Though your heart is aching…

There is nothing like paying a man hundreds of pounds to shove his fingers in your mouth and drill a hole in your tooth, to really remind you of the value of philosophy.

In the bitter blackness of Tuesday morning, I started my journey from Omagh to Belfast.

I had to go to an early morning appointment with an endodontist – which, if you don’t know, is just a fancy name for a dentist that specialises in what goes on inside your teeth.

I was booked in for a root canal at 9.45am, a procedure that, if I had remembered the consultation overview correctly, was to involve me sitting still in a chair for two hours, while a strange man and his evil assistant wedged my mouth open with a piece of hard plastic, bore a cavity into my otherwise impermeable tooth and scrubbed the inside of it like you might a partially blocked sink.

Driving up the M1, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was the butt of some cruel joke.

I felt like I had been conned into upholding both sides of some perverse bet, whereby I was at once paying money to see somebody do something degrading and unpleasant, and then doing the degrading, unpleasant thing myself.

Anyway, somewhere before Ballygawley, I had a flash of clarity, suddenly realising that my worry was completely disproportionate with its cause.

“Tighten up,” came a voice from within.

Taking heed of its wisdom, I stuck on some music to take my mind off things, but quickly concluded that the drug-addled poetry of Pete Doherty and Babyshambles was only exacerbating my anxiety,

I then put on a podcast about some of history’s great philosophers, from Jean-Paul Sartre to Albert Camus, and Friedrich Nietzsche to Martin Heidegger (who, let the record show, I am aware was a Nazi).

I’m not sure if I was in search of strength, solace or distraction. But, to my surprise, I found a bit of them all. I landed at my destination around 9.35am.

I parked across the road and looked suspiciously at the building, concluding, in rather paranoid fashion, that there was something decidedly sinister about how innocuous the premises tried to appear.

At the strike of 9.45am, I exited my vehicle, crossed the road and entered reception.

“I’m Emmet and I’m here,” I told the kindly lady at the desk.

“Sorry Emmet, but there is no sign of your name here. Are you sure you’re supposed to be here and not in our other practice?”

Knowing who and what I am, I knew immediately the answer to her question.

Instinctively, though, I raced to defend myself and started looking for some correspondence that might prove the practice’s system had been hacked and my name thus deleted.

Then, from the bowels of my brain, the half-remembered words of Jean-Paul Sartre were farted into my mind: “The only thing that matters in life is that you make decisions for yourself and bear full responsibility for them.”

I stopped my searching and told the woman that there had likely been a mistake on my end.

Presumably relieved by my change of tune, she rang across to the other office and they said they could take me if I made it over in half an hour.

Naturally, I forgot all about Satre, legged it downstairs, bailed across the road, leapt into the van and started driving hurriedly across the city.

Like most people, I think cursing makes automobiles go quicker. Therefore, I swerved, weaved and sped between lanes, all the while bellowing obscenities most foul.

Then some fella gave me a taste of my own medicine and pulled out in front of me…

I unleashed a torrent of slander, then I heard the voice of that old Nazi, Martin Heidegger.

“(Inexact quote) You are not the centre of the universe. Everybody’s actions are not made with you in mind.”

I shut up, breathed, realised the other motorist’s manoeuvre was unlikely intended as a personal attack on me, and drove the rest of the way with a renewed sense of calm.

When eventually I got into the dentist’s chair, the sweat was running down my back and I could hardly pay attention to what was being said.

As the two folks went about their business, injecting, drilling, prodding and burning, like Meursault from Camus’ The Stranger, I tried to focus on the sensory pleasures of the moment, of which there were very few.

So for the next two hours I smelled the smells of tooth swarf, cloves, bleach and melting rubber and listening to the sounds of drilling, squirting and scraping.

Strangely, it actually did pass the time.

I got up, thanked the dentists and headed out to collect the bill.

“That’ll be £700,” said the receptionist…

It was then I discovered that philosophy has its limits.