David Gillon

So problems on my trip North started even before I set off when I woke up and found I'd broken a tooth (molar) in the night. I'd actually lost about three-quarters of it during lockdown when I couldn't do anything about it and by the time we were out of lockdown it was completely healed and there didn't seem any point in doing anything about it, but now the remainer had been reduced to something uncomfortably like an upright chisel blade. As I was already committed to chasing about after other medical stuff that day and don't currently have a local dentist (previous dentist kept sending me to the top floor of their four storey steep stairs-only building and just no) I didn't have a chance to do anything about it before the journey. And while the tooth wasn't  causing any pain, that chisel blade kept slashing the underside of my tongue when I tried to eat or speak. Which was less than ideal.

The journey itself went smooth enough, at least until I got to Darlington. I have a forty minute wait for the local train to Bishop Auckland, so at one point I swapped out of the chair onto a bench in order to dig into my bag for my drink. Which is when I noticed the zip of my bag (rucksack hung over the back of the chair) was completely open down one side. One frantic check of my rucksack contents later I concluded that my toiletries bag had conveniently stuck in the gap and stopped anything else falling out. 

That was until I came to set up my laptop after getting to my mother's, which was when I realised that half of my laptop charger was missing. And of course it was the bit with the transformer, not the bit with the plug. *Headdesk* 

(I suspect the rucksack zip came open right at the start of the journey when I had a momentary fear of 'Did I forget X?' and had to stop and check it halfway to the station).

So on the Friday morning my sister rang around all the local dentists - she was definitely out to a 10 mile radius, possibly even 20, and no one could take on a non-local emergency patient, half of them didn't even have a dentist in*. This was a pain because by this time the underside of my tongue was pretty thoroughly raw and for some reason people (family) kept talking to me and expecting me to hold up my side of the conversation.

On the plus side I did manage to order a replacement charger, (kudos to Laptop Chargers Online who had it waiting for Royal Mail pick-up about 30 minutes after I pressed send on the order). I think it took longer to work out the precise model of my laptop (turns out it's inside the battery compartment) than to find and order the charger (£30 plus an extra £3 for 2-3 day delivery rather than 3-5).

No point in trying to ring dentists at the weekend, so I tried NHS 111** on Saturday afternoon and was told a dental nurse would call me back, but that they were 'very busy'. The call back was about four hours later and the nurse quickly ran me through an assessment, then decided I didn't meet their criteria for hospital emergency dentistry, mostly it seems because I wasn't taking over-the-counter painkillers. Pointing out that I was taking an opioid painkiller strong enough I might not even notice the kind of pain someone might use an OTC painkiller for didn't get me anywhere. And telling me "Even if you did fit the criteria we don't actually have any appointments" didn't really help. Not entirely impressed there.

On Monday my sister tried again, and this time she got one dentist who said "We don't have anything, but try our other branch after 9:30"*** And they did have a slot. So that was a 20 minute drive to a village the other side of the next town over. And I have to say they had a very slick operation - quarter of an hour filling in forms on my phone, then through to see the dentist, who agreed with my feeling that what was left had been wrapped around a now missing filling, and in fact what was slashing open my tongue turned out to be a pin left over from the filling rather than actual tooth. Five minutes with the glorified dremel**** and a touch of dental putty stuff over the remnant and it was at least temporarily fixed. 

And we were amazed they took me on as an NHS out-of-area patient, meaning I was only charged the NHS dental emergency figure of £23.40, we'd fully expected I'd have to pay private prices. (UK dentistry's an unholy amalgam of NHS and private, with fixed charges for NHS patients, some dentists are NHS only, some are private only, and some are both).

And when I got back to my mother's my charger had arrived - ordered 2:30PM Friday, arrived Monday AM - can't argue with that!

Which was when I discovered I'd left the dongle for my wireless mouse at home. *Headdesk* *Headdesk*

And that was it for problems.

The other end of the holiday was more about finding things. First I found my copies of Bujold's Captain Vorpatril's Alliance and Cryoburn, which I've been looking for for at least six months and which it turns out were in the Calibre library on my laptop (I hadn't used Calibre in ages), so it looks like I didn't buy them from Amazon after all, and no wonder I couldn't find them on my Kindle. And there were a bunch of other ebooks I've bought or downloaded from various venues over the years buried in odd folders here and there that are now similarly in Calibre. Then when I came to pack I reached into my rucksack and noticed there was a very faint bulge in the padding. It took me a few minutes to work out which pocket it was in, but yes, there was the missing charger. *Headdesk* *Headdesk* *Headdesk*.

There's a thin pocket the full size of the main body of the rucksack, which I never, ever use, because why? And of course it was in there. But why would I put half the charger in the main body, and half in a different pocket? Ah well, at least I can now leave one at my mother's and not have to worry about carrying it there and back.

Mostly smooth journey back, though I did get deposited at the diagonally opposite corner of Darlington station to where I needed to be (even the driver didn't know why we were there) with 8 minutes to make my connection and a guard who needed to lie down on the floor to work out how to get the ramp in place. When the on-station passenger assistance guy caught up with me he explained what was happening - they'd just had a freight train break in two (eek!) on the line my local service was continuing onto, and it would probably be turning around and heading back to Bishop, rather than continuing on to the coast. I suspect the trains were probably disrupted for hours afterwards, so just as well I wasn't on a later service (or headed to the seaside with a pack of screaming kids).
 

* The UK's having a post-Covid dental crisis, two years worth of deferred treatment and loads of dentists leaving the profession.

** The NHS advice/triage/referral line, by contrast my sister rang 111 at 11pm a few days later and got a doctor's appointment in the middle of the night for her husband without any drama.

*** No idea of the significance of 9:30.

**** While the dentist was working he told me that he'd visited his father in the South of England between lockdowns only to find his dad had just come down with an almost identical problem to me and him without any tools, which ended with him down in the cellar among dad's model railway layout fixing it using an actual dremel!