Alex Marsh - Sex & Bowls & Rock and Roll - How I Swapped My Rock Dreams for Village Greens

Past the gates of the old airfield, up the gentle hill towards the old service station. The sunshine washes across the fields and hedgerows and the music fills the car. I’d say that it was the sort of morning that made it impossible to have a worry or a care in the world about life, if I weren’t so worried and full of cares about life and – specifically – the morning ahead itself.

I park the car and slowly walk up the street towards my appointment. It’s a nice day, but let’s not get complacent. It’s at just these sorts of moments when life has a habit of hitting you in the face with a hammer.

I am hit in the face with a hammer.

I recoil from the shock and surprise. Not being complacent is one thing, but it is fair to say that I was not expecting anything quite so unpleasantly literal. The man hits me in the face again. Boff.

It is not a nice feeling, not a nice feeling at all, and improves not one jot when he repeats his assault twice more.

At some point, I tell myself, I should say something. He does seem pretty competent, and I get on with the chap reasonably well (although perhaps less so now, seeing that he is hitting me in the face with a hammer), but truth be told it is an unpleasant experience and I would like him to stop.

‘Diss crown is priddy impossible to shift,’ he explains, in a South African accent. ‘I hev tried wiggling it with dee pliers. Now I am hitting it with diss hemmer.’ He bashes my tooth with his hammer once more, to emphasise the point. Boff.

Randy Newman wails from my MP3 player. Unfortunately, I have absent-mindedly selected the wrong ‘genre’ in my haste for musical distraction, and instead of uplifting and rousing cheerful pop music, my head is filled with mournful minor-key reflections on losers and low-life tragedies in the medium of the blues, whilst I am being hit in the face with a hammer.

The anaesthetic seems to have made my face swell up, as if somebody has pushed a marble into my mouth and under my top lip. They may well have done. Or perhaps it is a snooker ball. It certainly feels the size of a snooker ball. It could be a penis, for all I know. I have my eyes firmly shut. I do not wish to open them as the hammer is unpleasant enough as it is without watching its descent. I can’t believe that it is a snooker ball – what dental purpose would that serve? I also do not think it is a penis, as he would not be hammering it so hard if so.

The only really good thing about a dentist putting his penis in your mouth and starting to hit it wildly with a hammer whilst you are under local anaesthetic and have your eyes firmly shut and are listening to mournful Randy Newman songs is at least you know that you will get offered some mouthwash afterwards.

‘It’s coming,’ he explains, not entirely reassuringly.

The sterilising machine in the corner of the dental surgery starts up with a big ‘whooooosh’. It makes me jump, but diverts me momentarily from the hammering, and from Randy Newman, who has just finished singing a verse about a girl who stole his car and went on to cause a traffic accident, running over a man named ‘Juan’. Randy Newman sounds particularly extra doleful about this; he has no car, and undoubtedly his insurance will be affected. The ‘whooooosh’ is presumably steam, but sounds remarkably like an enormous toilet being flushed.

Adam’s enormous toilet was, due to a quirk in the architecture of the London flat conversions, situated directly above my face.

This is what it had sounded like anyway when I lay sleeplessly in bed, my stare fixed on the ornate ceiling, marvelling at the noises that could be made by a simple item of plumbing. Whooosh! it went. Rushhhh! Sloshhh! It is virtually impossible to describe to somebody who has never lived in a converted Victorian house just how loud the noise of a man weeing in the flat upstairs can possibly be. Cities are never quiet, but the background noise will fall to a dead silence when set against the watery rumble of half a pint of urine hitting the base of an enormous toilet bowl over one’s head. The roar of the main stream, the sonically perfect echo of each single salty droplet as it splashed back against the rim.

Sloshhh! Slossssshhhhhh!

I had been on friendly terms with Adam. He was an amiable man who tended to keep himself to himself, but would always be up for a cheery ‘hello!’ as we passed on the stairs. Living on his own, his habit was to go to the pub each evening, returning at around midnight to start weeing.

I would lay in bed listening to the performance, work anxieties surging around my head. Beside me, the LTLP would snore gently in her anxiety-free woman’s world. As the weeing tailed off, the noises of the city would gradually fade back in: some drunks shouting, the clatter of freight on the East Coast line, perhaps somebody trying to steal my car. And then forty minutes or an hour later, the weeing cycle would begin once more.

Sloshhhhh! Slossssshhhhhhh!

Boff. Boff.

Another couple of bashes with the hammer brings me back to the present day.

The music fills my head to bursting point. Piano, bass, slidey guitar. As each chord hits home, I concentrate hard on trying to envisage myself playing it; the shape of my left hand across the strings, or the sensuous womanly caress of a minor seventh on the ivories. It is not enough to dismiss the hammering stuff, no matter how I want it to. Boff. I blink to myself. Why am I here? Why the bloody hell am I here? The hammer pauses for the gap between songs and then starts up again in earnest.

Why am I here?

Boff boff boff boff.

Why the bloody hell am I here?

Boff the boffy-boff boff boff boff.

Why the…and more to the point, how is this man hacking into my own personal inner monologue in order that he can hammer in perfect time with it? I give him an angry look from behind my protective goggles.

Why am I here?

Boff boff boff boff.

Why am I here? Here in Norfolk, pressed rigidly down into a dentist’s chair, being hit in the face with a hammer.

Lots of reasons.

The little picture reason is that I have a toothache; an abominably bad toothache that crept up on the roots of my incisors; a toothache that has lingered like a man in my area who has come round to give me a free consultation and a no-obligation quote.

The medium picture was the Harringay Station Herd, and the fact that my life seemed to consist of: wake up, fight my way to work, work, come home, listen to man weeing.

But the big picture was all to do with Strategic HR Initiatives.

Strategic HR Initiatives. The foundation stones of modern business. The management engines that are so vitally important to ensure that the companies of UK plc can innovate, thrive and come out clear winners in the global war for talent. There is nothing as pathetic as a moribund stuck-in-the-past company, doomed to hostile takeover, bankruptcy or a slow slide into sales oblivion because of the absence of great – or the implementation of poorly thought-out – Strategic HR Initiatives. That is why we must have them. And just as these initiatives invariably transform the fortunes of the smallest partnership to the most major conglomerate, so they have profound effects on individual employees.

This is what happened to me. Admittedly not quite in the way that was intended, but there you go.

I guess you would say that I had been quite successful in business alongside the musical accomplishments. Admittedly I hadn’t actually started any businesses, or employed any people myself, nor had I spotted an idea that had become really really big and had led to my share capital becoming millions of pounds overnight. However, I had managed to get paid every month without killing anybody or provoking employment tribunals or bringing the company to its knees by confusing ‘Press F1 for Help’ with ‘Press F8 to Delete Exchange Server’ on the IT system.