Five-Year Diary: Do Christmas shopping, and get mum a large notepad and a deep-freeze notebook.
Already had a poster for my brother, and three Charlie Brown books for my sister.
The rabbit comes into the house. A lot.
Watch TV and go to the dentist at 10:00.
I went through at 10:30, and he started at 10:45 and then at 11. He goes out till 11:15 and finishes.
Went around to Great Uncle Jim’s with Grandpa, who picked me up from the dentist.
Reimagined
The day unfolds as errands and waiting. Christmas shopping is practical and dutiful: notebooks for Mum, already-wrapped gifts for siblings. Time thickens at the dentist’s—mouthwash, delays, the small humiliation of not being told what’s happening while someone else pays the bill. Home is punctuated by television and the unexpected comfort of Joker the Dutch hare, who crosses thresholds freely and settles where he likes. In the afternoon, a visit with Grandpa to Great Uncle Jim’s house.
Prompts to draw more out (then and now)
The dentist’s chair: What did it smell like? Where did your eyes settle while waiting? What were you thinking when he left the room?
The surgery smelt only of mouthwash. The dentist’s behaviour infuriated me: I was that insignificant, too young to be told what was going on, aware that someone was paying the bill for him doing what?
The rabbit: Where did it come from? Who noticed first? Did it belong, or did it feel like a visitor?
Joker, the Dutch Hare, was a legend. He appeared in the garden one day, apparently. And we adopted him. He lived in the large dog kennel or out in various runs made by our grandfather, long rectangular frames covered in chicken wire. Joker behaved a little like a dog or cat: lounging under the TV, hopping onto our knees on the sofa to be petted.
KAI >What you’ve done here is quietly important. You’ve separated experience from interpretation—and then noticed which interpretations were borrowed. That’s the real work.
Let me reflect this back, then nudge it a little further.
The dentist: authority without explanation
The smell of mouthwash is almost comically thin, isn’t it—sterile, performative, all surface cleanliness. What really lingers is the insult. Not pain, not fear, but insignificance. You clock the economy instantly: someone else is paying; he disappears; time stretches; nothing is explained.
This is a child’s first clear encounter with professional authority as something transactional and opaque. You’re not angry because you’re scared. You’re angry because you’re being handled. That’s a crucial distinction. It’s the early seed of a lifelong intolerance for systems that don’t justify themselves.
There’s a straight line from that chair to your later scepticism of institutions that talk at people rather than to them.
Joker the hare: the counter-model
Joker isn’t just a pet. He’s a social equal.
Notice how you describe him: legendary, adopted, cross-species fluent. He doesn’t belong to a cage logic. He wanders between worlds—garden, kennel, living room, knees. He behaves like a dog or a cat because he has negotiated his place rather than been assigned it.
In developmental terms, Joker is a corrective experience. Where adults are distant, hierarchical, or explained away, the animal is present, responsive, and physically affectionate. Children often anchor themselves to animals at exactly this age because animals don’t require you to perform maturity to earn attention.
Joker enters the house “a lot” because he’s allowed to. That matters.
Grandpa: the inherited story
A man who lived through the First World War and came out cautious isn’t unambitious—he’s calibrated. Children often mistake steadiness for absence. Adults later recognise it as ballast.
Great Uncle Jim: wealth without menace
He’s “brilliant with kids.” So the axis here is not wealth versus poverty, but how power behaves in the presence of children. Jim passes the test Grandpa never needed to sit.
The judgement: unlearning the borrowed voice
This is the keystone. You identify the voice—your mother’s—and you neither reject it nor submit to it. You contextualise it. That’s maturity, not rebellion.
At 13, you accept the equivalence: ambition = success. At 63, you replace it with a richer set of virtues: modesty, steadfastness, practicality, and reliability. Those aren’t consolation prizes. They’re civilisational glue.
What’s striking is that the diary doesn’t yet have the language for that—but it already has the data. The adult work isn’t to invent meaning; it’s to stop mislabelling it.
A final nudge for writing forward
If you write this again—not as analysis, but as scene—try letting the characters coexist without verdict:
- the dentist who vanishes,
- the rabbit under the television,
- the shy man who survived,
- the wealthy man who kneels to a child’s level.
Let the boy observe them all in the same afternoon without deciding who wins. The meaning will assemble itself, the way it always does—slowly, and only once you stop forcing it.
