One thousand, seven hundred pounds. I simply couldn’t believe it as I walked away from my dentist’s surgery. I kept saying it over and over in my mind as I crossed the ancient pedestrian bridge over the picturesque river in our nearby Quaint Little Town, oblivious to the sunshine, the birdsong and the general promise of a lovely day: one thousand, seven hundred pounds. That was my dentist’s bill for the repair of two crowns. I think it is the most I have ever paid for dental work. I had approached my dentist several weeks before with a complaint about some roughness in one of my teeth, and she had diagnosed that one of my crowns was cracked and needed replacing. She ground off the roughness as a temporary measure and then gave me a quotation for the replacement, which was an eye-watering £850. It seemed that I had no choice so I accepted it. Now, on the big day as she rummaged around in my mouth, the dentist cheerfully announced that the tooth behind the errant crown was cracked too, so she would do both at the same time. Naively, I assumed that she meant she would do both crowns for the same price, or at least with a discount. Silly boy. It was one crown, £850; two crowns £1,700. On the plus side, the procedure was physically painless and completed in ninety minutes; on the minus side, it will clear us out of most of our hard-earned savings. Non-British readers may wonder why dental work is not free under the National Health Service (NHS) like most other health care in the UK. The answer is that there is a dearth of dentists in Britain signed up to provide NHS dental care; they are as rare as hen’s teeth, probably because the NHS declines to pay the market rate for treatment. We go to a private dentist because we can (normally) afford it and it releases the few NHS dentists to help those less well off (feel free to submit my name to the Pope for a sainthood). We cannot afford dental insurance, but we do subscribe to a healthcare cash plan, which pays all dental bills up to £250 each, per year. Usually, this easily funds our regular checkups and hygienist sessions, but not this time. Still, it will reduce my bill to £1,450, so that’s all right.
I have been spoilt of course. For most of my adult life I have been cared for by the Naval Medical Service, ranging from the lowest Medical Assistant in a frigate, through to top surgeons or physicians in an aircraft carrier. The bigger ships also carried a dentist, and I can still remember being treated as the ship pitched and rolled in a seaway, the dentist steadying himself by locking his legs around the pedestal of the treatment chair. He had obtained a brewery sign from somewhere, and this was stuck on the deckhead above the chair so that, as you laid back, you read the words, “Take Courage”. I used to be terrified of the dentist and would scream the place down when the day of appointment came (and that was when I was thirty). However, dental surgery has improved enormously in the last sixty-odd years and a visit never bothers me – until now. Dear oh dear: one thousand, seven hundred pounds. The amount is still rolling through my brain.
As I sat in the Breakfast Room (aka the Orangery or Garden Control Tower) in the sunshine, sipping my usual cup of black coffee and reading the depressing news in The Daily Telegraph, I heard the kerflip-kerflop of Jane’s sandals and detected a whiff of coconut suntan oil. Without looking around, I realised that summer had officially arrived. Sure enough, she duly appeared wearing a summer skirt, with bare legs and a light suntop. The weather does, indeed, look promising at last though the wind remains rather cool.
We have just returned from two weeks on the boat in Kingswear, where the weather had generally been good, but the wind rather chilly. Most of our time was spent tidying, cleaning and polishing in preparation for putting the boat up for sale, and the dreadful deed has finally been done. Yes, we have crossed the Rubicon and she is now on the internet seeking offers of a modest sum. Our final day in Kingswear was characterised by the local water supply being infected by a parasitic contamination called cryptosporidium, affecting the area around Brixham (including our marina) and causing diarrhoea and sickness. Contamination of mains fresh water is, thankfully, an extremely rare occurrence in the UK, where we take clean potable water coming out of our taps for granted. As we left Devonshire, bottled water was being distributed to the residents of the Brixham peninsula and people were being told to boil the water from their taps while the cause of the infection was being traced and rectified. As I write, two weeks later, the probable cause of the contamination has been identified as a faulty air valve in a farmer’s field that presumably sucked tiny remnants of cow faeces into the reservoir; however, the entire fresh water distribution around Brixham is still being flushed and some residents are still having to boil their water. Oh dear – I had only just filled the boat’s freshwater tank. I suppose the nasties are swimming around in it right now: a quarter of a tonne of dodgy water that will have to be flushed out and replaced. Fortunately I have also just purchased a General Ecology Water Purification System from the good old USA, which claims to filter out all bacteria, cysts, crypto, viruses, particles, tank taste and odours. It is probably the last innovation I will buy for the boat – I hope it works.
