CONVERSATIONS with dentists are rarely riveting affairs.

He and his dental nurse put a lot of metal in your mouth, pack your cheeks with cotton wool, inject a bucketload of Novacaine into your gums and then strike up a chat about holidays.

Aside from the odd strangled 'Ug', it's generally a one-sided affair that reveals the alarming fact that dentists have far more interesting - and expensive - holidays than the rest of us.

But during a visit the other day, he was waxing lyrical about a recent school reunion, how much fun he'd had, how he met all his best mates from school again and what an immense success the whole event had been.

So before the anaesthetic kicked in, I told him about my reunion.

I have very fond memories of my school days in Manchester.

The names from the morning roll-call still trip off the tongue to this day.

Bogie, Croke, Duckett and Titterington were some of the more interestingly-named classmates and when I was invited to a reunion of old boys from those days and surrounding years, I duly signed up to take a shambling trip down Memory Lane.

Despite all our best intentions, we had all lost touch, but I was sure that there would be an emotional rendezvous at the scene of many of our teenage crimes.

I duly turned up at the school to find a refectory (a wonderful old school word) packed with suits, bulging shirt fronts and lots of thinning hair.

Surely, I had accidentally stumbled into a meeting of the Retired Chartered Accountants Association, I thought, and was about to turn tail and run when a face I recognised came towards me.

"Ah, Butterworth," said my old history teacher, 'Basher' Bailey, "how wonderful to see you."

He then spent a remarkable ten minutes recalling my school days and football exploits in the minutest detail.

I spent my time nodding.

I had to as he was talking about my life and it would have been terribly rude to admit that I didn't remember most of it.

"Come and meet some of your old chums," he concluded and led me towards a group of people who I was sure must have been teachers, because they sure as hell looked older than I did.

I was introduced to several middle-aged men who could not have been more alien to me if they had been wearing their ears in the middle of their faces.

It very quickly became clear that I was sharing a room with school chums who had fulfilled the first part of the description by sharing the same educational establishment.

Sadly, they had wholly fallen down on the 'chum' bit by never actually having met me during the six years we learned together.

So when you are tempted to take the plunge back in time, try to dig out your old school photos and pick out the one spotty youth whose name you can't possibly remember.

Because sure as eggs is eggs, he's the one you will be sitting next to during the meal.

First published: Sept 27