DO VENTRILOQUISTS TALK TO THEIR DENTISTS DURING TREATMENT? (50)
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Today the air is lightly herbed with rosemary. It is fresh and cool and temporarily free from fumes. An orange cat is adventuring with purpose as a herring gull laughs and I remember looking for a red tinged moon last night in a clouded sky.
Alt Text makes me smile with this week’s suggestion of ‘A person standing in front of a wall of art’ for the photo of me at Qube Gallery in Oswestry where my #ElasticBandPhotos are being exhibited. I’ll take that as accurate.
On Saturday I made my third trip to the Pop-Up Wool Show in Port Sunlight. It was ace for many reasons including:
· Knowing which bits of set-up I am good at and just getting on with these.
· My enjoyment of talking to new people.
· The fact I was not responsible for an alarm system.
Last year I sat down next to someone for a tea break and shared with them my tale of how the school alarm system always needed attention at the time of this particular yarn show. (In 2022 it went off in the middle of the night so we only got a couple of hours sleep the night before the show. In 2023 the alarm panel needed a reset code so I travelled to set-up and then detoured to attend to it.) They then shared with me their tale of the day they had to deal with a gas explosion in their place of work (no injuries, but highly dramatic) and I realised that so many jobs carry that kind of responsibility and my experience in comparison was small. It’s good to talk, and to put things into perspective.
I had plenty of proof of things that could set off alarms that weren’t fire or intruders... a rapidly boiling kettle with a failed off switch, a person wanting to exit the building who pressed the wrong button, a spider in the sensor, a thunderstorm, an unclosed window, part of a display falling down. But my childhood experience was more 50:50...
My first experience of an actual fire alarm came when I had just started school. I remember crying as I walked in line as instructed and we made our way out onto the playground. I felt a grown-up’s hand take hold of mine and ask me what was wrong and I recall telling her “My new lunchbox is inside”. It was in a brand new Paddington Bear bag and I was feeling sad that it would be gone in the fire on its very first outing. I didn’t understand that this was a drill. My first experience of an actual fire came way before this when I was a baby. My brother was experimenting with matches and set fire to the curtains in the lounge much to my mum’s dismay. At least when he was older he made fires with a magnifying glass outside the house.
I was thinking again about the need to quieten an overthinking brain during my under-the-gum clean. Lying there I recognised a change in how I felt about the time it took for this procedure. It used to be a much needed twenty-five minute relaxation in a busy world and now I was viewing it as being simply a thing that needed to be done. And this time there was a picture of purple flowers on the ceiling for me to gaze at. Before those flowers I was never really sure what to look at during the treatment and I can remember one time staring into one of the ceiling lights for the whole process and then not being able to see properly when I needed to leave the room and go and pay. I only did that once!
This poem from 2019 captures an overthinking brain at the dentist:
Do Ventriloquists Talk to Their Dentists During Treatment?
Do they speak about their teeth?
Joke about the way their tongue tracks
the polishing brush?
Do they make small talk –
a statement on the weather,
where they’re going on holiday?
Do they mention that the song playing
on the radio is taking them right back?
Share that whole story?
Do they say they have heard
that ingesting plaque debris
causes heart attacks?
Pause for a moment,
then ask if it is true?
Do they disclose what it’s like
to feel too visible?
Wish they had kept silent?
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