After all [Time out Columnists]

Whenever I hear the word \´Liechtenstein\´, my few remaining teeth start aching. I haven\´t, it\´s true, got many left. One quick glimpse of my mouth cavity caused one London dentist to faint; it resembles a railway junction - plenty of gaping tunnels, cavities and iron bridges crisscrossing at different levels. The dentist, when he finally recovered his poise, referred to them ironically as "Lenin bridges". The most popular method of dental treatment in the former USSr, where my teeth and I grew up, was tooth extraction, so the former Soviet empire is strewn with my shattered molars, canines and incisors. I had my teeth plucked out with pliers and no anaesthetic, hacked out with a hammer and a chisel and tugged out by the grubby fingers of tipsy infirmary attendants in some godforsaken russian villages.