Root canal. The very words seem deliberately calculated to scare the living daylights out of you. It is the treatment suggested for dealing with my toothache (yes, I still have it, though it has eased considerably). I returned to the dental surgery the other day to have the errant tooth removed as previously arranged but, after conducting a full series of sophisticated tests that would have done justice to a wheel-tapper on the Great Western Railway, my new dentist, whom I hadn’t yet met, pointed out that the errant tooth was actually quite sound and it would be a shame to remove it; removal would also leave a significant gap in my mouth. Had I considered the alternative? I knew where she was heading and, yes I had considered it. It apparently involved a great deal of drilling and digging on a live person’s gums, namely mine, and I was not keen. Nay, let me expand on that: I was absolutely terrified. But the thing is, this dentist proved to be very attractive, with a delightful Irish brogue and fascinating big brown eyes that I could hardly miss gazing into as I lay horizontal in the chair. How could I, a trained killer of men, a one-time guardian of the North Cape against the Soviet hordes, a Cold War veteran admit to being afraid of pain? As it turned out, the potential agony was as nothing compared with the cost of the treatment when I received the estimate: £875. Good God. This is the drawback of using a private, as opposed to an NHS, dentist. Seeing my shock, Miss Brown Eyes thought she might have found a palliative solution: she asked if I ground my teeth. I thought back to occasions when I might have done that: the times when the BBC used the ungrammatical, “Due to…” when they should say, “Owing to…”; an incorrect use of the apostrophe that I had seen outside a greengrocer’s the other day; that article in a magazine when they used “Comprised of…”…Other than that, no, not really. She studied my face carefully, I assumed making a connection between my chiselled features and those of Daniel Craig but, as it turned out, merely looking at my jaw.
“There – you’re doing it now!”
Ah. Not Daniel Craig.
It seems there is a pinnacle on the errant tooth that I keep worrying at, and this may be causing undue pressure when I clamp my jaw. So she is going to grind that off in the hope of solving the problem. When I returned home I discussed it all with the memsahib and it turns out that she had had the aforementioned root canal treatment herself (it had escaped my memory). She said that the only awkward bit was lying in a chair almost upside down for an hour and a half. Thoughtfully (and, I suspect, with some relish), she then went on to describe the whole process in gory detail, from the first pain-killing needle to the injection of the disinfectant. I was not convinced about the painless thing – every man knows that we men are cursed with a lower pain threshold than women (it is a cross that we have to bear, along with the heavy shopping) – but I was a bit more reassured. Anyway, after the grinding session I am to be booked in to see The Man Who Does – some sort of itinerant dentist who specialises in root canal work and travels around various dental surgeries like a tinker selling his wares – to get a second opinion. The intervening period will give me time to raise a mortgage to pay for the treatment. Note to self: must remember not to make that remark to him about a tinker.
Well, I take it back. No sooner had I moaned about the ineffectiveness of the NHS on non-Covid illnesses in the last blog, than Jane received a phone call the next day, arranging an appointment with an ophthalmologist at the hospital on the same day. We were not too sure what to read into that: either it was good news and the ophthalmologist had been sitting around twiddling her thumbs, or it had been judged so urgent that Jane should be seen immediately. We duly drove to the hospital in the Big City, which is about 45 minutes’ drive away, encountering every possible obstruction en route such as dozy pensioners who shouldn’t be on the road, lumbering lorries, road works and cyclists, all of them making Jane fret as she hates being late for anything. Just as we came within ¼ mile of the hospital she gave a sudden cry, clutched the dashboard, and said,
“I’ve forgotten my face mask!”,
and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. If we had had any cloth we would have done some rending of that too. There then followed some scrambling around in the car trying to find something that would do as a face mask: a scarf, a boa, a pashmina, a bag to pull over her head…None of those things was available. My suggestion of her removing her brassière and using one cup as a mask was rejected with a stern look and an accusation of being frivolous. In the end she went into the hospital clutching a grubby yellow duster from the car bearing the logo “Rover Cars”, the aim being to tie it on as a triangle, like someone about to hold up the next Wells Fargo stage coach for Dodge City. She needn’t have worried of course, because the hospital provided a mask as she went in. A pity in a way, as that yellow duster matched her hair quite nicely I thought. Anyway, she came out smiling. The ophthalmologist gave her a very through examination and reported that the cataracts were nowhere near the stage for surgical action, the haemorrhage was extremely minor and nothing to worry about, and there was no need to worry about her blood pressure. What a relief! Now all we have to twitch about is finding the the £875 for fixing my tooth and a further £700 or so to pay for new lenses for Jane’s spectacles; my suggestion that it would be cheaper to saw off the bottoms of beer bottles was not well received. What’s that? Oh, all right: “Thank you NHS”.
