You are currently browsing the monthly archive for July 2009.
I’ve always been amazed at how the media manage to blow things so completely out of proportion, how a bit of a sniffle gets turned into a murderous epidemic, and one fairly uninteresting woman suffering the same sad fate as hundreds of other anonymous women suddenly manages to fill every page. And inversly, how some perhaps more deserving things get completely deprived of the oxegen of publicity. It is a strange and mystifying thing to me. Not the motivation for these arguable choices, that’s pretty simple: bums on seats. Paper and magazine sales, listeners or viewers, and therefore advertising revenue. That’s it. No, what puzzles me is how we, the apparently discerning public, get duped into watching/listening/reading this crap time and time again. I guess the operative word there is “apparently”.
On Wednesday July 29th 2009, people were born, people died, some other people did some stuff that was really quite important, while most people did their usual boring stuff. And David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party, said what may or may not be a slightly rude word on a national UK radio breakfast show, maybe by accident. Or maybe not. You can listen to it here, if you don’t already know what I’m talking about.
What surprised me the most, and certainly seemed to surprise most of those involved, was that this tiny, mild, 4-letter word warranted such a weather balloon of media coverage, to such an extent that Christian O’Connell was invited to appear live on Sky News that very evening to give his opinion on the whole thing. Also, Mister Cameron felt it necessary to issue an official apology for turning the airwaves so blue (surely Tories should be aiming to turn everything blue?). I personally think he shouldn’t be apologising for the use of the word itself, but for daring to utter such a feeble pun. The person who wrote it and fed it to him should be shot. Twice. In a painful and non-lethal part of his anatomy.
I watched a bit of the coverage on Sky News, I’ve read some of the reactions that appeared on the interwebs, including a rather neat note by Tony “Piglet” Moorey on the Absolute Radio blog. And yet no-one so far seems to have mentioned the subject Cameron was actually talking about: politicians using Twitter.
Basically, what he was saying, if I may draw aside the twat-pun-induced veil of shock for a moment, is that politicians shouldn’t use Twitter any old how, because its instantaneous nature makes it all too easy to say something rather silly in a public place without thinking.
Looks like that’s also true for the radio, isn’t it, Mister Cameron?
If there’s one thing I learned from organising our wedding, almost 6 years ago now, it’s that – like Uma Thurman in Kill Bill – the bride shouldn’t take shit from anyone.
I also learned that if you plan to disappear from the reception and hide out in a secret location for your wedding night so people will leave you alone, it’s a good idea to make sure you have a change of clothes for the next day, because having to put your wedding dress back on the next morning will make you feel incredibly silly.
Seriously, if it’s your wedding, you should make it yours, not the one your parents, in-laws, friends or old Aunt Hilda want you to have. Not the one you think they would enjoy. The one you want. It’s probably the one and only day you’re going to get that’s all about you, and you’re going to be planning it for weeks, months, if not years, so screw everyone else. Not literally, of course, or things could get messy when it comes to the vows.
That, of course, is not to say that you should be totally inconsiderate of people’s feelings or requirements. But you should really only accommodate the reasonable and genuine ones, a vegetarian option for the meal, wheelchair/buggy access, things like that. If you want to get married in a black dress on a cliff with Metallica playing in the background, do it. If you want to hire David Hasselhoff to give you away, hell, just do it! And don’t go inviting someone you really loathe just because Aunt Hilda will disown you if you don’t, even though she hates them too. Unless Aunt Hilda is incredibly old and wealthy and has been coughing a lot lately.
Why am I bringing up this subject now? Well, we were invited to a wedding about a month ago, and I’m writing this to remind myself of my own advice. The thing to remember as the bride (or the groom if you’re one of those grooms who gives a damn) is that everyone will bitch about your wedding. No matter what you do, who you try to please, they’ll all find something to criticise. For example, if you have a wedding list, they’ll complain about being stuck to a list, if you don’t, they’ll moan about having no idea what to get you, if you go for the money option you’ll be a pair of cheap-arses, if you ask them to give it to charity, you’ll be a pretentious do-gooder. You can’t win, you won’t, get used to that idea. In fact that doesn’t just apply to weddings.
So, all that said, here’s what this particular couple did wrong. Well, not much, it must be said. The whole thing was pretty well organised, tasteful (well, until the dancing/activities got started at the reception, but that was to be expected) and the food was great. There was a bit of griping about some people not being invited, or invited in that particularly cunning way that gets the bride and groom off the hook by making perfectly sure they won’t come. It’s quite an art. But hey, as I said, it’s their wedding, they’re paying for it, they get to pick and choose. Fair enough.
