The naked truth

Last night at choir we were talking about hair maintenance and the effects of age. "Don't get me started," a fellow singer said, pointing firmly between her eyes, "my pubic hair starts here." I laughed a lot and then began a nineteen hour reflection on the many ways that growing older has changed my body and mind. When I was younger, I thought that people started getting noticeably old in their sixties and seventies. There were children (who were short), grown-ups (who were tall but basically the same), and old people (who had wrinkles and grey hair). The idea that I would start getting old while still in my thirties didn't cross my mind. Now that I'm here, of course, reality has hit like a netball in the face. And since revelations from others about their secret pubic monobrows make me feel better about myself, I thought I'd perform a public service and admit the dark secrets of my own moribund form.

I'll start at the top. My hair used to be lovely. Now it is drying at the ends, itches in the mornings, gets greasy when I moisturise my face and occasionally produces dandruff. This alone is enough to make me want to be sick. Then there's my face. It used to be smooth and even. Now it is spattered with large pores. I get regular spots - more every month than I had in a year as a teenager - and I have scars where I've squeezed them. There are tiny red veins visible all round my nose, which make me look like I have a permanent cold. There is hair on my upper lip. If I dye it, it appears blonde but thicker. If I wax it, I get a red rash and ingrowing hairs. If I have it threaded, I get spots. There are hairs on my neck, around the place where my Adam's apple would have been if I had been lucky enough to have been born a man. And there's a patch of skin stretching up my larynx to my chin where the pigment is strangely white. I think this is the onset of vitilligo, an incurable and ridiculously unattractive condition of the epidermis. Hooray.

Moving down, my bingo wings, which are here for life, now seem to be developing baby cellulite and, unless they are suntanned, are emetic, making the wearing of strappy sundresses ill-advised, a shame as my shoulders are basically the only part of my body that don't make me want to hurl myself into the contents of an open bottle bank. My fingernails - once strong and glossy - now peel and ridge. My back aches. My breasts, while still a fairly nice size, are covered in stretchmarks - white furrows that don't tan and thus become more obvious in summer, and when I bend over and look at them hanging down, the 'rocks in a sock' label becomes acutely recognisable. My stomach is no longer flat and the dark hairs known as a garden path on men have emerged, although I doubt they serve as such an enticing invitation to any visitor that should find himself in the vicinity. There is a weird white mark around my solar plexus where there was once a mole. My body surrounded it with a white 'halo' (official medical term) and then basically consumed the mole, so all that's left is a white, pigmentless blob. I think it's quite clever that my body got rid of something dangerous, but I wish it hadn't left a residual stain that looks like some bizarre fungal condition in the middle of my abdomen.

Lower still, and we're getting beneath the waist, into the truly nuclear zone. Beware the truth. As admitted recently, a good portion of my considerable buttocks is covered with red spots, as persistent as cockroaches and possibly less erotic. Thanks to my beloved course of laser hair removal, my bikini line is less horrendous than it might be, but unfortunately the laser was not able to remove several inches of fat and thus leave my legs in perfect order. My thighs are rippled with cellulite. I have always had it, inherited at a young age from my mother, but the older I get, the worse it becomes. It is deeply, deeply unattractive. If my legs were otherwise slim, brown or smooth, the cellulite might be able to be borne. Needless to say, my vast, white thighs resist all tanning attempts, and the hairs are dark. There are even several long ones that grow horizontally on the back of each leg in a patch around the size of an average paperback. These make me wonder whether I am actually human and not some sort of minotaur sent to confuse people.

Beneath the cellulite and the hairs are the onset of varicose veins, a blight that I have miraculously fought off thus far as my father was having operations on his when he was in his twenties. I have several patches of blue behind my knees, waiting to pop at the most inconvenient moment and ensuring that - if the girth, orange peel effect and wolverine hirsuitedness weren't enough - I will never wear hotpants.

Finally, my feet - once so long and slender, now covered in mysterious lumps and knobbles. There are several dark hairs on the neck of my big toes. I have bunions emerging, in particular on my left foot - a condition that I would consider justified had I spent my life in stilettos, worn while successfully wooing Russian oligarchs, but given my absurd shoe size, I have spent almost all my life in men's trainers and lesbian Birkenstocks and have wooed a succession of men that have been almost universally labelled Not Good Enough. My high heel use has only emerged in the past three years or so, during which time I have researched the incidence of bunions and discovered that they frequently occur even when people spend their entire life in orthopaedic flip-flops and barefoot. My mother's toes are ghastly, veering off in different directions like bizarre coral, so I think it's clear what's coming to me, in the pedal sense.

And thus we reach the end of my thorough physical examination, a study driven not by self-pity but by a selfless desire to alleviate the panics of others through the admission of my own flaws. It is a sign of my own unbelievable arrogance that I do not believe my physical appearance to be the reason for my single status - rather, I think that, when covered up, I am actually quite attractive. I know for certain that I will never pull while wearing a bikini, but it's safe to say that I've missed the boat for a starring role on Baywatch, and anything that keeps me out of the arms of Mitch Buchannan is fine with me. May the fictional god bless physical imperfections - I'd be unbearable if I was beautiful.