The chattering classes

Sunday 19 November 2017 - 9:37 am
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Three days ago I was finally furnished with a set of dentures, following a two month delay. For some reason my birthdays and their gifts always seem to be heavily delayed. Good job I am patient in that department.

This is the first time in my life I have had properly straight teeth, as every previous attempt had failed for some reason. Call it sabotage if you will. When my "adult" teeth came through, they did so in that beloved one-behind-the-other fashion. Nothing made the kid so miserable as not having straight ones.

At the age of 13 I was equipped with a plate brace to start things off. This then progressed to the utterly fashionable railway track brace. Progress was all well and good. However at 16, the orthodontist decided that my teeth were a little too soft to continue yanking and cranking, so the brace came off with the job only being half done.

The orthodontist was not wrong. At 17 my teeth started to break one by one. I had my own personal domino rally in my mouth. Still young, yet with gaps in my mouth. Crowns were fitted, which eventually fell out. It became a losing battle trying to maintain what was left, and to top it all, those that remained began to move back to their old positions again. It was literally a curse. For Heaven's sake, I even broke a tooth while eating pasta. Apart from soup, I cannot think of any food softer than pasta!

Come the late 90s I just gave up. NHS dentistry became about as scarce as rocking horse droppings, and the only way forward was private dentistry with prices that only amount to blackmail. Pay through the nose or suffer - your choice. I abandoned all hope of saving them. Why fight a losing battle?

This summer I somehow managed to find a dentist that was willing to do some work on the NHS. Talk about a lucky find. The result is a partial/almost full denture that fills those gaps on the top row and actually looks presentable. My task now is learning to say: "Sophisticated sister sings for the soldiers of the soccer team", and of course learning to eat. Only at this late age of 45 does my mouth look acceptable to the shallow b*stards out there.

I am only grateful that my partner of seven years decided she could love me even though I had a mouth like sh*t. I don't call her a jewel for nothing. She had the sense to consider the actual person - which is so much more than can be said for so many women out there. In a world of people who are hellbent on looks, she had the heart and the brain to actually read the f*cking manual!

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