Snaggletooth
David on the phone to his Tooth Jockey
I have broached the subject of my unhappiness of the two snaggleteeth on a couple of occasions with The Tooth Jockey, a man who, in having a new car outside his practice pretty much every time I go there, you’d think would be happy to use my insecurity and vanity for a down payment on the next one. But no. He says, “Well, they aren’t that bad. You’ve got ask yourself, how bothered are you?”
Truth is I AM bothered, but he has made me feel an idiot for even mentioning it, so I meekly demur and slope off feeling my snaggleteeth with my tongue and check them in my rear view mirror on the way home trying to convince myself that he’s right; they aren’t that bad. I tell myself that if shit teeth were good enough for Freddie Mercury then they are good enough for me.
So, I decide to do something about it and last week I made an appointment to see about getting something called an Inman Aligner, which a man on the radio says can straighten your teeth in three months and is practically invisible. The nearest dentist that is certified is in Edinburgh, 120 miles away from my home. I take the plunge, I tell people, I Twitter about it, I proclaim my smile sorted by Christmas. People make noises about my teeth not being “that bad” (except my mum, who uses the occasion to badmouth The Tooth Jockey once more).
My appointment is with a young pretender tooth jockey called David who looks uncannily like the comedian Jimmy Carr. David/Jimmy looks at my gnashers, he takes photos of them and then he sits me down alongside him at the computer. He does not tell me “they’re not that bad”. They are bad, and he wants to tell me just how bad things really are. David/Jimmy, in fact, tells me things that I didn’t even realise were wrong with how my smile looks. I’m squint, I’m not symmetrical, my teeth aren’t in the right part of my mouth, my teeth are the wrong size, they are too close together, and one, in particular, is singled out as a complete design affront to God and the world He created.
I think he’s either trying to convince me how shocking things are so that I’ll definitely go for the miracle brace in some kind of clever sales ruse, or he is, in fact, the actual Jimmy Carr and gets a kick out of insulting people like he does on that show he hosts where no vulnerable section of society is too vulnerable to be the butt of his jokes. Turns out it’s neither. David/Jimmy is working up to break the terrible news to me; my teeth are too much for the miracle brace. “There’s too much that needs done. The Inman Aligner is not for you. It wouldn’t work. You’ll need full orthodontic treatment plus a possible four veneers if you were to completely correct everything. Go back to your dentist and tell him that’s what you want.”
Five minutes and fifty quid later I’m on the street with tears welling up.
I’m off to the Tooth Jockey next week. I may take my Mum with me.
Airbrush Android
I am not sure what to make of this. Meeester, who is not a bad photographer has been tinkering with a Photshop-esque computer programme that is making us all too perfect. It’s called Portrait Professional.
He’s been transforming us all and sticking the results up on Facebook for our amusement. One even prompted one husband to comment on response to his wife’s enhanced photo, that it looked like the photo of the actress that would play his wife in a TV biopic. I’m unsure if she has read the comment…
So what you do is you take your photo, warts and all (see PIC. A below) literally- find the wartiest one you can. There we go….
PIC A
and…you stick it in Portrait Professional and make yourself perfect….(see PIC B) …like so.
PIC B
I am not sure what to make of it. Part of me is delighted at the result. If Cameron Diaz can live by the pockmark vanishing airbrush, then so can I. Look, no wrinkles..! Look no blemishes…! look, perfect skin a la Lloyd Cole’s muse. Champion!
“That’s how I look in my head!” I scream (even though I have a little look of a Stepford Wife, I must admit).
But then Meeester puts them side by side for comparison and the depression sets in quicker than you can shout, “Help me, Gok Wan!“.
Initial delight is quickly replaced with soul destroying discontent at the actual state of things. Nudging forty, as I am, it crystallises the bare faced fact that no amount of pento-pento-peptides with a range of antioxidant boswelox-bollox particles rammed roughly onto my epidermis by the very hands of Nadine Baggot can save me.
Further depression sets in when I realise that PIC A is the one I sent to the radio station to stick on the website a good few weeks before Meeester even discovered Portrait Professional.
In the words of plastic surgery veteran and rhinoplasty poster-girl, Cher…”if I could turn back time…”
Bugger!
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Thousand yard stare
About aged 22 I noticed something.
I was finding it difficult to see things in the distance. I couldn’t see the number of the bus approaching (in fact, I would be lucky to see the actual bus), I would walk past folk on the street that I knew, prompting much embarrassment, I was giving the eye to monsters that thought looked like Nick Cave, when in fact they looked like Captain Caveman.
I would regularly drive down to Glasgow to visit Uni friends and I knew that I had to do something about my eyesight when for the second time I missed the turn off to the Glasgow road after the Perth bridgey/flyovery thing and was on the road to Edinburgh instead. (By the way, have you ever tried to get back on the road to Glasgow after making that mistake. It’s a flipping nightmare! You have to cut across fields and go through rivers, and everything! No wonder the Romans couldn’t conquer us, they probably took a wrong turn.)
Not only that, I would be in a cold sweat everytime I went behind the wheel, because I couldn’t see what I was doing, especially at night. I was a myopic nervous wreck.
And so it passed that I had to get glasses. *Sigh*
For about 4 years I got away with only wearing them to watch telly, edit and drive. I hated being a glasses wearer, as I’m too vain.
I thought of Velma from Scooby Doo, I thought of Edna Everage, I thought of Nan Mouskouri everytime I put them on. I would never wear them out and about, even though I would be in a bad mood when I got home because I couldn’t see what was going on at concerts, at the bar, across the table from me. In fact I would like to apologise to everyone who thought I was blanking them. I wasn’t; I was just like Al Pacino in “Scent of a Woman”, but without the scent.
One day whilst driving home from work, a white works van blocked the entrance into the right hand side street I was indicating to turn into. I wound my window down and said to the beast driving, “What’s the score? You’re blocking me.”
The Sun reading, pie eating, Irn-Bru swilling cretin turned to me and simply said, “Get tae fuck, you specky bitch!”
I nearly burst into tears. “Get tae fuck!” I can take. “Specky Bitch”, I couldn’t.
The time had come to get contact lenses, and these days I cannot do without them. I hate the fact that I cannot exist without the little expensive blighters. I hate the fact that I forgot to take them when I went to Finland and had to go four days with glasses before my package from home arrived with the lenses.
So I have been looking into the cut-your-eyeball-open-with-a-laser-surgery.
There’s only one thing stopping me: I am crapping myself.
