Of trauma and toadstools

I bravely said nothing yesterday about the trauma of the over-fired seeded loaf crust and the overhanging dental crown ... but I'm making up for it now. Last night I went to sleep convinced that I'd do further damage to what I felt sure was peridontal ligament damage after chomping down on a hard bit of whole wheat in the loaf I'd just made, sending an electric shock-like wave through the length of my upper jaw. I've had an over-large crown on an upper tooth for a few years now, but no-one has offered to do anything about it and then there was Covid - you know how it's been. When I could barely eat my muesli this morning (I lack molars on the other side) I decided I should perhaps ask for guidance: how long to recover from this sort of thing, for instance. I was taken aback when the dental assistant on the other end of the line said I should just turn up as they had big gaps in today and would I like to come at 2pm?

I'll try to be brief ... a dentist I've never met, a pleasant woman, tapped at my teeth with huge delicacy, linked the problem to the trigeminal neuralgia from which I sometimes suffer, x-rayed my jaw to see if there were any cracks, and drilled away some crown surface from opposing molars to lessen and disseminate the force of a bite. She also told me several times to remember to breathe, and remarked that she could feel the tension in the air ...

The end result is that more teeth now meet and though it's still like having electric wires vibrating when I close them I feel my bite is more normal than it's been for years. Hurrah! My main photo, oddly enough, is for this visit to the dentist: it shows the strange mist on the surface of the Firth of Clyde, through which is ploughing the silly wee boat that is the Dunoon ferry. The frame is the overhanging tree outside the dentist's surgery while I waited to be admitted. About forty years ago I used to sit there with an American naval wife while, as she picturesquely put it, "the little kids played with the rocks in the yard." (The toddlers played with the pebbles in the garden!)

After all this I felt sufficiently energised to walk up Glen Massan at high speed after a chance meeting with a friend delayed us for a full 20 minutes at the foot of the road and Himself gave up before we were halfway up the hill. He returned with his sore back to the car and I bashed on; I met two separate men, one of whom was labouring under the illusion that he could reach Benmore Gardens car park through the glen and the other, newish to the area, wanting to know if this was a good place to walk his wee dog. It struck me after our conversations that this is was utterly contrary to the expectation and fears of lone women these days, though I suspect age has much to do with it.

My extra photo is a collage of some of the amazing toadstools (or whatever) along the way.