My Teeth

Despite the general decline of all bodily accoutrements: eyes, ears, nails, joints, I remain intrinsically happy, which I am forced to take as a certain sign of onrushing senility.  My teeth are falling out, not en masse you understand, not even one at a time, but bit by crumbling bit.  Whatever I chew, however soft, I get the tell-tale ‘crunch’ inside my head and the chunk of tooth in my food.  I count myself lucky if the broken pieces don’t manage to break something else.  Generally they try.  This is the most dispiriting of all age-related degradations.

I’m not certain if it is a normal feature of ageing, or merely a symptom of somebody who should have known better than to open beer bottles with his molars in his teens, but either way, I fear I may be all gum before I reach 70.  I picture Spinal Tap playing a concert in the wreckage of my mouth.  It would seem that teeth were not designed to last as long as we need them for.  Perhaps having your food pureed is an evolutionary marker.

When I was a child, I do not remember anything much in the way of ‘dental hygiene’: we all brushed twice a day and seldom ate sweets or ice creams because our parents were ‘not bloody millionaires’, yet we all had a mouthful of fillings.  Why?  Well obviously nothing to do with a NHS dental service that paid per filling and, to my recollection, rewarded good behaviour in the waiting room with a lollipop.  I do not remember ever having a toothache of any sort as a child, but nor do I remember ever visiting the school dentist without emerging with at least one excavated molar and sufficient mercury filling to raise the top of my head when the sun shone.

Amalgam fillings degrade and, as they do, fail to support the thin bone-china casing left surrounding them.  These days I dare not even chew my lip with worry.  In an earlier life I had to be familiar with the Moh’s Scale of Hardness.  On this scale Diamond is 10, Sapphire 9, Topaz 8… whilst at the bottom end we have Gypsum (2), Talc (1) and my teeth (not even worth the effort of giving a number to).

After I left school I continued with my regular dental check-ups, but went probably forty years without needing any kind of work whatsoever – these days I don’t seem to be able to go forty minutes without losing some fragment (either big or small) of tooth.  If the Tooth Fairy operated in adult circles – particularly if she made part-payments – I would be able to buy dentures.

As things stand, my teeth are still up to smiling, although probably not grinning.  I can chew most things, providing they do not have a hardness that is greater than my teeth (see Moh’s Scale above) I believe that an uncooked carrot has a hardness of 2; mashed potato has a hardness that almost exactly matches my molars, and a Curly Wurly (judging purely by the havoc it wreaks within my mouth) a reading of 12,000.

Of all the bits of me that are queuing up to fail, my teeth cause me the greatest angst.  Each time some foodstuff or another partially extracts one of my pearlies I vow never to eat it again.  With the exception of dry roasted peanuts, I succeed.  I do not want to be all gum; I do not want false teeth; I do not want to be one of those people who hisses with every word and most of all I do not want to have to endure the bewildered expression on the face of my dispirited dentist ever again.  She does her best.  She apologises when she gives me the bill.  And I just have to grin and bear it…

N.B. Sorry this is so late – real life impinged…