It came to pass that I motored down to Ottery St Mary for a consultation with my former English dentist yesterday. As I predicted, removing the remaining useless bits of my €17,000 investment in ‘implants’ took just over twenty five minutes. It was a small bit of filing for the dentist, but a giant load off a Slog’s mind.
She’s something of a straight-talking gem is Nikki. She told me that patching up and filing down botched implants done by cowboys is quite a large part of her work. So indeed it is for her prosthetics technician, who specialises in made-to-measure dental plates designed to rescue mugs like me. It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good. Perhaps foul wind is a slightly more accurate group noun for the dental profession at large these days.
Back in Crewkerne, independent pc pointy-head Tom presented me with my thoroughly rebored and updated antique laptop. I had also taken chum Jon’s advice to dump Mozilla Firefox as a browser, and this too has made an appreciable difference. It’s almost as if the old hp has been given a miracle Alzheimers drug.
I popped into the old hardware shop and bought a dinner-for-one enamel casserole dish for £2.45. Then into a charity shop where a 1980s designer shirt was being offered at £3.50, and a pair of khaki slacks for four quid. When I got back, my hosts had a crab flan on the go. It was terrific.
This, I thought, is living. It might not be living in the present, but it certainly was living.
Today I made a lunch-snack for the three of us, a sort of embellishment of an online recipe I’d found. This visual for an ad was by the side of the recipe:
I couldn’t help feeling that the ad was more to the advantage of the advertiser than the website, but that’s what nobody seems to get any more in the digital [didji-oo] age. I wonder when contemporary advertising clients are going to wake up to the fact that the tartan paint artists selling online as a medium are crooks with little or no idea about whatTF they’re at: I was told the other day that the ‘hits’ scam (at least 30% of them involve user error) has been rumbled – so it’s only a matter of time before some visionary somewhere cottons on to the irritation most people feel when an ad-panel appears in the way of something, and then proceeds to jump all over the screen in an effort to stay alive.
While preparing the snack concoction, I was reminded once more about how frustrating it is to work in somebody else’s kitchen. This is a beautiful kitchen, but it took me half an hour to find the can opener, and then another ten minutes to work out what the point of it was. That’s to say, I know its point is to open cans, but this thing could easily have been for examining the human inner ear, if one didn’t have a kitchen as the context.
Further, my mate Jon is a serious foodie-chef – we’re talking a bloke who likes to excavate his own vanilla pods – so the culinary equipment drawer looks like a testament to the dark inventions of a perverted gynaecologist. There was one thing with two finger holders, but a pair of metal rhomboids where the scissor blades should’ve been. If your job was neutering cocks for the production of capons, it would probably be essential. As it is, I’ve still no idea what it was. I didn’t like to ask.
When you’re a tad mental about words, the day consists of idle musings about things that are not only abstract but also utterly pointless. This morning, I thought to myself, ‘Winnie Bago is innocent, OK?’ It was a daft thing to think, but every writer carries a notebook in which all this mildly amusing cerebral detritus is scribbled for posterity. In times of austerity, posterity can be very important for the humble scrivener.
But then one starts wondering what erity is. If ‘post’ is about afterwards (and trust me, all primary Roman sources insist it is…or rather, was) then preserving something for antierity would mean going back in Time to do it. While this explains the absence of antierity as a word in the Scrabble dictionary, it still doesn’t explain what an erity is…or rather, will be. Do try to keep up for heaven’s sake.
In fact, ‘ity’ is the Latin-derived word for ‘an existence or being’, which I suppose makes sense. So that leaves us with er….’er’. And ‘er’ is an Icelandic letter formation meaning ‘the designation of persons from the object of their occupation or labour’.
So posterity is the future time when my (or others’) labours are used to offer a glimpse into the history of people in the past. And the only reason it is revolves around Roman legions of Latin teachers and boats full of pillaging Vikings.
This set me thinking about austerity, and what it might tell us about George Osborne and Wolfie Wheelchair. At which point my left brain decided to change the subject, it being under severe pressure from a murderous right brain.
Hour after hour of pointless oxygen consumption can be devoted to this sort of stuff.
The Slog 