Simply Sue: The Tooth Is Out There
"Things got off to a bad start with the dentist when I nearly ampdutated his thumb...'' Sue Papworth tells a painfully delicious tale of a tooth disaster, somewhere in France.
I have a mouthful of smuggled gold.
Well, not full exactly, but there is a foreign nugget plumbed in to my upper jaw on a sort of raw plug that came undeclared through Her Majesty’s Customs some years back.
It was all the fault of a rogue piece of Gruyere cheese.
I was camping in a forest just outside Gruyere, in a collapsing caravan which I’ll tell you all about some other time. And I ate a Swiss cheese sandwich. It was a mistake.
When I went into the chemist, they eventually stopped laughing when they realised that this strange woman really was trying to say “Excuse me, but can you direct me to a dentist as I have broken a tooth on a piece of soft cheese.’’ She was just hampered by the fact that she was trying to speak French whilst holding the tooth together with her tongue.
Things got off to a bad start with the dentist when I nearly amputated his thumb. His English was a bit like my French, and he’d got “close’’ and “open’’ back to front. The more he yelled “Close your mowt!’’ the more I sank my fangs in.
When we sorted that out and he reached the relevant gnasher, I hit the ceiling. It got a bit fraught after that.
To cut it as short as I wish it had been, when he applied a drill (and after he’d dug my head out of the plaster), the entire tooth exploded. He yelled “Merde! C’est une catastrophe!’’, which I was able to translate even in my elevated state, and I ended up some traumatic while later with a solid gold Swiss tooth enamelled to match its neighbours, courtesy of AA Travel Insurance. Rawplugged into my face.
I developed the abscess under it later.
There was a hazy bit next involving German-speaking nuns and an injection somewhere in the small hours, and the next day the dentist and I taught each other some novel bits of each others’ language when he pulled the blasted thing with a pair of pliers. We both ended up in orbit.
Anyway, by the time I reached customs at Dover, with the offending bit of bullion in cotton wool in a matchbox and the EEC aspirin mountain in my bloodstream, I would happily have driven through the green channel and sixteen battalions of militia with the Koh I Nor diamond up my jumper.
It’s the truth your honour, and I’m sure Her Majesty will forgive me.
