Lo! friends,
The endlessly churning machine that is my live stand-up diary continues to chunter onwards, devouring the cities of the UK and spitting them out, awash with post-laugh serotonin. Come and see my current show THIS SUNDAY in…
…and next month I am back at one of my favourite festivals of all, the sun-soaked Brighton Fringe. I’m doing three Sunday afternoon shows which are always a blast. Come check the show out…
See you there!
I don’t know about you, but these days I’m seeing a lot of omens. Every day I am beset by a million tiny signs. I can’t move for portents. I wake up and it’s just: top-to-bottom harbingers. Everything bodes. And all those bodings point to one thing and one thing only: I am getting older.
These auspices come in droplets: my 24-year-old flatmate doesn’t know who Stephen Merchant is. I find a black banana in my coat pocket and think: ooo! I am seething with fury at the Great Western Railway sign-in portal. My one-handed texting technique reminds me of something and then I remember what: the way my mother uses the remote control.
And the crowning omen, Time’s most persistent indignity: my teeth. Why, as humans, do we still have teeth? I cannot imagine a more frustrating, fragile, neolithic method with which to digest anything. I, like most British folk, don’t really have a smile. I have a graveyard with lips. Everyday I must open my mouth for food or oxygen or conversation, and every day I am greeted by a tea-stained mausoleum signifying the decay of my own skeleton. Why? Why must it be like this for humans? Someone get Charles Darwin on the phone! For God’s sake!
When we were children there were two directives as far as your mouth furniture was concerned: brush your teeth and don’t eat sweets. I (a registered nerd, dweeb and swat) did not. It has helped me in no way. Because now, as an adult, if I don’t brush my teeth immediately after eating even fucking cereal, my teeth wince and ache and cry for the doctor. After cereal! What?! Eating grain cereal is what they’re for! Very specifically and evolutionarily! This is like when I found out it’s bad for your knees to run regularly. I’m sorry?! I shouldn’t run!? What did you think I was going to do with knees? What the hell is going on? The entire human body can’t just be for special occasions! This is madness. Someone told me recently that apparently it’s better for humans to swim than to run. To swim? The thing that it is famous for fish to do?! If that’s true, why do sharks not have knees?! Do they, on the sly?! Am I about to Google the words ‘do sharks have knees’? Am I going insane?!
As a result of my adult teeth’s inbuilt obsolescence, I now have to go to extreme lengths just to maintain them at a basic functional level. Truly, from the way I treat them on a daily basis, you would think they were listed buildings. On the instruction of my dentist, my teeth each have the conservation entourage of a National Trust site. The tools I have bought for them! The equipment! The accoutrements! Dental floss to floss them! Intra-dental brushes to scour them! Dental harps to play them soothing music! I now have a mouthguard to wear while I sleep in case I grind my teeth in my dreams, which is the most paranoid piece of apparatus in the world: a piece of plastic to guard my mouth against…my mouth. Honestly, my gob is protected by levels of security so high-end you would think Mariah Carey was living in there.
And let’s be clear: like most English Heritage cultural landmarks, my dental maintenance is not cheap. Astonishingly every other bone in my body is a socialist, quite happy to be serviced for free by the NHS. But apparently teeth are inherently right-wing, desperate for privatisation. And so every 6 months I pay a dentist (or at least someone in a mask who owns a tiny sink) to rummage around at the top of my throat, knocking and scraping, deciding which bits he or she is going to knock through. Hygienists will often refer to this drilling and scraping as ‘cleaning’, but make no mistake it does not feel like cleaning. Cleaning makes you think of polishing, smoothing, wax on, wax off. What the hygienist is in fact doing is a lesser-practiced form of fracking. Done right, you should be able to feel it vibrating in your pelvis. Meanwhile you lie there, trying to hide all your consciousness in the back of your skull where the childhood memories, sexual peccadilloes and TV advert jingles live, while a stranger looks into your unhinged jaw to find proof that you’ve been misbehaving.
I can’t bear it anymore. Please, God, or Darwin, or whoever it is (Jeff Goldblum?), just replace teeth with literally anything else. A sucker. A node. A leaf that absorbs moonlight. I’ll do anything. And do it quick. I’m getting old.
Feeling generous?
If you’ve got spare honk, why not consider giving to one of these amazing charities?
The Listening Place - this was recommended to me by one of our readers! a free counselling service for people who are struggling with suicidal ideation. It looks excellent. Donate if you can!
Parkinson’s UK - Parkies provides care and support across the UK for people with Parkinson’s, and fund research into a cure. They do incredible work! Please consider donating!
If you have a charity close to your heart, however big or small, and want to include it here {or you wanna get in touch for whatever reason!} - just send us an email benpope86@gmail.com or Tweet at us @LoAnEmail