In the tooth of a crisis

A tooth falls out - a tiny square of bone and enamel - and I deflate li ke a balloon

My front tooth broke off yesterday in the middle of breakfast. I felt it snap. I was just biting into a piece of toast when suddenly there was a strange void. I looked down and saw the tooth nestling like a large crumb in my toast. While my tongu e explored the crater it had left behind, my mind raced through the implications.

Fortunately, I had no reason to venture out in public until today, when I was booked to do an interview in the afternoon that could not be cancelled. I had 36 hours to solve the problem. By five to eight I was on the phone to my dentist. By a miracle someone was there - someone with a warm, comforting voice who understood the gravity of the case and assured me it would be a small matter to remedy it. "Come to the surgery any time between 9.30am and 5.30pm. No appointment needed. You count a s an emergency."

I picked up the tooth and took it carefully through to the bathroom. I risked examining the damage in the mirror. A snaggle-toothed, medieval peasant stared back. In the brief second it had taken me to bite, all the advantages conferred by contact lensesand hair colour had been rendered null and void. I was grotesque, fit for the brush of Hieronymus Bosch or a Dutch painting of the "drunken peasants making merry" genre.

"Does it hurt?" my partner asked as I returned, stricken, from the mirror.

"Hurt? No, it doesn't hurt, not in ver least," I said, discovering a new tendency for "th" to sound like "v".

"That's all right then. Lucky."

"Lucky? Vis is a dental emergency. I have loft a front toot."

He turned away and suppressed a snigger. "Yes, you have, haven't you?" Pause. "Poor old you."

I don't remember him ever calling me "old" before.

An hour later, muffled up to the chin and with a hat pulled low over my eyes, I set out and discovered that on the streets, in public, I had become a changed character. Instead of greeting the street-cleaners, I shuffled past, head bent into my scarf. I didn't risk buying from my usual newspaper seller in case she engaged me in conversation. I had taken on the surly incommunicativeness of the, um, physically challenged.

As I booked my ticket to East Croydon (that's how far you have to travel to find an NHS dentist) the ticket-seller demanded the wrong money. I did not allow myself to argue. At Victoria station, rather than accost the nearest figure in BR uniform and demand to know from which platform the next East Croydon train would leave, I meekly scanned the departures board and worked it out for myself.

Miserable, guilty and down in the mouth, I sat on the train immersed in the newspaper. Not for me the winsome gaze of peep-bo with the adorable toddler opposite. ("Only two and a half? Gosh, he's amazing isn't he!') Today I am Ms Misogynist; stay away from me.

Thank God! East Croydon! I pushed through the crowd and headed doggedly for the dentist, dreading the waiting room.There was only one other person there: a tramp, muffled against the cold, with a raw battered face and - ye gods! - a missing front tooth. I looked at him. "Fnap!" I said.

"Yer wot, Miffuf?" he answered.

My usual dentist was not in. No matter. Any dentist would have done. I followed the receptionist to a small cubicle. A young man with acne (Oh, poor him, I found myself thinking, uncharacteristically) greeted me. "Hi there, hello. Come in. Have I seen you before? Cold enough for you is it?"

I smiled wanly.

"What seems to be the matter?"

The wind whistled through the Cheddar gorge in the middle of my smile, and he was asking me what was the matter. I bared my lips in a snarl. "Ah yes. Got the tooth? Right. Won't be a tick."

The chair was wound down until I was horizontal. Dear me, that acne was bad. He wedged cotton wool between my upper lip and popped the rogue tooth in and out a few times. The dental nurse had prepared an adhesive which he wound round the tooth before jamming it into the gap and propping it there hard against his finger. While he counted to a hundred he crooned to himself: toodly-oo-dee-oo.

Tiddly-om-pom-dee. Pom, I thought. Tiddly-om-pom-pom. After a couple of minutes it was set. Miraculous, these new dental fixatives.

"Try not to chew on it today."

"Thank you," I said. "Gosh, that feels marvellous! Thank you." Suppressing the desire to recommend an awfully good lotion for acne, I made my way out.

"That'll be £5.28," said the receptionist. I beamed.

"Cheap at the price."

The moral, if you like, of this story is how pitifully little it takes to shake one's confidence. A tooth falls out - one tiny square of bone and enamel - and I deflate like a balloon. What a fool I must look normally, striding along the streets, head up, eyes front, coat swinging, heels clicking, insufferably pleased with the world! There must be an ascending scale of humiliation, starting with conjunctivitis, a black eye, a botched hair-do, a broken leg, right up to ... what? Amputation? Paralysis? Howdo people whose faces have been badly burnt or scarred in an accident muster the courage to venture out each day?