set behind him (and I’m sure it was a rented suit) and a tangible titter of gormless excitement would emanate from the audience.  The winner of the first series (a certain Daphne Fowler , famed Egghead, Brain of Britain, Fifteen to One double-winner and general “awful bore”) won a trip to the 1988 Seoul Olympics.  I like to think that the losing contestants were sent to North Korea.  For good.  In subsequent years, the grand prize was a gold-mining expedition to Australia, which probably meant deportation.

Sadly, Going for Gold was eliminated from our screens in 1996, but its legacy has been the culture of moronic TV text challenges that you now get on so many prime-time family shows:

What liquid is technically known as H2O?  Is it (a) Water, (b) Gibraltar or (c) Bring your daughter to the slaughter?  Text your answer to 08700 700 700.  Texts cost £2.50 each and those of you who text the correct answer will go into a draw to win the grand prize of Henry Kelly’s dinner suit complete with testicle-access flap and the scent of ineptitude.

Toilets of My Childhood

We had three toilets in my house when I was a kid.

Not because we were rich.  We weren’t rich.  Not money rich.  But we WERE toilet rich.  We moved into a newly built 3-storey, 3-bedroom, 3-bog, terraced house in a leafy London suburb in 1976.  I can’t tell you how exciting it was to discover a toilet on each floor.  Exciting and perhaps rather pointless.

However, each lavatory had a character of its own.  The ground floor one was used mostly by my brother and myself, because it was the most convenient convenience when you came running into the house, having been playing outside.  (For those of you born after 1985, I should explain that “playing outside” meant social interaction and physical activity for prolonged periods external to your place of dwelling.)  It was a judgement call whether we’d even bother coming home for a piss, as the local area was well-populated with a resplendent array of foliage and other concealed “natural” urinals; but if we were close enough to home and required a poo, then we’d hold it in until the tortoise was chomping cloth and then make a late dash for that lower-ground lavvy.  (OK, fair enough, if you’ve read other blog posts here, you’ll know that the occasional poo was dealt with al fresco.)

Perhaps because our parents tended not to use this toilet, my brother felt confident in applying some cheap biro graffiti to the painted wall.  “Boy oh boy” and “Matthew, King of the Poos” it read; much like the brown, personalised t-shirt I sent him for his 38^th birthday.  This graffiti was never washed off.  Nor was the brown stain next to it, which was the inevitable fall-out of an 8 year boy in a rush in a confined space.

The middle-landing toilet was the family shitter, next door to the lounge and housing with it one of our 2 baths.  The one we used.  So, our mum kept this room spotless.  You could eat Angel Delight out of that bowl, it was so pristine.  But scratch beneath the surface of anything so suspiciously clean and glorious and you’ll uncover some grimy truth.  In this case, it was the ubiquitous pair of heavily stained white y-fronts cast by either me or my brother behind the sink.  It tended to be the sink, because we kept a wire coat-hanger behind the loo itself, an essential tool in helping to “break up” anything that wouldn’t flush first time.  We were too embarrassed or scared (or perhaps responsible) to risk dropping such a toxic item into the laundry basket, for fear of cross-contamination, so this furtive strategy was demanded.  Mum usually found them within days, but by that point the offending soil had hardened like the lava over Pompeii and a blowtorch and chisel were called into action with the next washing machine load.

Finally, this tour of my childhood home’s triptych of turd-tanks takes us up to the top storey, the twilight toilet.  This room had no external walls, as it was between the two upstairs bedrooms of this terraced house and consequently windowless.  Therefore, it contained an extractor fan, which turned on automatically with the light.  A very noisy extractor fan.  Which would wake everyone if turned on during the night.  So we tended to piss in the dark in this one.

Now the universal insanity of having a carpet in any toilet is a problem magnified many times when you add into the mix the challenge of pissing in the dark.  You might use your knees to locate the rim of the bowl, but (given that we were all cavaliers and not roundheads in my family) there was no telling what angle that jet of slash would come out at.  So, you’d start away and hear nothing.  A terrible silence that meant you’d missed.  By the time you’d swung your body left and right until you could hear the relieving sound of water upon water, you’d already broadcast a litre of long-stored, night-time concentrate all over the carpet.

We weren’t money rich.  We never replaced that carpet in the 6 years we spent there.  By 1982, the fumes were enough to burn your retinas.

The Terrible Beauty of Bastard Routine (Part One)

I am brutally hauled from a state of nasal-cadenced torpidity by the radio alarm at 5.45am, tuned by a bed-sharer of less discerning musical taste to a station specialising in soul-less mid-80’s plastic rock and fatuous chatter from some treacle-voiced buffoon.  Cleverly, she has contrived the environment to ensure that the snooze button is within MY arm’s range rather than hers.  But the neurotransmitters are so numbed by this assault on their sensibilities, that they require several minutes’ exposure to the trauma before kicking back into function mode and sending that vital message to my arm to turn the fucking thing off.

