I have to go for a scrape and polish. I wish it was to do with my nails but unfortunately it’s a procedure to try to do something with my gnashers.

Perhaps the dentist wants them to have a less ‘luminous’ appearance, who knows? I actually can’t wait to go, for reasons I will divulge now…

It was my first trip to see the mouth doctor in quite a few years. Come to think of it, the last time I frequented a dental surgery was back in my teens.

I had what felt like 12 wisdom teeth coming through. The amount of pain and space they were taking up I should have grown a foot long, grey beard and had an IQ of 200. As you can probably tell my IQ remained around 65. The facial hair? Well, let’s not go into that.

As you can imagine I was petrified sitting in the waiting room.

Forty fags a day and copious quantities of coffee had worn down my once tough enamel to a thin sheet of tissue paper.

I now have the most sensitive teeth in Workington, though I still persuade them to chew forcefully on a Twister or a Nobbly Bobbly.

I needn’t have panicked. The dentist bore a very strong resemblance to Tom Hardy.

Other than that I can’t remember anything else. Oh, apart that he was wearing a well-known brand of clogs, but I can forgive that fashion faux pas just this once.

I soon joined up with the crew and informed them that I was in need of a scrape and polish. Everyone winced in unison.

They all have just as bad a set of (not so) pearly whites as yours truly so I don’t know why they were getting their knickers in a twist.

In fact, if you took a picture of us all smiling it would no doubt be distributed around the US as a textbook example of British teeth.

“Absolutely wrecks, ooh, butches,” My eloquent, young companion informed me.

Everyone else seemed to agree and I was soon inundated with horror stories about how a friend of a friend had lost their teeth, developed gangrene in their gums and died of a shock following a simple scrape and polish.

Being the gullible, idiotic fool that I am I immediately panicked and thoughts of cancelling the procedure were dancing around in my tiny 65-size brain.

“Just whiten ‘em at yam, ey,” I was advised.

Not such a bad idea. But how? I can’t use anything industrial, my teeth are barely clinging into my gums as it is.

So I bought a bargain shop-esque whitening kit and set to work. I smothered the guys in some thick, foul tasting mush and popped in the sexy mouth guard that came with the whitening pack.

Five minutes? No chance! If the colour of these teeth were on a chart they’d be Teletubby Laa-Laa yellow. Let’s just leave it on for a bit longer…..say, an hour.

Well, my teeth are a dazzling white. But not because I flouted the instructions, because the paste hardened and now I resemble a great white with massive, jagged toothy pegs.

I’m not mad though, it just means I’ll have more time to spend with Tom. Though I hope this time he’s left his clogs at home.