No, the thing they did wrong is much more obvious than that. A great classic of the very slippery discipline of the table plan. The old “it seemed like such a good idea at the time…”
They mixed people up.
At a wedding, you never get to spend time with the bride and groom, that’s pretty obvious. So if you only know a few people there, you will kind of want to stick together. Especially if you don’t see them often, you’ve flown in from abroad just for the wedding, you’ll only be seeing them for a few hours, and among them happens to be your little godson who’s growing up so fast. Nope. We ended up spread as far away as possible from the 5 other people we knew. Stuck at the end of a half-empty table with the very creepy (amateur*) photographer and a young lady who had something of the Luna Lovegood for those who have any knowledge of Harry Potter. Never has there been smalltalk so mortifying.
I know it may seem like a good idea in theory, to mix people up to get them all to know each other, but seriously, it doesn’t work. It’s just painfully awkward. It just ends in a lot of shy and middling attempts at conversation, or if you’re unlucky enough to end up in the vicinity of a Wedding Bore**, in you cringing and smiling politely for hours on end.
So, please, if you’re organising your wedding, make it your own, do it your way, but I’m begging you, don’t try to be smart about the table plan.
*You know, the kind of amateur photographer who is not only incredibly boring as he drones on about technical photography stuff to try to impress you with his knowledge for hours, but who also has a suspicious number of long-range telephoto lenses. And night-vision goggles. For bird watching. Possibly.
**Usually someone’s Uncle Alan, who has so many fascinating and not-embarassing-at-all (and hardly ever slightly racist/sexist/generally offensive) stories about his holidays at nudist camp and all the high jinks he and Auntie Elaine get up to in their spare time.
Have you ever noticed how we tend to sublime things we look back fondly on? How you always remember things as being so much better than they actually were?
The other day, I bought a 99 flake from an ice-cream van. The flake was rock hard, the ice-cream pretty boring and the cone was like wet cardboard. And I realised that it had always been the case, that cult figure of my childhood had always been a boring blob of white-flavoured ice-cream dumped in a cardboard cone, with a stick of chocolate shoved into it to make it look interesting. You know what? The flake does absolutely nothing. It doesn’t actually make the thing any nicer, because all you do is pull it out and eat it straight away. And then you’re left with the cold white blob in a vaguely edible carton.
There are so many childhood favourites that I missed – maybe even more once they became unavailable suddenly when I moved to France in my early teens – that I have tried again recently and been crushed by their lack of conformity to my memories. Battenburg cake, fondant fancies, sherbert fountains (I’ve never liked licquorice, what was I thinking?), turkish delight, those iced biscuit ring things… They all turned out to be too sweet, too sharp, or just completely different to what I remembered.
Actually, forget the clouds of childhood recollection warping your perspective, what about cupcakes? I mean look at them! They sit there, all innocent looking, charming you with the alluring curves of their sexy, coloured icing, and their liberal doses of sprinkles, egging you on and buttering you up until you succumb to their loveliness. So you buy one, and you bite into it, and all you get is a nose covered in sickly sweet butter icing and a mouth full of cake that will ineffably turn out to be too dry, too sweet or completely the wrong flavour. And not content with pulling this cunning trick once, these satanic lovebuns seem to contain some form of brain-control drug that makes you instantly forget about any previous disappointment on sight and allows them to fool you again and again!
People of the interwebs, we must unite to fend off the falsehoods of these cunning foodstuffs! We must say no to the enticing sugars and alluring colours, set aside the false memories and defend the temples that are our bodies from the ranks of the sweet! Rise up, friends, companions! Rise up and…
Ooh, is that a cupcake!?
I’ve been told I should write. So I thought I should write about that.
For the last 11 years now, Hubby has been nagging me about it, but we all know husbands aren’t there to be listened to or anything silly like that. I mean seriously, that would be insane, not to mention dangerous. So I’ve dutifully ignored him so far. But then, every now and again some un-biased (or at least less-biased) person goes and says something along the lines of “that was good, you should write a book!”.
