16-07-2025
JOHN MACLEOD: Farewell to Colin the dentist - he scaled and polished with the touch of an Old Master at work...
The other day, after the latest importunate and texted reminder, I dropped by my Stornoway dental surgery to book the annual appointment for smile-maintenance.
'And I'd like it to be with Colin Robertson,' I declared.
The receptionists stared, their mouths perfect little os of horror.
'But Colin's retired…'
'Yes – he retired last year.'
'Retired?' I gargled, in an inadvertent impersonation of Lady Bracknell.
'Yes. He's retired.'
To grasp the enormity of this, you need to know that Colin Robertson had near-uninterrupted charge of my gnashers, in four different surgeries in two different communities, for over thirty years.
Pert and funny, a son of East Kilbride, I have grown grey under the Robertson probings. He is oddly ageless. I glimpse him in the Co-op from time to time and, still pink and dark, he still looks good for the Fifth Year disco.
It would be stretching it to say I know Colin well. Given the nature of dental appointments, conversations tend to be a trifle one-sided.
And with that oddly distorted vision when your head is horizontal and said BDS has at your molars with some implement or other that always seems the size of a bicycle pump.
But, now that his hands are forever out of the saliva, I can attest that he was an extraordinarily good dentist, from our many encounters over the decades in Harris and Stornoway.
From the get-go, he was grand with the compliments – 'John, your teeth are good, and you look after them.'
Colin probed and drilled and scaled and polished with the touch of an Old Master at a great painting. By contrast, when I was briefly abandoned to another dental surgeon, that chap had at my tender gums like some Dad of a Saturday regrouting the bathroom.
Colin taught me to brush my teeth properly. On his counsel, I in time invested in an electric toothbrush – he recommended the brand, too – and was much loved in Harris, where he had the run of the school as well as the island, for his jolly spitside manner.
'Now, Duncan,' he once purred to a youthful friend of mine, 'I'm going to tug this out on the count of three…'
And yanked, in a painless instant, at two.
'Quite a few appointments cancelled the day,' Colin once intoned, as I stared back – supine – and oozed such witticisms as 'Gah.'
Colin winked. 'Probably because Marathon Man was on Grampian last night…'
For those unfamiliar with Seventies cinema, Marathon Man stars Laurence Olivier, no less, as Dr Szell, an ageing, vicious Nazi dentist who has longly at a pinioned Dustin Hoffman's unanaesthetised teeth with his drill 'until you tell me it is safe…'
'Wah-gah,' I bubbled sagely. 'Is it safe?' thereafter became our running gag for some years.
I particularly warmed to Colin because, like most of my generation, childhood memories of dental treatment are less than optimal.
In 2003, exploring the haunts of my Lochaber infancy, I was ambling down Fort William's High Street when I glanced sideways and beheld an open door with a flight of stairs ascending immediately.
Triggered? I actually sprang backwards, in instant and irrational terror, and drew breath, and took stock, and saw the brass plate intoning this to be a dental surgery.
In 1969 – it must have been that early, for I was still in tights – I was borne here, held down by pitiless arms, gassed unconscious, and came to in the family Morris Minor howling my head off and spitting blood all over those tights. Which were light brown, I remember.
'They wouldn't even let us hang about afterwards for a few minutes so I could calm you down,' my father would recall darkly.
Our dentist in Glasgow, a chilly man who did not like children, was little better. He didn't believe in a time-consuming, numbing injection for trivial things like a new filling and, when I once anxiously inquired what he was actually packing into the latest bored cavity, said coldly, 'A piece of potato.'
I am ashamed to say how long, and for years thereafter, I believed him. But, thanks to good genetics and lifelong application of fluoride toothpaste – to say nothing of growing up in an era when most Scottish parents confined treats like crisps, sweets and fizz firmly to Fridays – I reached my late thirties with all my own teeth.
And just two fillings that required periodic renewal, till Colin neatly permanented one with a rather splendid job in gold.
Just once, after calm adult discussion, he replaced the other without anaesthesia, explaining that if I chose this as a hill to die on it would have to be a palatal injection, protracted and unpleasant.
I trusted him, and just as we neared Dustin Hoffman territory the drilling ceased and was complete.
Colin's counsel on toothpaste was simple. Buy one you like the taste of; then you will brush more often. He had no time for Corsodyl toothpaste and told me bluntly nine years back to stop using it.
From 2015 he encouraged me to use little interdental brushes, as I never took to flossing, and to vast improvement for my gum health; I buy those packets of pink DenTek ones at Boots.
And in 2004 we dolefully agreed that two of my ivory castles had to go. They were rear, impacted wisdom teeth, almost impossible to clean and which were beginning to cause problems.
It was a bit dramatic – I swear Colin had to brace himself with a foot against the chair, as I stared at the ceiling and thought of the Empire – but out they were duly whipped, and any discomfort had ceased by the morrow.
I am probably an ideal dental patient because, as the son of a Free Church manse, I was schooled from an early age to sit calmly and still.
It wasn't just that we had to attend two Sabbath services a week – and my father rarely brought a sermon back to the runway within forty-five minutes – but we sat in a conspicuous manse-pew, side-on to the assembled faithful and the cynosure of all eyes.
Even now, I still bump into folk who affectionately recall the 'three little heads' in Partick Highland.
And I can still give the impression of listening with rapt attention when, really, I amn't.
We are all much more dentally conscious these days. When you recall public figures of the Seventies – Denis Healey springs immediately to mind – it is surprising how many had awful teeth.
Alert to detail and conscious of image, as always, Margaret Thatcher used to have a distinctive gap in her upper fangs. But, by the 1983 election, it had been discreetly disappeared.
Though I have always drawn the line at professional whitening, having no desire to go around leering like Liberace.
I hope Colin Robertson enjoys his retirement – this is actually his third attempt – and, no doubt, it will involve a lot of golf.
Meanwhile, I am booked in for the services of his faceless successor on 21 August.
But if he looks remotely like Dr Szell, I shall turn on my heels and flee.
