Ministerial Meandering

Gum recession

Or I might as well ask you, “Are you just getting long in the tooth?”  It’s one of those ‘is your glass half-full or half empty?’ questions.  And it’s all to do with appearances.

I watched a wonderful advertisement of a periodontist promoting his own practice for gum disease.  His first language was probably one of East Indian origin, but he was easy enough to understand, with his musical lilting phraseology.  He did, however, look absolutely terrified - like the proverbial deer caught in the headlamps - and his expression was so fixed you might have thought he had Parkinson’s Disease.  Nevertheless, he made an impassioned plea for his work, which I felt should drum up some practice for him.

My stepfather had terrible gum recession; at least, I had never seen such long teeth in a human being.  A baboon, maybe, but not human.  Dr Roy, the man of the video advertisement mentioned above, talked about ‘gummy smiles’, the result of gum overgrowth; my stepfather most definitely did not have that - rather he had the tombstone teeth.

But as I said earlier, it is all about appearances.  People’s confidence is significantly affected by their oral appearance.  I remember my sister, Penny, who took a bite out of the council paving as a small child, breaking one of her brand new top front incisors, leaving it like a battlement for years until it was eventually crowned.  She would try to hide her smile.

Our eldest, Ruth, had fused incisors and canines, and for a long time would try to hide her smile behind her hand or by pulling her upper lip down, until they were eventually capped.

So it is with some joy that I can tell you of two people I know who can give you the biggest smile in the world with not a tooth in their heads.  One is a lady in my AA group, and the other was a Leading Steward on a Type 21 frigate I sailed in to the South Atlantic and the Falklands.  I am sure he wouldn’t mind my sharing his story.

L/S Tuxford was enjoying a relaxing day on the flight deck with his mates as we sailed back from a 6 month deployment to the Falklands.  We were having a ‘Village Fête’ on deck, with all sorts of stalls - and with a deck hockey game thrown in.  ‘Tux’ had had a full dental clearance for rotten teeth many years before, so had a complete denture, top and bottom.  At some point in the afternoon, someone had told him a really good joke - and he lost his teeth laughing at it.

Came the time for the evening meal, and Tux was serving the First Lieutenant with his usual good humour, when the said officer turned and asked him, “Tux, where are your teeth?’

To which the inimitable Tuxford, with the world’s biggest toothless smile said - with some pride - “About 50 miles off Brazil, Sir.”

 

Philip+

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