A couple of good books help the medicine go down

It’s an ill drill, and all that

I had a broken tooth fixed yesterday. I don’t like going to the dentist. I don’t like the pain.

Dentists have as many words for pain as Eskimos have for snow. The sort of words that play things down. Their word for pain is generally discomfort. As modified by adjectives like slight, minor, or quantifiers like a bit of, a degree of, some.

For the rest of us, or for me at least, where the dentist says discomfort, replace with ‘agony’, and whatever type of discomfort is promised, that should be ‘excruciating’.

Add in the waiting room factor, and there’s not a lot to like about dentists. They call waiting rooms reception areas or lobbies now. I call them purgatory. Start the whole experience the way it’s likely to unfold: an uncomfortable plastic laundrette chair, some of those special waiting room magazines no-one buys, because they’re not on sale anywhere, because there’s no demand for them, other than for waiting room table stacks of untouched glossies.

Now, luckily, the library is opposite the dentists. More or less. The other side of the road and along a bit. If we’re getting picky. So I went early (the excuse? returning How I Killed Margaret Thatcher) in order to see what was on the shelves. Sweetening the bitter pill of the drills, those pointy metal things, the cold air spray, the cold water spray, the mouthful cotton wads, the whole torture chamber horror to come. I went in with one book, handed it back, and came out with two. No money changed hands. Beautiful places, libraries.

I came away with Narcopolis, by Jeet Thayil, and Michael Frayn’s Skios. I started Skios in the waiting room reception area. So far, an unwitting exchange of identical luggage has been teed up, and some of the players in the farce to come introduced.

Meanwhile: dental treatment. The tooth’s been rebuilt with a different composite material, and the pain discomfort should settle down. There was no timescale for this settling down process, no programmed date by when I should find everything thoroughly settled. My fault, really, I didn’t ask. I just saw that window of opportunity and bolted for freedom as soon as possible. If it breaks again, the threat is root canal torture, or the torture of extraction. I have a vested interest in making this new repair work. Asked about how it’s working out, I’ll be unable to give any sort of subjective answer.

“Yes” I would say “everything’s fine”, torture-dodger that I am.

The tax laws…

…are labyrinthine, over-complicated, and written by accounting firm personnel temporarily seconded to the revenue. The same accounting firm bods that then advise their clients on how to work the system they themselves have designed.

Now the top tax-dog has joined the top tax-dodging advice company. A move sanctioned by the prime minister.

There’s one law for the poor, and another for HMRC, it seems.