Can I join your group?

I find those little quizzes in magazines where you have to answer a series of questions to discover which ‘group’ you belong to irresistible. It’s rather like horoscopes, you know that they are a load of utter rubbish, but I would not trust the person who has the strength of character to ignore reading their reading!

The magazines latch on to the fact that everyone likes to belong, to a group even if it’s one like mine, characterised by a poisonous eight legged scuttling creature with a sting in the tail. We manage, of course, to rationalise and use metaphor to point up the obvious (to us Scorpios) positive aspects of our sign: lively, assertive, intelligent with the ability to use language to stinging effect – no one gets the linguistic upper hand with us! Hooray!

No matter how absurd the little quizzes are they are mesmeric in their attraction and also prompt extraordinary feats of imaginative thought to justify their results. I must admit I also have a healthy scepticism about the accuracy of these searching analyses ever since I filled out a sexual habits survey in a magazine when I was in university. I answered every question with total accuracy and discovered in my final points total analysis that I was – wait for it: absolutely normal. This was one of the most crushing personal insults that I have ever had to endure and, although my faith in these surveys obviously suffered a considerable dent, I struggled throughout the succeeding years and bit by bit I returned to my credulous scepticism and acceptance of the Olympian understanding of journalists in the world of popular magazines.

Accepting that the group mentality exists, my experiences today certainly categorises people; not so much via quiz but rather by reaction.

My day started with my being early for a dentist appointment: one and a half hours early. OK, so I was wrong rather than defiantly brave ad it did make the ensuing ninety minutes a little less than satisfactory thinking about what the dentist was going to do.

I trust my dentist; he has shown himself reasonable and, as far as I can work out, he only does invasive work when absolutely essential – but he is not Mr Hamilton.

Mr Hamilton was the dentist I used to go to in Maesteg when I was a kid. My aunt was his assistant and he always gave me a birthday and Christmas present. He let me dress up in his white coat and pretend to be a dentist by welding his instruments of torture; he even gave me, in what would today be regarded as an act of criminal irresponsibility, a little jar with a few drops of liquid mercury in it so that I could push the drop of liquid metal around a smooth surface. The hell with deadly heavy metals, this was the 50s and there was a boy to keep interested! Mr Hamilton was from Ireland and his accent was impenetrable; I understood virtually nothing except for the vaguely recognisable ‘Stephen’ which ended many of his sentences to me! I went to tea with Mr Hamilton and his wife. He was somebody I grew up with and he was what I thought all dentists were like. I never understood why school friends evinced fear and loathing when they went to the dentist. Why was this? Surely their dentists were exactly like Mr Hamilton.

Then Mr Hamilton died. I had to go to another dentist who I did no know; who sent me no birthday cards; with who I did not take tea. I was absolutely petrified. All the fear which I had not understood from previous years I experienced suddenly, in full, at once.

Now that I am at an age where there is greater perspective about my early reactions, I am able to take a magisterial approach and say that people do not have an attitude of indifference towards dentists. They form groups.

Let’s start with The Frankly Terrified: from a general check up to root canal work, the reaction is the same: unthinking, almost uncontrollable, gut wrenching terror. We could go on to The Defiant Liar: this is exactly the same as the above, but this person has enough gumption left to lie about their reaction. The most irritating is Open Faced Acceptance: this is a state where the person really and truly doesn’t really care about going to the dentist. There are at least one hundred and seventy three distinct extra types which you can discover in any reasonable text book, and you can find your own little group.

The other excursion today was with Paul Squared to get his stitches out in the Heath Hospital. Here is another of life’s little experiences which divide humanity: Hospital Visiting. The groups here range from the ghouls to the grumps: the former taking a macabre delight is seeing the sick and the latter resenting every second spent doing their duty to the sick.

My day was spent thinking about the house and the response thereto. The agent phoned up and said that the potential buyers liked the house but were concerned about the level of the back garden. We will wait and see.

Wait and see.