I’ve always been slightly afraid of dentists. Many years
ago, when I was still living at home, I had a wonderful dentist. He was called
Mr Ogilvie and he practised in a house in Lime Hill Road – probably downstairs
in his own home, in fact. He was quite an old man – or so I thought at the time
– and it didn’t seem that he had upgraded his equipment since originally
setting up. Everything was rather antiquated.
This certainly put people off, but what really freaked them out was his conversation.
I can remember a long disquisition on decomposition; and another on the
capacity of the human bladder. You will gather from this that he didn’t adopt a
normal chairside manner, but I found him interesting and the incongruity of the
topics amused me. And I always thought, and still think, that it was a quite
deliberate attempt to distract his patients from their fear at finding
themselves in the dentist’s chair – even if for a lot of people it had quite
the opposite effect. One of the things he told me was that people couldn’t
laugh and be afraid at the same time.
And that is the point I want to make about the wave of changes
to rules and roles that is breaking over us at the moment. Of course we’re
afraid of what is happening to us and our jobs, but one way of coping is to
laugh. I don’t mean that we should ridicule it - but do let’s try to see that there
is often an amusing side to it. If we
are engaged and interested in the changes that are happening, and if we
remember a sense of proportion and retain a sense of humour, I think we will
all cope a whole lot better.
