Bored of excitement – The griefjunkie blog 

Dear Rachel

I am the only heterosexual man ever to have bought Faith by George Micheal, and I continue to like it despite the number of people who think it would be nice if they could touch my body dwindling by the year.  I’m already resigned to increasing reliance upon professionals in this particular arena, a process which begun in earnest with a memorable bout of dentistry last week.  It started reasonably enough in the waiting room with the usual reading of Build Your Home magazine while assuming that the extra mouth washing I had undertaken prior to coming to the surgery would reverse several years of eating almost nothing that wasn’t caramel based.

While reading, I noticed a bloke Windolene-ing the glass doors of some kind of dental cabinet, and it was only when our names were called at the same time that I realised he was in fact my dentist.   I actually held the door open for him as we went into the dentistry parlour, and asked for a show about Gary Numan to be put on MTV for me to watch while we got down to the matter in hand.   This is how I came to be contemplating Gary Numan’s dentistry skills very intently indeed in a happily successful bid to take my mind off the drills and pain and gurgling.   He certainly has what appears to be a dentists’ shirt on in the ‘Are Friends Electric?’ video, I reasoned over the smell of scorched enamel, although admittedly it does make him look like the kind of dentist whose clientele would be either daleks or thought criminals, or who is employed on the Death Star doing fillings for stormtroopers.

For all his admirable if baffling attention to waiting room tidiness, though, my dentist is a larf, and quickly saw through my clever ruse of putting ‘Dentist’ as my occupation on my new patient form in order to get preferential rates.  Before we got underway, he asked me ‘Are you nervous of dentists at all?’ ‘No’ I replied, quite truthfully. ‘Well you might be after this’ he said ‘As it’s really going to hurt’.   I raised my arm very slightly as I felt our easy and highly enjoyable familiarity would support a high five, but it became immediately apparent that he had stopped pissing about and had started to earn his money.

It’s all good though, really.   Going to the dentist is one of the few times I get to be called Mr Smith without being arrested first, for a start, and I really do need to lose my stupidly sweet tooth.   I have diabetes, although my chosen method of dealing with this is to simply assume that, actually, I don’t.   I have it only very slightly, which is fortunate, and means that I don’t have to worry about insulin or going without huge cakes and such or anything like that.   In fact, I am so enthusiastic about not going without huge cakes that if sleeping on my own I will keep a gateau by the bed for reassurance in case I wake suddenly from a bad dream.   My diabetes does, however, manifest itself in an ocular condition called keratoconus.  This isn’t nearly as grim as it sounds, but I wouldn’t look up if I were you as any description will probably include pictures of corneal surgery.   I would imagine that one of the few crumbs of comfort about corneal surgery is that at least it isn’t dental surgery, and a considerably larger four-course-dinner-with-coffee-cheeseboard-and-cigars banquet of comfort is that your eye takes a year to recover, during which time you can legitimately wear an eye patch if you fancy it.   In the unlikely event I ever have the surgery, I would consider myself half a man if, under those circumstances, I didn’t get a parrot, a cutlass, and fuck about on the Spanish main making scurvy dogs walk the plank.   Thinking about it, though, weird diabetes of the eyes might explain why a dietician would conclude that I can only see sugar based products when food shopping.

[Can I just point out to my old dear if she is reading that I am neither toothless nor blind nor obese.   It's all fine.   Everything's fine.]

Twitter After all this time, I am still undecided.

Facebook: Still 117.  Someone left, but someone else joined, so it all worked out.