There’s good toothache and there’s bad toothache, right? The good kind is just a dull ache – enough to induce the weirdly enjoyable need to constantly press on it, whilst not exactly being a throbbing pain. The bad kind makes one want to commit murder.
Luckily, it is the good kind that starts up for me as we drive across Hungary to a campsite at the south end of Lake Balaton. I have a good feel around with my tongue, conclude that a tiny bit of tooth has chipped off (a sucky sweet may have been involved – I couldn’t possibly say), and seriously consider asking Steve to get his Dremel out once we’ve stopped. Then I forget about it.
The next day we go into Hevis to check out the market. Steve has an urge to buy proper Hungarian paprika, and spends a long time with a little old lady testing the samples on one of the stalls. Steve is pretty nifty at working around language barriers and only resorts to the joy that is Google Translate as a last resort. In fact he has an absolute gift for finding words that can be understood across a fair whack of the board.
So, ‘piquant?’ he asks the lady, pointing at one of the samples. ‘Yes’, she agrees; ‘piquant.’ He indicates another sample and asks again. ‘Brutal piquant,’ says the lady, offering to bag some up. Er, no thanks, we’ll stick with the piquant, thank you – my mouth is sore enough.
In fact, the toothache is now ratcheting up and this means I’ll have to do something about it. Bollocks. My entire knowledge of Hungarian consists of the word for thank you and now I have brutal to add to the mix. Doesn’t bode well.
The next day is a Sunday so I just have to bide my time. But by the end of the day another chunk of my tooth has fallen out. On Monday morning I slope off to see Janos in reception. He’s a nice young man – big smile, bald head, owns a beautiful Rhodesian Ridgeback, and has a good command of English. He explains the problem to the dentist next door (cos that’s handy) and makes an appointment for me.
By 10.30 I have a brand new filling, and have honed my negotiation-through-mime skills as to the price. Sorted. I head back to the van, wait for the pain to kick in, eat soft stuff, and watch The Handmaid’s Tale.
The next day we visit the Festetics Palace at Keszthely. This baroque beauty houses a fabulous library, several museums and exhibitions, a bird park, tropical gardens, and more besides.
The nerdily brilliant model railway takes up an entire hangar, and features trains through the ages, hurtling through lots of well-known Hungarian towns and landmarks. It has so much detail that I wander around twice, happily spotting a couple snogging on a park bench, a lady with carrier bags trudging up a hill just past the bus stop, and – my personal favourite – an army tank that has sneaked in to the drive-in movie.
Outside the Palace is a vintage car rally of old, Russian, cars – Volgas – and many of them are clearly still in use. One has a microwave perched on its passenger seat.
We see exotic birds, some stunning cacti and amaryllis, and an interesting ‘Travelling Aristocrats’ exhibition, before discovering a building that houses over fifty old coaches, carriages and sleighs.
And then it is time for coffee and cake at a cute little tunnel of a cafe, almost a corridor, really, but covered – absolutely plastered – in antique clocks.
And then my brand new filling falls out.
The next day I go back to the dentist, where she does a terrifying mime to show me that my tooth now needs to be extracted. We agree, and she injects the living daylights out of me: so much so that I can feel my whole throat closing over, and I have no way to swallow. I imagine saliva filling my mouth and dribbling out of my nose.
She gets to work, but what the poor woman doesn’t know is that one of my main personality traits is tenacity, and it seems that that applies to my teeth as well. At one point I genuinely think she’s going to put her foot on my chest in order to provide the necessary leverage, and she’s actually sweating. But after many cracking sounds, and a lot of heaving, it is Dentist: 1, tooth: nil.
An hour or two later, and I now have the pain that makes me want to murder someone. Steve, bless him, has raced to the shops and come back with broccoli to make into soup. Then Georgie gives an almighty lurch, followed by a horrible crunching sound. We’ve been hit!
We both race outside to see a rather large caravan stuck on our back ladder and a red-faced Latvian woman shouting furiously at her husband. Some careful backing-up of their van reveals a whacking great tear in their side, and on Georgie? Not a scratch.
The woman furiously informs us that she’d thought we’d been sticking out too far, but she’s had a walk around and seen that we are, in fact, touching the fence at the front. So, deffo her husband’s fault: I feel quite sorry for him.
On our last day we see her again and Steve invites her in to see the walkie-talkies. She looks so relieved at the idea that I wonder if she’s going to cry. I’m still so heavily medicated that I feel perfectly benign towards them both and besides, it’s time to discover another country.
And then one of Steve’s fillings falls out…….!
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