Our first regular dentist was the ancient Dr McIntyre, who was on the first floor off Cathedral Square in the then small but undiminished Christchurch. There was a clanking open-frame lift with pantographic doors, but one felt safer taking the wide polished wooden stairs up to the linoleum landings with their doors of frosted glass. And it took less time, which unfortunately meant that the appointment was not delayed.
Mr McIntyre was round and pink with a white coat and white hair and a hand that trembled. Maybe two hands that trembled quite excessively. The cream enamel dental equipment was driven by a system of belts and pulleys that didn’t actually drive the bits that fast but generated sufficient torque that, should a drill bit catch in a molar, you rotated around the drill with feet outermost spinning at a constant 86 rpm. There were no anaesthetics or needles, just “This may hurt a bit.” And hurt it did, in our world of no fluoride in the water and a diet of grandmother’s toffee and fudge. Mind you it hurt him when we bit his finger, as I recall. The visit to the dentist generated considerable dread and lead to avoidance behaviour and a fortune spent in later years trying to keep some of my teeth in my head.
Hence my eternal gratitude for my current dentist who has resurrected my mouth over time from many a disaster, including breaking a fall through a floor with my mouth. Now that was pain, driving into the city with several front teeth broken under the gum and one just literally hanging from the nerve.
Conversely, as memory gently erodes, one loses the benchmarks of what you were like and what you could do - until the moment when you find yourself in the company of old people and realise that you are one of them and you can’t remember one single name. And they are all your friends. Probably, under the slightest duress I would forget my own name. I know that in one stressful moment I forgot my wife’s.
And at every gathering now there is an extended first introduction and imromptu, which is called the organ recital, where everybody spends far too much time talking about their latest bodily misadventure. Knees, prostates, eyes, intestines, hearts and lungs - a veritable butcher’s shop of symptoms. Or who has gently shuffled off this mortal coil or gone raging into the darkness of the night.
As in the last lines of Shakespeare’s ‘The Seven Ages of Man’ we are on the way to being “ Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”
When I worked I met a lot of people. I know this because I collected their business cards which, the other day, I finally got rid of. There were about 1000 of them from all over the world and to be honest there were very few faces that I could recollect unless I had to met them again and my future, or a free lunch, depended upon it. One or two I know because I still see them in the supermarket or on the bus and thus have to remember their names are Chris and Bruce respectively. Doctor Bruce is memorable for the fact that he introduced me to London beer with the strange idea that I might like it and then had to endure my revenge of dragging him around what turned out to be R B Kitaj’s final exhibition in London. The paintings were memorably good and the beer memorably bad. Which all happened because we had a free weekend in London between meetings. So, not all business trips are an exercise in endurance, too much food, too little physical activity and never-ending sleep deprivation in strange hotels.
Actually the problem with names has been perennial, which was a bit of a curse when I was teaching for, as I was reminded the other day, one of two things that makes you memorable as a teacher is being able to remember the names of your pupils. At this I was a (memorable) failure. The kids knew I struggled to know their names unless they were incredibly talented, incredibly evil or astoundingly stupid.
Despite everything you might think about the northern suburbs, most kids were not. They were surprisingly nice, normal and well intentioned, which meant that, even though they deserved it I was scratching for names, even though I kept the most scrupulous notes on them all. Were the notes, at the end of the school day, about the right person? When I stopped teaching and went and did a job that earned more money, there were places that I had to avoid because there were kids that I had taught who remembered my name…… but there was no way that I could remember theirs.
By the way the other thing which makes you a memorable teacher is being able to teach, which is much harder than it seems.
The obvious thing to do, as a much more diligent person that I pointed out, was to photograph all the kids and paste them in you attendance and mark roll. That’s what gets you to be principal of a school.
But now I wonder, did I really write a report that stated that the child was a good argument to make birth control retrospective? It is not impossible, but I don’t really remember.