No rush to brush

If I hear one more person in Scotland bewailing anything Holyrood does as somehow prejudicial to the nation’s teeth (Letters, 29 September), I’ll scream.

Even if Alex Salmond ran through the streets whacking people in the mouth with a claw hammer, he couldn’t do any more damage to Scottish teeth that Scots do themselves.

It was a source of embarrassment to the late Norris McWhirter that throughout his tenure as editor of the Guinness Book Of Records, Scotland consistently held the record for the worse tooth decay in the world. Not the developed world – the world.

The reason is not so much our love affair with sweets as our aversion to basic oral hygiene, never mind visiting a dentist. Wallpaper-stripping halitosis thanks to last night’s booze is regarded as something of an inalienable human right that friends, family and work colleagues should just put up with.

Forget the fact that failure to deal with it might lead to any number of nasty cancers. So long as Scotland won’t rush to brush, access to dentists will remain the least of our worries.

Mark Boyle

Linn Park Gardens

Johnstone