It's well past midnight as I sit at home typing this blog entry. The passing revellers have long since sung their way home, but then, this is mid-week, so there was never going to be as many of them as friday or saturday night. The street remains silent in its orange-toned illumination. Only an occaisional car driving by with a low pitched swish interrupts the calm. Apart from the car that's just gone up the hill that is, revving the nuts off his engine in wild abandon. By now I doubt that's going to bother many people. Even the couple across the road have retired for the night. You can only have so much sex before you get tired. Only members of the Rolling Stones are allowed to without sleep.

In between cars the only sound is my faithful electric fan, whirring away with barely audible rattles. The movement of air is oddly chilling. With the room so warm you'd thing the fan would make little difference. The reason for that, as I discovered on a foray to back of the house, is that the night air is not the steamy summer evening I was expecting. A definite breath of wind makes it instantly chilly. Not a breeze, just a casual drift of air molecules that makes the temperature feel so much worse than it actually is.

I stood looking out the back window for a while. By now the urban foxes living in the old college site should have begun yelping and screaching. Even they're quiet, though I wonder if the impending demolition of the site has meant the animals have already been disposed of by pest controllers.

I listen out for those distant yells you sometimes hear in the dead of night, the last few stragglers too drunk to find their way home and wandering around making a nuisance of themselves. I can't hear any echoes of their nocturnal arguments with inanimate objects. One hopes the pest controllers have seen to them as well.

Teeth Check

I don't often go to the dentist these days, but sometimes you do start to wonder if you're suffering health problems and when that happens, the only recourse is to see a specialist. So when I got it into my head that I might be suffering from a developing abcess, I popped down there post haste. It was all very polite, professional, and painful, as all visits to the dentist were intended to be. For all the modern gizmos they use these days like x-ray machines, hand cameras, and so forth, there's something wonderfully medieval about dentistry.

So after half an hour on the rack and feeling no taller, I went away with my free pack of leeches... Ahhh, I mean toothpaste. But at least there's no abcess, and in fact the dentist was impressed by my gnashers, however horrific they looked to me in the images displayed on his dentistry imaging software. My dentist is however a private practioner, as opposed to a National Health one. That isn't anything to do with snobbery or status, but rather the current state of affairs. Although the governments of our day expect you to pay National Insurance to cover these health bills, there's precious few places for people to enjoy that privilege. So you can imagine my relief at discovering I can still chomp away without dentures. I can sleep safe in my bed tonight.