I went to the dentist yesterday for the first time in…well, put it this way: Creation Records was still alive and well the last time I sat in the big white chair. I wasn’t avoiding it, I just sort of forgot sometime around the turn of the century and carried on regardless. (I can almost feel the American(s) in the audience cringing here. Yes, I am British. No, my teeth are not actually bad at all.) Anyway, I bit the bullet—now there’s a reason for a dentist’s appointment—and had a check up last month. The dentist seemed to be struggling to justify any repeat business. “There’s a tiny cavity there,” she said after jabbing my teeth and gums with a sharp stick. I think she was actually trying to hurt me. “And I dunno, I suppose we could seal that wisdom tooth so it doesn’t pick up bits of food. Book another appointment and we’ll sort them out.”

So today rolled round and I plonked myself back on the couch. “Let’s numb you up,” said the dentist.

“Awesome! Hit me with some grade-A Florida snow, my good woman,” I replied. I didn’t really. What actually happened was that she stuck a hypodermic needle into my gum and very gently squeezed the plunger. Now having been absent from the hot seat for some time, I was inadvertently experiencing every new sensation with extraordinary clarity—sort of a hyperreal, slow motion oral invasion. I could feel the needle sliding into my gum. I could feel the contents being injected, and registered a faint feeling of increased pressure as they mixed with the tissue.

Like I say, it was weird.

She started off with a bit of general cleaning, scrubbing off plaque with some sort of rotary device. A hose pumped in gallon after gallon of purging water, while the assistant gamely sucked it right back out it with a suction hose. I was permitted to come up for air briefly before phase two began. “Right,” the dentist said, “now I’m going to seal that wisdom tooth,” and plunged straight back in with a drill, going for the molar with the cavity.

Nice misdirection, I thought. Just like the story about the nurse in the hospital. “Okay sir, I’m going to take the dressing off on the count of three. One, two—” rip.

Anyway, she went after the tooth with a vengeance. Christ, I thought, if it was only barely worthy of the cavity moniker beforehand it certainly qualifies now. It started to hurt a little. “Argle,” I explained to them both. It occurred to me that if I was experiencing a relative degree of discomfort now, with half my face under blissful lidocaine paralysis, it would have been incomprehensibly awful without. I grinned (or would have grinned, had not my jaw been pinioned open by the assistant’s suction tube) and bore it.

The sealing of the wisdom tooth was a walk in the park by comparison, if by walk in the park you mean exactly like having some exotic dental putty smeared all over a perfectly good tooth. “Okay, we’re finished,” she said. I rinsed the plaque, tooth dust, blood and amalgam out.

“I like what zhoo did wiv zhe mishdirection,” I slurred as best I could while I put my coat on. “You know, ‘I’m going to sheal your wizhdom tooth now,’ then going in wiv the drill. Nishe.”

She looked at me. “Right. Thanks,” no doubt thinking, I should have injected his damn vocal chords instead.