I pour milk onto my layered cereal breakfast of mini-Weetabix with chocolate bits and Cookie Crisp (also with chocolate bits).  This is the preliminary kitchen task, allowing time for the kettle to boil and the Weetabix to evolve from their primitive paving stone consistency into something molten enough to suck through the gaps in my teeth – not that I choose such a method of eating - while I make myself a chocolate spread sandwich to take to work.  I dine on my soggerizing cereal combo in front of the telly, either appalled by the crassness of BBC Breakfast and its twee and odious assemblage of offensively unoffending presenters or embarrassingly pleasured by the nostalgic indulgence and mind-gum plot development of New Dallas, which I Sky+ each Wednesday.

I don’t like to rush.  My mental balance is kept in equilibrium if I am in the bath within 15 minutes of 6.58am.  (It used to be 6.55am, thus providing a wash’n’dry window of five minutes before waking the kids at 7.00am.  But I have rebelliously waged war at this deadline until in a Castro-esque time-coup I seized for myself three additional minutes.)  This pocket of undisturbed, hot-water-swaddled meditation consists of a long, scornful stare at Twitter on my phone, leading me to despair of the creative void that is evident in human web-based interactions at this time of the morning.

Yes, I lie in the bath with my phone in my hand.  I have never dropped it.  I am the fucking KING of not dropping my phone in the bath EVER and by far more skilful at this than anyone you will ever meet in your whole life.

When there is evidence that my children’s sleep pits have been evacuated and their own morning routines are underway, I choose a CD for the journey and get into my Vauxhall Astra and drive to work.  My journey is the exact same time as side one of an album.  I know that CDs don’t have sides, so let’s say it is the exact same time as half a CD.  Half a CD of an album of optimal length, that is.   About 40 minutes.  All albums should be 40 minutes in total.  Anything more is perverse.

I am in some ways an adventurous spirit.  My veins teem with spontaneity.  I never know which one of two enticing routes I will take to work until I reach the point where I can turn off one onto another.  In most other respects though, my drive is relaxing and without event.  Especially now that I have mastered my Car-Tourette’s and inadvisable over-reactive and aggressive counter-provocation when encountering your average bullying cunt of the road.  A couple of occasions when car-emergence and likely physical confrontation with such rogues almost reached fruition have led me to reflect that I am not actually able to beat up EVERYONE else and would therefore be wiser to cease the more fight-inducing behaviours that I have exhibited for over 20 years.  I haven’t quite gone cold turkey on this road-rage heroin, but I am safer sticking to the methadone approach of simply slowing down to the speed limit when an impatient and aggressive cunt is tailgating me and allowing him to suffer the inconvenience of my admittedly smug and sanctimonious passive-obstructive protests.  No wanker signs required.

Thus I get to work unmolested.  I am imbibed with half an album of my own choice, songs that have put pay to the Bon Jovi brainwashing I had 1 ¾ hours before, and I go to my office having stuffed the Nutella-filled wholemeal bread package into the staffroom fridge.  The beautiful routine of my mornings is now terminated by the job.

(to be continued…) 

The Take-No-Shit Bullshitter Bastards

I never cease to be tickled by the irony that seeps from the pores on the earnest faces of THOSE people who tell you that they “don’t take any shit from anyone.”  Because, clearly, the very fact that they are telling you this is an implicit admission that they DO take shit from people and have thus created a bravado to combat their frequently wounded pride.   That bravado manifests itself in the form of a mask, an alias, a self-righteous un-caped crusader, a fantasy aspiration that we might call the Take-No-Shit-Bullshitter.

The burden that these pitiful morons bear is one which compels them to perform an ostentatious act of complaint in every situation in which they are seen not to get their own way. 

For example, during the pre-Christmas postal chaos in which England’s lazy arses did all their present shopping online, I joined a snake-like queue at the local sorting office to collect some parcels.  Feeling quite sanguine about this situation, I was gently amused to witness a Take-No-Shit-Bullshitter refuse to accept that the parcel he had been expecting had not yet arrived at the sorting office.  The poor sods on the desk had a good look for it.  It wasn’t  there.  Your common garden Take-No-Shit-Bullshitter abandons logic and courtesy at this point, because he believes that he is being “done over”.  The system (or someone) is lying to him and “taking the piss”.  He won’t stand for it.  So he throws his toys out of the pram and begins to get shirty with the counter staff.  As if it’s their fault.

What goes through his mind at this point, knowing that defeat is inevitable, is a plan to say something PROFOUND that he can tell his friends about afterwards: 

“So he says to me that they haven’t got it and I say ‘well that’s seventy quid’s worth of stuff there’ and he says ‘what do you want me to do?’ and I say ‘you can bloody well pay me the seventy quid then or I’m not moving’.”  Profound?  Or perhaps deeply discourteous, unreasonable and patently illogical?  But the point is, he MADE A STAND and took no shit.

At this point, he needs to leave the scene with his dignity intact, having got nowhere with his complaint, so he will try to engage a bystander with eye-contact, to gain affirmation that he is RIGHT  and the source of his complaint is WRONG; and he will utter that trite and fatuous adjective that all Take-No-Shit-Bullshitters bandy about: “RIDICULOUS!”  And he’ll repeat it to his audience and crave complicit nods.  “It’s ridiculous isn’t it?  Ridiculous!”

