Say, AAAAGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!

It’s 1.40am on a quiet Wednesday morning and once again I find myself wide awake and restless. The house is still, and the gentle screeching of car tyres on the road outside is typically punctuated by consistent sirens, drunken domestic disputes and the blood curdling squeals from the urban foxes. I’ve been trying desperately to convince myself that those squeals are one of delight, and that if I glanced out my window I’d see a small gathering of foxes all crowded around a particularly unappetising al fresco buffet of discarded chicken bones, burnt toast, feral pigeons and Mullerice yoghurts. Although, I’m too scared to actually glance out the window just in case my worst fears are confirmed and what I’m actually faced with is a violent urban fox gang rape.

Despite the obvious comforting ambience, I find myself wide awake for two reasons: number 1, I had a tremendous 4 hour powernap this afternoon, and number two – I experienced the excruciating pain of a wisdom tooth extraction this morning. Jesus wept, it hurts – but it’s always nice to have a sympathetic Jesus. We’re very similar to each other in that respect you see, Jesus and I, we both consider ourselves to have a very high pain threshold. I mean, I’m sure you’ve seen photos yourself – and when I say photos I actually mean windows, because when Jesus was alive they weren’t lucky enough to have digital cameras like us kids today and so from what I gather he pestered friends to paint pictures of him and then had them transferred to glass windows in Churches for all the world to see.

For any of you younger readers out there, if you haven’t been in one, a Church is pretty much a 3D Facebook profile page for Jesus. Although, you can’t just ‘Like’ what he says – you have to ‘Love’ it instead, and he’ll never ask ‘What’s on your mind?’…because he already knows. To his credit though, if you pop in for a chat, he won’t cut you off half way through your conversation like your broadband will.

It’s believed to be around six hours Jesus was nailed by his hands and feet to that cross – six hours, and if you look over any old pictures you’ll see that he barely even shed a tear despite shedding about 8 pints of blood; not one solitary tear.  But – and he’ll go tits at me for telling you this – if you ever saw him stub his toe in his sandals you’d lose all respect for him. He was such a wuss when it came to toe stubbing. Now THAT, would have been an excellent painting.

De-tag, De-tag, De-tag.

I was a clumsy kid, and I’m still embarrassingly clumsy to this day. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve cracked my head open, smashed my face in, trapped my fat hands  somewhere, got my head stuck between the springs of a trampoline or taken a pogo stick pedal deep into the back of my calf; but it’s the embarrassment that sticks in my head more than the pain. They way it seems to work is that, the larger the surface area of the injury, the more tolerable the pain. But sometimes the smallest thing in the world makes me wish I had a portable morphine drip to hand. Like, a spiky crisp. There is no pain in the world that hurts as much as getting a spiky crisp stuck in your throat. Or, eating hot potato – god forbid any of you ever have the misfortune to misjudge the temperature of a spoonful of potato. And I can honestly say I would rather have my feet sledge hammered by Kathy Bates than try to do up the button on my jeans after cutting my fingernails just a little too short. Why does it hurt so much? Why?!

Admittedly, I’ve never broken any bones or been in any life threatening situations and so you may argue that my pain threshold is somewhat inexperienced – and you’d be right. I have a friend whose knees have a tendency dislocate themselves at random and unbearably inappropriate times, and although I’m aware that it’s insulting to liken the pain to how it feels when I put deodorant on a freshly shaven armpit – unfortunately, it’s the only frame of reference I have.

 Just in case you’re wondering, if a friend ever says “I double dislocated my knees at work, it really fucking hurts” – it’s never wise to follow that up with “Oh god, I know how you feel, I underestimated a McCoy the other day.”

Never.

I’m sure you’ll agree though, that where pain is concerned, toothache is in a league of its own. Before I had it removed I had reached the point where the pain in my wisdom tooth was so bad that I began to resent having any teeth at all. In a flurry of hallucinogenic sleepless nights smacked off my tits on a cocktail of Coedine, Panadol and Whiskey, I remember fantasising about a toothless life full of soup, tinned peaches and endless gurning competitions. At the time, it seemed completely plausible that this was exactly where Evolution should be going next. I could start a cult, the Church of Edentulism – a bit like Scientiology only without the bullshit Alien theory; and Tom Cruise. No, instead we would idolise the likes of Albert Steptoe and Les Dawson, whilst singlehandedly providing a solution to the obesity epidemic because no one would be able to eat solid food. With 57 (and counting…) varieties of Heniz soup alone, how could life possibly be dull? The Heinz factory would become like the Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory of the savoury world, laden with Mulligatawny Rivers, Golden Chicken and Noodle showers and Pea and Ham puddles where tiny toothless ‘Urpa-Slurpas’ would be constantly working on new and exciting soup flavours for us to try. We’d even have a flag, very similar to the Welsh flag but with the sacred Soup Dragon proudly displayed in the centre – and the Mighty Boosh ‘Soup Soup’ song would be our anthem. Ainsley Harriot would be knighted as an honorary member of our church for his outstanding contribution towards soup production – despite having a rather offensive array of blinding veneers. We would simply ban him from smiling broadly in official photographs.

There would be only one thing that we do not tolerate in the Church of Edentulism – and that would be Chowder. Thou shalt not eat Chowder.

See, I almost had it all planned out.

 If going to the dentists has taught me anything about myself, it’s that I really shouldn’t mix medication –  and that I need to stop treating my mouth as though it’s an in built Swiss Army Knife. But, the biggest lesson of all that I have learnt is that my life would generally be much richer if I had spent more money on toothpaste instead of Drumstick lollies all these years…

Hindsight, eh – what a painfully expensive bastard.

And so to bed I go…fingers crossed that when I wake up I don’t still have a cheek like a disorganised hamster.

xx

More tits, less teef please Ainsley!