Last night, while I was lying on the couch/reading the Sunday Style supplement/watching Britain’s Got Talent on catchup/playing on my phone/drinking tea/eating the last of the cooking chocolate/chewing a particularly stubborn bit of my nail, doing all this at once, or thereabouts, because I am Queen of Multi-Tasking with a social media addiction and the shortest of short attention spans: well, my tooth broke off in two because of the horny-nail chewing. (This is one of my dirty little habits, alongside the enthusiastic chewing of the skin around my fingers, making tiny animal sculptures out of the hair that comes out after shampooing, compulsive psoriasis-picking of the scalp and behind the ears, swearing and eating food that is well-past the cut-off date or has been scraped up off the floor).

This is not an exhaustive list.

It went ‘pop’, kind of, and crumbled, and it ended up swimming about on my tongue and I picked out out and it was a proper fang. And what is left is a discoloured filling and half a real, dead tooth, and my tongue cannot leave it alone and when I smile, you see the gum and a sad little greying half tooth and I am reminded of those kids whose parents only ever gave them Fanta to suck from a bottle. I look decaying. I look like those enchantresses who take the youthful potion made with some sacrificial fluid but the potion is running out and specific bodily parts are becoming corpse-like as they run out of time to get more potion from the virginal maid whom they must harvest the sacrificial fluid from, but luckily some hero will get to the enchantress first and save the day, etc etc. I look like I have one of Miss Havisham’s teeth.

I AM TOO VAIN TO TOLERATE THIS PHYSICAL RUIN! The NHS dentist can’t see me until Thursday and I fear I won’t be able to smile until then, or even exit the house for any other purpose than an unsmiling school run. Thank goodness I am not expected to look nice this week. No one can fit me in, not even the private dentists whom I would be willing to pay all my money (there’s at least 27 quid in my account) and maybe some of Mark’s. So I must endure this terrible situation for another two days. TWO DAYS!

Here I am, gurning into my phone to take a photo of the true dental horror:

I might look very devil-may-care, even jolly, maybe mid-punch-line – but I can assure you I am not. I am in the depths of despair.

In Other News

Otis got dressed up by some lovely 11 year old girls last week and Mark got mad:

I applied for two full-time jobs and no one got back to me. I think I apply for jobs quite badly – I am a bit casual in my covering letter bit because I think that my charm will shine through – that it will bedazzle any potential employer, quite frankly, if I just stay true to myself and chat a bit. It reminds me of the time that I applied for jobs with the Law Society when we first arrived in London – and I got a call back from someone quite quickly. I was delirious with the excitement and couldn’t believe how easy it had been – but then when I spoke to the guy, he was actually ringing me to talk me through my CV because it was so terrible and I couldn’t be representing the New Zealand legal profession in quite so shit a light. I think also he thought he was saving me from myself. And so he went line after line, doing a bit of laughing, if I recall, and a bit of telling off, and afterwards I cried and cried.

Then there was that time I went into the High Court in New Zealand soon after graduating and asked if there were any jobs going in any offices where I could effectively intern and some woman said yes, come back in a month, and I did, but then, all cheaply-suited up and eager, she said she had forgotten all about it and I had best be getting on home.

Then there have been two redundancies, one at six months pregnant from a job that I had found myself hastily plonked in after the project I was originally hired for had been shelved and another because I wasn’t very helpful. The only job I have kept is this one looking after my kids, and that’s because no one else will do it.

Now I have talked myself into the most maudlin mood. Here are some photos of half term outings, which was mostly a happier time and place, when my mouth was an unbroken thing.

Firstly, a day at Southbank, with a food market (below) and a sandpit and some mudlarking on the Thames foreshore even though the sign at the top of the slippery muddy stairs said STRICTLY NO ADMITTANCE:

The zoo, for which we pay a yearly membership of about a million pounds:

And Kensington Palace Gardens, which takes five minutes to walk to and costs us nothing and where my two youngest boys held hands and played swinging games:

Right. Cheer me up by letting me know what your dirty habits are.