Trauma

Due to a disconcertingly traumatic afternoon we have not gone to work tonight.

I have had a difficult day.

I have been to the dentist.

This happened this afternoon. By the time I was ready to set off it was raining again, so Mark abandoned his shed-roofing and drove me across to Barrow. I was glad about this, because I am not very brave about the dentist.

Our dentist is just about as unthreatening as it is possible to be, if you happen to be a blood-soaked wielder of finely-whetted gruesome instruments for a living. She is small, and delicate, and Spanish, and so gentle that she makes me feel oafish and clumsy and brutal by comparison.

The problem is that the enamel on my teeth seems to have dissolved, probably due to repeated immersion in Merlot. A gap has emerged between the tooth and the gum, where the bone is visible, and agony can be induced simply by exposure to fresh air. I have been obliged to desist from smiling on chilly days due to this development, which has done nothing to improve my relations with the neighbours.

The dentist diagnosed Vitamin D deficiency, which I knew all about anyway, because it might have been a reasonable summer, but only by Lake District standards. It has still rained for all of August.

Then she said that she was going to coat the exposed bit with a mineral-rich enamel, and that it would hurt.

She was absolutely right about that.

We both cried, and she hugged me and said that my life would now be lovely, and I would smile again and the sunlight would come into my soul.

I would be pleased if it would venture into the garden.

I staggered out, clutching yet another prescription for enamel-reconstructing toothpaste, and was pleased to discover that she had been right, and that once again a cautious grimace was possible, even outdoors.

We ambled around Barrow for a little while, in order to get our money’s worth out of the parking ticket, and then went to Asda for the purposes of tuck-drawer restocking for the children’s return in a few days. We considered staying in Barrow, because everything is cheap, and going out for dinner, but we accidentally spent all our cash in Asda, and so in the end we had to go home.

I still did not feel much like going to work, even despite my newly mineral-encrusted teeth, and so we decided, recklessly, that we would not bother, but stay at home and recover from my trauma.

I do like this about our job. It is going to be very peculiar indeed to be working for the prison service, where I am quite sure that the phrase ‘I didn’t feel like it’ is not commonly used as an acceptable reason for not turning up.

We reheated some of the Turkish rice and Mark covered the dog-smelling sofa with an old quilt. We never get round to sitting on it anyway, but even if we were so blessed with leisure time that it was a possibility, we wouldn’t, because the dogs smell revolting. When we have a conservatory we are going to throw it away and get a new one from which all livestock will be barred.

We watched a film that had been recommended by my parents, about the girl who wrote Frankenstein, which turned out to be jolly good. Her teenage years seemed to have been even more adventurous than my own, and at the end of them she produced a classic Gothic horror novel, which under the circumstances was a feat deserving of much admiration, and more than I have managed even thirty years afterwards.

There were some actors in the film who we had seen in another film we have watched, A Game Of Thrones, which made me squeak appreciatively, and we ate the cakes that we had kidnapped at the end of yesterday’s afternoon tea. This turned out to be an excess of good things, and I felt a bit uncomfortable in the waistband department afterwards.

Ritalin Boy rang this evening. He has designed a robot whose function is to fart in  the living room on your behalf if you do not feel up to it yourself. He was very enthusiastic about this, and I think it might have potential. Certainly it is exactly the sort of thing I could imagine giving to most of my family for Christmas, and also it might have a function in the lives of the newly-single.

He might be on to something there.

Mark has gone to give the dogs a final emptying in the Library Gardens, and I am writing to you. It is lovely not to be at work, and we are going to have an early night.

We probably haven’t missed much anyway. Last night was shockingly quiet, and I fell asleep outside the nightclub.

Have a picture of the Library Gardens.

LATER NOTE:

It is only eleven o’clock, and we are just going to bed. This feels wonderfully idle and rascally, thinking of everybody else still out at work, a bit like you might feel if you got undressed and shut the curtains at half past three in the afternoon. It is a Happy Moment.