View all newsletters
Sign up to our newsletters

Support 110 years of independent journalism.

  1. Politics
  2. Health
6 March 2017updated 08 Mar 2017 2:29pm

What do you do when a gorgeous woman tells you to get your teeth sorted?

You’ll never get anyone with teeth like that, said C, and packed me off to the dentist.

By Nicholas Lezard

To Chelsea Harbour, and a dentist. This is something of an adventure for me. The dentist part involves a free consultation, arranged for me by C——, who, you may remember from a couple of weeks ago, gave me that nice kiss. She has given me to understand that anything more exciting than that will not happen to me, at either her hands or anyone else’s, if I do not get my gnashers sorted out.

She has a point: years of smoking and drinking red wine have taken their toll, and sometimes, when the lighting is in the wrong place, it looks as though my two front teeth have been knocked out when I smile. They’re still there, just a little . . . eroded.

This being a private dentist, I entertain no illusions about ever being able to pay for such treatment as I will need, apart from an idle fantasy that not only will the dentist be a beautiful woman, she will also decide that I am so wonderful that she will perform her services upon me for free. This falls at the very far end of the range of possibilities, way beyond “unlikely”, and indeed nudging the borders of “impossible”. Still, I need something to motivate me to get out of the Hovel.

And getting out of the Hovel and into Chelsea Harbour is a drag. For one thing, I haven’t been to Chelsea Harbour – to actually walk around it, as opposed to clocking it while driving over Battersea Bridge – for about . . . God, it must be getting on for thirty years. I was with Deirdre Redgrave, the ex-wife of Corin, mother of Jemma, sometime lover of Jeffrey Bernard and, in her own right, one of the most beautiful women I have ever known.

“Let’s go and see my friend Lemmy,” she said. “He’s on a barge in Chelsea Harbour.” I was terribly excited about meeting Lemmy, but he wasn’t in. (There used to be a website, called something like Hall of Lame, on which people would post their hugely anticlimactic stories about meetings or non-meetings with rock stars.)

Select and enter your email address Your weekly guide to the best writing on ideas, politics, books and culture every Saturday. The best way to sign up for The Saturday Read is via saturdayread.substack.com The New Statesman's quick and essential guide to the news and politics of the day. The best way to sign up for Morning Call is via morningcall.substack.com Our Thursday ideas newsletter, delving into philosophy, criticism, and intellectual history. The best way to sign up for The Salvo is via thesalvo.substack.com Stay up to date with NS events, subscription offers & updates. Weekly analysis of the shift to a new economy from the New Statesman's Spotlight on Policy team. The best way to sign up for The Green Transition is via spotlightonpolicy.substack.com
  • Administration / Office
  • Arts and Culture
  • Board Member
  • Business / Corporate Services
  • Client / Customer Services
  • Communications
  • Construction, Works, Engineering
  • Education, Curriculum and Teaching
  • Environment, Conservation and NRM
  • Facility / Grounds Management and Maintenance
  • Finance Management
  • Health - Medical and Nursing Management
  • HR, Training and Organisational Development
  • Information and Communications Technology
  • Information Services, Statistics, Records, Archives
  • Infrastructure Management - Transport, Utilities
  • Legal Officers and Practitioners
  • Librarians and Library Management
  • Management
  • Marketing
  • OH&S, Risk Management
  • Operations Management
  • Planning, Policy, Strategy
  • Printing, Design, Publishing, Web
  • Projects, Programs and Advisors
  • Property, Assets and Fleet Management
  • Public Relations and Media
  • Purchasing and Procurement
  • Quality Management
  • Science and Technical Research and Development
  • Security and Law Enforcement
  • Service Delivery
  • Sport and Recreation
  • Travel, Accommodation, Tourism
  • Wellbeing, Community / Social Services
Visit our privacy Policy for more information about our services, how New Statesman Media Group may use, process and share your personal data, including information on your rights in respect of your personal data and how you can unsubscribe from future marketing communications.
THANK YOU

I wonder how I can have avoided a whole area of London for so long. Well, getting there is fiddly; it involves getting on the right kind of District Line train, always an anxious process, and then, I discover, getting the Overground. Which is like a weird cross between a District Line train and a real one. I’ve been on the Overground twice before in my life and on at least one of those occasions got horribly confused and agitated when it came to remembering whether one pushed the button to open the doors or not. The trains also come at very infrequent intervals, and you have to wait for them – the clue is in the name – above ground.

