My kinda town

Americans are obsessed by their teeth. When I was a kid I tried every trick in the book to avoid having to wear a brace, but heck if I'd had grown up here I would have been an anomaly in the school playground. Americans have perfect teeth, fact, well at least the ones whose parents can afford it, because those shiny straight choppers do not come cheap.

Americans look at our British teeth with disdain a bit like we look at their burger habits or dress sense I suppose but I never thought my teeth were that bad, straightish, slightly showing the signs of years of drinking red wine, tea and more recently coffee but I'm not a smoker. And I've only got a few fillings, so when I first went to the dentist (recommended to me by Brian Dougal) 2 or 3 years back I thought they would give me the once over and I'd be off. Oh no....

I reckon I see the hygenist bird, her name is Sue and she loves my accent, about 5 times a year for a good old scraping and scrub up. Then the dentist always comes in and sticks his head in my mouth, tuts with derison then runs through them one by one in code shaking his head, before telling me that I should get this done and that replaced and that I should seriously think about getting my wisdom teeth yanked out. No thanks.

Last week I was sat in the chair, in fact I was sat in the chair 2 weeks before that as well, but most recently to have a crown put in - a bloody huge thing too - cost? A couple of g's. Some of it covered under America's wonderfully extortionate and unfair health system, some of it coming out of my bank, by direct debit for ease. How kind.

The first visit was the get a temporary filling he put in a year ago and then drill away for 45 minutes at the poor little peg and then put another temporary crown in while a new one is made. Then last week I was back in to have it fitted and because I am brave, nay stupid and scared of needles, I opted to have good old fashioned mouthwash instead as he played around with this new crown and my exposed nerves for half an hour to get the sodding thing fitted.

Tell you what I've never had a baby before, but don't tell me that it would be worse than that?

And all the time Brian Dougal gets sent gifts and cards for referring me to his dentist. I am not bloody surprised, he saw this particular Brit coming.