Sorry for the Group Email

The 28th of September was pretty rough. We drove an exceedingly long way: more than four hundred kilometres. We rustled out of our sleeping bags at six in the morning, piled everything away, necked some tea, and hit the road. Around one o’clock in the afternoon, we stopped in Rockhampton.

Driving fatigue is an insidious beast. You can drive attentively and carefully for hours at a stretch (my record is currently five), and then suddenly your spatial awareness goes to hell, your overtaking manoeuvres become erratic and dangerous, and you find yourself flicking two fingers up at anyone fool enough to tangle with your lane. We needed to stop.

Problem was, it was Sunday. Rockhampton was closed. The shopping mall, the supermarket, the little shops – with the unhelpful exception of an antique shop – were all closed for the day.

We passed entirely through the town, which was melting in the heat, until we found a Subway hidden away behind a warehouse off the highway.

“Nah, I don’t think Rockie’ll ever have Sunday trading,” said the woman behind the counter. We remarked we’d had a hard time finding somewhere to eat until we’d spied the Subway.

“Lucky us,” she said, a little hotly.

Things improved slightly when we found the cinema – which was open – and settled down to a bag of sweets. Things took an urgent and permanent dive for the worse when, halfway through the bag, my mouth filled with gravel and one of my molars, which had been giving me trouble for months, announced its presence with a searing blast of pain. A little investigation revealed the worst: my filling had disintegrated. Even Will Farrell teabagging a drumkit couldn’t take my mind off the fact that, come Monday, I was going to have to face a dentist.

I was miserable by the time we came out of the cinema. I was tired and aching from driving, my mouth had spontaneously gone to hell, and we didn’t have a campsite. When we did find a campsite we bickered pointlessly over where to camp (can someone please back me up that camping under powerlines is bad for you?), then went to bed with a handful of dentists’ numbers and a vague sense of unhappiness.

The next day improved slightly. The local hospital would only take us if we were registered unemployed or elderly, and the first dentist was full, but we wangled an emergency appointment on our third go. I brushed carefully.

The dentist peered curiously into my mouth.

“You do know you’ve got another hole?” she asked. There was a pause. She gasped: “Two holes! What have you been eating?”

“Bags of sugar, mostly,” I joked.

She gasped in mock horror. “And you dare say this to a dentist?”

I liked her from the start. We agreed to do a proper job on the molar, and temporary fills on the two partial holes, on the condition that I get them fixed when we reach London. Root canal was threatened if the filling didn’t work. To say I was nervous would be to understate things somewhat.

Since our myriad travel immunisations I’m not so squeamish about needles, but even so, the two mouth-numbing injections before we got started were unpleasant. It’s not just the impact of a sharp, dry needle coming into contact with my soft gums, but the lingering, irrational concern that I’ll reflexively clamp down, chomp the needle in two, and twirl shrieking into the waiting room, spraying blood, saliva and novocaine over the horrified assembly of waiting patients.

In the event there was a great deal of drilling and excavation, a little bit of pain, and an hour later I emerged blinking into the sunlight. In addition to three new fillings I also appeared to have a camping sock for a tongue and someone else’s teeth.

“Can you sort out the bill, please, darling?” I said.

Actually, I said “Ca yoo sthorchow th bee, blith barling?” I also seemed to have had a serious stroke while I was under the drill, and for the next few hours I was miserably mute, nodding, shaking my head, or gesturing helplessly whenever someone asked me a question. The next time you need to say something, I’d like you to pause and appreciate the fact that you can speak intelligibly without straining yourself or pouring a river of dribble all over your shoes.

Since I couldn’t talk, and it didn’t seem like much fun to sit for the rest of the day with a sore mouth in a hot tent, we drove. We drove for a long time, in fact. We left at around two in the afternoon, and we arrived in Airlie beach around eight in the evening. By that time my mouth had recovered feeling, and I was using my new-found powers of speech to unhappily recount my time in The Chair and to lament my painful gums. On the plus side, my molar was now merely sensitive to hot and cold, which was an improvement to the searing pain I’d been occasionally enduring whenever I ate.

The next day, I resolved, would be better. We were virtually at the Whitsundays, a collection of islands anchored to the Great Barrier Reef. Ahead: snorkelling, boat trips and absolutely no drills.

Dave uses mouthwash now. The total damage, by the way, was A$265 for three fillings, lots of painkiller and an X-Ray.