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.

Mirror, mirror

So I came back. Bit of a makeover for the blog, tart the place up a bit, try to encourage myself to come out of my barnacle-encrusted shell (do you get landlocked barnacles?) and just get on and write something. But what? Well, I said to myself I was going to be a writer, then I said to myself I'd better face up to the fact that it ain't gonna happen. And so it's time to face the other unpalatable truths of my life: 1. I am never going to be a beauty. Now I know I've blogged extensively about my bloodyminded embrace of plainness and all its attendant freedoms from unfeasible cosmetics bills and having to look in every mirror I encounter, but I have to admit here and now it didn't come easily. Because if I'm honest I'm like everyone else: I want the world to see how fabulous I am. Now, well-meaning friends and greetings card writers aside, no-one really cares about what's inside. Exterior is all. No-one ever said, "All right, she's got a face like the back of the bus but, my god, you should see her spleen." And that goes for more nebulous distinguishing characteristics. You could be the kindest, most noble creature on God's earth but if you look like a mangled trout no-one will give you a second glance, apart from, perhaps, the odd lairy twelve year old who will take great delight in informing you of your repellant aspect. (Really. It's happened to me at least twice in the street.) And all this leads on to: 2. I am never going to have a relationship of any meaning with anybody. Again, I've blogged bravely about the advantages of the defiantly single life, but when it comes down to it, when I've read too much Jane Austen or watched part four of the BBC's adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, it's a bit disheartening to know that I am never going to experience anything even faintly reminiscent of the grand passions evoked in great works of literature, or by the Mills & Boon oeuvre, come to that. In life, it takes a lot to get past first impressions (see point one) and no man is going to waste time on a borderline depressive teetotal wallflower. Well, one or two men might give it a go, but I know them by sight (and, in one case, by particularly pungent smell) and I take evasive action accordingly. When all's said and done, the fault's entirely mine. I'm misanthropic and would rather stay in sighing over fictional heroes than go out and find my own. Nevertheless, resigned singlism does have its problems, namely: 3. Leonard Cohen is never going to write a song about me. For various reasons, among them my inability to socialise like a sane human being, points one and two above, and, most importantly, the fact that we are never going to meet or have any other form of contact, I am never going to be the muse for a song of startling beauty and lyrical truth, sung by a man whose voice sends shivers down my spine. While realism insists I recognise this, I can't help feeling a twinge of disappointment as I listen to CDs on headphones in the wee small hours of the morning. 4. I am never going to be the wise-cracking all-action sidekick of a 1960s super-cool secret agent. It's 2009. Any remaining 1960s super-cool secret agents will be a) dead, b) too arthritic to swing or c) popping Viagra and trying to pull sceptical nineteen year old popsies with a line about their flying car that can go underwater. And it's that pesky point one again. 5. I never keep a promise, even to myself. I said I wouldn't write any more, but here I am. Next time, I shall blog on five things that make me feel good about myself. That will be a much shorter post. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to listen to Leonard Cohen. Well, a girl can dream.

Plain speaking

One of the cliches of spinsterdom is that spinsters are plain, almost by definition. In this image-obsessed world, you are not going to pull a man if you look homely, let alone like the back of a bus. I can only speak for myself here, since I haven't a handy panel of top flight spinsters to consult, but I don't much care for being pressured to look like a fashion plate. I don't think they have fashion plates any more, unless we're veering into Cath Kidston territory, but that's neither here nor there. No, one of the perks of being a professional spinster is that you can dress how you please and if you choose to go bare-faced and skip the hours in front of a mirror that's fine because no-one's going to wonder if you have an ulterior motive. I never went through the pink and sparkly girly phase when I was young. I went from cars to books quite rapidly, and the dolls I did play with were used for soap operas with long-running story arcs, rather than styling nylon hair into, well, pretty much what you started with, nylon hair not being terribly easy to style with a plastic comb larger than the subject's head. I did have a half-hearted attempt at glamour in my student days, along with one or two three-quarter-hearted attempts to throw spinsterhood aside in favour of relationships with men who, it turned out, had no interest in providing the other quarter. While the allure of looking like a woman from a Vettriano painting still lingers on in the outfits I never take out of the wardrobe, I have had to resign myself to the two facts that have led me to embrace the single life: I am plain and I have terrible taste in men. And I've realised it doesn't matter. Being pretty is all very well, but once it fades you've nowhere to go. Being plain is fine, because if you're even halfway lucky your face will gain character as you get older, etched in, unless you're going to use Botox to deny your nature. Because it's true that you get the face you deserve. It's not just getting older that frightens people into jabbing poison under the skin. It's the prospect of facing themselves once the mask of youth falls away. So why bother with make-up and all the rest of the ritual? Unless you're going to spend all day staring in a mirror, you won't see what you look like and why should it matter what other people think you look like? Feel good on the inside and never mind anyone else's opinion. By all means look after your skin, but don't abuse it in the pursuit of some unattainable airbrushed image. Life is too short to roast yourself on a sunbed. Go and do something constructive instead. Be brave. Be interesting. Be yourself.