Not afraid…

Today was a very scary day.

We had got to go to the dentist.

I am not very good at dentists, partly because of being terrified and partly because of the enormous expenditure involved.

National Health dentists are not very common in Windermere, and the one that we do have is oversubscribed to the point where they have closed the waiting list to get on to their waiting list.

My last filling cost so much that it took me over a year to pay it off and even then I am quite sure that he was economising on the anaesthetic.

Therefore, in the spirit of managing our lives like a proper grown up and being responsible for making sensible plans for things, a few weeks ago I telephoned the NHS and asked to belong to a dentist.

This was not an easy thing to arrange, I can tell you. They hummed and muttered and made some excuses and I made a huge middle-class fuss and alternately begged and pleaded, and in the end they thought that there was a dentist in Barrow who might accept patients.

Barrow is not exactly on the doorstep, being about an hour’s drive away: but it turned out after many telephone calls that the NHS were right, it was that dentist or horrible rotting tooth decay, gum disease and bad breath until eventually our mouths would become filled with blackened stumps and children would run away whenever we smiled.

We got an appointment for today.

The appointment was just for Mark and me, as we take the children to the dentist across the road and pay for it every month with a form of private extortion called Denplan. Oliver’s teeth crumble to dust as soon as he thinks about Haribos, and Lucy has an untouched mouthful of gleaming perfection which makes the dentist glow with happy pride whenever he looks at her. She does not deserve this as she lives on Pringles and Mars Bars, it is because she is not really our child but once belonged to a fairy who stole our plain fat brown haired baby and left us a tiresome squeaky ginger creature instead.

I don’t mind telling you that I was jolly scared when I got there. Regular readers will know that I have Tooth Issues which have been the cause of many agonising moments, and the very thought of somebody poking something sharp and pointy into the exciting corners of my poor troubled teeth makes me shudder with horror.

Because of this we went in together, which surprised the dentist a bit, on the whole I don’t think most people need their husband to come with them and sit in the corner looking encouraging, and Mark went first because he is bravest, and it turned out to be gloriously, astonishingly lovely.

The dentist was not an eight-foot tall grim-faced barbarian with a bloodstained apron.

She was Spanish, and tiny, with a mop of brown curls and one of the most kindly smiles you can imagine.

She was giggly, and gentle, and friendly, and understood without needing to be told that my teeth are very afraid of other people.

She explained why they were sore and wrote a prescription for some helpful toothpaste and said not to drink sugary drinks. We said that we didn’t, and she nodded sagely and said that she could see we would drink red wine, which was lovely to relax, but must be cleaned off the teeth later. She said that my teeth became sore because of being worried and anxious, and that I must practise to be happy and calm.

I asked – as I always ask – about doing something about the unlovely gap between my front teeth, and she said, as all dentists say, that it was not something that could be changed easily because of being the shape of my face and to change would be so so so expensive, but that the smile should be beautiful because of having a loving heart and gentle soul, not because of the shape of the teeth, and that I must think different to be happy.

We were completely enchanted.

We had been given to an utterly adorable dentist. Even the nurse, who was stout and looked as though she might have a bloodstained apron at weekends, was under her spell, and smiled and blushed when the dentist explained to us how clever and lovely the nurse was.

We came away feeling pleased with our teeth and astounded by our good fortune.

It is a horrid worry which has been charmed away.

The picture is Barrow Town Hall which is the most noticeable thing about Barrow and has a certain iconic attractiveness.

Nobody takes pictures at the dentist.