Patients who attend a doctor in emergency come dressed in their ordinary rags and tatters. Their outer clothes vary and their undies are sundry. Those who attend, foreknowing, for their piles or their pap, wear their best undies. We all do it; we prefer to dress up to undress.
 

That’s why I’m hurrying out to purchase a toothbrush. When my regular dentist enquires I assure him I my teeth regularly – and I do – every birthday as well as at Passover and Yom Kippur. Regularly. Never fail. (I suspect my dentist’s true question goes not to regularity but to frequency. But I answered truthfully.)

So I do already own a tooth brush. It has served me, three times a year, for twenty years. It’s an old comrade, faithful and ragged. Today, however, I’m investing in a toothbrush of twenty-first century manufacture. I’m going to brush my teeth today. I’ve googled ‘how to brush your teeth’ and I’ll imitate the you-tube that shows how it’s done.

I’m preparing to visit a special dental practitioner, a periodontist. I’ve never seen a periodontist before but I am reliably advised that this professional will be a torturer with higher degrees and advanced training. So I will come prepared – with a brand-new overdraft facility from the bank and my gums sparkling after the attention of the new toothbrush.

Why has my faithful old dentist sent me to his colleague? Apparently my long gums are going to get longer, my wobbling teeth will all fall out, my destined dentures will never chew adequately and a gummy grin will decorate my mouth in senescence. In short my days of mastication, like life on this planet, are numbered. There’s just time to enrich a professional before it all comes to pass.

Like everyone else I’m dressing up for my own funeral.