A Sunny Dawn

Well, I've taken the plunge. I've hit the vanity phase of the mid-life crisis and decided to undergo a course of mildly painful self-mutilation in the form of cosmetic surgery. Well of a kind I suppose. You see when I was a kid circa 11 years of age my upper canine teeth popped through one day, a little early you might say as the previous incumbent milk canines hadn't quite fucked off at the time.

So I ended up with a dual set of upper canines for a while. Unfortunately because of this unscheduled appearance the new canines sat proudly atop the milk ones thus actually existing at the top of the gum rather than the bottom. Unknownt to me at the time, the teeth on the bottom jaw were conspiring to recreate Tombstone Cemetery and ended up at an interesting mathematical set of different angles. My parents packed me off to the dentist where at the tender age of 12, life stretching out in front of me, a time of discovery and teenage angst as mates entered puberty before me, proudly displaying their newly honed bodies and hairy bits in the showers at school, I was given the choice - Removable "quick win" braces to pull the upper canines down, or "train track" cast iron appliances to fix them long term and give me a lovely set of pearly whites. Faced with the 70's school culture of being mercilessly ripped to shreds, called Jaws or MetalMouth and probably never having a girlfriend.....ever... meant that the cowards choice of the quick win braces won through. At that time we didn't know what "EnglishTooth" was as the yanks so graciously refer to this sceptred isles indigenous populace's crooked yellowing and generally ropy teeth. We were happy in our tobacco and beer stained apathy around dental hygiene. And so fo 32 years I have lived with crooked teeth. Not hideous, but not straight either. And after all this time my vanity and current mental fragility has pushed me into the world of adult orthodontics. And it is like cosmetic surgery because it is pure vanity that is driving me. My confidence through work has dipped. Of course this means that the writing increases because I have more time to think and more issues to mull over. But ostensibly this is just like someone having a nip or a tuck, or a boob job, or liposuction. I have started to wonder when meeting new people whether or not they are looking at my avant garde dental layout, and what decisions about me they then make because of it. To be honest I've been looking at this for a while now, but only recently decided to go for it.

So, for 2 years I'll be wearing some rather fetching half stainless steel, half clear ceramic weights on my teeth clamped by fine gauge steel wire. A year for the top row, a year for the lower row and some follow up work to prevent the "muscle memory" snapping them back to their comfort position of the last 32 years.

A snip at £3450 wouldn't you say?

Later, GrocerJack