The tooth is both supporting and compromising those around it, like a thruple gone bad. The impossible question? What to do about it
When you learn a new word in a dental surgery, that’s never because the news is good. This time the environment was so high-pressure that I can’t even correctly remember the vocabulary, because I thought she said “fractional”, and that it meant “you use it to chew food”, but the internet doesn’t agree.
On paper, I should enjoy seeing my dentist because I love her. We first met in the middle of the Greek financial crisis, and she, being Greek, had a lot of insights in this area, and a large number of hardcore leftwing opinions you don’t normally encounter in a dentist. (The primacy of hygiene in the profession seems to attract Conservatives to it; don’t ask me why – I don’t make the rules.) I could never signal how much I agreed with her because I always had a mouthful of equipment, so I would just make affirming noises, and this, it turns out, is the basis for a great one-sided friendship. I ended up extremely affectionate towards her, while she remains broadly neutral about, and occasionally disappointed by, me.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