Looking back, I suppose I have mentioned the NHS several times in the recent blogs, but it is inevitable in the present situation. Formed in 1948 despite strong opposition from the medical profession, the free-at-point-of-delivery service was created by the then Labour government after a series of studies dating back to 1909 that recommended an improved system of health care and a significant development from the Poor Law that roughly preceded it. The plan was that the NHS would be proactive and everyone’s health would improve so much that corrective medicine would reduce and the cost of the service would reduce with it. Dream on. Today about £150 billion is spent annually on the NHS in the UK, or roughly 20% of every tax-payer’s contribution. I think it is fair to say that the system is very good, though as flawed as any big organisation. It would also be fair to say that it is open to abuse. I remember that, on one of the significant anniversaries of the the service’s formation, a doctor wrote to The Times to say that he was a new NHS GP on the day that the service was formed in July 1948. At five minutes after midnight he received a telephone call, summoning him to a patient in a run-down part of town. When he arrived, he was puzzled to find the family awake, fit and well, and he asked where the patient was. He was told that there was no problem, they just wanted to know if the new, free, NHS really worked. Over seventy years later one still finds Accident and Emergency (A&E) Departments dominated by self-imposed medical conditions such as intoxication, drug abuse or overdoses and one still reads of people attending with trivial problems or demanding sanitary towels or paracetamol. No-one with any sense goes to A&E unless they are dying or have the masochistic desire to sit for twelve hours with a bunch of sick or raving people. I mention all this because the latest plan is, apparently, that we should book an appointment before going to A&E and trials are to be undertaken to prove the proposal. While any proposal that reduces the waiting time in A&E is to be commended, I am baffled as to how an appointment system will work. For a start, who plans to have an accident or a heart attack? On medical appointment systems in general, when is the last time you or I got to see our GP at the appointed time? Finally, as the plan states that people can still turn up on spec and be treated (good to hear), what will be the point of booking an appointment? For what it is worth, I think a better arrangement would be to make more use of the existing Minor Injuries Units in local cottage hospitals to screen out minor injuries and minor complaints, and perhaps have separate units attached to A&E for dealing with drunks and drug victims, paid for by the patient. I shall include those proposals in my manifesto for the new Shacklepin Republic.
It was my sad duty, recently, to write to a colleague whose wife had just died. These things are never easy, for words are hard to come by in such circumstances, but – in this instance – I was struck by another problem: my handwriting had deteriorated significantly. I pride myself on my handwriting and, for that reason, I always write with a fountain pen (I abhor ball-point pens). On this occasion the end result looked like a spider had walked across the page. It dawned on me that, quite simply, I was way out of practice. I am of a generation that always wrote longhand and I was a regular letter-writer, corresponding with my father when he was at sea and, later, with my family when I was at sea myself. All my engineering examinations were completed in longhand (and using a slide-rule, but that is another story). Even typed letters from the ship were drafted in longhand. Any younger person reading this (if any) will probably think that I wrote with a quill pen and stood at a desk – ‘not quite’ is the answer. Now, almost all my communication is by email or text; I only write longhand in ‘thank your’ letters and letters of condolence. And here is another odd thing: as I wrote this condolence letter, I kept waiting for the spelling checker to correct doubtful words, but there wasn’t one, and it didn’t. I had to get out the big Oxford Dictionary from the bookshelf and look words up. That was a distraction in itself and I went spiralling off into the English language for half an hour finding all sorts of words that I had been misusing and all manner of other ones that I could sprinkle into a blog. It would be a great shame to see the art of handwriting die and I must do something to rectify my personal situation, perhaps by writing to a friend with a traditional letter. That will floor them, but I am realistic enough not to expect a written reply: even before the age of computers I found that some people just do not like writing letters. Now where did I put that blotting paper, and who can I surprise?
