Last week I had to have a tooth out. On the way in, all the slender gun metal implements were laid out on a tray like a futurist fruit bowl: or a miniaturised set of exhibits from the London dungeon. “For what we are about to recieve…”

Jamie (my son) told me that he was relatively relaxed about having five teeth out at a sitting when he was 13 because he hadn’t seen the size of the needle until afterwards. I use his stoicism then as a model now.

I suppose its helpful to be told that “we’re just going to twist this round”; as having a rough idea of what’s going on, without being overburdened by detail, approximates to Buddha’s middle way.

It was all over quicker than I expected. they showed me the tooth, like a hard little birth, big, cracked, solid and bloodied. Red Molar.

There’s now an odd sensory battle going on between minding the gap – which feels much bigger than it looks – and a startling awareness of the remaining teeth, which are so much more present than they were; like the remaining relatives in a generation being lost.