I had two wisdom teeth out just over a week ago and my face is finally back to a normal size following several days looking a lot like Don Corleone.

As it turned out, the swelling made it much easier to do a passable Brando impression but since I was in self-enforced solitary confinement until I could leave the house without causing children to hide behind their mothers, I was only able to put this temporary ability to good use with the handful of random callers to my landline:

"You call my home on the day my daughter's to be married, and you ask me to switch broadband provider? What have I ever done to make you to treat me so disrespectfully?"

Anyway, here is a short list of things I have learned during my period as a dentally-challenged hermit:

• If you eat and drink nothing but smoothies¹ and soups² you won't have to wait very long before your bowels go on strike. In my case, after a three day siege with no sign of a resolution or even a list of demands, I was forced to send in an All Bran SWAT team to rescue the hostages. Like the dental procedure itself, the extraction was quick but brutal.
• If you're hungry, but have run out of proper soup, you can just about convince yourself that a bowl of plain baked beans is in fact a "simple but authentically rustic cassoulet".
• during the four seconds between waking up with blood on your pillow and subsequently remembering you've just had your wisdom teeth out, your mind is literally "reeling with possibilities", including: If I look under the duvet will I find I'm sharing the bed with the smaller half of a decapitated equine? Why would someone order an (apparently unsuccessful) assassination attempt? And if I pan my head slowly up to the ceiling will I discover the gory remains of a freshly-mutilated friend or colleague inexplicably suspended there?
• It is safe to eat bioactive yoghurt whilst on antibiotics, although it's possible that Bifidobacterium lactis would disagree.
• The West Wing Season 5 is really rather poor compared to everything that precedes it. Okay, John Goodman as a presidential stand-in with a yappy dog is entertaining, but unfortunately it simply does not make up for 22 largely dull epsiodes (by West Wing standards anyway). It is a testament to just how disinclined I felt to doing anything else that I soldiered nobly through the entire series rather than just getting the main plot points from Wikipedia and skipping straight to Season 6.
• Soluble stitches just don't dissolve in my mouth. I just seem to lack the chemical that breaks them down. Maybe my genetic line has yet to evolve that particular enzyme. On the plus side, I did finally get to use the tiny scissors on my Swiss Army Knife.

¹ Somerfield, 2 litres for £2.50 — a fruit-packed bargain
² New Covent Garden Soup Company — as far as I can tell just a flavoured delivery mechanism for toxic levels of salt