On Raven Hair and Being a 305.

Not Transylvanian. Greek. The dentist’s new nurse has ¼ Greek ancestry. She also has naturally black hair and chestnut eyes – which is unusual in Britain, and on which I made a point of remarking – and is obviously a pretty clued up sort of girl who realised I’d be interested in her antecedents.

‘My granddad was Greek,’ she told me.

‘I assumed it was probably South European from your eye colour,’ I replied. ‘If they’d been blue, I would have said Gaelic.’

‘I know.’

See what I mean? Clued up. And she has a lovely smile...

So anyway, after Dr Mengele had finished proving that my dental nerves are fully functional (dentists don’t do scale and polish half as well as hygienists) I asked whether he’d mind me reciting a poem to his nurse. ‘Not at all,’ he said, with just a hint of approval.

‘Would you like to hear a little poem?’ I asked her. ‘It contains a pertinent line.’

She smiled nicely, so I recited the one about paddling a canoe in Timbuktu, which includes the line ‘the girl with richest raven hair etc.’ She smiled nicely again. In fact, it was then that she told me about her Greek granddad. I think she was beginning to warm to me...

No? OK.

But then the dentist said ‘That was really nice. It’s years since anybody recited a poem to me.’ What?! I wasn’t reciting it to him, was I? He’s a man. Why the hell would I recite a poem to a man? Daft bugger!

*  *  *

But here’s the big discovery of the day: JJ is a 305. What’s a 305? Here’s the story.

I asked Dr M to tell me all about how teeth whitening works. I was just curious because there was an ad in reception offering a teeth whitening treatment for £299. (Think how many bottles of scotch you could buy with £299. That’s why I was only curious.) So he explained that the first part of the process involves dehydrating the surface of the teeth, and then doing something else, and then re-hydrating them.

‘I didn’t know teeth had water in them,’ I remarked.

‘Most people don’t,’ he replied.

And then he produced these two little objects that looked like bits of teeth. One was slightly darker than the other, and he told me:

‘That’s your colour. You’re a 305. Most people are either 300s or 305s. The other is the colour we could whiten them to.’

‘I don’t have yellow teeth, then?’

‘No.’

‘In that case, I don’t think I’ll bother. If I had teeth as white as that, the young girls of Ashbourne would think I was a celebrity and jostle me in the street. I wouldn’t like that. I’m a very private person.’

I was lying, of course, but I didn’t want to tell him that I thought £299 to be extortionate merely for the sake of having glinty teeth.

Maybe that’s why the subsequent scale and polish was so painful today. Commercial vengeance.