German Dentistry and the Rant-Free Live
Søren Kirkegaard, Danish philosopher and all-round cravat aficionado, once claimed that a bad conscience can make life more interesting. Which is why I avoid New Year’s Resolutions like I should have avoided that last Jägermeister shot. And yet I have recently been troubled by this - universally shared - tendency to furiously pound on my keyboard only when my sarcasm levels are reaching critical levels and venom is seeping from my fingertips. The final product is dumped on my blog, host to all my eye rolling, teeth grinding and hair pulling. And into the internet’s infinite cesspool it leaks. Yet most bloggers seem committed environmentalists given the amount of recycling that takes place in the blogosphere.
My wise father once urged me to pick up the pen not only when something bothered me, but also when something pleased me. Because it so rarely happens. People are more than happy to jump on the nearest soap box and loudly proclaim their disagreement/air their conspiracy theories/correct your grammar/invoke Goodwin’s law/ plead assistance on behalf of ailing Nigerian benefactors. Particularly, nay, only if they only made it as far as the fourth line of your argument. And this is the crux of the problem as the journalist Geoff Nicholson so lucidly put it: “people think you’re talking sense only when your prejudices coincide with theirs. Dissenters tend to raise the question “Who asked you anyway?” Nobody of course, apart from that little persistent voice in your head. The one that makes you go Eureka in the shower and comments on that woman’s pink UGGh boots at the bus stop. And this voice believes that I should rebalance the equation by writing something nice for a change.
I would therefore like to sing the praises of dentists, German dentists. My previous experiences in the UK had led me to believe that this profession was still filled by barbers, Medieval barbers. So awed was my deutsch dental practitioner the first time she set her eyes on the dental work performed by her colleagues across the Channel, that I feared she might cart me off to the DDR Museum near Unter der Linden. The filling material found in my molars had not been spotted in oral cavities since the fall of the Wall. My mouth was like a Hominina fossil, the missing link between historical orthodontics and modern dentistry. Great Britain might have won the war but Germany won the battle against shoddy fillings, botched roots canal treatments, unnecessary excruciating pain and peagreen coloured waiting rooms!… What’s that conscience? I can’t restore my karma by making another country the target of my bad puns? I was under the impression that throwing some abuse at my former host country would cancel out all my recent gripes about Germany. Like the yin and yang of insults. Ok, back to square one.
