Not even a raging toothache could keep me away from my favourite op-shop when we visited Ulladulla again yesterday. Mind you, being a whole one hour early for my dental appointment and not wanting to spend it in the dentist's waiting room listening to all those drilling and gurgling noises may have had something to do with it.
The gods must have been wanting to make up to me for all the pain I was in, because there, squeezed in alongside a whole row of forgettable potboilers, I found this little gem of a book, "The Durrells of Corfu", still in mint condition. It is yet another biography of Corfu's eccentric expat family immortalised in Gerald Durrell's "My Family and Other Animals" and its ITV adaptation, "The Durrells".
How I wished I had already read it when I used to fly across to Corfu for a short weekend to stay in my Saudi boss's villa on Messonghi Beach to recover from an overload of work in my Piraeus office, but then I also regret not yet having read T.E. Lawrence's "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" when I lived in Saudi Arabia, or George Orwell's "Burmese Days" when I worked in Burma, or Anthony Burgess's "Malayan Trilogy" during those beautiful twelve months in Penang. Of course, I read them all now, and many more besides, but it felt a bit like finally reaching out for the instruction manual after having struggled for days with an IKEA flatpack.
As for my dentist's diagnosis, it was like a fairy tale, GRIMM! While he cut away the remainder of the broken-off tooth which had caused me so much pain, he felt unqualified to extract it fully as the tooth is right in the path of all that cancer radiation I had received all those four years ago, and there was a likelihood that it may lead to complications and even require a bone graft from my leg.
While I still had a leg to stand on, I made my way to the Mogo Day Surgery where the oral and maxillofacial surgeon Dr Anthony Oliver practises for a couple of days a week. He was not due in until the next day for which I was able to secure a preliminary appointment at 1.50 p.m. Having all that time to wait, I looked him up on the internet, and was impressed - see here. Skilled hands when I need them indeed!
P.S. I was lucky to get an appointment with Dr Oliver the very next day - click here.
