It must have been around 1975, before I had my motorbike, but when I was already a certified menace on two wheels. We were visiting my parents’ friends—an Austrian couple who lived in a massive house clinging precariously to a hillside on the steeper side of Son Vida.
They had three kids: two daughters who were much older than me, and a son, Edwin, who was roughly my age.
Our parents were inside, presumably playing bridge or some other grown-up game that involved ignoring their children, while Edwin and I were outside racing our bikes up and down the brutally steep road. I, of course, was showing off.
At some point, a tennis ball started rolling down the hill.
And that’s when I had my brilliant idea.
Instead of stopping it with my foot like a normal human, or, say, letting it go, I decided to intercept it mid-motion—cleaving it perfectly with my front wheel. In my mind, this would be spectacular: a display of coordination, dominance over gravity, and possibly something I could later add to my expanding catalogue of bike stunts.
Instead, the ball locked the wheel instantly.
Physics took over.
I was launched clean over the handlebars—soaring like a doomed mallard—before the tarmac greeted me with open arms and zero mercy. My whole body hit the ground, but the real victim was my front tooth, which took the full brunt of the impact. It snapped off at the root—a brutal, exposed-nerve catastrophe.
The pain was biblical. But worse than the pain was the humiliation. I’d just faceplanted in front of Edwin and his sisters, and nothing obliterates a prepubescent boy’s confidence faster than grovelling in agony while trying to pretend you’re fine.
To make matters worse, it was a fiesta weekend. In Spain, that meant everything was closed—including anyone capable of fixing what was left of my mouth. I spent the next three days watching black-and-white Spanish TV and drinking soup through a straw, every second dragging out like a slow-motion horror film.
By Tuesday, my parents finally managed to find a Spanish dentist. He took one look and delivered the news:
“No point in a crown—his mouth hasn’t finished growing.”
Just like that, I was front-toothless. Possibly until my sixteenth birthday.
For a while, that’s exactly how things stood. I went to school with a gaping void where my tooth used to be, clinging to the hope that my social life might somehow survive the hit. But then, by some stroke of luck, my dad befriended an English dentist on the golf course—a man who actually had some concern for my future dignity.
He took one look at the situation and said:
“If you leave it like that, the other front tooth will start migrating to fill the gap.”
Cue an emergency trip to London.
There, I was fitted with a lump of dental putty that, in theory, resembled a tooth. In practice, it looked like a pale, slightly crooked impostor stuck beside its smug, surviving twin—who, to this day, I still don’t understand how managed to get through the accident unscathed.
And so began my prepubescent years with a lopsided smile and a vaguely beige block in my face.
I spent the rest of my childhood looking like someone who’d lost a pub brawl at age ten—waiting, patiently, for my sixteenth birthday, when I could finally stop pretending that dental putty was a personality trait.