I hope to age well – like a mature cheese

LEADING WORRIERS want a ban on cut-price deals and aggressive sales techniques for cosmetic surgery. Sounds a bit odd. “Look, dear, they’ve brought down the price of a new nose to £199. Think I’ll get one. Hey, I might even get two.”

The fretters are fighting a losing battle anyway. In future, I suspect, we shall all choose how we look. We might even change it from day to day: “Today, I shall have a pudgy wee face and broon, greasy hair.”

In no particular order, right now I’d have a new nose, mooth, eyes, cheekbones and, what the hey, an entire new heid. I’d like nothing better than to take the current one off and give it a rest.

It’s been battered about for 55 years and, in my view, is well past its sell-by date.

The human race is mutating like never before and already has the capacity to modify itself with artificial techniques.

Studies show natural blondes are dying out, yet there are more blondes waddling round our streets than ever before. Blonde from a bottle, d’you see?

Women have an edge in the looks modifying department, having been able for some time to look like two different people entirely: the one who just got up and the one who goes to work. It’s as if they’d swapped heads. At the same time, the male body has evolved something chronic. Look at pictures of top boxers from the early part of the last century. They’re potato-pale, knobbly kneed and with not much in the way of muscle.

Now, look at the everyday monsters who stravaig about our streets. Ernie the under-librarian is a fighting machine. Some of them give the impression they can hardly move they’ve got so much muscle.

Biceps are everywhere. You half-expect to find your bank manager sitting in a vest with his biceps bulging as his Biro writes “rejected” across your application for a loan of a tenner.

It must be something they eat. I go to the gym every week, in the hope of getting muscles as big as Madonna’s, but still two wee marbles are all that remain.

I’m still staggered to see men at the gym staring at themselves for hours in the mirror. It’s the opposite of the home: mirrors are where women live.

Yet at the gym you never see women look in the mirror, for the same reason I don’t: it’s depressing.

The narcissism of men at the gym is appalling.

I’ve always wanted to lecture them about it but, while I’d like my looks to change, I wouldn’t like them punched into a new shape.

Fundamentally, I am Mother Nature’s son. I don’t indulge in the unnatural practice of shaving and leave my hair as grey as a Scottish sky.

Cosmetic surgery, meanwhile, is for those and such as those. Me, I hope to age well like a mature cheese: smelly, blueveined and best taken with a vat of wine.