Pay the ransom and save the hostage? I don’t think so.

He looked at it. He looked at it again. “There are two options, you can save it, or you can lose it”. It had come to this. I had a decision to make. “How much will it cost to save it?” I enquired. “Well……” (as if it prepare me for the news) …. It will cost five hundred pounds”. How much did this mean to me? Two hundred and fifty pints of beer or, saving it? A flight to Canada, or, saving it. Almost as instinctively as the images of beer and airplanes flashed in my head, came the reply. “Let it die”. If you ever find yourself being taken hostage, don’t ever call me. You wouldn’t get out alive.

It’s been two years since I have been to the dentist. Actually, make that two hours.

And I realised why. Going to the dentist is like paying car insurance, you don’t really want to, but I guess you have to from time to time. Next month and next week always seems better than today or tomorrow. Then one day, a rush of pain tells you maybe next month should be tomorrow. Pain is great at focusing your mind. The thing is, the fabulous state of British dentistry means that you can’t really go tomorrow, more like in two months. Of course it was my fault. I work on the ‘no pain, don’t engage brain’ methodology in life.

“E5 ok, lower D4 , upper B2”. It was some secret code, being passed to his assistant. All I knew was it must be bad as the mirror on metal stick thing moved on from tooth to tooth. I’m no expert in dentist terminology, but I could translate it as “the bottom right one, well that’s fucked, too many sweets. The one next to it, well don’t really know but if I say E3 very quickly nobody will know. The top right one next to the silver filling colour one has got a big hole in it,,,,,,,,,,”. I would have preferred the truth in simple terms. Maybe he was going to tell a few jokes first, get me relaxed, then tell me that I might as well put an entire set of false teeth in.



“One of your teeth is in a bad way, you have got a filling as well, but that’s all I can tell before we get the x-rays”, he said. I’m just going to check to see how bad you’re your lower left tooth is”. I think that was obvious. Half of it was missing. Half of it had come out in Thailand whilst chewing on a chewy thing (I couldn’t understand the Thai label, but it probably said “don’t chew, it breaks your teeth”). “Okay, I’m just going to blow some cold air into it to see if your nerves still function”. Great, it was like the kiss of life, it’s just I already knew my tooth was half dead.

“Did you feel anything?” he probed. I may as well have not answered. My face screwed up like junk mail. Touched a nerve? Just a bit. “Okay, well as the nerve is not dead, you have got two options.