Ah, well, here’s the thing. Even if I was to admit that what I write is any good, I’m absolutely hopeless at finishing things. Unless I have to, of course. I mean, if I have a task at work, and it needs completing, it’ll be done, and knowing me, probably way before the deadline, because I like to get things out of the way. Because I’m lousy at finishing things, and if I don’t finish them quickly, I’ll forget, or start procrastinating, or lose interest or a subtle brew of all three. I also have no patience whatsoever, if something has to be done, it has to provide results fast, or I’ll get annoyed and drop it. And that is exactly what seems to have happened to all my great personal writing projects, including at least 5 Nobel-worthy novels.
Could I write a full-scale publishable book? I honestly have no idea. And if I say here and now that I can’t, I know it will come back and bite me in the arse once I’ve become a multi-million copy selling star of literature. And if I dare say I think I could, well, I have no doubt that the 3 people to read this would gladly point the finger and laugh as I fail miserably… But hey, maybe one day I’ll try. Again.
So this is my latest attempt at “you-should-writing”. Blogging is so far the best format I have found for my little outbursts of verbal creativity. I can make each post as long as I like (within reason), and there may just be a chance that I can give each one a roughly decent ending before it becomes too boring or I forget what I was talking about in the first place. And unlike scribbling in a notebook (as much as I looove notebooks) there is a chance that someone will read it. Maybe.
I must admit, being able to do it on the iPhone is a great help and a luxury I deeply enjoy. With my handy little WordPress app I can jot down my ideas as they come, rework them until they’re in a roughly presentable form and then upload them directly into your poor unsuspecting eyes. I probably wouldn’t write even half as much without my Pocket Brain.
But what should I write about? Inspiration has always been both the blessing and the curse of all us “creative types”. It tends to come in flashes, I find, but whether or not that shining vision will last long enough for you to see the project to fruition is what really makes all the difference. Most of the time, my cunning plans barely last long enough to reach the “scribbled down on a scrap of paper” stage.
A few years back, I joined an online wargame that a friend of mine had developed, it had a text-only interface, and a very simple game play system, so all the fun was in the creating and developing of your character, writing short stories and role-playing in the “Tavern” chatroom. This provided hours of fun and plenty of inspiration, as I was constantly interacting with other characters, quite a few of whom enjoyed writing as much as I do. However, as one does, after a good few years, I tired of the game, spent less time on the site, and wrote less. But I must say that the medieval-fantasy-comedy mixture I indulged in at the time was very pleasant to write, as much as it is to read, Pratchett fangirl that I am…
So, am I going to start producing pages of sword-wielding orcs slipping on banana skins? Meh. Not here in any case. I think this blog is pretty much going in the direction I want it to go in, but please, dear reader(s?), do tell me if there are things you would like to see more or less about! – Ah, I have just seen that the most popular search terms that have led people to my blog this past week were “bruno cock”. Oh well, if you so desire…
“Long ago in days of yore, it all began with a god named Thor. There were Vikings and boats and some plans for a furniture store…”
So sings Jonathan Coulton the Great, and right he is, as always. However, here in Dublin, the plans for a furniture store have been so long in coming to fruition that there is even a successful comedy called Waiting for Ikea that has been running in local theatres for a good few years now. But that play is about to be outdated at last.
Today is the Big Day, Ikea is finally launching its very first shop in the Republic of Ireland. And I was honestly that close to taking a day off work just to be there. I wouldn’t have been the only one.
The saga surrounding the installation of Ikea on Irish soil has been nothing short of epic, in pure Scandinavian style. Seriously, the Vikings had much less problems settling here back in the day than Ikea have had getting planning permission alone. Maybe if they had stuck to the old traditions and burned down An Bord Pleanala… But let’s not get bogged down in that, it is not for me to tell that tale, for it is boring and would take me ages to type out on my iPhone keyboard.
Today, as I was saying, is a Big Day for the Irish people, for it means independence at last, no more 2 hour trips up all the way up to Belfast, where the money looks strange and the people talk funny! As for me, well, I can finally get back to my old habits: buying tons of stuff I don’t need but really really want, and stocking up on frozen meatballs and lingonberry sauce.
When I was about 7-ish, I fell in love. With a chair. I don’t know if it was an Ikea chair, but it was a Swedish chair, and it was unlike any other chair I had ever seen (very similar to the iconic Ikea Poäng chairs). I thought it was the coolest thing ever. It had a matching footstool. And it belonged to a Swedish family who had lots of cool Swedish stuff. They were friends of my parents, had children the same age as my sister and me, so we spent loads of time at their house. I guess that’s when it all started, although back then, and in fact, until I was about 18, I had no idea Ikea even existed. But scandinavianness had me hooked. And so did design.
