Peter Rhodes on painless dentistry, secret Budgets and 'salting the earth' in Westminster
I checked Wednesday's item on South East Asia against my archives and found this reader's email from a column 12 years ago: “I am taking a new job in Seoul. Is this a good Korea move?”
Off to the dentist's where, after 75 minutes of pretending to be heroic, I emerged with two shiny new fillings and a wallet 70 quid the lighter. This strikes me as good value, so long as you don't obsess about the NHS's promise to be “free at the point of delivery,” a solemn political pledge which, like so many others, has vanished into the mists of time.
Like anyone whose experience of dentistry began in the 1950s, I will never be a happy patient. The treatments today are almost painless but, as the drill screams into your enamel, you recall the agony of yesteryear, at the hands of dentists who didn't believe in anaesthesia for children, and urged you to be a brave little soldier. The pain of some procedures was legendary. A colleague of a certain age once told me: “If love didn't hurt so much, all the great songs would be about root canal.”
