DENTAL REFLECTIONS

“Mm, you’ve got a bit of decay starting under that inlay. Perhaps I can fix that now. Save you coming back. It’s only just started, only take ten minutes. What do you think?”

Now the last time young Mike said this to me half my wisdom tooth disappeared ground to fragments underneath his drill. Rotted from the inside, he had told me. I looked at the ceiling and pondered my habit of eating digestive biscuits at three in the morning as a cure for night starvation and then falling asleep again before I could clean my teeth.

“Do it without anaesthetic shall we? Very small! If it hurts stick your hand up.

Still, I told him to go ahead and to be fair I was genuinely surprised at how little he found to drill. All the same I stuck up my hand.

“It’s not the drill,” I said. “It’s the mirror.” Which, stuck at an awkward angle was doing its best to separate my cheek from my jaw. Mike recommenced.

Dentists - and hygienists too - do like to talk in my experience. Perhaps it’s because they know that with your mouth full of their paraphernalia you can’t talk back. You can only look at the ceiling and listen to the various sounds and wonder whether the ultra-violet light gun will burn a hole in your cheek.

When all is done and the chair lowered and you rinse and clamber out, you are so pleased to be free that you don’t have time to say what you had thought of earlier.

So I thought I’d put it in a blog. What I might have said to Mike or to Jennie had I had the opportunity.

Why (I would have begun) do those engaged in medical practice today now wear an ugly design of uniform that first appeared on the space travellers and people of the future in childrens comics of the fifties and sixties? When they were not wearing space helmets the inhabitants of the Dan Dare - Pilot of the Future - column wore exactly the same outfits as today’s caring professionals. Maybe, I wondered, you travel space when you leave the surgery?

Maybe it is why there are no mirrors in hospitals, have you noticed? Or very few anyway. No matter whether you are a nurse or a dentist or a technician today you wear some species of baggy nylon tunic top and trousers whose putrid pastel shades must be designed designed to frighten the patients into wellness. And on your feet you wear trainers, which may be comfortable, but at which the matrons of yesteryear must turn in their graves.

No wonder the NHS is in a mess, though to be fair even private establishments seem to have thrown over the white, fitted collar-buttoning jacket and dark trousers (for the men) and the recognisably smart and confidence boosting rig for nurses (who used to looked like nurses and could never in a million years be mistaken for anything else), with their capes and sashes and upside down watches pinned to their pinafores.

There is a small problem of what to do with male nurses. But still men can wear capes and look dashing with it. No, I suspect, as in so much else, we have been influenced by developments across the Pond. Dress has become more casual and we have casualised the so-called caring professions. Even the consultants have exchanged the top hat and morning dress in favour of the casual suit - some of the time at least.

The white collar-buttoning jacket I suppose was too restrictive. And always there was the danger of being confused with a chef, a waiter or an admiral in Mediterranean dress. There’s a restaurant in Brussels where all the waiters are dressed as admirals, complete with gold braid and epaulettes on their white coats. Very good waiters they are, too, who know what eating and serving food should be about.

But there was no-one to say all this to as I made my way down to the reception desk, clutching my card and fearful of the depredations about to be made to my bank account. One of the receptionists there has been there as long as I have been going to that practice and that’s more than thirty years. Amazingly, she hasn’t changed a bit in that time. Her classic almond face and beautiful hair have not aged by a day and she still wore the same neat dark navy suit.

I thought of saying that she must have discovered the secret of eternal youth. But as time has not been quite so forgiving to her colleague I thought better of it and simply smiled as I handed over my money and walked out into the morning sunshine.