I don’t suppose anybody actually likes going to the dentist. It’s just one of those things that you have to do every once in a while. Like having a smear or visiting a senile relative. It has to be done, but you just wish that some other poor bastard was going through it instead.

The niggling and constant pain in my wisdom teeth was not a good sign and I could no longer ignore the fact that my canines were fucking up once again. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I think it’s because I was the seventh child and therefore deprived of calcium by my mother’s poor worn out body. My husband can quite happily crunch on a boiled sweet or chew a toffee for an hour or so. But I only have to lick a wine gum and my tooth will dissolve in protest.

I hate everything about dentists – it’s just so bloody primitive. How can we be in the 21st Century and yet still be pulling out teeth with pliers? Surely that’s not right? And don’t get me started on those shitty clampy things they use.

I even hate the waiting rooms. Barren, sterile places containing ashen faced patients preparing for their fate. All pretending to read the ancient copies of Reader’s Digest, but never actually turning a page. All the while, posters warn of oral cancer or display alluring images of rotting mouths.

Tomorrow I will face my fear yet again. I will once again sit in that chair, staring helplessly at a picture of a mountain range (which is meant to relax me, but actually leaves me feeling rather nauseous) and will allow a man with a masked face to poke around inside my mouth. I know he will tell me that my wisdom teeth will need to come out.

Extraction brings problems of its own. My sister had her upper molar removed last week and was told quite sternly that she must avoid blowing her nose. For a month! My sister panicked. What would happen if she did? Would her part of her brain come out of the hole?

Bloody teeth. And bloody dentists.

As my Dad always says “you never see a bloody poor one!”