This morning on Remembrance Day I dreamed that I could hide it no longer.

I went to the dentist and told her that I had a hole in my top right incisor, a huge hole, nearly half the tooth.

The dentist had previously attended to the bottom row of my teeth, but for some reason she never looked to the top.

She started to scrape away at the cavity without comment. This surprised me. I had expected much sighing, ooh-ing and aa-hing, at the sight of the hole. But she merely set about the task of cleaning out and then refilling it.

‘I can’t quite get the colour match right,’ she said at one point and showed me a small ball of putty, the stuff she was using to fill my tooth. It looked almost brown and when I saw my newly filled tooth in the mirror, the difference between the old and the new was obvious.

‘I’ll have to leave it as it is till next time you come,’ the dentist said.

I left the surgery, wondering whether I had the courage to alert her to a second large hole further along the row of my front teeth near my right molars.

How would she react to that? I wondered.