It has been an exacting sort of day.
This is because of yet another ghastly outbreak of toothache, so awful that this morning I would have bitten the bullet if it hadn’t been too painful to bite anything, and arranged an emergency appointment at the dental hospital.
I spent the day in a sort of throbbing limbo, eating over-the-counter painkillers in desperate handfuls and waiting for the hands of the clock to creep round to the appointment time, which was not, disappointingly, two-thirty, as in the humorous quip of the variety enthusiastically favoured by Oliver, but twenty to six.
Twenty to six found us queueing up in the Outpatients waiting room at Kendal Hospital. Mark came in with me, because I am not very brave about dentists, but in the event I didn’t need to be because the dentist lady just took an X-ray and afterwards was brief and to the point and said that my gum was full of vile infection, and sooner or later I would need to find a dentist who was willing to take the tooth out because I would carry on having tooth-related unhappiness at intervals until it had left my mouth for ever: and in the meantime here was a prescription for some antibiotics, next please.
We went to Asda for the antibiotics and some more cheering-up drugs, and then when we went home I modified her advice to wash hot salty water around the tooth which she thought might help, and washed warm cognac around the tooth instead, which very definitely helped: along with antibiotics and codeine and some morphine and ibuprofen and paracetamol I began to feel quite recovered.
Within an hour there was a bursting sensation and the sort of curiously salty trickle that is beyond revolting to imagine but actually a profound relief to experience, and although I may have been mildly intoxicated by then anyway, the hideous thumping ache subsided, to be replaced by a glorious relief and joyful appreciation of the wonderful world in which we live, imagine being an Ancient Egyptian and having to sniff at lotus flowers and sacrifice bulls to Amon Ra in the hope that the combination might somehow magically cure dental abscesses.
Mark made dinner for us after that, because I was starving then, having been incapable of eating all day, and whilst I have been indisposed he has had the sort of day which has resulted in my feeling an uncomfortable combination of gratitude and guilt.
He couldn’t do anything to make me feel better at home, so went off to spend the day working on the allotment, the picture at the top indicates the impressive efforts he has made. When he got home he drove me to the hospital and back, poured me a sympathetic drink and cooked dinner, and is now washing the pots.
I am not nearly as lovely a person as he is and have spent the day mostly whingeing and trying to distract myself by writing letters and doing accounts, which was all I could manage to organise, and even then I think I may have to do most of them again tomorrow.
I don’t really mind this. I am going to have to redeem myself by having some achievements tomorrow, however, because I have not kept my end up especially well today.
I have promised that I will come and help on the allotment tomorrow, and am just hoping that he gets distracted and forgets that tomorrow was the day when he thought that he might go and dig some sacks of muck out from the farm to drag back in the taxi to increase the Windermere Allotment abundance of soil fertility and create some earnest countryside aromas in order that other allotment holders will admire his industrious enterprise.
I am going to cut this short and take myself off to bed as the world is still a rather fuzzy sort of place. Also if I have got to be both recovered and helpful by morning I think I had better go and do some sleeping it off.
And of course it might always rain.
