About fifteen years ago I was renting a house on the Lisburn Road, having just moved back to Belfast from Manchester. One of the last things I had done before leaving England was have a couple of front crowns fitted. I was rather proud of them, not least because one of them replaced a denture I had had to get when I was seventeen. (A long story of adolescent disregard coupled with someone else’s elbow during a match in a cow field somewhere around Drumbo.)

Greg Finnegan was recommended to me by a friend as being (a) just around the corner; and (b) totally unlike any dentist I would ever have met. (a) was unarguable, (b) was practically a guarantee that the experience would fall well short of expectation. Still I needed a dentist. I walked the short distance from my door to his.

And?

And I had to admit, he was the first dentist I had seen who didn’t look like he had been drawn by Gerald Scarfe (I used to have nightmares about my childhood dentist), whose patter didn’t sound like it had been scripted by Roald Dahl in one of his darker moods. Almost the first thing he asked me was who did my crowns.

I told him, this guy in Manchester.

He didn’t look impressed. He looked, in fact, pained on my behalf.

‘What’s wrong with them?’ I asked.

‘Oh, there’s nothing wrong with them. It’s just… Well you know how in paint stores you have dozens and dozens of shades of white and then you have pure brilliant white?’

I did.

‘Well twenty-eight of your teeth are a shade, and two are brilliant white.’

I studied the crowns in the mirror he had angled towards me. He was right. They were. Brilliant… and not so brilliant at all.

It wasn’t a question of cleaning or polishing the other twenty-eight (though Greg cleaned and polished as assiduously as my Granny Coates once did her front step); it was a question of harmony.

Everyone’s teeth were a different shade. Greg showed me on his computer. That was one of the other things you noticed about Greg. He showed you things. He talked to you about what he might do. This wasn’t ‘me dentist, you patient, open wide and accept it’. This was a conversation.

And if, very occasionally, you were sitting in the waiting room ten minutes after your appointment time, that was OK too. Why should I – why should any of us –be the only one he had conversations with?

We talked for two years (I went home in between times, of course, other people came and sat in the chair, got to see the computer) before I had the crowns replaced.

And, Reader, I haven’t stopped smiling since.