The Circumcision Factory is no more

It felt like the death of a friend. The Circumcision Factory has changed its name. Once, the starting point of conversations with disbelieving Ottawans, it has gone banal. It is now, in an appalling nod to wokeness, The Smiles Centre. Whether or not illicit circumcisions are still performed, perhaps under the cover of a general anaesthetic, perhaps masked behind loudspeakers playing a Bonne Tyler song at full blast (“Loving You’s a Dirty Job” perhaps, or “It’s a Ball Ache”) so the screams no longer disconcert passers by or other patients, is anyone’s guess. But from now on, my family doctor resides at The Smiles Centre, or as I shall call it, The Factory Formerly Known as The Circumcision Factory.
 
In any case, I was at The Factory Formerly Known as The Circumcision Factory thanks to the wonderful ability it affords me to book an appointment two months in advance. When I came back from Portugal, I had a skin tag in the fold between my inner thigh and my right testicle (don’t ask if you don’t want to know, honestly), which made walking great distances incredibly painful. It had become inflamed and quite large (stop it, I’m talking about the tag), and I wanted it dealt with. Thankfully, I think, I cannot walk great distances in Ottawa, and so the angry skin tag had stopped being angry and had, as it transpired, fallen off. My doctor spent a few minutes poking around with a miner’s helmet and lamp on his head before announcing I was cured. I had to invent a couple of minor ailments to keep him from getting angry.
 
I left The Factory Formerly Known as The Circumcision Factory in quite a good mood, which was not dampened by the fact that I had a dental appointment at the other end of town. My dentist had managed to squeeze me into her manic schedule before she flew off to the Dominican Republic for two weeks of volunteering in a shantytown near the Haitian border. I like my dentist. She is pleasant and excellent – but I always leave her chair feeling like a serial underachiever. She looked at me in disbelief as I told her how I had chipped my tooth on a turkey bone on Christmas Day – “how could you do something so stupid?” she asked. Before I had an opportunity to tell her, I was horizontal with a wedge in my mouth and she was pelting me with factoids about how few of her cases in the Dominican Republic were likely to have been caused by an overweight chef testing the flavour of his turkey by gnawing on an overcooked wing bone. Even I could see she had a point.
 
Back home, again $350 poorer but thankfully insured, where I settled down to watch Liverpool lose away to Tottenham Hotspur. It was an abject game. This is what watching Everton must be like. I sulked my way through dinner, which was Wiener Schitzels and potatoes… cooked by Mrs. Ottawacker.