I am ashamed to admit that I had a beer tonight.
But it's all right. It was a ginger beer! We're still on track. Gotcha!
Days Without Alcohol - 87.
I had been meaning to pop into the dentist yesterday, but had too much other stuff to do and similarly had it on my to do list today, but was told with very late notice that it was time to get my Fringe Guide listings in. So I spent the morning doing that. Which meant I had to decide what shows I was going to do. Here's what I wrote:
40 words
Richard Herring â Christ on a Bike: The Second Coming. âIâm not saying Iâm Jesus â thatâs for other people to sayâ. Hit 2001 show resurrected! Evangelical atheist examines Messiah obsession. Limited run. Book early! âHilariousâ Guardian. âTop-notchâ Chortle
Richard Herring â The Headmasterâs Son. Whatâs worse than being a podgy, swotty, virginal schoolboy? Ho about your dadâs the headmaster too? Oh F***, Iâm 40 star relives childhood embarrassments and examines psychological repercussions on adult life. âSmart and effectiveâ Chortle
60 words
Richard Herring â Christ on a Bike: The Second Coming. âIâm not saying Iâm Jesus â thatâs for other people to sayâ. Hit 2001 show resurrected! Evangelical atheist examines Messiah obsession. TMWRNJ star answers the great theological questions â Why did Jesus always call Simon, Peter? Was it like Trigger always calling Rodney, Dave? Limited run. Book early! âHilariousâ Guardian.
Richard Herring â The Headmasterâs Son. Whatâs worse than being a podgy, swotty, virginal schoolboy? What if your dadâs the headmaster too? Fist of Fun and Oh F***, Iâm 40 star relives childhood embarrassments, first love and belching during the minuteâs silence in church. What are the psychological repercussions of schooldays filled with suspicion and mistrust? âSmart and effectiveâ Chortle
Perhaps I should have gone to the dentist then, but I convinced myself that I could wait til my appointment on the 1st April and instead headed into Hammersmith to go for a swim after doing some work in Caffe Nero.
I have to say that I was full of energy and enterprise. I managed to write a synopsis of what might happen in the series of my Scrabble sitcom,
Absolutely Scrabulous (provisional title). And then pounded through the water managing 50 lengths with ease, despite being in a lane with a woman who seemed to determine the rule that you swim clockwise back and forth, rather than staying in one side of the lane.
As I swam I wondered if it would have been better to do an Edinburgh show about dieting this year. But decided it was too late to change. And so are crucial decision about my future made.
I went out for a meal and a drink (ginger beer) with a friend. As we walked to the pub I was chewing on some gum. Absent mindedly I chewed on my broken tooth and realised that another bit of it had come away. In fact the gap seemed so big that I thought the entire tooth had gone, which given that I was in no pain would have been extraordinary. But I managed to retrieve the sizeable piece that had come loose and think it was probably the expensive porcelain filling that I had put in not quite a year ago. It had clung on in there for three weeks, whilst the tooth had disintegrated around it, but now it was out. I looked in the mirror in the gents at the pub and sure enough the entire front section of the tooth is gone, with just the last third still there, presumably with the root beneath it.
It was both funny and upsetting. I couldn't actually work out if I was more upset to lose the filling than the tooth. It had cost me a lot of money and now it was useless. Even though I still had it there was no point in putting it back in with no tooth to go around it. If only the dentist had given me an immediate appointment I might have saved the tooth, but now it was nearly all gone. It is what I had said I had wished for it
when the first bit came out, but maybe this was a Pyhrric victory. I am not even sure what can be done to save the situation. But possibly it really would be better to get rid of the troublesome thing all together. I still can't believe that this has occurred without me experiencing any pain. But doubtless that is to come.
I played with my extricated filling all night, unable to let go of it, again probing the chasm in my mouth, rather distracted from the conversation, even though it was mainly about my teeth and whether this was shoddy work by the dentist or if he should have noticed something awry at my recent check up (I had told him that I thought I had chipped the tooth, but he thought it was the back one and said it was fine).
I considered giving the fractured bit of filling away as some kind of prize as no doubt one of you weirdos would like it (and it has a £280 value from what I recall), but I put it in the little pocket in my jeans, which I forgot about and I've just put them in the washing machine, so it might be lost. It would be quite a neat joke on me if the broken bit of filling somehow manages to clog or destroy the machine, leading to even more mayhem. But it's the kind of incident that I can put into a sitcom, so I win in the end. My life is a sitcom. A really rubbish sitcom.
Still I've got another 31 teeth and really only half of this one has gone, so I've only lost one sixty-fourth of my teeth, which doesn't seem too bad. And maybe they can rebuild me and give me a bionic tooth that can chew ten times faster than all the other ones. Which will probably just be an inconvenience come to think of it.
