The Butcher of Carling

Having already managed to put off my semi-annual dental check-up once, I wasn't really in a position to negotiate when the rescheduled day came around, so off I drove, bright and early, for a visit to my least favourite person in Ottawa: my dentist.

Actually, it's not so much the dentist as the hygienist. She somehow manages to come across all sweetness and light, while prodding and scraping with sharpened metallic incidents, asking me "is that OK" while simultaneously stabbing me in the gum line. I'm sure she is a perfectly nice person when she takes off her white coat, but inside the enclosed space of her "examination room" it's a different matter. 

Why do we subject ourselves to this tyranny of the toothbrush toters? Dentists I can just about see the point of, but the North American fetish for squeaky teeth, white and straight, clean and polished is something I have never really understood. I'm lucky - my teeth have always been excellent (give or take the odd issue relating to an elbow in the face playing soccer). I refuse to have braces (don't need them), only floss when my wife is standing next to me at the bathroom sink, and manage nonetheless to come away with perfectly healthy teeth that need little in the way of remedial work.

I mentioned this to a Covid vaccine denier once. He'd been banging on about it all being a global scheme to insert Bill Gates's DNA into the whole population of the earth (or whatever the bollocks du jour was) and I jumped in with a "Yes - and do you know what dental hygienists do twice a year? Those probes are part of another Soros plan to put alien DNA into us all. Never take the fluroide either: it's a slow-acting poison to sterilise us all." Then I opened my eyes wide and stared at him for a couple of minutes until he walked off.

That - along with making eye contact with people on buses and asking them to come and sit next to me - is my latest way of passing time.