My teeth are falling out. I won’t miss them

Like many Brits, I never had perfect teeth. Even when I was young they weren’t gleaming white and the two front ones had a gap between them. I grew to quite like my gap – ‘diastema’ to give it the correct name – and found out all kinds of interesting facts about it. In The Canterbury Tales, the ‘gap-toothed Wife of Bath’ symbolised the supposedly lustful nature of diastemata types, who include Madonna and Brigitte Bardot. In some African countries, the condition is considered so attractive that there is a roaring trade in cosmetic dentistry to create it. In France they are known as dents du bonheur – lucky teeth – due to the fact that the Napoleonic army recruited only soldiers with perfect teeth, classifying my gap-toothed brothers as unfit to fight and perhaps to die prematurely. 

Had I grown up in a middle-class milieu, I might have considered my teeth to be substandard – but so proletarian were we that my grandmother had not a tooth in her head and my father did his own dentistry by tying a piece of string to a door, knotting the other end around the rogue tooth, and slamming it.