It’s a small world.




It was situated on a busy road that housed not only Tranmere Rovers football club and the Ducklings nursery but also numerous medical practices of uncertain status.

A huge plastic banner resembling one of those ‘all you can eat’ banners that buffet-style restaurants like to display was draped across the front wall.‘NEW PATIENTS WELCOME,’ it announced.


The Buckingham Dental Practice was in fact a large,Victorian house which had been converted, so that patients would frequently wander into rooms not meant for them. In vain might one try to imagine the original character of the house and of those who once lived there, so heavily impregnated was the whole place with its present purpose and its pink mouthwash smell. It was impossible not to run one’s hand along the smooth curved banisters without a frisson of dread at the horrors to come. Neither could the waiting room, with its gaudy women’s magazines spread on the low coffee table reassure.


The morning of my appointment to analyse a flaring tooth pain was a bright, brisk, December morning. Sunlight, passing in and out of the clouds faded in and out of the waiting-room, coinciding, it seemed, with the flares of pain. Each burst of sun from behind a cloud illuminated the low table in the centre of the waiting room.

The lady sitting opposite me was about fifty-eight. She was seated on a black, studded, leather chair. Half discomfitted, half-curious, she leaned forward on the creaking shell of leather, picked up one of the fluorescent chat magazines and held it at arm’s length for an instant before dropping it cautiously on the pile of similarly pink and yellow chat magazines that boasted ‘Britain’s first pregnant man, and whose features, including ‘My doughnut shame’ and ‘In a Klass of her own’ were so garish that they seemed to be shouldering each other off the page.



The woman was dressed darkly, in order to resemble someone much younger; her own daughter perhaps? Her feet were crammed into black, chisel-pointed boots and the chain-belt she was wearing cinched a waist that was barely distinguishable from her hips. At her throat, she wore a pashmina, tie-style scarf. Reactolite, square- framed glasses topped her head( she felt that glasses like these took years off her). She had lately been considering laser eye surgery but had decided to have her veneers done instead as this seemed the natural thing to do.



A few minutes elapsed in the private, but disturbed sphere of the waiting room, during which time she took a packet of Dove tissues from her handbag, blew her nose in a self-satisfied way and lifted the main body of the Daily Telegraph, which someone else had cast aside. She appeared to read the main headline in a desultory fashion, her face retreating from the newspaper pages in affectation of distaste, then she let it flop back onto the low coffee table as though it was too heavy for her to hold.

As is so often the case in a doctor’s or dentist’s waiting room, it was hard to discern the exact reason for her visit. Nonetheless, she was to be seen swiftly.


The dental assistant, whose badge read ‘Kirsty’ was wearing a pastel green smock. She waved me down the landing to an empty practitioner’s room and swiftly backtracked along the corridor to usher another patient towards a door marked Dr.Lindsay. I stood for a minute in the empty room before realising that it was the wrong one.


I soon found the correct room with Kirsty now installed by the dental instruments cabinet. The tall Dr O’Brien hovered near the yawning black dental chair while I contemplated the statistic that dentists, followed by farmers were members of those professions most liable to commit suicide. I wondered what it was that induced such despair. I could understand farmers, lonely, communing with their Fresian herds at 4 a.m., then deriving less than a penny a litre for their milk from the ruthless supermarket chains in the face of soaring feed prices. I could feel their despair at having this year’s wheat crop flooded at the crucial harvesting time, but dentists?


Dr. O’Brien took an x-ray then sent me back to the waiting room, where a conversation was now flowing between the fifty-eight year old woman and a new, middle-aged woman with thinning, magenta-coloured hair, a tailored denim jacket and Ugg boots. They seemed to have some sort of connection between them.



‘We were in Cuba too last year’ said the first woman. ‘Isn’t that strange. I think we stayed in …I can’t remember the name of the place... I think it began with an H?’

‘Havana, so were we, but we had the second week in Puerto de los Sablos. That’s on the coast.’

‘Did you?' the first woman purred, the self-satisfaction now having spread to her conversation.'Oh yes, we found the hotel in Havana was alright but they’re like, very laid back in there.’

‘Mmm, that’s right, we found that too, but the year before that we were in Thailand. They couldn’t do enough for you there, and right away. Everyone is so friendly.’

‘Well, they do say that don’t they? A bit too much sometimes with the men!'

There was a burst of appreciative laughter from both the women.


‘And I think it was in 2005 that we went to Jamaica' the first continued.

‘ Now that’s somewhere we’d love to try, but Brian’s not as keen as me.’


Both women laughed and there was a kind of gurgling satisfaction in their laughter.


‘So how are you fixed for Christmas?’ the first woman asked the second.

‘Oh we thought we’d go away again but I’m not so sure with all this, you know, the credit crunch. My daughter’s asked us over to Sligo, that’s where she met her husband.’

‘Oh that’ll make a change. We’re off to Florida. We DID do the shopping trip to New York a few years ago, it was amazing but…’



At this point a small, tinny shout seemed to leap out of the first woman's handbag. She stared at the bag, wilfully pulled it towards her, whipped out the offending mobile whose ringtone was a pre-recorded male voice which shouted angrily ‘message!Message! MESSAGE! M-E-S-S-A-G-E! She swiped at the thing, pointed it away from her, shot me a withering look in reply to my obvious scowl. Staring incredulously at the screen, then cupping the mobile against her cheek so she could fondle the bag, she told the mobile, the waiting room and its occupants that she had done the rest of the shopping but would be late, repeated the word ‘Prenton’ twice, then squirelled the mobile away into her bag. She picked up the dropped thread of the conversation almost immediately.


‘Yes, we DID the shopping trip to New York too’

'Did you stop off in London like WE did on the way back?’ the first woman interjected.

‘No, no. God, no.Too much trouble. Queues etcetera. Anyway this year we just want to be somewhere warm, after all that cold, so we thought Mexico.’



During the course of their conversation, I had been holding the pages of the Daily Telegraph open on page twenty-seven, retreading an article that bristled at me not so much because of its content but with my annoyance reflected back at me from the page. I fulminated at the thought of the air-miles the two women had blithely clocked up over the past few years between them.



The tall Dr.O'Brien appeared in the doorway to relieve me of my fury.

‘Mrs Jean Robbins.’ he called, appearing to examine the sheet of paper he was holding out in front of him.


The first woman stuffed her Dove handkerchieves into her handbag and waddled to the door. After she was installed in Dr O’Brien’s room, the second woman with the thinning, magenta-coloured hair turned to me approvingly.


‘Isn’t it a small world?’ she remarked. ‘Would you believe that that lady and myself were both in Cuba last year, and then we both turn up at the same dental practice?

Unbelievable!’