And finally, monsieur, a wafer-thin mint...

I went down to Portsmouth on Friday to meet up with a few old mates who I hadn’t seen in some time.

I don’t go down to Pompey much now, except to pick up and drop off my son at weekends – and he doesn’t live anywhere near the centre.

But when I do go it all looks so different – it’s hard to believe I lived there for the first 35 years of my life. Very few of my teenage haunts remain, and if they do they tend to have been renamed after a colour and either a fruit or animal of indeterminable origin.

Portsmouth has always been a ‘hard’ city, built as it was on the navy and the sore thumbs of thousands of dockies.

By the way, the phrase ‘chip on the shoulder’ is believed to have originated in Pompey dockyard was back in the 17th century. I’m sure there is a website confirming this etymology somewhere, but I really can’t be arsed to find it.

Anyway I digress. Portsmouth has always been a ‘hard’ city, but I didn’t realise, after living away from it for 11 years just how much of a big Jessie I had become.

This was brought home to me in the early hours of Saturday morning when, after a distinctly average curry, I lost a filling on an After Eight mint. Even soft mints are hard enough to take out a filling in Portsmouth when you’ve spent 11 years living in the semi-rural confines of fluffy Petersfield.

So it was, that this morning I found myself registering with a dentist in fluffy Petersfield – not having bothered in the previous 11 years in protest at the dearth of NHS options.

Those particular chickens came home to roost when I realised what bad condition my molars were in. As the lady dentist leaned over what felt like a chasm in my tooth, she asked her hygienist to prepare some cement.

“How much?” asked the hygienist, presumably of the opinion that I could do with having my entire mouth filled.

“Not a bucketful,” replied the dentist.

Had I not, at that moment, had a young lady poking around in my oral cavity, I would have assuaged my natural curiosity by asking if there were only two quantities of cement which could be prepared: a bucketful, and not…

However, as the aforementioned young lady was, at that very moment, poking around inside my cavity with a sharp implement I’m sure I last saw in a tableau on board HMS Victory, I decided against imparting a remark which might have been interpreted as sarcastic.

Having not visited a dentist for more than a dozen years, it was amazing how familiar the sights, smells, and sensations felt. It might well have been yesterday that I last had weapons of mandible destruction wielded in my mouth. The scrapings, the sound … it was all so familiar.

What was hugely different was the fact that as I departed my new chamber of horrors of choice I was clutching a bill which amounted to a three-figure sum. And to get full value from it I have to return next Monday for more of the same.

Folks, as the great Pam Ayres once opined, I wish I’d looked after me teeth…