'What do you think of the new Eureka Street that I can’t read?’ my dentist asks.
He always asks curly questions when I am defenceless with a mouthful of wadding. I don’t think it’s a power thing because he is a gentleman in every sense. That’s why I’ve gone to see him, voluntarily, at least twice in the last ten years.
'Whad d’yer mean yer cawn readid?’
We are old hands at diverting conversations. He knows they help me unlatch my fingernails from the palms of my hands. His hands are unscarred and he has a deft touch with his battery of instruments. He also knows it helps to show the instruments to this incorrigibly curious patient so that she can, like Galileo, have her moment of tortured anticipation to allay the guilt about having only come twice in the last ten years. I suspect that the ritual brandishing is also his way of tacit reproach, but he is such a gentleman I can’t be sure.
But I am sure he wants an answer to his question because he extracts the cotton wool from between my clenched jaws.
Spit, gargle, spit.
‘What do you mean? You prefer reading Eureka Street in the old hard copy, so you can papier-mâché it in the bath or take it to bed with you?’
‘Yep.’
‘And you haven’t got grandchildren who can drag you into the 21st century?’
We digress for a few minutes. He was the father of young children when I first took my pre-fluoride dentition to him, a few years before Eureka Street began publication. I used to trip over his youngest son asleep on the choir-loft floor of Canberra’s St Christopher’s Cathedral. Lucky I didn’t break his baby teeth. We’ve sung complicated fugues and church-militant recessionals together. Belting out ‘We Stand for God’ together makes for wry mateship.
I offer to send over some of mine (grandchildren, not battle hymns) to initiate him. After all, I inveigled him into his first Eureka Street subscription. He thinks that’s just boasting about who has grandchildren etc. It probably is, but the generic usefulness of grandchildren as a spur to technological uptake is undeniable, so we spar on for a few minutes more as I attempt to shame him into exploring online and remind him of his obligations to say in touch with the next generation.
Then—forget proselytising—we start serious drilling. I