I have always suspected I have a high pain threshold — I will feel something, but wouldn’t call it pain. As a result, visits to the dentist are usually conducted without anaesthetic; gym workouts go to the point of exhaustion, I’ve broken one foot and ripped a muscle in the other from running too hard, I don’t get headaches or muscle aches, I don’t really understand the point of massages, and I have nothing by way of medicine at home, not even aspirin… My body is always pain-free, it would seem, leaving me to wonder, have I worked myself into some kind of zen-like approach to pain as an illusion, or have I just been lucky?

I have just been lucky, it turns out. I have an inflamed tooth. Oh. Wow. After a sleepless night without pain medicine (due entirely to my lack of contingency planning), I am now sitting in an internet cafe waiting on my dentist like a heroin addict anticipating a fix. The 24-hour pharmacy has just sold me some pain medicine, so the hammer-like throb is subsiding to the level of a dull ache. I am beginning to think straight again.

Pain is useful, though. It warns of things going awry with our bodies that we’d disregard at our peril. And that is precisely why pain is so difficult to ignore when it comes — it is precisely that quality of not being disregardable that defines pain. Pain is impossibe to abstract — It is the ultimate subjective experience. We can’t, in fact, feel each other’s pain, but have to access our own memories of pain as a references when we empathise, as I hope you are doing abundantly in my case just now.

When the throbbing first flared last night, i though I could out-think pain’s effect, neutralise it by accepting its presence, but no. There is no vocabulary of pain which you can use to communicate with it, ask it to be reasonable. It is there and it is urgent and it is adamant, and no amount of distraction is going to make you forget it.

And by the same token, it is hard to imagine what pain is like when you are not in its grip. I used to think that pain’s silver lining was that you at least knew you were alive, and that even if the feeling was a nuisance, at least it was intense, and isn’t that something? No it isn’t. That whole line of thinking looks like so much twaddle from someone who wasn’t experiencing pain then. Okay, time for the dentist now.