Read a year of Barn Hill reviews and the same four things recur, in roughly this order. Time — the half-hour appointment is mentioned more than any treatment, because nobody believes it until they have sat in it. Honesty about money — the written plan, the fee guide in its green folder, and the recurring astonishment that the bill matched both. Nerves handled kindly — Dr Sharma’s list generates the longest reviews on the page, usually ending with some variation of “I cannot believe I am writing a positive review about a dentist”. And continuity — the pleasure, hard to manufacture and impossible to fake, of being remembered: the clinician who asks about the wedding, the hygienist who recalls which tooth is ticklish, the receptionist who books you your usual Thursday.

For balance, the criticism, reported as faithfully as the praise. The Georgian staircase earns a grumble every winter, which is why the ground-floor surgery exists and why reception offers it first to anyone who mentions a hip. Fridays finishing at two o’clock disappoints commuters, and we hold our hands up: it is the price of a small team that does not rotate. And one memorable two-star review objected to the waiting room having “no telly, like a museum” — which the practice has chosen, after discussion, to have engraved on nothing but its collective memory. Every review, kind or cross, gets a reply from Dr Wray herself.

Long before online reviews, patients wrote letters, and the practice has kept them — there is a drawer in the office with thank-you notes going back to the 1950s, including one addressed simply to “The tooth doctor, Barn Hill, Stamford”, which the Royal Mail delivered without hesitation. A few themes have not changed in seventy years: relief that it did not hurt, surprise at being listened to, and gratitude for honesty about what could wait. The stationery has changed; the practice tries very hard to make sure nothing else has. New letters, and emails printed by Margaret with faint disapproval, still go in the drawer.

Nobody is asked for a review at the desk while their mouth is still numb, and nobody ever will be. Once a year the practice writes to patients treated in the previous twelve months inviting honest words, good or bad, with a stamped envelope for the traditionalists; online reviews arrive on their own schedule and are reproduced here exactly as written, spelling and all. Names are shortened only where the author asked. The two-star review about the television lives on this page’s files as faithfully as the five-star ones — a testimonials page you can trust is one that was clearly not curated by the marketing department, this practice not having one.