Jane has recovered from the many bites, blotches and scratches of the last blog, but has not been put off the garden. As I write, she is out there now, between showers, peering under foliage and cutting slugs in half with secateurs. There is none of this humane nonsense of collecting slugs and snails for transportation into the countryside and release with Jane: death is the penalty for any creature messing with her garden and eating her hostas and lupins. She has even been known to go out at night carrying a torch and secateurs, yet dressed in evening wear, to find more interlopers foolish enough to think that the coast is clear. There is something of the night with Jane, literally and figuratively: as a little girl she apparently chased her elder brother around their smallholding with a pig’s eye because he annoyed her once too often (he still has not forgotten it, over 50 years later).
The total of daily deaths attributable to CV19 in the whole of the UK was down to 155 on Tuesday 30 June and it continues to fall. One newspaper has reported, with evident relish and concern, that the gradient of the graph is worryingly beginning to flatten out. I think someone needs to explain to those journalists what an asymptote is; they will be really worried later, when the graph flattens out completely at zero deaths. Up to the end of June 2020, 43,730 people had died from Covid-related illness in the UK, yielding an overall probability of death from CV19 in a population of 66 million of just under 0.07%. The probability of catching CV19 in the UK (whether mild or severe) is currently 0.47%. The total of weekly deaths in the UK is now actually less than the five-year average for this time of year. Significantly, the graphical trend of cases is diverging from the trend of deaths: an extensive programme of testing is identifying cases much better, but you now stand a much improved chance of survival if you do catch CV19 than you did in February, owing to a better understanding of the beast and better treatment. The optimists are beginning to emerge from lockdown like moles crawling into the daylight; the pessimists (which include many of those over 70) are still distinctly cautious. Of those for whom the glass is half full, many are looking forward to US Independence Day for totally different reasons to our cousins across the pond: on that date the pubs and restaurants will open again. The general consensus is that all hell will break loose on that date, with High Streets busy again and roads to the coast clogged. Notwithstanding the general improvement, the city of Leicester has been put back into lockdown because of an apparent localised spike. I wonder if it had anything to do with the Black Lives Matters (BLM) protests, with their total absence of social distancing. I see that the nearby county of Wiltshire has featured in the headlines because of a 300% increase in cases; when you look into it in more detail, however, you find that, in the entire county of over 720,000 souls, the number of cases has gone from one to a grand total of four. Statistically correct, but journalists: don’t you just love them.
I see that President Trump in the USA has been quoted as saying that he has ordered the US government to slow down on Covid 19 testing, as the programme is revealing too many positive cases. I am sure he has been misreported by those pesky journalists. True or not, it reminds me of the story of a local councillor (I cannot remember where) who stated at a council transport committee meeting that if buses kept stopping for passengers then they would never be able to keep to the timetable.
The BLM witch-hunt continues, with institutions still falling over themselves to virtue signal. The latest is the Church of England which, in some churches, is to remove stained glass windows depicting anyone even remotely connected to slavery. On the 3D front, “some statues will have to come down”, according to our trendy Archbishop of Canterbury. In yet a further development, we now read that St Albans Cathedral is to replace the current altarpiece with a pastiche of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper with Jesus recast as black, in respect to the BLM movement. Yes, They are coming for Jesus now. I understand that the artist produced the pastiche as a protest against Jesus “always being depicted with fair hair, fair complexion and blue eyes”. In my 68 years on this planet I cannot say I have ever seen Him depicted like that. Surely Jesus was neither white nor black; if anything, I suppose, he was olive-skinned with black hair and, to my mind, that is how our portraits or sculptures show Him. In a further, totally-off-the-planet allegation, someone has now complained about how the obscure honour, The Order of St Michael and St George is depicted. The emblem shows St George standing on Satan, but apparently the concern is that it looks like a white man standing on a black man’s neck. For heaven’s sake. In Cambridge, a university professor has been promoted despite declaring, “white lives don’t matter”: a statement which undoubtedly is racist, and would be regarded as such if stated the other way. This BLM movement may be well-intentioned, but it is in severe danger of creating the opposite effect to that intended, as resentment grows against spurious or imagined slights. It seems to me that all lives matter, whatever people’s race, creed or sexual orientation. I think some people have too much time on their hands and we should be looking less at each other’s skin colour and more at how we respect others and behave towards each other. Here endeth the lesson (and that’s the last money the Church of England gets from me, by the way).
