Anyone remember all those high hopes I had of making the blog a more regular thing? Who was I kidding? Only me, I suspect. Various factors have since got in the way. One is that reviews seem to take me longer to write these days. Put it down to my age and comically unstable health. Directly related is the fact that time seems to shoot past me nowadays at a rate I swear it never did in my teenage years. Then again, since those days are now far behind me, that they probably did and I simply didn’t notice it. Maybe I just had more energy then.

When planning my review schedule for April (I know it’s May now, but go with me on this), I too late realised that I had four packed titles to cover that were due for release on the very same day, and that a sudden (if temporary) explosion in the workload that I get paid for was going to prevent me from starting on them until later than I would have preferred. The titles in question were One for the Road and the three-film box set of 70s British sex comedies titled Stanley Long’s Adventures for Indicator, and the comedic martial arts double of Knockabout and Dreadnaught for Eureka. Despite the work-enforced late start on these, I opted to tackle Stanley Long’s Adventures first, partly due to curiosity about how these very 70s movies would plays to more enlightened modern eyes. Not great, as it happens, but there was still more to talk about than I was expecting, so I dove in anyway. And that was when…

I’m guessing that many you have had wisdom teeth removed at some time or other. Most people have potentially troublesome ones extracted when they are either in their late teens or early twenties, when the roots are not fully formed and the teeth are thus not too difficult to remove. I was always chuffed by the fact that three of my wisdom teeth came through just like their more regular brethren and thus created no problems for me. The fourth proved to be the idiot of the bunch and grew at a preposterous angle, heading almost sideways into the side of the adjacent tooth and only partially erupting through the gum. Absurd through this wayward molar was, it caused me no trouble, and as long as it continued to do, every dentist I have visited over the years was happy to leave it where it was. Recently, my regular dentist retired and a new one took his place. She was instantly more concerned about this tooth, and after a bit of digging and two very thorough x-rays, she discovered that the side that was still buried deep the jaw was starting to decay. As this was likely to cause me serious trouble if left unattended and was almost impossible to operate on, it was decided that I should have it removed.

Now before I go on, I should point out that my what follows appears not to echo the experience of most who have been through a similar procedure. If you are some due to have wisdom teeth removed in the near future, take comfort in the fact that most who do so have little in the way of major problems. That said, you still might want to give the next three paragraphs a miss.

Okay, here’s the thing. I’m not a healthy young fellow in his early twenties but a malfunctioning git that you might politely described as late middle-aged. The silly sideways tooth has thus had decades to get its roots firmed embedded in the back of my jaw, and I thus knew it wasn’t going to be a simple extraction job. It wasn’t. I had the procedure at an NHS dental clinic that specialises in such things, and will say that the process was far quicker and more efficient than I was expecting. That said, it did involve an unusual four injections to numb the area, the gum being sliced open, some jaw-rattling levering, the cutting of the tooth into pieces with what looked to me more like a Dremmel than a dental drill, and three stitches sewn into the gum at the very back of my mouth. It wasn’t traumatic and I left the clinic in unexpectedly high spirits. Then the numbing effect of anaesthetic started to fade…

I love how medical practitioners sometimes play down upcoming experiences with softening adjectives. “You may feel a little uncomfortable when the anaesthetic wears off,” the surgical assistant told me. “Just take some over-the-counter painkillers like Ibuprofen or Paracetamol.” A little uncomfortable? Are you fucking kidding me? I’ve dealt with a lot of pain in recent years, courtesy of my accursed left foot, but nothing as nightmarishly concentrated as this. Fortunately, I’d bought some strong pain killers and chugged more of them than I probably should have, and while this did take the edge off of the pain, it didn’t reduce it to what I’d describe as a comfortable level. My face looked like I was trying to smuggle a grapefruit into the country by hiding it my right cheek, and I quickly found myself unable to open my mouth wide enough to get anything but liquids and scrambled egg into. Online searches unearthed people sharing stories of pain that starts to recede after 48 hours or so, and I thus pinned my hopes on experiencing a similar reduction in the next couple of days. It did not occur. Then came the exhaustion. For reasons I’m not medically qualified enough to explain (but have since had explained to me), I began falling asleep every time I managed to reduce the intensity pain just a little, and I mean shutting down suddenly, like John Beck’s co-pilot Shoulders in The Big Bus. Two days ago I slept for 17 hours out of 24.

While the grapefruit got a little smaller over the next few days, it didn’t disappear, and the pain remained a constant reminder that I still had a long way to go. It probably didn’t help that one of those wisdom teeth that I was so pleased came through like regular molars was now pressing on the swollen gum every time I closed my mouth to swallow. Something clearly had to be done. Constant pressure from my increasingly concerned partner prompted me to get an emergency appointment with my regular dentist, where I expected to be told that this was all normal and I had to just wait it out. Not so, as it turned out. She quickly discovered that the socket was infected and oozing puss, and thus irrigated it and has put me on a course of strong antibiotics, advising me to double up the first two doses. The swelling has certainly gone done a bit now that the poison that was causing the grapefruit bulge has been flushed out, but I still feel as if I’ve been kicked in the side of the face by a furious donkey with a personal grudge. Apparently this pain will subside when the antibiotics start to take effect. I’ll believe it when I feel it.

All this nonsense has of course completely torpedoed my plans regarding the above-listed reviews. Even focussing on a computer has been close to impossible for the past week – I was lucky in having my review of The Wrong Arm of the Law almost complete, and was able to polish it off and upload it in a rare period of relative calm, just before I was ravaged by the sleepy-time monster. I thus put most of the reviews on hold, though have since passed the Stanley Long’s Adventures discs on to a once active but now irregular contributor to the site, largely on the basis that these films were probably more up his street than mine. He’s working away on the review as I type, but is still a few days away from completion.

As for me, well, the mere fact that I was able to type this lot out shows that I’m a notch up on where I have been in recent days, and once the antibiotics kick in (although they did come with the proviso, “you probably won’t like them” – more medical underplaying, I suspect), I'm hoping to be back up to my regular speed. I’m especially keen to get up to date on those Indicator titles and the upcoming May releases, for reasons that should become clear in the days ahead…