General dental practitioners are largely paid to fix things. To examine, to diagnose, to treat and to review at whatever recall period is appropriate.

In a football season where a statue has been raised in Plymouth of Jack Leslie, a black footballer, racism is in the news. Leslie played 400 times for Plymouth Argyle in the 1920’s and 30’s, scoring 137 times in the football league. Selected for the England squad in 1925, in the form of his life, he was inexplicably then dropped.

Porcupines – literally ‘spiny pigs’ - have a gestation period of about six months, which is completely irrelevant to dentistry but a useful introduction to the subject of recall intervals for dental patients.

You don’t have to hang around on Twitter for very long these days to discover that there are some subjects you cannot raise without receiving a barrage of opinion and sometimes abuse from both sides of the argument. Accusations of being a (insert subject here)phobe are rife.