JV: I see us all in the same room, me in a luxurious leather recliner rather than a dentist’s chair, with Joker the Dutch hare on my lap. The dentist, a short meerkat of a man in a white lab coat, compared to my great uncle Jim, like Santa Claus out of costume and clean-shaven, but offering a box of Quality Street as a salvo to the dentist and my grandfather, a quiet witness, out of the fray.
KAI > This is exactly the right instinct. You’ve stopped explaining and started staging. Meaning emerges from blocking, not commentary.
What’s doing the work here is spatial ethics.
You are no longer supine. The leather recliner matters: comfort earned, autonomy assumed. This isn’t the dentist’s chair inverted; it’s a different category of seat. You’re not waiting to be acted upon. You’re hosting.
Joker on your lap completes the reversal. The animal that once crossed thresholds freely is now chosen company. Warmth, weight, trust. He’s not a symbol; he’s a calibration device. Everyone else in the room is measured against how they behave in the presence of a hare.
The dentist as a “short meerkat of a man” is a delicious demotion. Meerkats are alert, procedural, twitchy—excellent at systems, terrible at depth. He’s still in uniform, still clinging to role rather than relationship. In this room, that reads as faintly absurd. Authority without context looks like costume.
Great Uncle Jim is fascinating here. Santa out of costume, clean-shaven, offering Quality Street “as a salvo.” That word choice is precise: a peace offering, but also a social manoeuvre. He understands rooms. He understands sugar as diplomacy. He’s not confronting the dentist; he’s disarming him. Wealth here manifests not as dominance but as ease with ritual.
And then your grandfather.
“A quiet witness – out of the fray.”
That’s the moral centre of the room. He doesn’t compete, doesn’t perform, doesn’t intervene. He survives the scene intact because he never needed to win it. In Jungian terms—since you’re circling that territory—he’s the Self observing the egoic scramble without needing to comment. The boy couldn’t see that. The adult stages it instinctively.
Fifty years on (the meaning that emerges):
The day resolves into a lesson about authority, belonging, and borrowed judgments. The dentist now reads as an early encounter with opaque power—procedural, unaccountable, faintly absurd. Joker stands out as a counterweight: warmth, agency, and unnegotiated affection. The visit to Great Uncle Jim’s reveals how a child absorbs an adult’s value system—ambition mistaken for success—before learning to revise it.
Seen whole, the day is not about shopping or dentistry but about learning where worth actually resides: not in status or control, but in witness, reliability, and the ability to sit comfortably with what is alive in your care.
JV: The orthodontic brace may already be in, or goes in around now. Age 14 here, it goes in, to be removed in March 1978, age 16, as an Easter Holiday promise to girlfriends. The dentist is a link across adolescence.
Cinematically this brace would have to look like a barbed wire entanglement designed to put off and fend off girls! Who’d want to kiss a boy with a gob full of metal.
KAI: Yes—and that exaggeration is exactly what cinema owes adolescence. The brace isn’t orthodontics; it’s defensive architecture.
On screen it should read instantly, viscerally, as a deterrent system. Not neat brackets and wires, but something closer to improvised fortification: metal glinting when he smiles, catching the light like razor wire on a border fence. A mouth that says keep out before he’s learned how to say it himself.
This does two things at once.
First, it externalises fear. At fourteen, the terror isn’t really rejection—it’s proximity. The brace turns the mouth into an excuse, a shield you can blame. Who would want to kiss this? Relief and humiliation in the same frame. The body collaborates with anxiety.
Second, it literalises delay. Barbed wire is never about stopping forever; it’s about slowing movement, controlling access, marking territory as dangerous for now. The promise of removal in 1978 gives the image its cruel irony: this ugly, militarised thing is being installed in the service of romance. Endure the wire to earn the kiss.
Cinematically, you let the audience feel the absurdity:
Girls leaning in, then recoiling—not in disgust, but in startled laughter. The metallic click when he closes his mouth, louder than it should be. Sweets were offered, then withdrawn. Sugar as temptation, metal as law. The dentist is adjusting wires like a quartermaster tightening defences.
And crucially: Joker. The hare doesn’t flinch. He noses the chin, feels the vibration of speech, accepts the boy whole. Animals always see through armour. That contrast saves the image from cruelty.
