Agonising post from Trixy at Is there more to life than shoes?. I too have had stuff like this happen and can understand how utterly futile and rather irritating other peoples’ sympathy, particularly unsolicited, can be at a time like this.
I can confirm that what Dr. Crippen said in the comments, about free treatment at teaching hospitals, certainly used to be the case because I once obtained treatment on this basis from the Royal Dental Hospital in Leicester Square (and the critical bit was done not by students but by a professor).
I note that The Devil has allowed the use of his PayPal account for donations.
Because I am now myself what Trixy describes as ‘benefit scrounging scum’, my own capacity in this respect is regrettably limited (and I never use PayPal, but if the dead-letter drop ever materialises I will send a modest cheque); it might interest her to know that being on incapacity benefit does not qualify one for free dental treatment, nor free prescriptions. There is a difference (as I often feel obliged to point out) between people who have ended up on benefit because of some misadventure and those who have always been on it, and on everything else they and their social workers know how to claim, as a career option.
Is there more to life than shoes? has been added to what used to be called the ‘Righteous indignation’ category, but which has now, thanks to leg-iron’s definitive terminological intervention, been renamed ‘Anti-Righteous Indignation’, which sounds rather better anyway. Trixy says:
The state of finances in this country is a mess: my loan could get called in at any time and yet my savings can vanish and from banks which I’m bankrolling through my taxes which don’t really provide me with anything. I’m all in favour of a strong armed forces but even they are being sent to Iraq for a war which is illegal and unnecessary. I have never had a chance to vote on whether I want to be part of the EU and yet that costs tax payers in this country billions of pounds in direct payments without even counting the costs in loss of efficiency through excessive regulations and downright dumb laws and rulings. My food prices are higher than they should be because of the Common Agricultural Policy, my money is being wasted on an energy policy which will have the country flooded with darkness in a few years time and every nice part of the countryside covered in fucking windmills whilst the people who own the land are paid for these monstrosities sitting on their land. Council workers are being paid hundreds of thousands of pounds a year to oversee failing services which allow children to be tortured and murdered, every time you move you’re at risk of breaking a law and yet people who commit the worst crimes are getting sentences which in no way seem to compensate for the awful crimes they’ve committed and the danger to society that they are.
Hear, hear.
I share Obnoxio’s distaste for the register-to-comment process; should there be no alternative but a massive fundraiser, I would request that the dead-letter drop be organised and posted as soon as possible.
BTW I should point out that the root canal treatment for which I once paid exactly twice what Trixy has been quoted, including the crown, though lengthy and tiresome, was remarkably lacking in discomfort, thanks to the specialist responding to my usual speech about my resistance to local anaesthesia by producing, by way of an hypodermic, what appeared to be a stainless-steel caulking-gun. The effect of the treatment, some fifteen years ago, has to date been wholly satisfactory.
