Humour and surrealism interrupt Linda Grant’s tale today about her wish to have “American teeth” — those big, regular things that help us distinguish Americans from anyone else. Her story is every bit as painful as your worst dentist nightmares. At one point, in great pain, and scared away from her usual dentist, she found her way to a late night emergency dental surgery in Hackney “in a queue of extremely poor people, too poor even to afford NHS dentistry”. Sadly, even they cannot help her. Then this happens:

On the way home, I was struck by how very un-American all this was. I just couldn’t see, say, Tina Brown standing in line in the Bronx in the early morning, among individuals whose canines had been knocked out the night before in a fight. What the hell did Americans do? I rang an American. “For crying out loud,” he shouted at me. “What the hell are you doing in Hackney? You go get a second opinion.”

Here’s what happened. I rang a friend. The friend rang his synagogue secretary, who gave him the number of a person who was described to me as the Top Man. The Top Man rang me that night. He had been told that the person who occasionally wrote something not entirely negative about Israel in the Guardian was in terrible pain. He would see me the next morning.

I’m not sure why I find that so surreally funny, but I do. Perhaps it’s the way a huge prejudicial stereotype crashes in on the personal. Perhaps it’s because it comes after waves and waves of misery.

Anyway, Linda does get closure, but it takes a long time. The obvious moral is: never wish for American teeth. Though I’d probably extend that. To avoid disappointment, never wish for anything.

Tags: pain, dentistry