He wields that drill with such authority

If you know me, know of me or have been within a ten metre radius of me at any point over the last month, you'll know I've been having some toothache. I've been pretty brave about the whole thing and you've probably only heard me mention it eight or nine times. I am terrified of the dentist. Something about having a total stranger fiddle about inside my face while I lie there totally helpless and unable to speak makes me uncomfortable. Call me crazy.

With this in mind, when I arrived for root canal on Wednesday I asked the dentist if I could listen to my iPod during the treatment, to take my mind off it. His head nodded politely but his eyes were full of disdain.

I think my dentist is very attractive. I can't be 100% certain - there's always the chance that he only seems attractive in contrast to the horrendous experience he inflicts on me. He's Polish, blonde, smiley and quietly charming. However, I'm not certain he actually passed any of his exams.

The problem is that I'm quite thick, and therefore going to the dentist for me is on a par with having brain surgery. What he is doing is so beyond my understanding that I would never be able to accuse him of doing it wrong. I mean he could tell me he needed to crush my teeth to a powder, and mix that with flour paste in order to rebuild them as one giant tooth-panel. He could suggest that we replace all my teeth with whistles. He could remove my tongue and send me away with a course of penicillin and an Etch-A-Sketch, and I would shrug and use it to scratch out a spidery message to friends: "I told him to do what he thought best. He's so handsome!"

The iPod did help with the anxiety though. I settled on In Rainbows by Radiohead, which is both calming and sort of involving, and made me feel weirdly detached. I started to imagine that instead of getting root canal, I was in a cinema watching a trippy feature-length arthouse film filmed from the point of view of a mouth, with In Rainbows as the score. Which weirdly, I later found out, is Thom Yorke's next solo project.* In some ways it was similar to how I felt while watching the Danish musical Dancer In The Dark at the cinema: trapped and hopeless about life. In a peaceful sort of way.

Drifting around on the music in my head and enjoying the local anaesthetic, I started to perceive my mouth as a big marshmallow cave rather than a house of pain. Which was quite pleasant. I also found that I'm so ignorant of what dental processes involve that I couldn't make any sense whatsoever of what the dentist and his assistant (or was she a dental nurse?) were doing. Mysterious implements were whipped quickly in and out of my sight and I couldn't turn my head to get a better look. At one point the dentist pulled out something that looked like my old Walkman headphones, but with a hand-pump on one end, and jammed that into my gums. Later his assistant produced a big metal spike and starting heating one end of it up using what looked, out of the corner of my eye, like a cigarette lighter. My eyes must have been wide with alarm under my stupid plastic goggles, but no one took any notice. Finally what I could have sworn was the mains lead for my flatmate's Toshiba laptop was produced and the dentist made me press it against my teeth while he and the assistant left the room. When they came back I was all ready for them to pull a six-foot floor lamp out of my gullet like in Mary Poppins, and then perhaps perform some sort of musical number about death. It felt like anything could happen.

They also had an unsettling habit of using my, er, chest area as a makeshift instrument table. The dentist would say, "I need two yellows and a purple," and the woman would wander off to a drawer, reappear with some coloured metal things, and casually line them up on my T-shirt, like that was the most appropriate thing in the world. More painfully, a couple of times some horrible chlorine-y tasting solution went down my throat, and at one point acid was spilt on the side of my mouth, and it really burned. I now have an attractive scab on my face, which is going to make a great impression when I start my new job tomorrow. ("Hi, I'm Hattie - I'm the new lifestyle producer. Before we start, let me clear the air: this thing on my face is not a sexually transmitted disease but rather an unfortunate dentistry mishap. Right - where's my desk?")

Throughout the procedure the dentist kept stopping what he was doing, leaning close in to my ear and bellowing "YOU OK?", while punching me jovially in the shoulder. Then when he finished he smiled charmingly at me and said in his lovely Polish accent, "There were many many complications." He explained that one of the menacing-looking spikes that he'd been jabbing into my tooth had snapped off. It is now forevermore living in my root canal. "It shouldn't bother you," he said shortly, before changing the subject.

In summary, I think my dentist may be a sort of Catch Me If You Can-style phoney, and I literally have no idea what he has done to my teeth. And yet, I sort of love him. We've been through so much together.


*The Thom Yorke thing is a lie, but if he wants to use the idea then I am, as always, 100% behind him.

Preaching to the choir

So, I've mentioned many times how much I love Twitter. And I really do: it's become a big part of my daily routine, and I feel like my online interactions - with friends, with strangers, with people from my industry, with experts in various fields, with comedians and journalists - bring me into contact with a lot of thought-provoking ideas and some great, interesting, funny online content. And 'content' really is just a silly 21st century word for ideas again, so there you go. I might be kidding myself, but I feel like for me, life is enriched by what I find on Twitter.

That said, over the past 24 hours I've become more aware of a possible drawback of Twitter, and I wanted to talk about it a little here. Yesterday I threw myself into some serious discussion and a lot of piss-taking on the subject of Nick Griffin's appearance on Question Time. I supported the BBC's decision to invite him on, and then I made fun of the ridiculous comments he made. I was lucky enough to have one of my tweets 'retweeted' - copied and distributed further - by the comedian Iain Lee, and another by Charlie Brooker, and suddenly I was getting retweeted by dozens of total strangers, and getting some lovely and funny responses.

