Always look on the bright side...

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.