Queue Jumping in Monculi

The dentist is obsequious.  I'd be obsequious if I planned to inflict fear and pain on willing victims.  Anyway, I walked through signorina Borri's olive groves, down to the  appointment with doom, at the bottom of the hill, just like the bank.  A filling efficiently consigned to target in one of the finest departments of dentristy in the UK  had yielded to the finest of Tuscan meat.  Chewed out, I suppose.

With Lillian Hellman's  'An Unfinished Woman ' jiggling in my hands (why did a small HG give me a book with such a title,  jiggling about in my mind) I sit in the waiting room.  Silence, apart from the musak, reigns; no screams, no urgent, barked orders.  Perhaps it will be all right?  Then a little old lady of the petit bourgeoisie enters.  Nothing could direct the adrenaline better.

'O, Signora,  thank Goodness it's you.  I need to see the dentist. You know how it is. Cold March, I've come out without my scarf and gloves, though I have my umbrella, I was in such a rush.   Do you find this a cold March?  Mind you, I expect you are  cared for, though of course you deserve to be, the wages being asked these days, and by people from who knows where.  (By this time I am frozen wordless: with outrage that I am being queue-jumped; by the implication that I am the kind of person who condones this behaviour; by the implication that I have slaves; by the identification of her values with my own; by the fact that the door to the dentist is closing behind her and I am still in the waiting room with my book. I wish I could speak Italian like my aunties-in-law. Or at least display their calculating, extensive, local knowledge.  She wouldn't have dared do it to one of them - the vengeance eaten cold would have been casual and deadly.

But my teeth are back in eating form (never try to eat with teeth out of action, I have lost pounds in the last few days);  and it's a very interesting book; and books are as good a read in one place as in  another.

I suppose.