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.

Safe to cross

I knew there was something I'd been meaning to write about for a couple of weeks. Predictably, now that I've remembered what it was, the urgency with which I was trying to recall it seems a little OTT. It's about varicose veins. Yes. Disappointing.

Anyway, a few weeks ago, Paul introduced me to a lady who is a massively successful, well-respected, authoritative and scary vascular surgeon who told me that the aforementioned urban myth is founded on absolutely nothing, and that I can cross my legs with gay abandon in future. I tried hard to ignore the degree of disbelief in her voice that anyone aged thirty with a fairly comprehensive education had managed to be sucked in by such unfounded claptrap, but despite my best efforts, I was left feeling a tad idiotic. But let's concentrate on the positives: although I'm still convinced that I'll go varicose in future, I'm relieved that the comforts of leg crossing won't play a part in the ordeal and consequently - is't possible? - I now enjoy sitting down even more than I used to.

How's that for a dangling preposition?

Wait in vein

A tenuous pun for the title but it was either that or 'You're so vein' which made even less sense. The last 24 hours have felt a little revelatory. I have realised that I was on the receiving end of a cruel vein conspiracy. Everyone on the planet seems to have known that crossing one's legs increases the chance of varicosity. Even those who don't believe the connection are still aware of the theory's existence. Apparently, I am one of the few individuals left in the developed world who was blithely crossing my knees willy nilly, blissfully ignorant of the pressure that was building up above my calves. Laura at work was astonished I hadn't known this nugget until now. Even - and I consider this a monumental betrayal - even my own mother knew but had, for some cruel reason, never chosen to pass on her pearls of wisdom. Sure, she'll ask me if I'll be warm enough every single time I leave the house, even in the peak of the British 'summer' week; sure, she'll phone me up at work and ask if she can open my post in case it's something important - but when it comes to life-altering information regarding the very blood coursing through my veins, that's considered too irrelevant to share. Pah.

I'm not sure if any of you, the Faithful, have tried to give up crossing your legs. When it comes to challenges, I'd rank it up there light years above quitting nail biting and a fraction below going cold turkey after a five year crack binge. It's an automatic reaction for me, following the 'sitting down' movement as naturally as sweet follows savoury. I never realised the depths of my passion for leg crossing until it was forbidden - now, just an instant of knee over knee action is a sensation akin to a deep massage or a glass of white wine after a long day at work. Still, the thought of the lumpiness that I might avoid or lessen is enough to keep me on the straight and narrow.

The mystery for me, however, is that if everyone knows, why do they persist to cross? Surely the threat of the varicose far outweighs the joy of the cross? Or perhaps, like me so recently, they aren't yet aware. I might start handing out informative leaflets to the crossers I meet on my travels, just so that they can cross with awareness. I feel like I've been in the dark all these years and now I must become some sort of itinerant evangelist and share this potential joy with the masses. I will be the modern St Paul, and this blog will be the equivalent of the first epistle to the Corinthians. St Paul and I aren't too similar, it must be admitted, but we share a fondness for telling people what to do and (admittedly for different reasons) neither of us are too big on spiritual gifts. That said, unlike Paul, I've got no problem with people marrying because I'm not too big on the imminence of the parousia. Ah, it's all flooding back... Right, bedtime.

Unrelated points

I am going to Penzance this weekend and could not be much more excited about it if I tried.

Zen doesn't work. I lay in bed at 00:23 last night repeating to myself that tomorrow was an illusion but I couldn't stop worrying about what to pack for Penzance. I fixated on waterproof trousers which wasn't helpful.

Today I have been organising an appointment to have my boss' garage door motorised. And I didn't go to the gym.

I think I have developed an addiction to the humble Twix. But since I'm still losing weight - or, at least, as Paul McKenna won't let me weigh myself, since my clothes are still getting looser - I'm not really overly concerned.

I am reading My Traitor's Heart by Rian Malan and thoroughly recommend it. Thanks to Fi for the tip-off. It's an incredible portrait of apartheid written by the descendent of one of the system's creators - utterly moving, honest, raw, real and still frighteningly plausible.

Yesterday evening I was told that if you sit with your legs crossed you're far more likely to get varicose veins. I don't know why I didn't think of it before. Susie, who told me, said that when she was about 14, her schoolfriend's mum had to have an operation on her legs and her doctor told her the problem veins had been massively exacerbated by a buildup of pressure caused by her knee crossing habit. From now on I will sit with my ankles lightly interwoven, like the Queen. The similarities will end there.