How much does a human leg weigh? Any guesses? I have no idea either, but my estimate would be about ten stone each, judging from the extreme fatigue we encountered during a seven mile walk in the English countryside the other day, dragging and lifting each leg through long grass for almost the whole way. When we got back home, both of us collapsed in a heap, totally exhausted – a state of malaise that lasted just one minute for me because I suddenly had to leap up, suffering the most appalling cramp in my thigh muscles, which was absolute agony. Four painkillers and a hot bath later I was able to hobble down the stairs to a cooling glass of Pimms on the patio. The whole thing was astonishing – all that fatigue after only seven miles; we have walked fifteen before now and not suffered as badly. The thing is, when you look at the verdant pastures of England from the car or an aeroplane it always seems so flat and green and inviting, like a golf course. Walking across it, however, can be a different story as we had just discovered. The odd thing is, we had done this particular walk several time before, though not recently. It was never a doddle, being up hill and down dale and usually involving ploughed fields, cattle and mud. However the route is a pleasant ramble, getting us a way from the noise of our fellow human beings and enabling us to appreciate the beauty of the English countryside. This time it was different, for the grass in almost every field we walked across had been allowed to grow to knee or even waist height. Superficially, this sounds wonderful as one imagines those television advertisements of young lovers running towards each other through the high grass before embracing and later slapping butter on their sandwiches or whatever is being advertised. In practice, lifting and dragging your legs through the stuff tires you out after only a few steps. We must have slogged through acres of grass, and not on just one farmer’s land. Why the farmers had not cut the stuff down for silage or hay, or let their cows or sheep loose on it is a mystery.
Fortunately, there were perks to the expedition that made it worthwhile. The hedgerows were awash with colour as sorrel competed with cow parsley, clover and cranesbill to proclaim the coming of summer. Aside from the slog of walking, it was delightful to be out there and to take in the views around us, with not another human or a car in sight and nothing but the birdsong to disturb the peace. As I have mentioned before in these blogs, we in England and Wales are blessed by the provision of designated ancient public footpaths and bridlepaths on which we can walk (or horse-ride) across farmland and moor with impunity, stiles, bridges or gates being provided for that purpose. In return, we are expected to keep to the paths or bridleways, shut gates behind us, leave no litter and stop our dogs from worrying livestock. There is also a tacit understanding that walkers and riders walk around the edges of fields rather than pedantically take the direct marked paths across growing crops. It is not a bad system, even if some stiles are badly maintained, some gaps in hedges are overgrown and some farmers liven up a country stroll by putting a bull, a herd of cows or a pigsty on the route. A Canadian friend of mine once told me that if you wander across private farmland over there you are likely to get a blast of salt from a shotgun; my cousin in the USA remarked that you would get blasted with more than salt if you wandered across the prairies in the ‘States. Returning to our little adventure, we had decided to take a picnic with us (guess who had to carry the rucksack): nothing fancy, you understand – just a flask of tea, some egg sandwiches and a couple of jam doughnuts to wash the tea down. This modest repast began to dominate our minds as we reached the halfway point of the circuit and there was much debate as to where we should pitch our temporary camp. A convenient bench at a rural crossroads where our route crossed a busy trunk road seemed attractive until we had experienced the joy of cars screaming past at 60 mph; we soon abandoned that little oasis and pressed on, back onto the fields and into the long grass. Eventually, we settled down for our picnic on a lush patch of grass next to a solar farm and under an electricity pylon, with 400,000 volts of power crackling overhead (we were hungry, so ‘needs must’). This brings me to another common myth: the comfort and joy of a British picnic. We are all familiar with the scene: a grassy field, the tartan rug set out on the ground with a smiling family sitting on it, selecting choice items of game, chicken legs, pork pies, cucumber sandwiches and cake from a wicker picnic basket, a flask of steaming tea at hand. Have you ever actually had a picnic like that? I think the thing is a complete myth. In our case, we did not have the tartan rug or any of the other impedimenta – just a plastic bin bag to sit on and a rucksack with the flask of tea, the sandwiches and the doughnuts. For a start, it was hard to sit down on the ground in our state of fatigue and – erm – mature years. Jane executed a sort of tottering articulated movement like a circus elephant about to kneel down, then collapsed into the long grass like an android suffering a power failure. She became virtually invisible from ten feet away. As I joined her by the same undignified manoeuvre, our backs collided because I was aiming for the same minuscule black bin bag that she was sitting on. This drew forth a few heated words, during which unkind things were said about the size of my gluteus maximus, but that dispute paled into insignificance when the next pitfall of the traditional picnic revealed itself: it is nigh on impossible to be comfortable while sitting on the ground unless you practise yoga or can still sit cross legged – you have to prop yourself up somehow. Try as we might, we could not achieve this using our hands, so we ended up sitting back-to-back in a sort of uneasy, grudging, truce, food and tea being passed by touch alone over our shoulders. We were not pestered by wasps, spiders, flies or other pests but, on the other hand, let us just say that the picnic was not the relaxing experience of folklore, though the sustenance was welcome. But wait – there is more: after securing our vacuum flask, wiping our hands and stowing our rubbish we then found that we could not get up. All manner of contortions and positions were tried, with the two of us cavorting around in the long grass on all fours like hippopotami, trying to achieve the perpendicular. In the end, through superhuman effort and the aid of my walking stick as a prop, I managed to heave myself up. I was then able to help pull Jane up to join me, though narrowly avoiding being pulled back down again to join her on the ground. What a team? What a farce! Next time, we will find a convenient log or rock. Or maybe I will be ordered to carry a pair of folding canvas chairs as well as the rucksack. C’est moi, le banquier et l’âne.
