Dentistry

Tuesday

Houman Barekat

A magnificent set of dentures still leaves little to smile about

From our UK edition

John Patrick Higgins is unhappy about the state of his mouth. His teeth resemble ‘broken biscuits’, a ‘pub piano’, ‘an abandoned quarry’ and ‘Neolithic stones. It’s all I can do to keep druids from camping out on my tongue each solstice.’ So he invests in a series of expensive interventions. He has seven gnashers removed, followed by three root canals, and acquires a natty set of dentures. They feel a bit weird at first (‘it’s like having an internal beak’), but ‘I look like the actor playing me in a Hallmark movie of my life.’ In this slim, refreshingly unpretentious memoir, Higgins, a middle-aged English filmmaker living in Belfast, chronicles his emotions as he undergoes successive rounds of treatment.

Monday

Matt Purple

At war with my pearly whites

I am a dental basket case. When I was a child, my orthodontist used to joke that he could drive a Mack truck between my two front teeth. I didn’t have braces so much as fight a losing battle against the evil telekinetic forces at work in my mouth, which seemed to shift my molars and incisors around at will. This was back in the 1990s when orthodontics was a matter of steel torture devices glued to your teeth — and I had all of them. There was the expander, a kind of bear trap in the roof of my mouth, which every night my mother would tighten by inserting and twisting a key. There was the headgear, the wires that circumnavigated half my head, which my orthodontist was delusional enough to think I was going to wear to school.

teeth

Tuesday

James Snell

Is Britain really ‘on the brink?’

There’s a macabre joke in Britain these days that my friends and family also play. We compete to see who has had to wait the longest for medical treatment. It starts relatively innocuously. People talk of the ordinary things: like having to wait days to get an appointment with a doctor. They call up in the morning at 8 a.m., only to be told that all of the slots are gone. Best of luck tomorrow. Then someone will say that they’re waiting for minor surgery. Perhaps a small corrective procedure. It was put off first for the pandemic, and now is lost amid a sea of backlogged work. They wonder if someone has lost their details in the slush. Normally I win, although not always. My old general practitioner retired before the pandemic, and his practice was transferred over to another doctor.

Thursday

Daisy Dunn

The shocking story of Charles and Mary Lamb: Slightly Foxed podcast reviewed

From our UK edition

The Slightly Foxed podcast, like the quarterly and old bookshop of the same name, is almost muskily lovely. It’s the sort of thing you can imagine listening to with a dog at your feet and whisky by your side in a draughty Mitfordesque folly. Ordinarily, you might attribute its homeliness to the fact that it is recorded around a kitchen table. But with the hosts now socially distanced across the country, and it feeling just as cosy, you realise that the atmosphere must derive from something else. In the latest episode, Philippa, Hazel and Gail were joined down the line by biographer Felicity James to discuss the early 19th-century writers Charles and Mary Lamb.