Snow and Bastards with Posh Sledges

My fellow citizens of St Albans have embraced the snow with their customary resilience and fascist liberalism.  Sledges from BMW’s 4-by-4 range are being tugged along the streets by many a fleece-adorned, middle-aged parent.  They might be stealing trays from McDonald’s in nearby Borehamwood, but here we approach our snow transport with class and affluence.

While their actual “St Albans tractors” were parked in drives and garages over the weekend - ready to glide effortlessly through the snow on Monday morning at normal speeds of 40 mph in 30 mph zones, scathingly dismissive of fucking over-cautious plebs in smaller vehicles like myself - the pavements and parks became a play-zone of plush plastic people-carriers.  Sledges designed to carry 2.4 children.  Parents, the same thoughtless cunts who won’t park between 2 lines outside supermarkets and won’t park at all outside schools, expecting childless pedestrians to indulge their territorial aspirations to own the pavement.  Sorry, my children are sledging here, please walk around us.

One exception, but superior in arrogance, was a tosser local to me who preferred to pull his child’s sledge along the road.  I am guessing that he is from a pocket of residence near to where I live, who for the rest of the year makes a point of reclaiming the road outside his house to play cricket with his kids.  If he lived in a cul-de-sac, then fair enough.  But it’s a through-road.  Cars arrive every few minutes, slow down and wait for this family of fascist liberals to make way.  My message to you, sir, is fuck off and live in a village.  This is a town.  In fact, it’s a small city.  Roads are for cars, not for jumper-wearing fucktards with delusions of rustic freedoms.

A Bastard History of Crap Christmas Presents

The worst present my Dad ever got my Mum was perfume.  This iconic moment from the late 80s that says so much about their relationship when they were together, was captured on video tape and thenceforth available to enjoy for posterity.  I can see it now:  My mum opening the parcel;  my Dad - in stark contrast to the family trait of offering a self-deprecating apology when giving anyone a present - displaying naïve optimism about how expensive and top-of-the-range the gift was;  my Mum’s face, stony and stoic as the moment of denouement becomes akin to unwrapping a turd.  My Dad watches her, crestfallen, as she opens the bottle and sniffs.  “Do you not like it?” he asks, pitifully.  She retches; one of those enormous, hacking, phlegmy retches.  An uncontrollable wave of nausea engulfs her senses.  If my Dad had placed his buttocks either side of her nose and sharted, she might not have responded quite this badly.  “It’s like the stuff Greek women wear!” she moans (not actually with any xenophobic spite, as she is half-Greek.)

I have therefore never bought my wife perfume unless she has specified the type.  I learned from my Dad’s mistake.  But I didn’t learn enough.  When I met my wife, she was still 19 and had something of a different taste to what she had as she was pushing 40.  Not that I noticed this development.  So, when I purchased a pair of coconut shell ear-rings, made in West Africa and carved into elephant shapes, I believed it was a fiver well spent and just the sort of thing she likes.  It wasn’t.  She made it VERY clear the ear-rings were crap.  So, I rewrapped them and gave them back to her the following two Christmases.  By that point the joke had worn thin and she set fire to them before casting them into the rubbish.

This present-buying crapness dates back to when I was first old enough to get on the 29 bus and go to Wood Green on my own in order to choose something for the family. It would be harsh to call me a thoughtless present-buyer though.  An unimaginative one maybe.  At the time, I recall asking myself the question, “What does Mum like doing?”  The answer led me, on one occasion, into buying from Argos a drying rack for dishes and cutlery.  Even my Dad saw the error in this choice and pointed out the ungrateful message I might be sending Mum.  So, most other years I concentrated on her other pastime and bought her ash-trays, lighters or (when I was really short of ideas) just 40 Embassy.

Not that my Dad was (or indeed is) any easier to buy for.  Being a cynical old goat, he doesn’t really have any interests.  I tend to buy him a book each year and suspect he never reads it.  The only time he showed true gratitude towards a present was when I put a bet on for him for Italy to win the 2012 Euros (actually, that was a Fathers’ Day gift.)  They didn’t win, but it gave him more interest in the competition.

Within families, people tend to pick up on one thing that you’re interested in and then buy you something related to that every year for the rest of your life.  When my brother reached 16 or 17 he must have got so pissed once that my Dad ended up recounting this misadventure to my aunt who then formed the assumption that booze is his chief interest.  He thereafter received beer each Christmas and felt quite insulted by it.

You can, of course, just make a list and use your family like a retail delivery service.  This stops them making any mistakes.  I first did this at 12 and wrote down that I wanted Adam and the Ants’ new album, Prince Charming.  This was duly bought for me.  Dad inspected it after I’d opened it, cast aspersions on Adam Ant’s sexuality (and by implication on my own) by saying, “He looks like a pooftah” and then reading out the tracklist which included the song S.E.X., which he repeated until I had cringed my way into a small ball of embarrassment.

If only we could sometimes muster up the courage to say, “I don’t know what you want, so I bought you fuck-all.”  I’m sure my Mum would have preferred the smell of fuck-all to whatever foul liquid was in that perfume bottle back in ’88.