As I wrote in Blog 42, there is a management technique aimed at keeping you on the back foot that is sometimes practised by the Commanding Officers of HM Ship. It runs on the general lines of:
(Self) “Right sir, my team has screwed the starboard propeller back on, we’ve pumped out the After Machinery Space, the shipwrights have welded a patch over that hole in the port bow, I’ve found a cure for the common cold and I think I may have a solution to world poverty”
(CO) “Yes Horatio, but have you sent off that defect list yet?”
I was reminded of this approach last Monday when my dear wife returned from her weekly games of mahjong and bridge with the other ladies of her coven. While she is away on Monday afternoons I am left to my own devices to indulge in all manner of otherwise discouraged pastimes, such as putting my feet up and watching a black and white war film on the television while drinking tea and munching a corned beef and chutney sandwich made with white bread. On this particular afternoon I was aware that there were all manner of outstanding jobs to be done because of our absence from home on the boat, so I forswore The Dam Busters on the television and postponed the tea in order to get up to date. I have to say that I was quite pleased with myself when the memsahib reappeared, which was probably the cause of my downfall. The conversation went like this:
(Self) “Hello dear, I hope your games went well. I’ve done all the ironing, put a new load of washing on, swabbed down the floors upstairs and down, vacuumed the stairs, fixed the towel rail that had come loose, cleaned out the extractor fan in the bathroom, cured the electrical fault in the table lamp and peeled the potatoes for supper”
(Jane) “Yes, Horatio, but have you emptied the dishwasher?”.
It’s true – you couldn’t make this up. And she hasn’t even done the Royal Navy’s Commanding Officer’s Qualifying Course at Whale Island.
On the political front, the prime minister has asked the King to dissolve Parliament and we are all set for a UK General Election on 4 July. This is the cue for wall-to wall media coverage on all things political, a freeze on any new ventures (known as ‘in purdah’) by the civil service and, on the whole, boredom, cynicism or indifference on the part of the British public. The signs are that the result will be a Labour victory though not because the Labour Party will be much better, but rather because the (ruling) Conservative Party deserves to lose. The party has lost a lot of its traditional supporters because its policies are so very similar, in many areas, to those of the Labour Party. Worse than that, the present government appears not to be able to control the country through the mechanism of government. For example, the Health Secretary seems unable to stop the NHS calling mothers ‘chest feeders’; the Education Secretary seems unable to stop schools from teaching school children homosexual technique; the Justice Secretary seems unable to build enough prisons; the Chancellor of the Exchequer seems unable to get HM Revenue and Customs staff back into their offices from home; the Home Secretary seems unable to combat lawlessness and anti-semitism on our streets; and no minister seems able to get the civil service to do as it is told. I am not at all convinced that the Labour Party will do a better job, but there it is. Whichever party wins, the new government will still be faced with the fiscal problems of the huge debt clocked up by paying people to stay at home during Covid; a working population that demands the right to work for fewer hours, or from home, or both; and a significant section of the working-age population, with a misplaced sense of entitlement, subsisting entirely on benefits. Who to vote for? No idea, but I do intend to vote for someone – it is a privilege that not every citizen of the world has, and it is a right fought for by my ancestors.
So – by the time you receive the next blog the UK will have a new government; Jane and I will be recovering from cryptosporidium because that American anti-viral water filter will not have worked; I will be bankrupt but have perfect teeth; and we will all be basking in a hot English summer; or not.
Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention that £860 optician’s bill for those new rinky-dinky, frameless, varifocal, titanium spectacles that turn grey-green in ultra-violet light. Thank heavens it’s only money, that’s what I say.
26 May 2024
"A Very Vintage Chap..." 