I remember it well

Our
first regular dentist was the ancient Dr McIntyre, who was on the first floor
off Cathedral Square in the then small but undiminished Christchurch. There
was a clanking open-frame lift with pantographic doors, but one felt safer taking
the wide polished wooden stairs up to the linoleum landings with their doors
of frosted glass. And it took less time, which unfortunately meant that the
appointment was not delayed.
Mr McIntyre was round and pink with a white coat and white hair and a hand that
trembled. Maybe two hands that trembled quite excessively. The cream enamel
dental equipment was driven by a system of belts and pulleys that didn’t
actually drive the bits that fast but generated sufficient torque that, should
a drill bit catch in a molar, you rotated around the drill with feet outermost
spinning at a constant 86 rpm. There were no anaesthetics or needles, just “This
may hurt a bit.” And hurt it did, in our world of no fluoride in the water
and a diet of grandmother’s toffee and fudge. Mind you it hurt him when
we bit his finger, as I recall. The visit to the dentist generated considerable
dread and lead to avoidance behaviour and a fortune spent in later years trying
to keep some of my teeth in my head.
Hence my eternal gratitude for my current dentist who has resurrected my mouth
over time from many a disaster, including breaking a fall through a floor with
my mouth. Now that was pain, driving into the city with several front
teeth broken under the gum and one just literally hanging from the nerve.
Conversely, as memory gently erodes, one loses the benchmarks of what you were
like and what you could do – until the moment when you find yourself in the
company of old people and realise that you are one of them and you can’t
remember one single name. And they are all your friends. Probably, under the
slightest duress I would forget my own name. I know that in one stressful moment
I forgot my wife’s.
And at every gathering now there is an extended first introduction and imromptu,
which is called the organ recital, where everybody spends far too much time
talking about their latest bodily misadventure. Knees, prostates, eyes, intestines,
hearts and lungs – a veritable butcher’s shop of symptoms. Or who has
gently shuffled off this mortal coil or gone raging into the darkness of the
night.
As in the last lines of Shakespeare’s ‘The Seven Ages of Man’
we are on the way to being “ Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”
When I worked I met a lot of people. I know this because I collected their business
cards which, the other day, I finally got rid of. There were about 1000 of them
from all over the world and to be honest there were very few faces that I could
recollect unless I had to met them again and my future, or a free lunch, depended
upon it. One or two I know because I still see them in the supermarket or on
the bus and thus have to remember their names are Chris and Bruce respectively.
Doctor Bruce is memorable for the fact that he introduced me to London beer
with the strange idea that I might like it and then had to endure my revenge
of dragging him around what turned out to be R B Kitaj’s final exhibition
in London. The paintings were memorably good and the beer memorably bad. Which
all happened because we had a free weekend in London between meetings. So, not
all business trips are an exercise in endurance, too much food, too little physical
activity and never-ending sleep deprivation in strange hotels.
Actually the problem with names has been perennial, which was a bit of a curse
when I was teaching for, as I was reminded the other day, one of two things
that makes you memorable as a teacher is being able to remember the names of
your pupils. At this I was a (memorable) failure. The kids knew I struggled
to know their names unless they were incredibly talented, incredibly evil or
astoundingly stupid.
Despite everything you might think about the northern suburbs, most kids were
not. They were surprisingly nice, normal and well intentioned, which meant that,
even though they deserved it I was scratching for names, even though I kept
the most scrupulous notes on them all. Were the notes, at the end of the school
day, about the right person? When I stopped teaching and went and did a job
that earned more money, there were places that I had to avoid because there
were kids that I had taught who remembered my name…… but there was
no way that I could remember theirs.
By the way the other thing which makes you a memorable teacher is being able
to teach, which is much harder than it seems.
The obvious thing to do, as a much more diligent person that I pointed out,
was to photograph all the kids and paste them in you attendance and mark roll.
That’s what gets you to be principal of a school.
But now I wonder, did I really write a report that stated that the child was
a good argument to make birth control retrospective? It is not impossible, but
I don’t really remember.