The first cut is the daftest

I can't remember when it first happened. I was slumped in front of the telly, probably knitting (depending on the pattern, this can make TV like radio, only with inferior pictures). I glanced up. On screen was a Moderately Well Known Actor. I paused. I peered. I may have dropped a stitch. I turned to the Electric Landlady. "Here," I said, "has he had a nose job?"

The Electric Landlady made a cursory inspection. "Yes," she said eventually. "Think so."

"But!" I spluttered. "But! He had a perfectly good nose before."

The Electric Landlady shrugged and went back to her crossword. I gazed intently at the screen, willing them to show a close-up, and, if at all possible, a profile shot.

Since then, whenever the Moderately Well Known Actor appears, I scrutinise his nasal area. I try to judge the distance between his septum and upper lip. If the Electric Landlady is about I irritate her beyond human endurance by canvassing her opinion even though I know it hasn't changed. I am now 95% convinced he's had his profile tweaked. And this makes me wild. Not wild as in an OMG-you-sexy-moderately-well-known-actor. Wild as in what-the-hell-did-you-do-that-for-you-silly-man?

It's not just MWKA and his profile. It's not even just Very Famous Actor and his missing wrinkles. It isn't the aging actresses (all of twenty-four) being sliced and diced because no-one will employ them beyond thirty unless they're Judi Dench or Helen Mirren. It's not the identikit pop tarts writhing around MTV in their scanties. (It's not titillating because being told to strip off by a record company exec is empowering, OK?) It's you. It's me. It's all of us.

There's a secret the entertainment, cosmetic and fashion industries and all their myriad fellow travellers don't want us to know. However, fearless tweedy plain monobrowed spinster that I am, here and now I am going to blow it wide open. It is this:

You are all right as you are.

You don't need to be sexy 24/7. You don't need to be hot. You don't need to change yourself to fit in with a committee's expectations.

And if your nose is a little longer than you'd like, if your eyes disappear when you smile, don't be upset. We don't hate you for it. We may even like you more.

Just be you.

Fleeting appearance

Some of the things I've learnt in my sabbatical:

1. Be careful what you wish for.

Virginia Woolf said that for a woman to write she needed money and a room of her own. Having neither, I had a ready-made excuse not to write. Now I have a small desk in the spare room with the laptop upon it. Theoretically, this is an improvement on sitting on the floor with the laptop on my knees. In practice, there is so much junk in this room that the impact of my fingers on the keys makes the adjacent tottering miscellany wobble alarmingly and I cannot get my knees under the desk. The folding chair is too low for comfort so I am sitting on a cushion. A hundred and twenty-six words into this, I have twinges in my shoulder muscles that are advising me to give up.

2. The worst limitations are those we place on ourselves.

When I bought the Folly last year, friends and family were delighted. "It's freedom!" they said. "You'll be able to drive yourself to all sorts of places. You'll love it." The Folly sits outside, admonishing me fiercely about the lack of miles on the clock. It needs a clean. It needs exercise. It also needs a little paint work on the bumper after I bounced it gently off a protruding brick wall last week.

I quite enjoy driving. I loathe owning a car. It's a nice car. It goes vroom and it's a fair sight more comfortable to sit in than hunching over this desk on this chair. But it's a millstone. I might hurt someone with it. I might cause an accident. And if I hadn't bought it I'd have a little more money each month that I could put towards my escape fund.Having a car hasn't given me freedom because the biggest restrictions on my life are those I've made for myself. Given the choice between a day out pootling around country lanes with Black Box Recorder in the CD player or skulking indoors binning my undergrad notes, I'll take the latter every time. I must deal with the impedimenta of a life lived cautiously, finally reading then recycling the years-old magazines I bought then hung onto in the hope that I'd get round to reading them eventually, shredding the letters from friends I never hear from now. I've got into the habit of Being Good, which is less about disposing of sentimentally hoarded memorabilia than feeling terrible guilt at the lack of anything to show for the last twelve years of my life. The cheerful face in the student photos is not the one that looms pallidly in the mirror. I have become mentally incapable of having fun, which makes for dreary blog posts and drearier company.

3. Occasionally, I get things round the right way.

Boucing gently off a brick wall at under 5 mph was silly. Not colliding in any way with the loose horse in the road was not. Given the choice of first prang, I know I got it right. And there are worse ways to spend a sunny spring evening than teaming up with two coppers, two passers –by and a dog to persuade said horse back into its field instead of heading for the dual carriageway.

4. Some things do not improve with time.

Reading back this drivel, I see that the break has not sharpened my pen or loosened the block. I still have nothing of interest to say, just self-absorbed maunderings. And so I shall stop again. Ta ta.