Day 578: Gnash

Thank you, Tottenham Court Road, via Kate Boo. I kind of know you’re right about this, and I’m certainly almost determined to believe it. No, it never has ‘worked out’, whatever that means, with anyone else, and I’m fascinated to meet the person about whom I can say this. Excited maybe too, but fascinated above all else.

Oh, the power of the mind. I went to the dentist today. Just the clean, clinical smell of whatever it is that dentists’ surgeries smell of so immediately made my hackles rise. Add to that the fact that whatever I’d done to my tooth hurt so much yesterday when caught up in an unlikely mackerel breakfast that I was rigid before I even reached reception. My dentist (and I’d like to keep her) is a hardy, down-to-earth woman in her fifties, I’d say. Big glasses. Persian. No nonsense, to or from.

She told me that I wasn’t able to respond to her properly because I was too tense. She whacked me almost upside down and swung my legs in the air after injecting my gums with numb (I found out afterwards that I’d lost all my colour when it went in, hence the flip – all I noticed was that my thighs had gone weird). She wiggled a crown and made me bite down on metal tools, presented me with the options and the cost, and then drilled the living shit out of a back tooth. It’s amazing what fear can do. That’s what we discussed, legs high, waiting for the injection to kick in. There was hardy any pain but the fear of it had me locked from chest to jaw, all twisting feet and cramps. All in the mind. Not surprisingly, she agreed.

On my route home, I often pass a gardeny, watery area on Canonbury Grove. It’s so-so. It looks like it must be pretty, but I’ve never stopped. At night, so-so turns into delicious thanks to some night-scented blossoms which pump out their rich sweetness into the air and wrap it around me as I cycle by. This brings me joy. Tonight, I remembered this as I turned in. I was already in the throes of bliss when I realised that I couldn’t actually smell it. Maybe the wind was taking it another way, or perhaps the blossom’s passed. Why let that stop me in my tracks, though. Bliss is bliss. I carried on, and enjoyed the sensual glory of my nose, even if imagined.

Jim Crace. Bugger me. I love the way that man writes. He pentamets it up iambically, only not quite rigidly… there’s a rhythm about reading him that dances in my mouth. I feel lifted, carried, held. I love it. In safe hands.