Music, mobiles and molars

Bad news on the dentist visit. If you’ve read the comments of yesterday, you’ll know that I broke a bit of tooth on one of my own home-made almond macaroons. I’d allowed a batch to get slightly too crisp and, yesterday, seizing one, just as I left the house to collect M from the Guildford train, a bit got caught between two teeth. I’m not sure if the tooth was actually broken at that moment, but trying to floss the particle out made things worse. My dental appointment was to redo a filling on the other side, and when the dentist looked at this new problem, he started making noises like a building contractor who is estimating a job and is about to charge you three times as much as normal. ‘You have done a lot of damage,' he said. 'It’s not just one tooth – it’s both of them. You’ve got a very small mouth and they’re very close together. It’s bad enough to consider extraction.’

Needless to say, I was not happy at this, and the outcome is also unsatisfactory. He couldn’t fill the tooth/teeth; he had to put a temporary repair in and I have another half hour session booked in a fortnight, when he will see what he can do. And I’ll still have the new filling on the other side awaiting work.

Listening to the radio discussion yesterday about more emphasis being put on music in schools, (and the usual misquote about music soothing the ‘savage beast’,) I thought back to my school days in inner London. It was a grammar school with some very good teaching and some not so good, but we did have quite a reputation for music. Three times in the years that I was there, we took part in an oratorio with the City of London Police Choir. (Elijah; Messiah and Creation.) Some of us (not me) were better than others and made up a separate choir, who would perform specific parts of the oratorio, and obviously the soloists were extremely talented. Nevertheless, this was a project that the whole school took part in. We built up to it over numerous lessons, in which we would go over one piece many, many times. But in the end, when the performances took place, they were memorable. When you have participated in an event like that, you come away from it with a huge sense of pride and achievement.

The other topic, which also took me back to my school days, was the policy of humiliating teachers in various ways and taking mobile photos of them. When I was in the third year – I suppose we were 14 years olds - someone suggested letting off a ‘stink-bomb’ in the Geography lesson. This was done with the agreement with the whole class, bar one. We were not generally naughty – perhaps we got the idea from an Enid Blyton book. When the deed was done, the headmistress came to our class, and asked each member whether they knew what was to take place. She told us how upset our teacher was at this. I think we were astonished that we had upset her; she was well liked and the deed was not malicious in any way; we all felt chastened and I think we all apologised to the teacher. How different things seem to be now.