Ever since Ikea opened a store in Toulouse, minutes away from where I lived, my friends have jokingly said that I live in Ikea. Not only because of the amount of time I spent in the store, browsing the aisles and consuming ridiculous amounts of meatballs, but because most of my furniture and decorations consequentially come from there too. My living room was a copy of page 36 of the 2003 catalogue. Except for that lamp over there, that was on page 84. Aside from the furniture itself, and the meatballs, and those sinfully lovely biscuits, what I love so much about Ikea is the way they just bloody well get it right. Right for their customers. Every time.
I would love to get a peek of Ikea’s marketing team and how they work, because honestly, some of the little details, the little things they come up with to just make your time in their store easier and more pleasant, and even to make you smile while you’re at it, they’re just plain genius! The well known ones are the tape measures and pencils they always have handy, but there are so many more, like adding a touch of colour and humour to the kids’ toilets by decorating them with Ikea stuff, hell, even just having a toilet especially for kids is a great thing, but making it more fun by adding you products to it and therefore making the kids want them, now that is marketing genius! I have heard the phrase “turning customers into fans” more often than I can count, but Ikea have certainly managed it, and I’m glad the people of Dublin are finally getting to experience that warm, fuzzy Swedish lurve.
Now, if you need me at any time during the next few months, you’ll find me sitting opposite the Manger headboard, crying quietly into my meatballs.
This weekend we were diagnosed with Canadians. Don’t worry, they’re only mildly contagious and we’ve been told we’ll be all better by Monday.
Today’s pick of the week is a topical one, as we have 2 lovely guests staying with us this weekend, courtesy of Couchsurfing.org.
I must say that in the year and a half that we’ve been taking part in this project, we have been very lucky, all the people who have come to stay with us have been interesting and nice people. The first reaction I usually get from people when I tell them about couchsurfing is along the lines of “wow, I could never do that, what if they’re horrible people?”.
Well, for a start, you don’t have to let them come stay with you, you get to see their profile, see if anyone has recommended them, you can chat as much or as little with them beforehand as you like, and if you don’t like the look of them, well, just say no. But the thing is, a project like this depends on people being nice to each other, so it does tend to attract a majority of nice, like-minded people.
There is a fantastic community vibe to Couchsurfing.org, in Dublin there are plenty of couchsurfing evenings and activities going on, and if we weren’t so shy (and so far from Dublin for late night activites) we would join in more.
The thing about peppers, or bell peppers as the Americans apparently call them, is that although I really quite like the taste of them, they go through me quicker than a handful of protons. Neutrons. Neutrinos. Quarks. Whatever those thingies are that go through anything really fast. A handful of them.
Well, if I may be so bold as to attempt a dodgy analogy – and you know I am – politics are kind of the same. I know that as a responsible adult *cough* I should know and care about politics, and I do kind of understand the basic mechanics of it all, roughly. But I don’t like politics, I can’t seem to digest political stuff at all. Any conversation veering toward the subject will be met on my part with a politely dazed silence, or at best a pathetic attempt to agree with the general trend of the discussion without taking to much of a risk.
Unless of course it’s something obviously ridiculous like “yes, but Hitler was a really snappy dresser”. Obviously.
Aside from mildly alienating me from politically-inclined people -which is no real loss, for them or for me, I guess- the main consequence of this affliction is that I struggle to enjoy political satire and politically-themed comedy. I remember enjoying Yes Minister and Yes Prime-Minister when I was younger, but like Blackadder, I was only getting half the jokes. When I grew up and watched Blackadder again I was almost shocked to finally grasp all the naughty innuendos, cringeing at the knowledge that I had proudly repeated those jokes for years, from age 7-ish onwards, oblivious to their true meaning. When I watched Yes Prime-Minister as an adult, I still didn’t get all the jokes. Either that or the canned laughter was in the wrong place.
Or take the recent film In The Loop, with the most excellent Chris Addison and many other talented peeps. I went to see it, and although I laughed a lot, I got the same feeling: there were things I just wasn’t getting. So I generally enjoyed it, it did seem very well written, finely crafted humour, but it did give me a bit of a headache, and left me feeling rather guilty. Because I always get the feeling that I should be more interested in all that stuff.
