I always tell the truth, honestly! Naturally, I don’t always feel obliged to answer nasty questions like, “How old are you Sally?”, and if people guess that all my children are still in their twenties (or younger) then really that is up to them. “Who cares about age?” people ask. Well, I hate the idea of revealing my age only to be categorised into a particular box. Journalists have a penchant for attributing every Tom, Dick and Harry with an age, especially when there is an accompanying photograph…

“Guess how old that poor old codger is?” I have asked of Chris many times.

“Eighty-two,” he might hazard a guess judging by the wrinkles and loss of hair colour.

“Ha ha! I thought so too but, would you believe it? No you won’t. That old candlestick maker is four years younger than you?”

But Chris sometimes gets his own back when I show him a newspaper photograph of a grey-haired little old lady and he ponders long and hard before guessing…

“Forty-one!” he’ll say.

“Oh! I thought she looked much older than me. Surely she looks in her sixties?” I query.

“Yes, but I was making allowances for that. You wouldn’t have asked me unless she was much younger,” he says rationally. “How old is she?”

“Forty-one, smarty pants!”

Well, the reason I’m pondering on the subject of age today is something quite momentous (no, I haven’t reached one hundred!) – my eldest great nephew has just become a father! For some years I’ve accustomed myself to being “Fantastic Aunty Sally” (my sister Mary became a granny at thirty-eight!) but what am I now? A great fantastic aunt or a fantastic fantastic aunt? Whatever I am, I am not old – my Mum is still hale and hearty, and I still have my own teeth, which leads me on to something else I have to impart…

Now I have a theory about dentists, they are usually pretty good (or even great) until they reach the menopause (in the case of lady dentists) or they start to think about retirement and golf (in the case of men dentists). Apart from the obvious signs of aging like wearing glasses, there are those other little give-aways that make you begin to wonder if they’re taking their jobs as seriously as they used to. “You don’t really need that tooth,” or “Nobody will notice the gaps,” or “The National Health Service wasn’t designed to nurse your teeth!” are the oft used words of dentists not in their prime and with a jaded view of life in general… and your teeth in particular.

I love Goska (pronounced goshka). She’s my Polish dentist. Goska isn’t very “long in the tooth”; in fact she’s young and fertile, and still very much interested in saving patients’ teeth, reducing pain and keeping her patients as youthful looking as possible. She even offers Botox and Fillers as a sideline… to older ladies than me, of course. I went to see her today and brought something precious along with me. I opened my purse and hooked out the item I had wrapped in foil. Goska beamed as she opened the tiny silver parcel.

“It’s been very adventurous,” I began, “it’s even been in a rubbish bin, after I forgot it was on the table and emptied the groats on the tablecloth from breakfast into the bin. That happened in the first week that I was away in Australia. Then I stuck it back on with dental glue… but it came off after one day…”

Goska laughed.

“At least you didn’t swallow it!”

I put back my head while Goska and her pretty blonde assistant worked with relish, sticking and grinding, and polishing. She didn’t begrudge the twenty minutes she spent returning the veneer to a nude, rather thin little tooth beside one of my top molars. I smiled with confidence and she beamed again.

“See you in a week and I’ll replace your temporary filling,” said my dentist.

“I really love Goska,” I said to the receptionist as I was leaving.

“Me too,” he laughed – Peter, the receptionist, is Goska’s husband.

And I left feeling great. Or should that be great great?