MOST OF THE THINGS WE WORRY ABOUT NEVER HAPPEN

"I'll give you two weeks," he said. "Otherwise I'll have to cut it off."

"But that will mean a new crown! Mike, that's £400!"

"Something like that," he replied airily, with that studied indifference professionals are apt to adopt towards their patients' bank accounts. "I can't leave it like that," he added, just in case I might be having second thoughts. Uh-huh? Since when did my teeth become his teeth, I wondered.

Fresh from the agony of having an implant fitted a few months back - the agony being not so much the physical discomfort as the hole it left in my spending money - here I was knocking on Mike's door again for more of the same.

Mike is relatively new at the practice. He is a fresh-faced earnest, sporty young man who wears trainers and a sort of athletic blue uniform that one imagines dentists might wear in North Korea - that is if they have dentists in North Korea.

He sits me in his chair while I explain that one of my crowns is loose and the tooth underneath objects violently whenever I chew on something harder than a boiled egg. "Has the crown actually come off?" he asks. "Not exactly," I reply opaquely. “Half-off perhaps.”

So Mike tries to remove the half-off crown, using a weird instrument called a 'crown puller' which fits under the rim of the crown. Mike then flicks a brass weight whose momentum is supposed to act as a species of hammer. No joy! He tries heaving with various levers but these don’s shift the crown either. After a quarter of an hour Mike gives up and sends me home to experiment. Which is where we came into this tale.

You can imagine that knowing that it would cost me at least £400 if I failed, my motivation to unstick the sticking cown was high. A series of improbable and dangerous implements began to grace my dressing table. Thread, wire, knives, skewers and needles of various descriptions, pliers and finally a plumbers wrench. But the only success I had was in giving myself toothache.

So in the end I had to confess defeat and resign myself to £400 going down the drain as Mike's electric grinder cut through the dental gold. I was angry at myself and apprehensive at the inevitable pain of the dental operation. I wondered if Mike had forceps? I put the plumbers wrench in my handbag just in case.

So now we're back in the surgery, trying to be positive. "It's much, much looser," I say cheerily. "And you'll save me a ton of money if you can just grab it with forceps and pull."

"Let's give it a last go," says Mike, who I feel at last is on my side.

In case anybody is wondering why the crown would not come off the answer lies in my wisdom teeth. While the rest of me crumbles towards senility, my wisdom teeth are still green and growing. Thirty years ago this one on the lower left was a little tooth bud barely breaking the gum. Now it is a half grown tooth and trying to make room for itself by shoving all the other teeth down the bus, as it were. It had grown over my crown by just enough to stop it coming off.

Mike had another go with his crown puller with no more joy than on the first occasion. Then he filed the side of the wisdom tooth with an emery board. Then he called in Gareth who used to be my dentist thirty years ago and who is now seriously eminent. Pound signs flashed before my eyes.

Gareth dons latex gloves, whereupon the crown - clearly realising that with two dentists at work further resistance would be hopeless - gave up its barnacle operation and popped off, smiling with a sort of 'oh is that what you wanted?’ look.

What lay beneath was a large area of rotten tooth, which he proceeded to drill and fill with the usual dental gusto. But having just saved £400 - Mike upped the ante now by telling me now it would have been £500 - I was so pleased as not to care about the filling, the frozen mouth, the horrid after taste and all that. And at the end - when the girls gave me the bill - I was practically laughing.

Having been prepared for at least two appointments and £400 plus debited to my plastic, I rejoiced to receive something that demanded (only) £130.

Poor Mike did his best to console himself and his loss of business. "Of course, there's just a chance that the tooth may die and then you may need a root canal filling," he said cheerfully. But it should be OK!”