Fiona McCade: Let’s end this hidden currency imbalance

No, I’m not talking about the minimum hourly wage. This is about milk teeth and how much the Tooth Fairy is leaving under the pillows of our gap-toothed little darlings.

When my six-year-old started to lose his baby teeth a few months ago, I had the inevitable discussion with Mr Me about how much the Tooth Fairy should cough up. Given that I used to get 10p for mine, many decades ago (so even in the crisis-ridden Seventies, I was better off than kids in Hull today), I reckoned that 50p would be more than fair. However, my husband was more generous and lobbied for £1 a tooth. I argued, but I was no match for the magic of the Tooth Fairy. I put a 50p piece under the pillow, only to find that she’d come along in the night and swapped it for a quid. She must be flush, that’s all I can say.

But my little domestic problems fade into insignificance next to the price of a London child’s teeth. Seriously, £5.10 a fang? Given that human children usually have 20 milk teeth, the little wasters will make a cool £100 for doing nothing but shed enamel. And that’s just the average. Assuming there are expats from Hull living in the English capital, that means that someone, somewhere (probably Kensington) is giving their kids a tenner. It makes my head spin.

I reckon that Glaswegian parents have got it about right. 11p a tooth is not too shabby at all – better than nothing, that’s for sure – but as soon as the mad Londoners get involved, Glasgow suddenly looks mean. Because the teeth of London children are practically worth their weight in gold, the Tooth Fairy can’t help but give the impression of getting more tight-fisted the further from the sound of Bow Bells she goes, and I don’t think that’s a fair appraisal of the situation.

The fact is that some parents, with more money than sense, are letting the side down and making life more difficult for all of us, not to mention trashing the Tooth Fairy’s reputation north of Watford. So, we need some sort of legislation to stop this unacceptable imbalance across the UK.

In an ideal world, magical, gift-giving creatures would be perfectly egalitarian. All children would get the same amount of presents at Christmas; the Easter Bunny would be equally generous when distributing chocolate eggs; and the Tooth Fairy would be well and truly capped.

Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to control the first two, but because the Tooth Fairy deals in hard cash, I reckon it wouldn’t hurt to publish some official, national guidelines for her to follow on her jaunts around the British Isles. We need a Gold Tooth Standard. After all, it’s not fair that rich kids’ teeth should be worth more than poor kids’, is it? Or southerners’ more than northerners’?

If everyone could just agree that a healthy British milk tooth is worth, say, 15p, that would help restore some stability to this dangerously chaotic currency market.

Unless we do something like this, I can’t let my kid communicate with his cousins in London, in case they let slip how much they’re making from their massively over-valued gnashers, and he starts demanding stocks and bonds in exchange for his pearly-whites.

We need a definitive ruling from the Bank of England, but while they’re deliberating over the details of dentition, I may have a canny Scottish solution.

All Glaswegian parents should hold on to their children’s milk teeth. Don’t put them under a pillow; don’t give them to the Tooth Fairy. Instead, wait until all 20 have fallen out, then buy the cheapest ticket you can down to London, and put them under pillows there. Given the generosity of the Tooth Fairy in London, you’ll make a profit of £4.99 per tooth, and an overall gain of £99.80. Which, by anybody’s standards, is better than a kick in the teeth.