That’s an unusual title for a blog post isn’t it? It sounds like I’ve fallen in love with a man called Nikolai and, I suppose, in a way, I have. He’s great.

Permit me, if you will, to explain.

He’s my dentist.

So why do I love the fellow? Well, in a nutshell, he’s just about the best dentist I’ve ever had. I’m not sure of his origins but his accent is Slavic and to be honest with you, I don’t give a damn where he came from just as long as he keeps looking after my choppers the way he does.

The thing with Nikolai is that he doesn’t waste time. He cracks on and gets the job done with the minimum of fuss. He’s softly spoken and as gentle as a lamb and he’s got a sense of humour, which is something I have found lacking in previous dentists.

I required a filling recently and Nikolai performed it completely pain free. You know that sudden sharpness of the needle going into the gum? Yes? Well, I didn’t even feel that. Nothing. Not a single thing. And the whole shebang was over in a few minutes and I was out of there and back on my way before you could say the words, “Rinse and spit!”

I have had a few dentists in my time here on Earth and whilst, yes, some of them have been very good but none of them have been up to his standard. And, during my childhood, my mouth was set upon by some absolute monsters.

My very first dentist was a lady called Miss Campbell and I still have vivid nightmares about the woman. She was about four and a half feet high, well advanced in years, hunchbacked and stooped, and should have retired at least a decade before she did. She had clearly never heard of the concept of pain free dentistry and, being the official school dentist, she was allowed to practice oral terrorism on every child in the district.

She wasn’t an unkind lady though, not really, just crap at her job. I can still hear the screams of the other children as I sat trembling outside the “treatment” room waiting my turn. I was petrified, truly petrified. I would rather have jumped in front of the school bus than endure her horrific methods.

The worst thing that Miss Campbell did, however, wasn’t to me but to my brother. We both required “treatment” at the time and were hauled into Miss Campbell’s waiting room quivering with fear. I was selected to go first and, in spite of my high-pitched squeals of agony, Miss Campbell set about me with her trusty drill.

My brother, on the other hand, required gas for his “treatment.” Back in those days it was common enough for dentists to render their patient’s unconscious by means of a heavy, black, rubber mask being placed over the mouth and nose and a mixture of nitrous oxide and halothane being pumped into the mask and inhaled by the patient.

Standard practice in those days.

However…

Miss Campbell, who I mentioned earlier was way past retirement age, gave my brother too much of the gas mixture and there then followed a frenzied episode of general panic as she and her assistants endeavoured to revive him. I was terrified and I can’t even begin to imagine how my mother must have felt. It was horrible.

Thankfully, Ian eventually came round again and we left the dental surgery and had ice creams as a post torture treat. That was also common in those days.

Can you imagine that happening these days though?

If that happened now then the dentist would have been hauled through the courts, been put out of practice, and my family would be wealthy beyond our wildest dreams due to the huge settlement fee we would have received.

But this was 1972 and we just got over it.

We moved to a new area when I was eight and I thought I had left all my dental horrors and Miss Campbell behind me. How wrong I was.

The next dentist I had for the remainder of my school years was a lady, and I use the term “lady” loosely, called Mrs Rampton. There’s also a high security mental hospital in Nottinghamshire called Rampton and I have a firm and unshakable belief that that’s where the woman belonged.

I swear she was psychotic.

She seemed to delight in inflicting pain on children. Seriously, anyone walking past her surgery during school hours would have thought blue bloody murder was being committed in there. She would regularly perform dental surgery without any form of anaesthesia and would screech like a harpy at any child who dared to register even the smallest cry of discomfort.

But, Mrs Rampton had a husband – Mr Rampton. Mr Rampton was the antithesis of his wife. He was physically huge but as kind towards children as could be. He would talk to you through the whole process and would always give you a sticker for being so brave. How could the two be so different?

Sadly, I only saw Mr Rampton on a handful of occasions and most of my “treatments” were done by the Psycho Bitch from Hell instead.

No wonder then that once I reached the age (16) where my mother could no longer get me to go to the dentist, I simply didn’t go. I’d had enough of dentists to last me a lifetime and I sure as heck wasn’t going to put myself through that if I didn’t have to.

The downside to this was that my teeth, over time, fell into disrepair and I was forced to go and visit a dentist for some major dental work at the age of twenty-five. And it was ok. In the nine years between my final savaging at the hands of Mrs Rampton and the work I had had done in the early 90s was remarkably different. I finally felt that I could go back to having regular dental treatment.

Since then, I’ve had maybe four or five different dentists and they’ve all been really good, especially Mrs Jassat, but none of them can compare to my main man Nikolai. He’s the bees knees when it comes to my oral hygiene.

So I guess the moral of this story is, when you get a bloody good dentist hang onto them for dear life because the alternatives might not be so pleasant. And I’m hanging on to my Nikolai.