Right on cue, as we begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel with Covid 19, The Times reports that a new strain of Swine Flu has been discovered and there may be an epidemic this winter. Excellent: I wondered what we would do for Christmas.
We are heavily into “Game of Thrones” again. We first heard about the series some years ago when it was on Sky TV but, not being avid watchers of television, we did not subscribe to that extravagant indulgence. But you know how it is: you hear lots of people waxing poetic about a programme and eventually your curiosity gets the better of you. We finally started watching the DVDs when we were on holiday in France and became totally hooked. When we returned home, we continued watching piecemeal, but lost the flow and continuity, often forgetting where we were and spending half an hour or so in setting it all up again (please tell me that we are not the only people to do this). We didn’t get the final series when it first came out (“How much? You must be joking!”), but have now just ordered it. However, we had forgotten the plot by this time, so have started all over again with long sessions in a darkened drawing room. I must say, it is a jolly good drama.
The Prohibition may be over (Blog 51), but it appears that we are now into famine. I sat down to breakfast this morning, rubbing my hands in anticipation of the latest creation by the Head Chef, and had placed in front of me a large plate with a tiny puddle of yellow mush in the middle, complemented by a single sliver of pink, semi transparent, protein.
“Oh. How nice. Pray, dear, what is this?”, I (more-or-less) said.
“It’s scrambled egg and smoked salmon”
“There doesn’t seem to be much there”
“Yes, it’s only one egg. No toast – it’s carbohydrate. We’re on a diet”
“Since when?”
There then followed a protracted discussion, during which phrases such as “60 grams of salmon”, “five-two diet” and “cutting back” were mentioned. I could not remember discussing any of this. Indeed, the only thing I could remember was suggesting that we skip the usual bowl of fruit this morning, the better to make room for a hearty cooked breakfast. Something seemed to have been lost in translation in the transit down the stairs, from bedroom to Garden Control Tower where we eat breakfast. Conscious of the fact that if I commented any more about the breakfast then either I would be wearing it, or it would be decorating the dustbin, I woofed down this cheeky little repast in thirty seconds flat and filled up the corners (as the hobbits say) with copious amounts of coffee. As we sat afterwards, reading the papers, Jane declared that it had been surprisingly filling.
“Oh, absolutely”, I said.
Ten minutes later she said,
“God, I’m still hungry”.
We just looked at each other.
So here we are. We have had the drought and we have had the famine. I now look forward to the plague of locusts to make my biblical experiences complete. But you know, as I said to a friend the other day, I reckon that – with God’s blessing – I may have only about another 20 years left on this planet. It seems to me that what’s left of life is too short to worry about Covid19, drinking a few glasses of wine, or putting on the odd pound or two. I intend to enjoy life while I can. I must put that proposal to the memsahib, ideally when she is hungry, thirsty or both. I’ll let you know how I get on.
I leave you with a quotation from the author William Golding of Lord of the Flies fame, which I think is very profound:
“I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men. They are far superior and always have been. Whatever you give a woman, she will make it greater. If you give her sperm, she will give you a baby. If you give her a house, she will give you a home. If you give her groceries, she will give you a meal. If you give her a smile, she will give you her heart. She multiplies and enlarges what is given to her. So, if you give her any crap, be …ready to receive a ton of shit!”
– William Golding, British Novelist, Playwright and Poet, 1911–1993
2 July 2020
"A Very Vintage Chap..." 