Good Evening Gentle Reader,



Portia has decided it is time for a bit of an overhaul, hair, teeth and that sort of stuff.



Now, in my family we are all proud possessors of fine strong teeth (all the better to eat you up with my dear!), you can always tell a gathering of the famille Portia by counting the number of people opening beer bottles with their teeth.



I haven't been to the dentist for a while, so I trotted off see a posh dentist in a nice part of town earlier today. I was a little nervous, not of the dentist of course, they hold no fears for Portia! - but of the huge estimate he was going to present to me to put the old gnashers right after years of beer bottle opening and chewing off the ears of local government officials.



It has to be said also that my dentist is violently Anti-European. Those who know me, know that Portia is madly pro-European. I expect that the dentist sees this as a valuable opportunity for a rehash of my political education.



I was not wrong either! - no sooner did he have my mouth full of mirrors, sharp pointy things and unspeakable mouthwash, than he started telling me he was going to a pro-referendum rally tomorrow. For once, all I could do was nod dumbly instead of giving him a piece of my mind like I normally would do. He was cackling gleefully and I just sort of lay there in unaccustomed helplessness.



Now a dentist, no matter how posh, is, after all, a tradesman. He may not drive a white van, he may not eat in greasy spoon caffs, he may have had a lengthy college education and not have the worries about traffic wardens that the more conventional tradesman has - but be warned, the dentist is still prone to tea breaks, lists of remedial works and padding the job out just like his more humble brothers. My dentist confirmed this by producing a huge list of works to be carried out to my poor teeth and despite the fact that he thought my teeth were in pretty good nick for a woman of my age and prediliction for opening beer bottles with my teeth, he still managed to give me an estimate for nearly £1000.00! My word! this man charges almost as much as I do!



I have two appointments to attend over the next few weeks. One for a cleanup and a couple of teensy fillings and another for root canal treatment and a porcelain crown to be fitted.



The second appointment will be for TWO HOURS. I shall have to bring my trusty ipod to drown out the scrapings, drillings and ravings about bureaucrats from Brussels.



The male I dont share living space with considers that I have got off pretty lightly and quoted from the 'Life of Brian'.  'You bastard! you lucky lucky bastard' he said.  But I suspect this is to be expected from a man who had to buy his teeth rather than grow then as nature intended.



Portia



ps. The Cartoon comes from a delightful blog called www.cartoonchurch.com - please do pay it a visit.