My tooth fell out in the shower. There was blood in the bathroom sink. I’m now missing several teeth on the right side, from essential extractions and general wear and tear. When I grin or laugh out loud, you can see the gap. It’s a crone-like vista. Hag City, Arizona. I might have to stop grinning and laughing out loud, for vanity reasons. Or I might have to get an implant. I don’t know which would be more painful.
I can’t imagine a life without grinning or laughing out loud though. My friends are too funny, many of them men. (I’ve never believed those people who say men can’t be funny. That they are biologically incapable.) I had lost touch with a friend of the female variety but met her again recently, the two of us sharing the famous pear-and-bacon sandwich in the Pepper Pot Cafe and a slice of cake. She made me laugh until my tummy ached and even after she was gone, I sat there grinning remembering the things she had said.
I can’t stop laughing. Or grinning. Teeth or no teeth. It’s impossible. Especially since being introduced to my new favourite comedian Graham Fellows. He’s been around for a long time, so apologies to all of you going, “Graham Fellows? Sure he’s been around for decades, you absolute dose.” Yes I know. I know that now.
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Fellows, who is 66, invented his John Shuttleworth persona in 1985. Before that, some readers with implants and missing teeth might remember Fellows from his song Jilted John which reached number four in the British charts in 1978. But it’s John Shuttleworth he’s been inhabiting for more than 40 years. The fictional radio presenter is an aspiring singer-songwriter from Sheffield. I love Steve Coogan’s Alan Partridge but I might love Fellows’s John Shuttleworth even more. He lives on a housing estate with his wife Mary and their children, Darren and Karen. He plays a Yamaha keyboard and writes songs about domestic dilemmas. One such song is Two Margarines.
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It tells the tragic, stressful tale of the time when Mary cracked open a new tub of margarine while there was already an open tub in the fridge. This causes Shuttleworth much distress. “Two margarines, on the go, it’s a nightmare scenario,” he sings jauntily, at which point I start to cackle, hag-like, my mouth opening wide, the dark place where my teeth should be clearly visible to anyone who glances in my direction.
My friend Gerry introduced me to John Shuttleworth during Scrabble night. He put on a classic Shuttleworth number called I Can’t Go Back to Savoury Now and that was me gone. This song is about another household conundrum whereby John has enjoyed his wife Mary’s stunning shepherd’s pie and started her dessert of treacle sponge pudding when it becomes apparent daughter Karen isn’t going to finish her plate of shepherd’s pie.
He is now faced with a domestic dilemma of Shuttleworthian proportions. He contemplates abandoning the treacle pudding to help himself to his daughter’s savoury leftovers. But, as the song explains, he can’t go back to savoury now: “That shepherd’s pie was stunning but I’m halfway through me pudding.”
He points out that were he to return to his main having started dessert, his taste buds would go crazy. “I can’t go back. I won’t go back. Obviously, I’d love to go back. But I mustn’t do that.” I’m cracking up as I write this. “Take this plate from me, oh Lord,” he sings. It’s comedy perfection.
At difficult times, people find their solace, comfort and joy where they can. The Winter Olympics helped a lot of people through the rainy season. It was, some said, the Emotional Support Olympics. The figure-skating, the ski-jumping and yes, even the curling (I don’t trust people who don’t appreciate the curling) helped many of us through the rain. The rainy season is now over. By declaring it over in the paper of record, it will of course be made manifest. It’s blue skies from now on, people. Nothing but blue skies.
I knew it was finally, suddenly, actually spring when the first daffodils appeared in the garden the same day a taxi driver turned to me and said – as though he was the only person to ever say such a thing – “you can really feel the stretch in the evenings now”. It was 15 degrees outside. Positively balmy. Elizabeth Strout in her novel Olive, Again put it even more poetically when she described how, in February, “you could see at the end of each day the world seemed cracked open and the extra light made its way across the stark trees, and promised”.
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Through challenges, dental or otherwise, we have to keep looking for the light, for the promise. It helps to listen to Graham Fellows, who has several books and a brilliant, long-running Radio 4 sitcom called The Shuttleworths, not to mention a song called One Cup of Tea is Never Enough (And Two is One Too Many). Shuttleworth would write a great song about the grand stretch. He could rebrand himself as Sean O’Shuttleworth and have a whole new career over here. I just hope he has more gigs planned so I can see him live. I need to keep laughing, teeth or no teeth.
