The Dentists Chair

No, not a reminder of Gazza's celebration in Euro 96 but a paragraph or four about my visit to the dentist this week.

As an adult I only had one dentist from 1990 - 2005, he then decided to retire and head off to sail around the Greek islands, his eldest daughter had been his dental nurse and she decided to pack it in when Dad did. He sold his practice to one of the many company's that saw changes in NHS regulations as a good way of buying up several practices in one area and bringing them all under a single administrative office.

This means that my dental practice is now one of half a dozen in the area that belong to the same owners, it also means that sharper business practices have been brought into operation where before the practitioners were really vocationalists in it for the long haul. Since the change in ownership I have seen a Latvian, Pole and this week a Lithuanian, dentist. The company seems to be some sort of training school for Eastern European dentists - and they are all women.

The Lithuanian lady just happened to be one of the most attractive women I have ever met and if it hadn't been for the fact that she had her fingers in my mouth and I was under the effects of anaesthetic I would have asked her if she'd ever done any modelling. Although I have six monthly check-ups this was the first time since at least 1994 that I have had to have any work done, I'm sure that by the time I go back in December she will have been replaced by somebody from Estonia, I would then have had the complete set of Baltic women poking around in search of broken fillings and other potential problems.

The downside of an almost production line attitude to dentistry is that the traditional conversation has gone, there's no time to discuss sailing or cycling or tax returns, now it's a series of "Mmms and aahh's," and that was her! The surgery is now open from 8 am to 8 pm six days a week, again a big change from the old days. Obviously there will be people who will claim that this new arrangement is depriving British people of job opportunities, but it's actually given jobs to people. Whilst the dentist is European the admin staff and the reception staff are British and there are six of them whereas under the old practice there was one old dear who was on her last legs, the surgery employs three dentists and three nurses which in turn means that more patients get seen. It's a win-win situation, particularly when you get to gaze upwards at the love child of Julie Edge and Britt Ekland.

Oh, and one final thing. Is it just me but isn't it a little worrying when you're having an x-ray that the other two people in the room leave whilst the machine does its thing? What's so dangerous that a fifty year old man in a horizontal position has to experience it on his own?