Unfortunately, my brain’s rejection of all things political seems to be as uncontrollable and uncurable as my digestive system’s reaction to peppers.
Neighbours, everybody needs good neighbours… Well, I guess that’s expecting a lot, I mean good neighbours are hard to come by, but would it really be too much to ask not to have bad ones? Over the years, especially living in small flats in high-rises, we have had quite a wide range of strange and annoying neighbours.
There was the young Asian couple who had a hobby of assembling flat-pack furniture at 1am with a large hammer and didn’t speak a word of French or English. Then we moved in underneath an illicitly sub-let flat where they would always run their very unstable washing machine at midnight or play their stereo very loud at crazy hours of the night, and would never answer the door because, well, they weren’t supposed to be there. That’s when we began to get quite good at Zen and the art of Passive Agressive Note Writing. (Note to self: good title for a book?)
On the ground floor of that block of flats lived probably the most amazing of all neighbours we have ever had, the Bin Man. This didn’t refer to his profession, as far as I know he didn’t leave his flat much, he earned this name by hoarding refuse. You could tell by walking through the entrance hall if he had opened his door that day. It wasn’t that bad, it was worse. He also used his old Peugeot* 105 as a fridge, even in the summer, and kept fruit, meat and milk in there. Or maybe he just left the milk in there until it was technically meat. He would always dress in the same “outfit”: baggy shorts that you prayed weren’t actually underwear, a string vest and a woolly hat. Classic. Of course, the complaints about him and the effects of his poor hygiene on the rest of the building had been pouring in for years, but it is incredibly hard to kick someone out of social housing in France if they’re paying their rent. And he was. They finally managed to get him to leave after he punched up a guy who had filed a complaint. When he had moved out they had to call in a team of 4 guys in white hazmat suits to clean the place out. While they were cleaning, the hall floor looked like a herd of festival-goers had trampled through it without wiping their boots. Except the dirt was going from the inside out. Nice.
So, when we moved to Ireland and stumbled across this lovely little suburban house, with a beach down the road, we thought we had finally made it. This, we thought, must be bliss, a lovely quiet estate, a back and a front garden (well, the front one is a tiny square of grass with 3 struggling shrubs but hey…), luxury was ours at last! Well, not quite. The house itself is fine, it could be improved, what house couldn’t, but honestly, it’s a great little house. No, the things that are driving us nuts are outside.
You see, I spent a good few years of my childhood in the suburbs of the good town of Swindon. Freshbrook to be precise. And I loved that house, I had nothing but fond memories of it. After that house my parents moved to a great big farmhouse in the middle of the French countryside, and although I dearly loved that house too, the little** control freak inside me longed for doors that fitted their frames, central heating and a neatly-mown regularly-shaped lawn. So I moved back to suburbia thinking I was finally going to get all that, which I did, in a way. But I was forgetting a couple of details.
The first was that back in the good old 80′s, house alarms were still quite a rare thing. So I have no childhood memories of being woken at 2am by an alarm that will not stop until maybe some time the next day. Things have changed. People with annoying house alarms should have their stuff stolen on principle. Seriously, sometimes I’m that far from going to look for the culpable house and looting the place, seeing as no-one seems to give a damn about the alarm.
The second thing I failed to realise was that my old house was detached, this new one is a semi. And somehow, someone forgot to put anything but a thin bit of drywall between the two halves when building it. This would only be moderately annoying if we had reasonably quiet neighbours, but the family next door seem to have developed a form of communication purely based on screaming. I don’t mean shouting, that happens in all families with kids, no, screaming. They have 2 kids, a 4-year old boy, named after his father, which makes things even more confusing, and a 5-year-old blonde angel of a girl, whose name seems to be “You Little Bitch”. As in “Oi, get in ‘ere you little bitch yer food’s getting cold!”. Yup. Delightful. And that’s a pretty tame example of the way their mother addresses them. The thing is that You Little Bitch seems unable to speak, all she can do is produce a shrill scream. Whatever she happens to be doing. Riding her bike along? Screaming. Playing with the other kids on the street? Screaming. Sitting still on the pavement? Screaming. Seriously.
Obviously, the Screaming Nextdoorses do sometimes go to sleep, and there are rare times when no house alarm is going off, so just in case we were feeling weirded out by the peace and quiet, the Backside Neighbours (our back garden backs on to their back garden) regularly make sure they leave their dog alone for a day or two, so the poor thing barks and whines, sometimes all night. That earned them one of our patented Passive-Aggressive Notes™ after a few sleepless nights…
I’m beginning to dream of a house in the woods, with no neighbours for miles…
*Pronounced Puh-show, not pew-joe.
