Why do my American friends keep asking me to marry them?

My diary has been filled with dental appointments, reflecting a truism that American dentists pray for British teeth. The tally in this past month is one root canal, three extractions and two bone grafts, which more or less equals the cost of putting one dentist’s child through a year of college. The epic began almost a year ago with a mild toothache, which my usually excellent dentist in Charleston, South Carolina, insisted needed the attention of a specialist. I rejected her advice with the confident assurance that I was getting old, the pain was mild, and it was a race between the tooth and death, a race that death would win. The tooth won. Are British teeth among the worst in the world? I have no data on the subject, but some years back I was invited to the Strawberry Hills Races in Virginia, a very social event with four steeplechases and a single flat race. It was a delightful day out, but I did think at one moment that I was back in Britain, as the crowd overwhelmingly seemed to have bad teeth and wore Barbours.

It has been a wretched year. In any usual year I manage to visit Britain twice, but we haven’t flown to London in 19 months. I should not really complain about being locked down, as I have been writing a new Sharpe adventure and writing is, anyway, a solitary vice. We spent the entire time on Cape Cod, one of America’s more civilised enclaves. Charleston, where we usually retreat to in the winter, is charming but the television adverts for firearms never cease to astonish me. Last year we were encouraged to buy a semi-automatic assault rifle for $425 and the shop would throw in a ‘lady’s handgun’ for free. We eschewed the offer, relying for our protection on an elderly Cavalier King Charles spaniel called Whiskey.