Reflections of Mortality

A post for paid subscribers. This appears in The Times today, but behind a paywall. So, if you don't have a Times subscription, you can read it here. There's a paywall for non-subscribers.

My moustache is the bane of my life. Tweezers, hair-removing cream (both for face, underarms and legs), razors (for men and women), a battery-operated tool that professes to rotate to de-Hitlerise me . . . nothing works. Every day, since I hit puberty, I wake with a whacking great forestry between my nose and upper lip.

Some of the hairs are soft and a bit fuzzy, others like pine needles that you find behind the sofa in August, long after you’ve taken down your Christmas tree. A few are so irritatingly stubborn, they lurk like blackheads beneath the surface and nothing short of drawing blood can entice them to pluckable viability.

Not even menopause succeeded in stopping their growth. While my body hair under my arms and on my legs stopped sprouting (although I can still have enough to plait my vaginal coiffure – what’s that all about?) my upper lip could give a gold medal in the Chelsea Flower Show a run for its money.

There’s so much else I notice these days. An extra wrinkle that I swear hadn’t been there 24 hours earlier, a sagging of the eyelids, a stomach that requires a periscope if I have a desire to see my knees (apart from checking the bruises as a result of my latest fall, I don’t).

When did all this happen on my way to the mirror?

I got older.

And I hadn’t even noticed.