IT’S not the way we encourage our children to behave in the playground, but we’ve all heard the phrase an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, except, thank goodness, for the tooth fairy who unbelievably swaps old teeth for ready cash.

This is surely the antithesis of good business sense and I wonder if she’s on an interminable search for a magic tooth, like the new-lamps-for-old trader in the Aladdin story.

In the meantime, she’s always fluttering past to carry away chunks of enamel while the children slumber because The Youngest is shedding teeth like pass-the-parcel wrappers.

I, on the other hand, am cursed by an incredible sweet tooth that refuses to budge, and the children have inherited it.

We’re so transfixed by confectionary that entering the cinema we’re like a camel train lugging our pic’n’mix load to the cheap seats, our gummy bear selection doubling the price of a family afternoon out.

However abstemious I try to be in the face of white mice and sour cola bottles (my favourites, just in case you were thinking of parcelling some up in ribbon for me) I always end up red-faced as the scales bulge with horror at the sheer weight of temptation, and the aghast girl behind the till asks if I need a member of staff to give me a hand carrying our purchases to our seats.

Eating this many sweets can be dangerous – when my job involved driving to appointments up and down the country, I spent the first quarter of the journey munching like a monster, and the rest of the motorway miles driving erratically trying to retrieve the still bulging-bag from over the far side of the passenger seat where I’d pushed it away in a moment of strength to save me from myself.

The problem is I’m quite neat by nature and I do like to finish something once I’ve started it, even if it is a kilo of sherbet or a 500g pack of rhubarb and custard.

It was with a certain trepidation therefore that we set off to the dentist last week. I pretend to the children that dentists are people underneath, but there’s something chalk-on-blackboard about their scratchy tools.

They can’t fool me with their Good for you, Scooby Doo stickers, the cheery impressionist poster on the ceiling, and the promise of mouthwash elixir in a plastic beaker when their disclosure tablets sound ominously like something Spooks would use to elicit underground information.

These vampire tablets turn the children’s teeth as purple as a five-a-day overdose in a blackcurrant field – even the tooth fairy would be leaving those behind under the pillow.

But I’m proud to report that the children all sat still and opened wide beautifully in the dentist’s chair. Of course they did – I’d promised them each a lollipop when we got home.