**Well, I was littler then, the control freak grows with the rest!
I first saw the IT crowd on the Interweb somewhere, lurking down one of those pipes. At first I thought it was one of those really great little amateur productions that you only get on the web and that sadly never make it any further in spite of their genius. Believe me, this is quite a compliment coming from me, some of that stuff is pure wasted genius! And then I found out it was actually a proper thing that had been on the telly and all, and there was much rejoicing.
Some of you, I fear, may have already downloaded the series. This is wrong.
After all, you wouldn’t steal a baby, would you? Then take a shit on the baby and give it back to its mother. Then steal her handbag while she’s distracted. Then take a shit in the handbag and give it back? Then steal the baby again, and eat it with mint sauce. Would you?
I hope you wouldn’t, otherwise I’m pretty sure I don’t want you visiting my blog, so bugger off.
Seriously, buy the DVD boxset.
Why? Not because it’s the right thing to do. Not because it’s a few more pennies in the pocket of the very delightful and deserving Graham Linehan (I could just kiss his brain) and all his chums what made it. No, you should buy them because the DVDs themselves are just genius. This weekend, for the first time ever, I sat there watching a DVD menu, just for the sake of it. Each menu and submenu is a hilarious little homage to those old computer games, the Lemmings and the Prince of Persias we all know and love.
Not only are the menus absolutely brilliant, the artwork seriously cute, and of course the series itself as funny as a pink banana, but the DVD bonuses kick some serious donkey too. And you can have the while thing subtitled in Geek, or in 1337 if you should so wish.
Awesomeness in a box. Buy it. Now.
About 2 months ago, a large chunk of one of my molars came off the worse for its encounter with a Curly-Wurly. So I went looking for a dentist, having unfortunately left my perfectly delightful and amazingly talented one back in France when we moved to Oyreland. A colleague recommended the new surgery only a block away, and an appointment was made. By email, what’s more, how very modern!
I would like to say, before I launch into my storytelling, that on a purely medical level, I am quite satisfied with her work, and that none of what I am about to tell you has anything to do with her dentistry skills.
However, it must be noted that she is a very strange young woman. Well, for a start, she is a young woman! So young she makes me feel terribly old. I guess there has to be a time in your life when the medical professionals treating you will be younger than you, rather than older and wiser. Let’s call it the Dougie Howser Point. It hurts.
So, what makes this lovely young dentist so strange? Well, basically, she’s a bit too much like me, personality-wise, and that’s not good. Especially for a dentist. She tends to say weird things that make people* a little uncomfortable, that good old Too Much Information Syndrome. Not just that usual dentist thing of asking you questions you can’t answer because they have half a cutlery set shoved in your mouth, no this is quite different. A few of my favourites are as follow:
“Isn’t it weird that I really love that smell of burning?” (coming from the temporary filling being baked in my mouth with that funny UV stick thingy)
“I really get a kick out of cleaning people’s teeth, isn’t that strange?”
“Right, I’ve cleaned around the cavity now, do you want to have a look at the decay before I clean it out, it’s lovely and black and squishy…”
“I’ve been reading a lot of vampire books recently, you know, the stories are often pretty basic, but there’s plenty of blood, that’s all that counts eh!”
“Aw, now come on, you barely flinched when I stuck that first injection in, you could at least pretend that that hurt. (she shoves another injection in, this time it does hurt and I wince) Ah, that’s better! Thanks, even if you were pretending!”
That’s just my choice selection, if I was to list all the crazy stuff she entertained me with over our 2 month relationship I could go on for pages. My crown was finally fitted yesterday (“Now I’m just going to pop it on the tooth to make sure it fits ok, don’t go swallowing it or I’ll have to make you throw up!”) and I left with a lovely doggybag: the mouldings that had been taken of my teeth to make the crown from. “There you go,” she said, “take them home with you. You can paint them if you like.” o_Ô
But maybe the strangest thing of all, is that when she’s not saying strange things while rooting around in my mouth, I actually quite like her! I mean, if she wasn’t performing denstistation on me at the time, I would quite enjoy her quirky conversation. And yet, I’m always reminded of this little gem from The Little Shop Of Horrors, and I begin to hum.
*Me.
My book(s) on lulu.com
