I DON'T spend much time thinking about my cheeks. The ones under my eyes I mean, not those ones. They're just there, really, ready to have make-up adorned on them from time to time, to blush if I say something embarrassing (this happens quite often) and to pink up during the cold, icy weather.
I mention my cheeks because they're going to be the thing this year apparently, the "look" of 2008, the new physical feature to worry about courtesy of a number of miracle products on the market promoted by plastic surgeons.
I'm getting thoroughly
bored of this now. The notion that each year we need to be worried about another body part, concerned about it being the right shape or, heaven forfend, the right texture, and get dragooned into slavishly copying celebrities whose genetic good fortune means they happen to possess the correct curvature for this, that or the next body part.
So this year's trend is for "apple cheeks", and the easiest way to get them is via a "filler" injection, which can apparently be done in just 30 minutes – although it'll take you a lot longer than that to pay it off. Intrigued, I went on to a website for one of these fillers, and had a browse through their before and after pictures.
The results were terrifying. Beautiful, middle aged women with interesting lines on their faces were pictured, post-filler, looking like something that had been blown up in a Barbie factory. All their character and charm had been erased, replaced instead by a smooth, blank look that conjured up the futuristic Papa Song fabricants of David Mitchell's brilliant novel Cloud Atlas.
The idea of fillers is that they do not involve going under the knife, or a lengthy healing time. Yet however uninvasive these procedures are, the fact remains that they still fundamentally change people's appearances. No one seems allowed to grow old gracefully now, no-one is allowed to look interesting or – horrors – old, as if trapping some notion of youth in aspic is somehow more attractive than showing the life you've lived on your face. Well, it's not. It looks stupid, and foolish, and strangely sad.
I'm 30 now – young to some I know – but for the first time in my life I'm seeing small lines on my face, teeny-tiny pathways that tell me I'm no longer 21 (and frankly, thank God). Eternal youth may appeal to some, but not to me. My cheeks – both sets, since you ask – are just fine as they are.
&149 IT SEEMS even Keira Knightley's friends are fed up with her. They've made a bet that the 22- year-old won't be able to do a photo shoot without stripping. I agree. I'm thoroughly sick of the sight of Knightley's nether regions splayed across Vanity Fair covers, Chanel adverts and so on. Keira, here's a thought for 2008; why not do something really shocking and cover up a change? Apart from anything else dear, we've seen it all before.
Want a job? Ease up on the chicken throwingIF YOU had told me a year ago that I and all my friends would have Facebook profiles in which we posted unflattering pictures of each other and threw chickens around, I'd have told you to go and boil your head. Yet here I am, an enthusiastic member of the Facebook community – an enthusiastic "poker" too.
And I'm not the only one: so popular has poking and Facebooking become that both words are in the 2008 edition of the Collins English Dictionary.
Worryingly, the example of the word's usage Collins has gone for is: "I thought one of the interviewees was perfect for the job, until I Facebooked him."
Maybe I'll ease up on the chicken throwing this year.
New Year resolutions are worth keepingFOR reasons long since lost to the mists of Cabernet Sauvignon, a friend and I sat down around this time last year and decided to make out a wish-list of things that we hoped might happen in 2007. We then stuck the lists in an envelope and hid them somewhere around the house.
Mercifully I have forgotten where I put mine, as I'm sure the list would only depress me (I still haven't found a cure for cancer, and failed to clinch that three-book-and-a-movie deal), but one thing I know I wrote down which I have achieved was to "do something for charity".
At the time I had vague notions about running a marathon or something similar, but in the end I decided, days before my 30th birthday, to sign up with the Anthony Nolan Trust as a bone-marrow donor. I've written here about it before, but just a couple of weeks ago my documents, along with a donor card, arrived in the post, telling me I was now a bona fide member of the register, with the potential to save the life of a leukaemia sufferer or someone with a similar potentially fatal illness.
I may not have hiked up Kilimanjaro or held my dream wedding yet, but it made me feel that, sometimes a New Year's resolution is worth making after all.
