can anybody help me get a paragraph summary for the poem "Oh I Wish I'd Looked After Me Teeth"??????????pls........

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Pam was born in 1947. The UK provided a National Dental Service for the first time in 1948, and dental services became free for all UK citizens for all essential work.

But because of the way this first generation of dental services were funded - with easily claimed and relatively lucrative grants for dentists who extracted teeth and supplied dentures, but much less accessible or generous funding for orthodontic work - dentists between 1948 and the early 1970's mainly took an aggressively interventionist approach to their work with NHS patients. Fillings, braces, and bridgework were freely available to private patients; NHS patients were more likely to have their teeth removed, and be fitted with dentures (often even when the teeth were saveable).

Pam Ayres poem is simply the lament of someone who has developed minor dental problems - because of slack eating and dental hygiene habits - and who has lost many teeth to the new clean-sweep UK NHS dental practices.

The poem doesn't have any deep meaning as a poem. (Ayres isn't that kind of a poet). But it reflects a particular moment in popular culture: a moment when the post-war British public suddenly found they had access to dental care their parents could not have afforded, but only on terms which the dentists (and their state-funding) dictated.

The poem hit a nerve when it first appeared - especially with people ten- or twenty-years older than Pam Ayres (Pam Ayres has always focused her appeal to older people). These days it makes little sense to anybody under forty. (The problems with NHS dental funding were noted, and mainly rectified, in the late 1970's).

Like almost all of Pam Ayres' poems 'I wish I'd looked after me teeth' is a social document, rather than what we would normally call a poem. (Pam's work has a great deal in common with the poems of Allan Smethurst: 'the Singing Postman').