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honestly, I’ve started resenting my own teeth. I know you need them to bite and chew, but they don’t half piss me off. Impacted wisdom teeth, extractions, root canal work – I’ve suffered them all. I chipped one piece off a tooth when I was 12, whensomeone accidentally turned and whacked a fishing rod in my face.
    ‘Look,’ I said to my dentist, a lovely man called Lance, ‘why don’t we just cut to the chase and have them all out and fit dentures?’
    He smiled sweetly. ‘That won’t be necessary.’
    No, of course not. That’s because he knows full well that if I do have dentures his profits will plummet. My crooked white teeth are his pension plan; whenever he sees them coming through the door he thinks, ‘Holiday home!’
    The saga of my ill-fated teeth continues. Only last month I was nursing a gaping hole in my gum where a tooth cracked when I was having a crown fitted. The only reason I needed to have the crown fitted in the first place was that after bypassing a Snickers and going for a ‘healthy option’ bag of apricots, I bit into one that hadn’t been pitted and ended up cracking a tooth and killing the nerve. Then I had no choice but to have it extracted. However, Lance is planning to fit me a porcelain crown, an exact copy of my original tooth, he assures me – which I am dreading because when you have teeth as big as mine, it’ll be like sucking on a urinal.
    * * *
    Back in Northampton, though, in the distant days of childhood, home was a happy place. Mum eventually gave birth to Gary, and so when he was older I had a brother to play with. She had actually asked me the year before, when I was playing with my Evel Knievel figure in the garden, whether Iwould like a little brother. I can’t remember what I said, but it looks like they went ahead with it anyway.
    Even though everything seemed so warm and homely, I still managed to suffer, though, because I was so accident-prone. I remember jumping out of bed on a Monday morning, excited because I had a whole brand new week of school. My family was having new carpets fitted and had taken up the old ones. In my eagerness to run downstairs, I caught my foot under the carpet gripper and ripped all my toenails out. I was in agony and instead of going to school and doing fun things, I had to lie on the settee watching Pebble Mill at One like a prisoner of war.
    As with all kids, I was into He-Man and Star Wars , and any money I received would go to buy a figure that I could act out scenes with. Francesca across the road, who was my age, had great girls’ toys, so we would often pool our resources and make up our own fantasy world. For nearly a year Barbie and Skeletor were co-habiting in Castle Grayskull without a care in the world. Our Castle Grayskull was actually a more feminine affair than usual. Under Francesca’s watchful eye, it had a pink chest of drawers, pink curtains and a big pink double bed.
    Contrary to what you might think, I scorned the pink frilliness of Barbie’s world and chose to have ‘wars’ with soldiers. Fuelled by Saturday afternoon reruns of Sinbad , I would always have my sword and scabbard at the ready, and if I couldn’t find those, a stick. Looking back, I wish that now I had a tenth of the energy that little Alan used to have. I was a bag of energy, full of beans, always making loads of noise, so much so that Mum cut the tongues out of my Hungry Hippos.
    The only glitch in this boyish world that I threw myself into was the time I asked Mum to help me write a letter to Jim’ll Fix It to ask if I could meet Wonder Woman. I knew her name was Lynda Carter, my mother’s maiden name, and I prayed that she was a relative and that at a family wedding she would turn up, obviously dressed as Wonder Woman, and I could meet her and tell everyone I was related to Wonder Woman. Surprisingly enough, she never turned up – it seems Lynda cares more for her career than she does her own flesh and blood.
    It was around my eighth