How time goes.

I went to the dentist this morning.

Now the thought of visiting the dentist chills my blood.

Little sister used to hate the dentist more than most so would be taken into The Room first.

I would lurk in the plastic-seated waiting room, age seven ish, little basin haircut, flicking without comprehension through copies of Homes and Gardens.

To a soundtrack of my sister howling.

Purely in anxious anticipation of the event, you understand.

The volume would up as soon as any sort of mouth delving was required.

So as some sort of peculiar hangover from this time, I've never much enjoyed these dental times.

Teenage time and I fell into the habit of trotting through whatever school thing I was learning at the time in my head by way of a distraction.

I distinctly remember a couple of years of following the passage of the blood round the heart from aorta to ventricle and back again. (Bet I've got that wrong. Siobhan will tell you.)

As a grown person - and remembering nothing from my schooling years as my good friends will testify - I've defaulted to lines learnt.

So today, as the cleany thing whined in my aural passages, I racked my brain for Secret Rapture lines.

And racked.

But they were gone.

Scene after scene of (pleasant but blandly delivered) lines and all I could remember was (predictably): "he's an ad man. His heart presents a very small target."

I could even cough up a couple of strands of Much Ado. ("Is it possible disdain should die while she hath such meet food to feed it as Signor Benedict? Courtesy itself would convert to disdain if he come in her presence." and then I flounder.)

But SR. Gone gone gone.

How time goes.