A miserable morning

Once again I slogged through positively Biblical floods (on a bus) this morning, this time for the unenviable destination of the dentist. I always say that I'm going to floss more when the ordeal of jabbing at the bases of my teeth with pickaxes is over, but then I always forget and the whole process is repeated the next time. The reason that I don't do it is that, having had too many teeth since I was 13, it always seems like more pain than it's worth to me - though I'm told that it gets less painful after about five days if you do it straight, and at the moment sticking some tape between your teeth seems like a complete holiday compared to the after-effects that my mouth is still feeling from the excavation.

I also made the mistake of mentioning to her that I had had a couple of mouth ulcers and had treated them by washing my mouth with bicarbonate of soda. She just said that "I'm sure there are people who do that", while obviously meaning "They're exceedingly strange". My mum's home remedies have always been treated with suspicion here as if they were the Elizabethan medicine of wearing a pig on your head and walking around your house backwards, but I was sure that it helped.