So this was my day today

I do find dentist appointments unsettling, even when it's something as routine as a couple of filling-repairs.

To neutralise my anticipation (the appointment was 11.40 am this morning) I first ran through the exercise sequence which came with my 'York Fitness Cast Iron Dumbbell Set - 20kg'.

Dumbbell exercises

Here is your author in action.

Showered, mouthwashed and toothpasted, I was lying back on the dentist's couch by a quarter to twelve. There is a tone of voice in which the dentist asks,

"Do you usually have an injection?"

where he means,

'Are you some kind of wimp?'

I nodded coolly and said,

"For the replacement of old fillings? Nope, let's give it a go without."

The dentist looked pleased (three minutes shaved off the time) and got to work.

I wasn't really expecting Marathon Man and to be honest it was a breeze; I closed my eyes and thought about Marx's theory of crises.

---

This afternoon Clare's new tablet arrived. The iPad 2 she acquired from my late mother is increasingly clunky and slow, so I decided to replace it with a Nexus 10, a copy of my own but with better battery life.

I ordered mine back in March 2014 and it's worked well. The Nexus 10 is obsolete really, so I was able to get a bargain: Google Nexus 10 Wi-Fi only, 16 GB (Certified Refurbished).

I don't really get 'refurbished'. I assume it's just surplus stock which has been sitting in a warehouse somewhere for a year or so and is now being disposed of. In any event, it arrived in true minimalist fashion: just the tablet and a travelling charger + cable.

Its Android release was early 4 (we're currently at 5.1.1 Lollipop) so I've spent the afternoon loading version after version of the OS as it makes the long climb towards Lollipop. Towards the end I was dismayed to find the tablet kept turning itself off; buy cheap and have to send it back, I thought to myself. But it was simply the Nexus's way of telling me that its battery was down to 4%.

It's currently on the charger, telling me it's still too tired to install the latest Android iteration.

I have to wait.

Spatial Awareness

There's a special feeling of relaxed contentment when you're back home from the dentist.

Shards of memory: lying back, staring at fluorescent grills in the ceiling, everything yellow through the goggles; the steel hypodermic syringe, floating above my face, orienting there .. and there; the pressure of fluid building up in the gums.

The pretty, full-faced assistant asks the dentist, "Is there anything you need?"

Sotto voce I hear his reply: "Spatial awareness ... ."

I manage a contorted smile.

Later it seemed to me that he was a dead ringer, sight and sound, for Moriarty in BBC's "Sherlock".

---

I'm reading "Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World" by Bruce Schneier.  It's an easy read and brimful of fascinating information about government and corporate surveillance.

I've been trying to identify the chronic, low-level irritation I'm experiencing as I turn the Kindle pages. And now it's dawned on me:  that moralising tone. It's the same feeling I get when reading The Guardian.

Dental machismo

My previous dentist was ethnically East-Asian. He was highly-competent, but visits to his surgery were marred by his addiction to an ambient "Lady in Red". Anyway, he has now moved on, taking his Chris De Burgh fixation in tow.

The proximate cause of this afternoon's trip was the sucking-out of a filling (top left) by a post-dinner piece of Xylitol chewing gum: that stuff which is supposedly so good for your teeth. Tellingly, the effect on fillings has been less mentioned.

My new dentist was a plump, middle-aged woman who by accent was from Poland. She inspected the damage and said, "It's repairable."

Show no pain!

I have to say that up to this point, it had never occurred to me that it would not.

"Unfortunately," she continued, "I'm going to have to do some drilling. No problem; no need for anaesthetic. You OK with that? Let me know if you feel pain."

In front of a woman used to tough, leather-jacketed Polish males, what could I do? I smiled with what I hoped was the right degree of languid indifference and replied casually, "Sure. If it hurts, you'll know."

The drill whined and ground into my enamel. She was right. Didn't feel a thing.

---

Adrian has more extensive dental work scheduled for later this afternoon. I'm thinking of sending him a WhatsApp progress report summing up my afternoon's experience:

"Easy in, easy out."

Do you think he will find that encouraging?

Skype on the iPad

I can be reduced to a shuddering blob of incandescent fury by the iPad. It flatters, performance-wise, as a PC peer but its functionality is that of the stripped-down apps on a smart phone.

Take Skype for iPad, which I set up for my mother yesterday. On the PC there is an "options" menu which allows privacy settings, contact management, ring-tone control etc etc.

On the iPad - nothing. The proximate bug was that her iPad wouldn't ring on an incoming call. Subsequent googling has persuaded me that somewhere in the iPad's "Settings" system app may lie an answer but why not replicate what the PC application provides?

Dentist note: a filling disintegrated yesterday, after I bit on a nut. This confirms my belief on the dangers of a healthy lifestyle: if I restricted myself to junk-pap my fillings would last forever. And running around in your sixties? Bound to cause joint damage.

I say to all the proponents of health who focus on exercise: "Be brave, take on the food lobbies, the important thing is to tell people to eat less and better! Exercise only works at the margins."

I came home with a new white filling and an appointment two weeks time to see if it survives, otherwise it's a crown for me.