Mind the gap

I know it’s not yet quite a fortnight since my visit to the dentist that culminated in a frozen mouth and a hole where a tooth used to be, but I had hoped that what, ten days on, the gum would be a little tougher where it’s grown back over the gap.

Admittedly the other space where I had a tooth pulled is thirty years old and the shape of the gum there has changed so that you’d never know there was a tooth ever there other than as signified by the gap. The recent pulling, however, is far from that stage. The gum is healing and has closed over the place the tooth root used to be, but it is still obviously tooth root shaped and tender. I still have to do most of my chewing on the other side of my mouth and I still have to be a little careful when I attack my gnashers with the tooth brush.

Last night I stabbed the gum with, of all things, a sliver of crust from some garlic bread and crivens, but it hurt. It drew blood, too, though that stopped quickly. The point is, it’s still tender and sore and no amount of antiseptic mouth wash is toughening it up. I think that I shall have to resort to sluicing my mouth with warm, salty water. If that doesn’t loosen the cookies, nothing will.

I hate dentistry.

Really and truly. With a vengeance.

Mind the gap

I know it’s not yet quite a fortnight since my visit to the dentist that culminated in a frozen mouth and a hole where a tooth used to be, but I had hoped that what, ten days on, the gum would be a little tougher where it’s grown back over the gap.

Admittedly the other space where I had a tooth pulled is thirty years old and the shape of the gum there has changed so that you’d never know there was a tooth ever there other than as signified by the gap. The recent pulling, however, is far from that stage. The gum is healing and has closed over the place the tooth root used to be, but it is still obviously tooth root shaped and tender. I still have to do most of my chewing on the other side of my mouth and I still have to be a little careful when I attack my gnashers with the tooth brush.

Last night I stabbed the gum with, of all things, a sliver of crust from some garlic bread and crivens, but it hurt. It drew blood, too, though that stopped quickly. The point is, it’s still tender and sore and no amount of antiseptic mouth wash is toughening it up. I think that I shall have to resort to sluicing my mouth with warm, salty water. If that doesn’t loosen the cookies, nothing will.

I hate dentistry.

Really and truly. With a vengeance.

The politics of environment

On my way home tonight, I may well nip into Books Etc and pick up a copy of Albert Gore’s enviro-evangelistic tome An Inconvenient Truth (in papperbok) and give it a read.

I want to do this because I feel that I should have both sides of an argument at my finger tips. There is a lot of noise made and reams of paper printed with claims about the environment and it seems reasonably clear that there are environmental problems building and accumulating that will have an effect, if not immediately, almost certainly in a generation or two from now.

I confess that beyond an awareness that environment change has muscled its way onto the political agenda (more obviously centre stage in some places than others) and that there is a great deal of oft-repeated and loudly expressed alarm in some circles, I know very little about it beyond the unquestioning reports in the news media. I have allowed the science, if not the politics of the matter to scutter past unheeded.

I get the horrible feeling that we are being spoon-fed rigid dogmatic and largely one-sided arguments and I know there are counter arguments that are not generally as trendy as those trumpeted by the mass media. So I thought that I’d have a stab at finding out a little more and making my own mind up.

Of course, there is a little more to it than that. I am prompted to take this step at this time because a friend of mine, whom some of you may know beyond his LJ-lurking name of drjohnsilence has just published a book (primarily for the US market, hence its title) that comes at the same subject from the opposite direction: Really Inconvenient Truths. I have a copy on order from Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1596980540

It is my aim, initially at least, to read both books, hold them together and see if they explode and then, assuming they don’t, place one on the left of my bookshelf and the other to the right. Balance in all things.

Of course, I do realise that by buying two books, neither of which are necessarily printed on paper from sustainable sources I could be adding to the problem. I shall balance this by refraining from pulling out life sustaining and oxygen-giving weeds along our path.

Iain has already agreed to sign his book next time I see him and has offered me a dollar if I can get Al Gore to sign his.

The politics of environment

On my way home tonight, I may well nip into Books Etc and pick up a copy of Albert Gore’s enviro-evangelistic tome An Inconvenient Truth (in papperbok) and give it a read.

I want to do this because I feel that I should have both sides of an argument at my finger tips. There is a lot of noise made and reams of paper printed with claims about the environment and it seems reasonably clear that there are environmental problems building and accumulating that will have an effect, if not immediately, almost certainly in a generation or two from now.

I confess that beyond an awareness that environment change has muscled its way onto the political agenda (more obviously centre stage in some places than others) and that there is a great deal of oft-repeated and loudly expressed alarm in some circles, I know very little about it beyond the unquestioning reports in the news media. I have allowed the science, if not the politics of the matter to scutter past unheeded.

I get the horrible feeling that we are being spoon-fed rigid dogmatic and largely one-sided arguments and I know there are counter arguments that are not generally as trendy as those trumpeted by the mass media. So I thought that I’d have a stab at finding out a little more and making my own mind up.

Of course, there is a little more to it than that. I am prompted to take this step at this time because a friend of mine, whom some of you may know beyond his LJ-lurking name of drjohnsilence has just published a book (primarily for the US market, hence its title) that comes at the same subject from the opposite direction: Really Inconvenient Truths. I have a copy on order from Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1596980540

It is my aim, initially at least, to read both books, hold them together and see if they explode and then, assuming they don’t, place one on the left of my bookshelf and the other to the right. Balance in all things.

Of course, I do realise that by buying two books, neither of which are necessarily printed on paper from sustainable sources I could be adding to the problem. I shall balance this by refraining from pulling out life sustaining and oxygen-giving weeds along our path.

Iain has already agreed to sign his book next time I see him and has offered me a dollar if I can get Al Gore to sign his.