The Oral Tradition

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There's gold in my mouth. But not in my pocket.

Yes, Kapitano now has a gold tooth, fitted without anaesthetic and with a free tutorial on the history of false teeth thrown in.

Bone, ivory, wood, plastics and ceramics have all been used - but it seems the worst material to make false teeth out of is...real teeth.

Prior to roundabout the 1600s, peasants often sold their teeth to aristocrats, who with their diet of sugary molasses and acidic wine were prone to tooth decay.

The obvious irony is that the peasants with their diet of half-rotten vegetables and low protein had ground-down but solid teeth. Indeed, it was only when sugar became plentiful and cheap enough for poor people to get addicted to it that their dental health of got as bad as the rich.

But the other irony is that teeth taken out of living gums and stuck in the mouth of a lord, fall apart in weeks. Other substitutes lasted longer, but were more expensive and difficult to produce. The aristocracy constantly needed new false teeth, but they wanted them cheap - so it's fortunate for them there were so many peasants around, undercutting each other's prices.

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I bet you thought I was going to write about something else, didn't you?

Well anyway, the whole operation cost UKP300, which means on the one hand I really need to get some kind of job, and on the other means I'll be able to chew on the right side of my mouth in 10 years.

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One of the other things I do with my mouth is sing. With 10 days to go till I have to perform half an hour's worth of cover versions for a pub full of tipsy lefties, some of the backings need work and I still haven't memorised some of the lyrics.

I have a method of practicing for a performance: I record rough versions of the songs, and play them back at frequent intervals on an mp3 player while doing other things. And sometimes sing along with myself in a vaguely narcissistic way.

This gets the lyrics more firmly implanted, and tells me which bits of which songs I need to work on. It means I can practice at odd spare moments, and hopefully by the time I do it for real I'm almost on automatic pilot.

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I am informed the "H" from Steps has come out of the closet. Following in the footsteps of John Inman, Boy George and Danny La Rue, a former celebrity has finally acknowledged what even their parents must have figured out, years after they drifted out of mainstream consciousness.

Dirk Bogarde and Raymond Burr were posthumously outed to no effect, Ian MacKellen and Rupert Everett became professional homosexuals, Holly Johnson and Pete Burns failed to do the same, Liberace and Malcom Forbes were outed on the days of their deaths and all the newspapers pretended to be shocked - as well as surprised.

Neil Tennant came out formally when there was no longer any point in pretending to be closted, George Micheal turned his outing into a smart career move, Truman Capote was never really in and Barry Humpries has never come completely out.

Graham Norton and Julian Clary neutralise their out status by adopting the sexless camp of Larry Grayson - who made his living as a gay man pretending to be a straight man pretending to be a gay man. Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams did something similar.

Will Young, Stephen Gately and even Richard Fairbass can be popular with teens and their mums, and can even have boyfriends. They just can't officially have sex.

Outing Susan Sontag was pointless. Outing John Guilgud backfired. Outing Mishima felt like an explanation for his life, but wasn't.

And Jeff Stryker, who became famous for having sex with other men on video, isn't actually gay.

I wonder if this is really about "H" trying to relaunch his pop career.

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