Travelling down there hauls me, somewhat painfully, down memory lane. I’d heard some of John Hurt’s performance in Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell a couple of days earlier and, as I may have mentioned once or twice before, he and I had a little history. It was when I lived in Earl’s Court; and I can date my departure from there to the day, because a few hours after I left, the 1987 hurricane happened and the fourth floor of the mansion block I’d been living in became the third floor; if I’d stayed there one more night, I’d have been killed by the masonry.

Anyway, I get to my stop, Imperial Wharf, and look about me, and I recognise nothing. Instead of what used to be there – that is, a visible stretch of Thames, with boats on it – all I can see now is some kind of sanitised Ballardian mall, fake Georgian architecture nestling up to more unapologetically modern stuff, and in front of me an utterly typical car park.

Such traces of individuality as the area may have had have been erased. It is remarkably dispiriting, and I have to call the dentist’s three times to get my bearings and point myself in the right direction, though Google Maps told me they were only three minutes’ walk away.

Well, as it turns out, the dentist is not a lady keen on giving herself and her dental skills to me, but a nice man in (I suppose) his fifties with a picture of what looks like Stirling Moss in his Maserati 350S at some point in either the 1956 or the 1957 Mille Miglia. I can’t tell for certain, because the photo has been taken from behind.

I am also distracted because I have been totting up the costs that would be involved in making my teeth sexy again. It comes to about a grand; and the chances of finding a spare grand are remote – as remote as finding a time machine that will take me back to 1987, or the keys to a Maserati 350S in the car park downstairs.

Content from our partners
The promise of prevention
How Labour hopes to make the UK a leader in green energy
Is now the time to rethink health and care for older people? With Age UK

This article appears in the 01 Mar 2017 issue of the New Statesman, The far right rises again

Select and enter your email address Your weekly guide to the best writing on ideas, politics, books and culture every Saturday. The best way to sign up for The Saturday Read is via saturdayread.substack.com The New Statesman's quick and essential guide to the news and politics of the day. The best way to sign up for Morning Call is via morningcall.substack.com Our Thursday ideas newsletter, delving into philosophy, criticism, and intellectual history. The best way to sign up for The Salvo is via thesalvo.substack.com Stay up to date with NS events, subscription offers & updates. Weekly analysis of the shift to a new economy from the New Statesman's Spotlight on Policy team. The best way to sign up for The Green Transition is via spotlightonpolicy.substack.com
  • Administration / Office
  • Arts and Culture
  • Board Member
  • Business / Corporate Services
  • Client / Customer Services
  • Communications
  • Construction, Works, Engineering
  • Education, Curriculum and Teaching
  • Environment, Conservation and NRM
  • Facility / Grounds Management and Maintenance
  • Finance Management
  • Health - Medical and Nursing Management
  • HR, Training and Organisational Development
  • Information and Communications Technology
  • Information Services, Statistics, Records, Archives
  • Infrastructure Management - Transport, Utilities
  • Legal Officers and Practitioners
  • Librarians and Library Management
  • Management
  • Marketing
  • OH&S, Risk Management
  • Operations Management
  • Planning, Policy, Strategy
  • Printing, Design, Publishing, Web
  • Projects, Programs and Advisors
  • Property, Assets and Fleet Management
  • Public Relations and Media
  • Purchasing and Procurement
  • Quality Management
  • Science and Technical Research and Development
  • Security and Law Enforcement
  • Service Delivery
  • Sport and Recreation
  • Travel, Accommodation, Tourism
  • Wellbeing, Community / Social Services
Visit our privacy Policy for more information about our services, how New Statesman Media Group may use, process and share your personal data, including information on your rights in respect of your personal data and how you can unsubscribe from future marketing communications.
THANK YOU