Date Archives: Monday March 21st 2005

Cracking a tooth on a frozen Opal Fruit (Starburst for anyone in their teens) caused me yet another visit to the dentist last week. Actually, I had three visits; the first time the dentist was sick and only the hygienist looked at it. The second time there was a gas leak at the dentist, so my dentist had a look at it in reception and told me to come back when the gas had gone away. The third time I went I actually got the work done and my tooth is now fixed up and ready to chew for another few years.

It’s come to annoy me that I’ve been to the dentist hell of a lot over the last few months, having finally lost the plot with the teeth on my lower left side being extremely sensitive I decided to go get them sorted out before xmas. I ended up needing root canal in two of them, which was lovely, and over the course of four appointments either side of the festive period it cost me upwards of ?200.

So there I was, back again only two months later, with my dentist commenting that I’d become a real regular since he took over from my old dentist.

“Tell me about it,” I said “I should be invited to the christmas party.”
“Absolutely,” the smug fucker replied, “you’ve probably paid for the christmas party by now.”

I think that might have been a rookie dentist faux pas, as I cant imagine it’s good practice to remind people how much you’re going to skin them for half an hour’s work/mindless banter with the hygienist.

Anyhow, pain in jaw and wallet in hand, I made my way to reception to pay Marie the ?60 for the Opal Fruit repair. The fact that I knew the name of one of the many receptionists/hygienists brought further ridicule on my situation. You should never be attending the dentist often enough to be on first name terms with them, and certainly not to the point where they’re comfortable enough to say “See you, Rob” as you bid them goodbye.

Normally I’ll read the sum total of one book per year. It’s not an average I work hard to maintain, you understand, it’s just that I’ll really throw myself into anything I’m reading, usually going cover to cover in a short span of time. At the end of a reading frenzy like that I usually cant face another one for some time, hence my one book per year average.

Since the turn of this year, though, I just cant get enough of reading books. I started off the year with The Bone Collector by Jeffrey Deaver, but it was so predictably… shit… that I was really force feeding it to myself, and wasn’t in a great deal of hurry to work my way through it. That’s an alarm bell right there and then, for me. If I’m just not enjoying it I’m quite happy to cut my losses and walk away. If something doesn’t have me gripped by the first chapter or two then I’m quite content with not knowing how it all turns out.

So, after calling it quits on The Bone Collector, and getting back on the horse by reading Frank Skinner by Frank Skinner on holiday, the floodgates have opened. I finished that, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, and Richard Asplin’s Gagged in little over a month. I’m up to 2008’s book quota already and it’s only March 2005.

I’ve hit a bit of a fork in the road, though. Crazy Uncle John asked me to find a book for him called The Facts of Life, which isn’t the sex education tome you’d expect from the title, oh no, it’s a fairly weighty book that deconstructs Darwinism and picks holes in the theory. Quoth Crazy Uncle John; “I have no problem with Darwins Theory of Evolution, other than the way it’s taught in classrooms as if it were fact rather than just a theory.”

I found myself agreeing with said uncle.

I tracked the book down on Amazon and I have it all lined up to follow Gagged, which I finished at the weekend. But then work bought me The Zen of CSS Design by Dave Shea and some chick I’ve never heard of. So now I have a bit of a problem.