The atmosphere on Twitter - from where I was sitting - was great last night. We all seemed to be in agreement: Nick Griffin is a repellent, bigoted and ignorant man and his policies are so ill-thought out and unpleasant that no one with any sense would vote for him - and those who have voted for him before have surely now seen him for the racist buffoon he really is. People were triumphant that he'd been shown up on national TV.

When I woke up this morning I felt much more uneasy about the whole thing. Here's the problem: on Twitter you don't have to follow anyone whose ideas you disagree with. Also for that reason, it's likely that the majority of the people who follow you will be more or less coming from the same point of view. It's a nice set-up - it makes you feel as though you're among friends and kindred spirits, because essentially what you're doing is tuning out everyone whose views you don't agree with.

In that sense, we might call Twitter a community, but it's got to be one of the only communities in which you can surround yourself only by people you like. You don't have to listen to the people who are talking about how great it is that Nick Griffin wants to tackle immigration, or how poor Nick is being victimised by the "lefty" BBC. It can give a very skewed perspective of public opinion, and when I logged back on to Twitter this morning, I was disappointed but not shocked to see Iain Lee commenting "Depressing night listening to TalkSport. Turns out most people thought Griffin came across well and they'll vote for him."

Well of course they did, because the listeners of TalkSport are most likely not the people I've been paying attention to. But they have as much right to vote as any of us, and if as a nation we are going to stop the BNP from growing in power then these people's concerns need to be addressed. Tearing apart racism to a bunch of people who already hate it is about as much use as sitting around a dinner table with close friends and putting the world to rights. All we're really doing is preaching to the choir, and (I know from personal experience) it can be dangerously easy to feel smug when everyone agrees with you.

I still love Twitter, and I'm not going to stop using it. It's great to find that there are many, many others out there who share your point of view, and I had a really good laugh reading their comments last night. But as a political tool I don't think it's going to achieve much, because it cordons us off into groups of like-minded people. There's dialogue and sometimes debate, but our views are rarely strongly challenged, and we aren't required to make any effort to listen to the people on the other side of the fence. When it comes to achieving any serious cultural change, unfortunately it falls to the other political parties to win back the respect of the voters, and to all of us to actually vote.

I LOVE Liz Lemon

So, as I told you last time, my flatmate and I now have cable TV. This is what has kept me going through the aforementioned shitty autumn of 2009.

When I was a kid it felt like we were the only family in Newcastle who didn't have Sky TV. My parents stubbornly refused to give in, however much I begged (and continued to beg, year after year after year). They said I watched "enough crap as it is". Well, parents, I can now confidently reveal that you were wrong. For now that I have all those extra channels, I know for certain that I have not been watching enough crap.

On Saturday my flatmate went away and left me alone with the cable, so this weekend I have done very little except (a) sleep, (b) carb-load and (c) watch multiple episodes of: True Blood, The Real Housewives Of Atlanta, Hung, Samantha Who?, 30 Rock, Buffy The Vampire Slayer (I don't care, I like it) and Sex And The City. I've also got a lot of America's Next Top Model waiting for me, and I'm toying with series-linking The Ellen Degeneres Show. I am starting to develop genuine emotion for the cable box. I think I'm in love with it.

Also, if it weren't for cable, I would not have learnt Liz Lemon's airtight technique for getting out of jury duty: just dress up as Princess Leia. I leave you with the evidence.


[Incidentally, when I started looking for a 30 Rock clip on YouTube to share with you, it popped up with a list of videos 'Recommended For You'. Apparently YouTube thinks that I need to watch a video about how to find a bra that fits. Because if your friends won't tell you that your breasts look like two puppies fighting in a sack, YouTube will.]

Autumn 09: Just no.

I've noticed something over the past few weeks - something interesting and sinister. And now the time has come for me to share this information with you, dear reader, and see what your thoughts are. So this is what I've noticed: so far, autumn 2009 is awful.

Usually I love autumn: I get to wear boots and scarves again, everything smells autumny, there's Halloween and Bonfire Night (let's face it, very nearly as good as Christmas), I can fatten up because no one can tell, I can have a hot water bottle at night - it's brilliant. Not this year. This year I feel like I'm trapped in a cheap soap opera. All my nearest and dearest are going through heartache and stress, dilemmas and drama. I won't spill their woes on the internet, but as for mine: I broke up with my boyfriend. I have toothache. My hair is at an awkward stage. I spent my wages too quickly this month. There seems to be a plague of spiders going on. I did really badly in a pub quiz last night. Everything is shit.

OK, not everything. We all have jobs. We're all basically healthy. I got cable TV installed last week, which is amazing. Still though, I'd like for things to just get a bit generally better. I'd be interested to hear if other people's friends and family have been going through similar crap or if it's just people who know me.

Before I go let's perk things up a bit with a list of Five Things To Be Happy About.

1. We still haven't had Halloween or Bonfire Night. They could really put a different spin on this autumn. Also I have an American friend who's recently moved to London, and I'm not sure she even knows yet that we burn an effigy of a man on 5th November. She's going to love that!
2. I've got into Fleetwood Mac (the latter years). Amazing!
3. My 18-month-old nephew has learnt to say 'Hattie'.
4. I really like this nail varnish.
5. It surely can't be long until the third season of Mad Men starts on BBC4.

Sorry for this godawful post. Something more interesting soon.