The reality of middle age: whopping great nose hairs
I mean, they don’t add anything, do they? If you didn’t have a foot or a nose it’d be a bit of a blow – no pun intended. But if you were born without your eyebrows you could probably cope just fine.
And it’s not just my brows, the same has happened with my nose and ears. They are full of hair. In fact when I visited my mother the other week and leaned in to give her a hug, she recoiled and said, ‘good god, what have you got in your ear, is it a hamster?’
The reason you get more hair in places you’d rather not as you age is because of increased testosterone, which makes hair coarser and thicker.
I know this because I googled it while writing this column in a cafe. Unfortunately just as I did so a very attractive young woman stopped at my table and started talking to me. I’m fairly sure she was on the verge of telling me how disillusioned she is in her marriage and slipping me her number, when her eyes glanced at my laptop screen. On it was an article with the headline, ‘Why older men have such hairy ears’. She looked back at me, focussed on my ears, then dashed off.
Because of my problems I decided to purchase a nasal hair trimmer. You can use it on your brows and in your ears too. A middle-aged friend of mine has one and swears by it.
The results were great. But then some days later I began to notice blood on the tissue whenever I blew my nose.
For some reason I didn’t connect this to the use of the nasal hair trimmer and instead googled ‘leaking blood from nose daily’. This was a mistake. I learned at worst I had a week to live, at best I might just see who wins the FA Cup in May.
I went to my GPs’ surgery, which was an eye-opener. When I was younger, the doctors at my surgery were all elderly and male, wearing white coats and stethoscopes they never used around their necks.
Nowadays GPs are in their 20s and appear to have been told there is no longer a dress code. The doctor I saw the other day, for instance, wore a mini-skirt. Don’t get me wrong he was a nice fella, but I’m just not sure it’s appropriate.
Anyway I told the doc about my bloodied nose issue. He was nonplussed and told me to come back if it didn’t clear up in a week. A few days later, with the problem still occurring, it suddenly dawned on me it must be the nasal hair-trimmer.
I realised I had been shoving it too far up and cutting the inside of my nose. Lo and behold, since I’ve stopped using it so vigorously, the bleeding has stopped
To an NHS already stretched to breaking point I can only apologise, though my nose has never been less hairy.