So yes—make it barbed wire. Make it ridiculous. Make it tragicomic. Adolescence is a body declaring war on its own desires while promising peace later.
What matters is that, fifty years on, you can smile without flinching—and see that the wire was never there to stop girls. It was there to give a frightened boy time to grow into himself.
JV: Fifty years on, indeed, since late March 1978, I have had a great set of teeth and a lovely smile. That said, this same cheeky dentist managed to fill no fewer than four molars the day the brace came out: kerching!
KAI: That’s the punchline adolescence deserves.
Fifty years on, the promise did come good: straight teeth, an easy smile, a face that no longer needed fortifications. The barbed wire came down and—almost on cue—the social future arrived. Whatever else the brace delayed, it didn’t derail the outcome.
And yet the dentist gets the last comic beat. On the very day the apparatus of deferral is removed—release day, Easter horizons opening—he slips in four fillings. A little flourish of commerce at the moment of liberation. Kerching indeed.
Read generously, it’s the final toll booth on the road out of childhood: one last intervention before autonomy. Read less generously, it’s a reminder that systems rarely relinquish you without extracting something. Either way, it fits the pattern you’ve traced all along: authority that explains little, charges much, and insists it’s for your own good.
What saves it from bitterness is perspective. You can laugh because the outcome held. The smile lasted. The dentist became a story rather than a shadow. The wire did its time; the witness—your Grandpa—would have approved of the steadiness, and Joker, had he still been around, would have accepted the grin without comment.
Adolescence ends not with a kiss, but with a bill. The trick, fifty years on, is smiling anyway.
JV: What this exercise does well is to frame the age 13/14/15 by this orthodontic brace. Sold to my father who would pay for it. My
Mother to manage. Me to endure with no understanding of it’s necessity or future worth, but with elastics to endure, a ban on apples and toffees, and a need for greater oral hygiene – let alone the impact on kissing a girl. I didn’t! Not one girl for 27 months. Hold hands yes. Closed lips smack on the cheeks ro say hello or goodbye. No more. It was a chastity belt for the mouth (if read about these in an encyclopaedia).
KAI: Yes—this is the frame clicking into place. The brace becomes the governing metaphor of early adolescence, and it works because it was imposed, managed, endured, and only later justified. That is exactly the adolescent condition.
Seen cleanly: Your father buys into the promise. He funds a future he assumes will pay off, as fathers often do—outcome-focused, abstracted, convinced by authority.
Your mother administers the regime. Elastics checked, apples banned, hygiene enforced. Care becomes compliance.
You endure. No explanation you can inhabit, only rules that colonise the mouth—speech, eating, smiling, proximity.
That triad alone could carry a chapter.
What makes it powerful is the asymmetry of knowledge. Everyone else understands the why. You live only with the how. Adolescence is full of that: bodies being re-engineered for reasons that arrive later, if at all.
The specifics matter. Elastics snapping. Toffees forbidden. Apples demoted from innocence to threat. Brushing elevated from routine to ritual. This is discipline masquerading as care, and it leaves marks even when it works.
And then the line you’ve landed on—because you have landed on it:
It was a chastity belt for the mouth.
That’s not hyperbole; it’s accurate. The brace regulates desire by making contact awkward, risky, embarrassing. It enforces delay not by forbidding sex but by sabotaging intimacy at the most tentative threshold. You can hold hands. You can exchange ceremonial cheek-kisses. But nothing exploratory. Nothing improvisational. Nothing that might teach you through doing.
The encyclopaedia aside is perfect, by the way. A boy learning about medieval chastity devices in the abstract while wearing a modern, suburban equivalent without recognising it as such. Knowledge without application; application without knowledge. Again: adolescence.
What this exercise has done—quietly, effectively—is restore agency to the interpretation, even if it was absent from the experience. You didn’t choose the brace. You didn’t understand it. You didn’t benefit until much later. But you can now name what it cost: not sex, not romance, but practice. The rehearsal space of teenage intimacy was fenced off.
And yet—this matters—it didn’t embitter you. It delayed you. That’s different. Delay preserves possibility. Resentment corrodes it.
Framed this way, the dentist isn’t a villain, the parents aren’t dupes, and the brace isn’t a mistake. It’s a rite of passage no one had the language to explain at the time. Fifty years on, you finally do.
That’s not grievance. That’s understanding.
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